Source: Facebook/Shades of Our Sisters
Last week the Ryerson School of Image Arts and Ryerson Image Centre building glowed red, shining a light not only on campus but on a critical issue affecting Canada— the death and disappearance of Indigenous women, girls, transgender people and two-spirited people. The LED light display is a precursor to Upwind Productions’ Shades of Our Sisters, a collaborative project between the team of eight fourth-year RTA students and two Indigenous families whose daughters passed away.
“In a nutshell, Shades of Our Sisters is an installation that consists of short documentaries, physical artefacts from these women’s lives, as well as soundscapes, and they all work together to tell the story of Sonya Cywink and Patricia Carpenter” said Laura Heidenheim, the executive producer of the project, in an interview. The installation aims to take a more compassionate approach to representing missing and murdered women. Rather than focusing on the circumstances of these women’s deaths, Shades of Our Sisters allows people “to get to know them, to get to see how they lived and how they were loved,” Heidenheim said.
The upcoming installation will be featured in the Tecumseh Auditorium in the Ryerson Student Centre next year, from Feb. 17 to Feb. 19, before travelling to the home communities of Sonya and Patricia in Alderville First Nations and Whitefish River First Nations.
Upwind Productions was first inspired to take on this issue due to the media’s misrepresentation of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
“[W]e were really angered by the way mainstream media tends to cover these stories; they sort of revictimize the victim when they just focus on the situation she was living in, or if she had any substance [abuse] issues,” Heidenheim said. “They often focus on alcohol content in her blood, or if she happened to be in the sex trade working. They focus on that, but they don’t focus on who she was and the fact that people loved her.”
The students subsequently decided to make a documentary that would “humanize” one of the victims, and collaborated with Sonya Cywink’s family to tell her life’s story. The pieces of media created were to be handed in for their final thesis project, however their commitment to her story did not end there.
“After that documentary was finished we really saw the positive effect it had with the family. We saw how it really helped them in their healing process and we decided that we wanted to push that project further,” said Heidenheim. This is when the team decided to pursue the project independently of their studies, creating a full-blown installation that people could engage with. Rather than simply watching a documentary at home, this will allow the audience to “become an active part of the healing,” said Heidenheim.
When guests first enter the installation, they take a bundle of tobacco to hold throughout the experience. The tobacco is later offered back to the Cywink and Carpenter families or placed somewhere in nature, as a way of showing respect.
A collage featuring photos of Sonya and Patricia. Source: Facebook/Shades of Our Sisters
The first component of the installation is two ten-minute documentaries telling the story of both women. To follow, there is a space for each woman that provides a more immersive experience. The installation is heavily media based– Patricia Carpenter’s section, for example, will include a recreation of the photo wall that can be found in her mother’s home, except instead of picture frames there will be iPads that allow the audience to listen to stories that Patricia’s mother tells. Both spaces also include physical artifacts—dolls, a wallet, a written poetry, for example—partnered with media components that explain their significance.
The setup will allow the audience to “digest these sort of large scale pieces about [the women] and then move through and see smaller, really tangible things that help to tell their stories,” said Heidenheim.
While Upwind Productions is primarily responsible for the installation, the Cywink and Carpenter families are the main producers of the project. The team’s mandate is to allow the families full authority over the way their daughters’ stories are told, while the students simply use their skillset to bring these stories to life through new media. The families also provided input on aesthetic choices—none of the student collaborators are Indigenous, so they were very conscious of ensuring that they did not appropriate any aspects of the culture. This includes the decision to make the project’s message inclusive of transgender and two-spirited Indigenous people: two minorities that are often left out of the conversation around violence against Indigenous women.
“Even though neither of the young women that we’re doing were trans or two-spirited, we really think it’s important to acknowledge the entire spectrum,” said Heidenheim. “[T]his project is looking at two stories that are involved in a much bigger issue.”
Upwind Productions and the Cywink and Carpenter families hope to engage and educate students through the installment, looking at the importance of community and violence prevention, said Heidenheim.
Shades of Our Sisters can be found on their website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.