• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

GRASAC logo

  • About
    • GRASAC’s Database
    • Where We Have Researched
    • Funding
    • About This Website
  • People
    • GRASAC’s Steering Commitee
    • Research Assistants
    • Profile Articles
  • Exhibits
  • Research
    • Research in Action
    • Publications
  • Learn
    • Great Lakes Treaty Timeline
    • Great Lakes Communities Map
    • Indian Residential Schools
      • Access Support
      • Provide Support
  • News
    • GRASAC News
    • Newsletter
      • Newsletter Stories
  • GKS
  • Contact

To Honour and Respect: Gifts from Michi Saagiig Women to the Prince of Wales, 1860

June 1, 2021 by chass_wp-admin

Quilled birchbark basket by Hannah McCue
Quilled birchbark basket by Hannah McCue, given to the Prince of Wales, 1860. Image: Lori Beavis. Royal Collection Trust/Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, RCIN84337.

by Lori Beavis & Laura Peers

Hiawatha First Nation (HFN) and the Peterborough Museum & Archives (PMA) have been awarded $153,817 by the Department of Canadian Heritage Museum Assistance Program, through the Indigenous Heritage stream.

“To Honour and Respect: Gifts from Michi Saagiig Women to the Prince of Wales, 1860” will facilitate the loan of a group of quilled birch bark items from the Royal Collection Trust in England, in 2023. The items were gifts to HRH Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, at Rice Lake in 1860 during his tour of Canada. Remarkably, each is signed by the woman who made it, enabling connections with descendants today.

The PMA will house the ancestral items while in Canada. HFN will lead associated programming, including workshops on quillwork, birch bark arts and Michi Saagiig language. Project leads Dr. Lori Beavis (a Hiawatha Nation citizen) and Dr. Laura Peers note that they will hire Indigenous youth as exhibition docents.

Chief Laurie Carr (HFN) said, “It is so exciting to have our Ancestors come back home to our First Nation, our Traditional Territory. All of these gifts given to the Prince in 1860 are interwoven from our past, to our present, and into our future. The spirit of our Ancestors lives in these gifts and it is such an overwhelming feeling to know that we will be able to meet them and have ceremony and bring together many generations.”

Filed Under: Newsletter Stories

Previous Post: « Concrete Lessons: Policies and Practices Affecting the Impact of COVID-19 for Urban Indigenous Communities in the United States and Canada
Next Post: Scriptural Relations: Colonial Formations of Anishinaabemowin Bibles in Nineteenth-Century Canada »

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • Passing the Torch for GRASAC’s Communications
  • GRASAC Connects with the Baraga Collection at the Slovene Ethnographic Museum in Ljubljana, Slovenia
  • Wampum, Partnership, and the Bank of Canada Museum
  • To Honour and Respect receives Michael M Ames Award for Innovation in Museum Anthropology
  • From the GKS: A Mokuk made by Bamewawagezhikaquay or Jane Susan Ann Schoolcraft