Grassroots group sewing red skirts for women's march
Red Sisters Gathering founded as place for homeless and marginalized women
Jamie Smallboy was hungover in an alleyway on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, feeling empty and homeless. She heard the sound of drumming, like a heartbeat.
Smallboy got up and followed the sound. “I turned the corner and there were hundreds of Indigenous women and non-indigenous supporters marching.”
Smallboy was flooded with emotion. Growing up in Treaty Six territory in Alberta, before she was apprehended by social services and removed from her family at the age of 11, ceremony had been a huge part of her life.
Smallboy asked the marchers why they were drumming and singing. “They said it was for the missing and murdered Indigenous women.”
Her tears began to flow — she was one of the missing. Smallboy, driven by despair and addiction, was living on the streets, so disconnected from services or supports that she huddled in shopping carts at night, and covered herself in cardboard to stay warm.
“That march literally saved my life,” said Smallboy, who reached out to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside Women's Centre for help shortly after that day in 2011.
The journey wasn't easy, but the Langara College student, now 50, has been drug-free and sober for nine years. “I was homeless and I had given up hope. I was consumed by alcohol and addictions.”
Smallboy is now sharing her story, like a drum she hopes others will hear. “I never knew someone as broken as me could come back and heal.”
Smallboy is the founder of Red Sisters Gathering, a small, grassroots project to create red ribbon skirts for the families of missing and murdered Indigenous women, which she will distribute at the 29th annual Women's Memorial March, taking place Feb. 14.
Smallboy founded Red Sisters Gathering in 2019 with two Langara classmates, Holly Desjarlais and Michelle Paquette, to make a space for marginalized and homeless women to participate in the creation of the vivid red skirts.
“The Red Sisters Gathering is for marginalized women,” said Smallboy, who said she hopes to raise funds to purchase fabric, donated or loaned sewing machines, and coffee and doughnuts for the socially distanced sewing gatherings.
The gatherings are more than just sewing circles. “It's ceremony, and the welcoming of women back home in our culture, and ceremonial circles. Our ceremonial circles revitalized my pride as a woman and lifegiver, and the ceremonial skirts we are making are part of that healing,” said Smallboy.
Smallboy, who is Cree, said, “The colour red is said to be the colour a spirit recognizes. I would like to give red-ribbon skirts to the families so the spirits of their loved ones will see a parade of women in red, and the victims will come and march with their loved ones.”
Each stitch in the ribbon skirts binds her more closely with her culture. When Smallboy aged out of the foster care system in Alberta and returned to her family in Maskwacis, Alta., she felt like she didn't belong anymore. “All my friends had grown up together, they had bonded, they had danced powwow together. I was a stranger.”
In 2009, Smallboy moved to Vancouver to try and start a new life.
“I had no idea what trauma was, or what intergenerational trauma was,” said Smallboy. “I didn't know I had rights or that I had PTSD. I was ignorant about the facts of residential school and the impact of culture being taken from us.
“I have my kids, I'm clean and sober, I'm in school,” said Smallboy, who's rebuilding her life with her five kids on the Downtown Eastside.
Anyone who wishes to help can contact Smallboy at: redsistersgathering@gmail.com or teira2580@outlook.com.