Edited by Jaime Black-Morsette. Highwater Press (2025).
Fifteen years after the beginning of the REDress Project, visionary Red River Métis activist and artist Jaime Black-Morsette brings together memories, stories, and art in the anthology REDress: Art, Action, and the Power of Presence (Highwater Press 2025).
In her foreword, Cathy Merrick (1962–2024), a proud Cree woman from the Cross Lake Band of Indians in northern Manitoba, describes the REDress project as a memorial and a mandate. Not only is it a call to action, Black-Morsette’s book is a documented record of struggle and a testament to the strength of women and the resilience of Indigenous Peoples.
As Merrick illustrates, the colour chosen for the dresses used to bring attention to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit, and Gender Diverse people (MMIWG2S) is significant because red is thought to be the only colour spirits can see. Whether hung from trees, along stretches of highway, or on fences, “the red dress is now the silent witness that urges us to remember the people who should have worn them.”
“The poems, essays, and reflections within these pages invite us to see the unseen, to hear the unheard, and to remember the forgotten. Through words and art carefully sewn together by love, we are reminded of our inherent power to transcend boundaries, to heal, and to transform,” writes Merrick. Black-Morsette offers a poem in memoriam titled “Cathy.” She writes: “you place your hand / soft / on my shoulder / you held me in kindness / in gratitude / and I held you that way once / before you left / your body.”
The anthology is also filled with a vast array of Indigenous visual artists whose work has been inspired by and instrumental to the MMIWG2S movement, from a photograph of “Women in red dresses in a field,” featuring Natu Bearwolf, Tiffany Joseph, Erynne Gilpin, Keilah Lukenbill-Williams, and Lindsay Delaronde (photo credit by UATE), to installation photos of Christi Belcourt’s Walking With Our Sisters, along with images from Raven Davis’s video It’s Not Your Fault (2015), and performance stills from Black-Morsette’s the water in me, recognizes you (2022). The photograph on the cover, taken by Black-Morsette, is powerful and provocative. An Indigenous woman is moving in the snow at the edge of a forest, wearing a red dress and shawl, which is half-blurry, the red a stark contrast to the white snow and bare trees.
In Black-Morsette’s essay “Beginning,” she writes about how we all once lived in harmony through land-based culture. For thousands of years, we were able to sustain balance, living with one another and the natural world. We lived in relation to one another, supported each other, and cared for all our relations, taking this responsibility seriously.
“Returning to the wisdom of our ancestors is a powerful antidote to colonialism—as we reconnect to land and water and reclaim spirituality, art, language, and space, we continue to unsettle the nation-state and grow ever stronger in who we are and what we are fighting for,” writes Black-Morsette. “The power of our collective voice is a beacon for the rekindling of memory, a reckoning with history, and a homecoming to a profound spirituality that holds scared space for all life.”
In Christi Belcourt’s essay “The Power of Red and The Power of Community,” she writes about Maria Campbell’s 1978 film The Red Dress, which echoes the themes of her groundbreaking memoir, Halfbreed, published in 1973, and was filmed in Lac Ste. Anne, a Métis community in Alberta. Belcourt was able to meet her chapan (great-grandmother) Madeline Letendre (née L’Hirondelle). The film, which is available on the National Film Board of Canada’s website, follows a “Métis man without treaty or hunting rights, struggling to sustain traditional life.” His daughter Theresa, who dreams of going to France to study art, dreams of a red dress.
According to Campbell, the dress becomes an important symbol, as it marks Theresa’s desire to become an artist and represent her people. “Her lands are being clear-cut, and she believes it’s her way of being able to help. She believes that if she has a red dress that she will be a good artist and will be able to help her dad speak for her people and her lands. She longs for it, as she believes it will somehow be the power she needs to make her dream come true.”
Belcourt asks Campbell why she titled the film The Red Dress. She answered: “The red dress was a symbol. If we became spiritually grounded, we would be stronger to make change. I always had a red dress hanging in my closet all my life. I would never wear it. My auntie had a red dress—she never wore it either.” Campbell asks Belcourt why she decided to use red cloth under the vamps in Walking With Our Sisters. Why did Black-Morsette hang up red dresses?
“It means all of us are working toward a spiritual meaning. The red cloth helped us find a way. It’s like blood memory. One thing we have in common is the colour red. Our blood creates our menstrual cycle—we are two-leggeds, we are humans, nothing else.” Campbell continues, “Blood is where life begins. Blood is where it comes from. Red is the colour of creativity. It’s Creation itself—the most powerful thing of all when your body creates a human.”
Canada’s first Inuk professional classical singer, Deantha Edmunds, reflects on writing and singing her song “Legacy.” It was first shared at a Sisters in Spirit gathering she organized at the New Brunswick Community College in Saint John, New Brunswick, where she worked as an Indigenous advisor in 2017. She sang the song a cappella and hung red dresses around the room, as well as on campus with accompanying cards about Black-Morsette’s REDress Project. Her first performance of “Legacy” was for a virtual concert in May 2021 in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, during the COVID-19 pandemic. She performed the song as a soloist with members of Lady Cove Women’s Choir and the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra. She had the chorus of the song translated into Inuttitut, the dialect of Inuktitut spoken in Nunatsiavut, the ancestral homeland of the Labrador Inuit, where her father grew up. “The very last line in Inuttitut means ‘it’s not goodbye.’”
In “Legacy,” Edmunds sings: “No matter how long, / How near, how far, / Led by Sister Sun or the North Star, / You will be found, / We’ll sing you home, / Your beautiful Spirit not left to roam. / Sister, I feel you walking with me / I hear your voice on the breeze / And I know that you will always be / More than a memory, / Alive like the wind flying free.”
Edmunds reflects on collaboration with Mi’kmaq dancer Sarah Prosper in 2022, who joined her onstage during her performance of “Legacy” at One Sky: Artist Showcase, part of the Spirit Song Festival, a multi-day event celebrating Indigenous arts and culture that has taken place in St. John’s since 2013. Prosper danced around her while ten other Indigenous women, wearing red, stood silently on the stage in a half-circle that embodied an ulu, the traditional Inuit women’s curved knife.
“The feeling in the performance hall was heavy with emotion, but also there was a sense of quiet strength, solidarity, and warmth. Sarah’s beautiful dancing took the significance of my song to a deeper level. As she moved around me and the other women, the breeze she created brought to my mind the energy of MMIWG2S that will never expire.”
