It’s not uncommon for Claire Tuckanow to hear a sewing machine whirring in the background while she works inside Regina’s mâmawêyatitân centre.
The Métis-Cree woman from Okanese First Nation says it’s usually one of the three dozen young people she’s been working with to make their own ribbon skirts.
“They’re like, ‘Can we just come and make a ribbon skirt?’” said Tuckanow.
“It’s beautiful to see that.”
Tuckanow is a co-ordinator with the Regina non-profit Growing Young Movers, which looks to mentor youth living on the margins.
It was recently approved for a grant to help set the wheels in motion for a ribbon skirt regalia library in the community centre.
Young women wearing ribbon skirts arrive for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation ceremonies in Calgary on Sept. 30, 2022.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
Once it’s up and running, Tuckanow said, youth will be able to borrow ribbon skirts and ribbon shirts for ceremonies or other events.
The idea started when Tuckanow began reflecting on her culture and how she was surrounded by ceremonial practices growing up. She wore a ribbon skirt to ceremonies, symbolizing the power of womanhood.
“When you put on a skirt, you’re reclaiming that,” she said.
“I have a skirt that I only wear when I’m going to funerals or wakes, I have skirts that are pink and yellow and vibrant, and I’ll wear them out, even if I’m going grocery shopping, because it feels beautiful to put on a ribbon skirt.”
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Saturday marks National Ribbon Skirt Day, established in 2023 after a 10-year-old girl was shamed for wearing a ribbon skirt to a formal day at school in southern Saskatchewan.
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Tuckanow said she noticed the ribbon skirt tradition was missing among urban Indigenous youth at the Regina centre.
“Because of history, a lot of Indigenous folks are displaced from their communities outside of urban centres. And you lose those really important cultural and significant protocol pieces, such as wearing ribbon skirts,” she said.
The garments are also hard to come by and can be expensive. So Tuckanow decided to take matters into her own hands: the centre would make ribbon skirts available to young people and two-spirit folks.
Indigenous women from Alberta share the strength behind ribbon skirts
Before long, she had sourced some ribbon skirt kits from Edmonton and borrowed sewing machines from the centre’s actual library. She also asked an Indigenous advocate to teach youth how to make them.
There was a lot of trial and error, said Tuckanow, but those in the group of 20 helped each other out.
During that first class, she said, one moment hit close to home.
“I was just sitting there just watching them. And I was feeling emotional, because this is what our grandmothers wanted for us,” she said.
“The next week, we had our annual fall feast, and I was blown away by all of these girls coming in, sitting down with their skirts. It was just such a beautiful feeling.”
The goal now is for the group to work with elders and knowledge keepers in the evenings to make more skirts that can be added to the library.
A group of Indigenous youth pose wearing the ribbon skirts they made with Growing Youth Movers at the mâmawêyatitân centre in Regina in this undated handout photo.
Courtesy: Claire Tuckanow
For now, it’s about building up stock and finding a space to store all the skirts.
Tuckanow said she hopes to include ribbon shirts for boys, too.
Anyone, including non-Indigenous people, can wear ribbon skirts, she added — as long as their intentions are good.
“I really like this idea that as Indigenous people, we’re not going to be contributing to that intergenerational trauma,” Tuckanow said.
“It’s creating this intergenerational love through teaching, through being there and having accessible cultural wear.”
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