Join us for a quill dyeing workshop with Jessa Rae Growing Thunder, a third-generation beadwork and quillwork artist from the Fort Peck Assiniboine/Sioux tribes. She is a current Fellow with the Colby College Museum of Art’s Lunder Institute of American Art.
In this workshop, participants will learn about indigenous science and will use and apply natural dyes to porcupine quills. There will be two opportunities to join the workshop, from 2:00–4:00 p.m. and 5:00–7:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public. No prior experience is required. Registration is recommended.
Jessa Rae Growing Thunder comes from the Fort Peck Reservation in Northeastern Montana. She is Sisituwan/Wahpetuwan Dakota and Wadobana Tuwa Nakoda. She is a traditional beadwork/quillwork artist and an Indigenous feminist historian who specializes in Indigenous-led arts research-creation. She holds a Ph.D. in Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. Jessa Rae’s research is rooted in the practice of history as an Indigenous tradition of Dakota/Nakoda peoples. Not only is she critically engaging with intergenerational oral history, but she is also asserting that Dakota/Nakoda women have always been historians. Through traditional beadwork, Fort Peck women have encrypted our/their histories into every stitch. These beaded histories, though seemingly voiceless, have “spoken”—and can be read as texts—with precise articulation via traditional forms of knowledge transmission throughout colonialism.