Bead Soup Challenge

#BeadThisInYourStyle and the #BeadSoupChallenge are but two examples of online communities of practice that have emerged to support revitalization of beadwork practice. Through the use of hashtags across various online platforms including Twitter and Instragram, these online communities bring together beadwork artists from around the world to share experiences, teachings, and techniques and build skills.

During the January 2020 Twitter #BeadSoupChallenge, I received a baggie of beadsoup in the mail from the challenge coordinator in Edmonton, Alberta. Baggies of beads were sent to participants in this community-building project around the world.

The rules of the challenge are simple. Use only the beads provided. Don’t appropriate culture or imagery. The deadline for submissions is January 15. No prizes or competition, simply an opportunity to create art in parallel with community members around the world.

The challenge, in practice, is hard.

Through the winter, Treaty 1 sees sun. Where I make home now, January is grey. The holidays are challenging, and in January I miss the sun. It is my «blue month». These are conversations we often have in my Faculty; mental health and wellbeing in the legal profession and in legal education are research threads I am working to gather.

Thankfully, January is also when beaders dig deep in their beadboxes. Beadwork was historically a winter activity, when folks would hunker down and thread up. 

When the #BeadSoupChallenge bag arrived, I planned to freestyle and follow the beads. Thankfully, my Learner Mary McPherson suggested that I should probably sort the beads first.

My children assisted with the sorting, which took 4 days and nights. At times it was frustrating, but it was mostly meditative. I was forced to slow down and reflect on what kind of beauty I could bring out of the chaotic mess. 

The most robust piles were blue and white. All three Tiny Métis agreed that this meant water. January meant I was thinking of home. It was my son who suggested I bead The Forks, and his sisters eventually agreed when they acknowledged that there was not enough green to undertake the #BabyYodaBeadThisInYourStyle pattern.

The weather cooperated all weekend bringing rain (freezing and regular), snow, slush, plus 5 degrees one minute and minus ten degrees the next. It was the perfect weather for wading through the soup. 

100% of blues and reds were used. Beading the river in red was more than a nod to the name - water is life, but the Red also carries devastation. For me, red now evokes red dresses. Remember: folks regularly Drag the Red.

Unlike the patchwork fields many think of today, farms in the Red River settlement were long slim strips known as River Lots. Organized in this way, each piece of land being cultivated had access to the river on one end and common land on the other. Crops would have included potatoes, barley, peas, & wheat. Every green & yellow in the #BeadSoupChallenge bag became a field.

I beaded the map’s cardinal points in the colours of the medicine wheel: White, red, yellow, black.

I completed the beadwork in time for the January 15 deadline, but only just. My contemporaneous reflections from January 2020 can be found in a 16 (!!) tweet thread here.

To read more about online community beadwork spaces, you can read my contribution to Can’t Compute: Moving Towards and Equitable Digital World, Legal Resurgence and Online Communities of (Beadwork) Practice, here. You can also explore themes of online communities of care in my chapter “Resurgence in Times of Corona: Community, Collegiality, and Care (Online)” beginning at page 330, here.