Materializing the Missing: Christi Belcourt’s Walking With Our Sisters

In 2012, Métis artist Christi Belcourt used social media platforms to solicit donations to Walking With Our Sisters, a public arts project commemorating the thousands of ‘disappeared’ women and girls from communities across Canada and the U.S, a disproportionate number of whom are Indigenous. Belcourt had hoped to recruit 600 people to create and mail moccasin “vamps”, the top portion of the shoes which are traditionally stitched and beaded by hand. In just over a year, the artist had received over 1,600 uniquely decorated pairs and by 2019, the exhibit had visited over 25 sites across Canada and one U.S. city many of the vamps were created in beading circles lead by Indigenous community members in various sites across Turtle Island (North America).

Scholar Maya Ode’Amik Chacaby challenges the fact that words like ‘missing’ and ‘disappeared’ are used to denote lives taken but not to refer to the dismantling of knowledge or the absences of equity upon which systemic erasure are built. Lead by ancestral knowledge and produced through community collaboration, this essay contends that Walking With My Sisters both honors the dead and those who mourn them while foregrounding that which is always already ‘disappeared’ under colonial logic. To use Ode’Amik Chacaby’s framing further, through its materiality, process, and public engagements, Walking With My Sisters offers an “un-settling presence that brings awareness of relationships that have for too long been occupied with erasure.”[1]