REGINA — The Royal Saskatchewan Museum is partnering with a Métis artist to create a hooked rug that will be displayed in the museum’s First Nations area.
The museum is working with its artist in residence and Métis Elder, Margaret Harrison, on the project. She and several other participants are working together at the museum to create a six-by-10-foot rug, which is intended to showcase Métis culture and traditions.
Minister Alana Ross was at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum on Thursday, where she joined Harrison and other participants in rug hooking. She called it “a great opportunity to get a glimpse of our province's past and connect with the Métis culture.”
Harrison designed the rug and Kate Boyer handled the illustration. Harrison said she developed the design from her experiences growing up in the Qu’Appelle Valley. The design features the hills, birds, pelicans and chokecherries that were part of life there.
It is an elaborate design requiring a team effort of hooking material onto the rug to create the various colours and illustrations. It is a large project and, as a result, the rug hooking is being done in stages on three pieces of rug, with Harrison saying there are still two more left to complete. Harrison admitted it is “going to take a while.”
“But once you get going, you know, they're hooking pretty fast right now, so it'll be amazing.”
Bailey Monsebroten, curator of Indigenous cultural heritage at the museum, said she completed her master’s degree on the tradition of rug hooking.
“I wrote my master's thesis on Métis rug hooking and Margaret was one of the last people in the province who was still practicing it and still trying to keep it alive,” Monsebroten said.
“So I decided I had to find her and talk to her. And we met, we formed a good friendship over that time. And when I defended my thesis, we decided that we needed to keep this going. So we figured out a way to get the community project going. We didn't want to just make an artwork for the gallery. We wanted to make sure that while we were doing it, we were giving the skills back to people.”
This Métis cultural tradition went into decline between 1930 and 1950, Monsebroten said. As people moved into cities, “it seems they had less time to practice traditional arts and things like that. And they needed to move to wage labor rather than craft.”
Harrison said one way she is helping keep the tradition alive is by training others.
“Yes, and so I'm doing workshops as well,” Harrison said. “I think we're all doing workshops for things, trying to keep some cultures alive, and some of our culture. So I'm training rug hookers all the time so that there'll be a spark somewhere. Not everybody, you know, wants to do that for sure, but we might, we might get a few yet.”
Harrison credited Monsebroten with bringing her on board at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum for the project.
“And when I first met her, she was so interested that, you know, she just kept at me all the time, let's do this. So then we got together and yeah, she learned how to do it and wrote her thesis on it and did a beautiful job there. So we're so proud of her as one of our students that are doing this art. And she's brought us here to this day, bringing us right here to the museum to be able to hang our piece and bring other artists together so that we, as Louis Riel said, you know, we don't sleep for a hundred years, but our artists are going to bring our spirit back. And I think that's what I'm working towards is to bring the spirit back in art.”
Ross called it a “wonderful in-life display of Métis culture. And I am looking so forward to seeing the end result. It's absolutely beautiful.”
“And I know Margaret has played such a big part in keeping this tradition alive. And those traditions are important because they tell the story of the Métis people in Saskatchewan and Métis people in general. And I know specifically this was an art form that was in and around this area.”
Ross said it was important to share the tradition of rug quilting.
“You know, it is. And that's so important in human relationships. The more we can learn about one another and understand each other, we just create such a more positive society as a result of doing that.”
Members of the public can drop by the Royal Saskatchewan Museum and see the rug hooking project in action. Once the finished rug is completed, it will be displayed in the museum’s Indigenous Gallery, which is expected to happen sometime within the next year.
Harrison encouraged students who are interested in the rug hooking tradition “to give it a try. You know, it's something that you may not, you know, take to. It can get frustrating, like embroidery sometimes does when threads get knotted up. But I don't know, working with cloth is a little different. It's, you know, it's softer.
“And once you get into it, I think it's a good, it's a good place to sit and just think by yourself, get yourself, you know, away from all of the world and just enjoy putting that hook in there and pulling that loop out. And that's part of meditation. And I think it's, you know, it's calming. And we need that today in this world. It's, you know, we don't know what's coming next for us. So, and I just want to leave that behind for people to enjoy.”
