Valuable Materials, Invaluable Relationships: Exploring Indigenous Culture and Sovereignty Through Moose and Caribou Hair Tufting in the NWT

Moose and caribou hair tufting is an important Subarctic women's artform in the Mackenzie Valley, Northwest Territories. However, tuftings and tufters have historically been identified following non-Indigenous ideologies rooted in colonialism and capitalist values, resulting in labels such as "craft", and "artisan", that are difficult to change. This practice has undervalued, if not dismissed, Indigenous artists, their artistry and by and large their art. This dissertation takes a multi-sited approach using archival records, museum objects, and interviews with tourism shop employees, and especially with tufting artists to elucidate the complex ways artists have employed their art to traverse cultural borders. In tracing the history of tufting, I discuss how women have used their artistry as acts of agential resistance to re-assert their own cultural and place-rooted relationships and meanings in the face of centuries of colonial violations. The central objective of my research is to make clear the dimensions of significance engaged with in hair tuftings by Dene, Métis, and Inuvialuit artists. I show how important values such as skill, landscape, and culture are a connected whole that is embodied within each tufting. A second objective is to uncover how important Indigenous values were and continue to be impacted by colonization. In my early chapters, I explain how Western values were imposed on Indigenous peoples and livelihoods. Thus, the Indigenous values attached to artistic making were regarded as inferior as viewed through Western critics' lenses. Third, I discuss the ways tufters have used their creations as sites of sovereignty to continuously negotiate and challenge colonial endeavors and carry these vital knowledges and values into the future. A critical outcome of this research has been the deconstruction of the colonial spaces that have silenced Indigenous peoples and their textile creations. Here I have offered a revisionist narrative that is informed by artists, Elders, and community members to provide a critical understanding of the multiplicity of values that are essential to Indigenous societies. Finally, this dissertation reflects on my positionality as an anthropologist and highlights to importance of "listening" as a methodology.