Crafting Inoculation

Abstract

Cree visual artist Ruth Cuthand utilizes traditional and contemporary Indigenous beading techniques to craft multicolored, enlarged images of deadly diseases spread during contact with European settlers. The beaded virus makes visible the 500-year history of biological warfare waged against Indigenous communities, while the act of beading, a form of medicine in itself, is a centuries-old practice of continuity and memory. The paper builds upon Avery Gordon’s (2008) theory of hauntings to investigate traces of memory contained in viruses, beads and beadwork. I argue that the continuous outbreak of viruses that Indigenous communities experience operate as ghostly matter that make present the ghost of colonial violence. Building on decolonial feminist theories of inoculation, theories of temporality and semiology, bio-medical innovation and material history, I consider the viral impact of glass beads to argue that Cuthand’s beadwork acts as decolonial inoculation: a technology that indigenizes the elements of colonial invasion to enable Indigenous resurgence and continuity. I examine Cuthand’s beadwork as well as the role of the needle in both Western scientific and Indigenous practices of medicine. The paper closes with an examination of works made by Cuthand during the COVID-19 pandemic including A Remembrance of COVID-19 (2022) and a photo of Cuthand wearing an N-95 respirator mask beaded with COVID-19 microbes. I propose the mask is an act of temporal recurrence and discontinuity: it aligns the present with past moments of bioterrorism but reflects a divergence, a move toward Indigenous communicability as an act of survival.

Notes

1 Artist talk with curator Felicia Gay, University of Saskatchewan College Art Galleries, Saskatoon, SK, 7 April 2021.

2 In the previously cited 2021 artist talk with Felicia Gay, Cuthand mentioned that she chose to move away from the traditional patterns of beadwork as a means of distinguishing her beadwork from craft. While Cuthand’s work eschews traditional floral or geometric patterns it retains the physical systems of beading itself: circular rows of beading, two-thread techniques, zigzag quill techniques and so forth.

3 On 29 June 2022 Cuthand posted on her Instagram account that she was offering her work, Gonorrhea, to a sexual health organization working with Indigenous people.

4 For additional contemporaneous descriptions of impiraressa see Karklins (1991: 73) and Trivellato (1998: 47).

5 A Remembrance of Covid-19 (2022) was commissioned for ‘Radical Stitch’ (2022), an extensive exhibition of contemporary Indigenous beadwork.

6 Cuthand credits her beaders: ‘Patricia Worm, Melissa Worm, Amanda Worm, and Pinch Hitters Natalie, Jan, and Peggy’.