Baapaagimaak: Weaving Endurance by Katie Wilhelmina and Summer Bressette

Indigenous resilience takes many forms. The shifting shape of endurance in the face of devastation manifests in digital video form at Museum London. Basket weaving is a part of the Anishinaabe way of knowing and being. Indigenous ways of being are not compartmentalized. Basket weaving is interconnected with community, family, craftsmanship, oral teachings, and with the plants and trees from which the basket supplies are harvested; basket weaving thus represents a complex relationship between human and non-human persons, which is echoed by the complexity of the basket form itself.

The video exhibition is an array of natural images: trails, dappled light through branches, pieces of bark, vivid blue skies, and small green areas. As a moving collage of the natural world, it becomes a narrative about survival, and the complex responses of Anishinaabe people as part of the land’s ecosystem. 

The writing of the Ash Borer beetle on bark is the symbol of environmental catastrophe. This invasive insect, which came with settler colonialism, is responsible for ecosystem loss. The calligraphy of the Ash Borer resembles the winding path of our river, the Deshkan-ziibi, through the land. Like all other aspects of the film, this is a reminder that the land functions as a teacher, and all that lives on it is a teacher. Katie Wilhelmina and Summer Bresette have much to teach our city, and by extension, the world.