The Traveling Dress Project
Project Description
I belong to a group of wonderful women photographers with whom I meet with virtually on an ongoing basis. We all live in different areas of the country or in another part of the world. By chance, we met through Brooke Shaden's mentorship program. We wanted to collaborate on a project together. Taking inspiration from the movie The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and The Travelling Dress Project, we went looking for a dress in which all of us could use to each create an image of our choosing and in our own style. Once someone was done photographing the dress, it would be mailed to someone else in the group. The dress ended up traveling to three continents, has its own story to tell, and has taken us several years to complete.
About this piece
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I wanted to bring attention to an Indigenous issue that is not well known in "general" society, which is also a woman issue. This issue is Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), where Indigenous women, girls, and two spirits go missing and are found murdered. After talking about that issue with someone and they being skeptical that that even happens, I knew that this was something that perhaps I could bring a tiny bit of attention to through the use of my art.
I've first seen red dresses hung at Pow Wows many years ago and then learned about MMIW. It happens in both America and Canada and around the world. Indigenous women, girls, and two spirits are kidnapped predominately by non-Indigenous males on tribal lands. It also happens around "man camps" which are temporary housing areas for the employees of resource extraction industries such as oil and gas. The women, girls, and two spirits are subjected to abuse, assault, and violence. They are human and sex trafficked and murdered.
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This piece speaks to the situations in the "man camps" and MMIW. In Indigenous culture, red is used for MMIW, is the only color seen by spirits, is used as a link to ancestors in the spirit world, and other symbolic meanings.
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There are a number of sites dedicated to MMIW. Here is one to get you started in learning more.
https://www.wernative.org/articles/what-is-the-mmiw-movement
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