Image courtesy of the Métis Nation of Ontario

Tracey-Mae Chambers is a Métis artist and citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario. Her installation #hopeandhealingcanada has appeared at cultural centres, museums, art galleries, and  residential school historic sites across the country, sparking conversations about decolonization and reconciliation. In September of 2024, she was awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal in recognition of this work. 

The Toronto and York Region Métis Council spoke with Chambers about growing up outside of her Métis community, her artistic practice, and what the significance of the #hopeandhealingcanada project is today. 

TYRMC: You have shared publicly that, due to being adopted as a child, you were not aware of your Métis heritage growing up. Can you tell us about the process of learning about your roots and connecting to your Métis identity?

TM: The Children’s Aid Society had put non- identifying information on the adoption records when I was put up for adoption, and my mother hadn’t listed my father on my birth certificate, so it was sort of a perfect storm.

All she had said was – the word that they used at the time was native. That’s all she said about my father. Then because of adoption laws in Canada, I wasn’t able to connect with him for quite some time. It took a long time to be able to find my birth parents. When I did, my father was living in Midland.

There wasn’t a whole lot of conversation about our heritage and I didn’t see much of [my birth family], because I lived in southern Ontario and had my own things going on – I would have been in my early 30s.

I didn’t get my Métis card until 2019. It was problematic that my father’s name was not on my birth certificate and that, when I was adopted, my parents changed my name. I was denied several times. Finally, in 2020, I got my citizenship card. I’m 55 now. It took that long to sort out – to be able to prove to them who I was.

By [the time I got my citizenship card], lots of people within my family had passed on [and] there was not a lot of cultural connection. We’re working on that now to try to figure out why that was, but I think that can be said of a lot of families when there’s a separation between what would have happened in the culture, how they reacted with their community, how they celebrated their Métis-ness – all of those things seemed to be lost along some sort of generational shift.

COVID made it even more difficult for us to connect, but I [understood] that colonization was part of the problem of why it took me so long to be recognized as being Métis. That really sparked that conversation within my own mind about what decolonization meant, understanding that I can still be a part of something even if I had not grown up with what other people may have experienced in their own families.

TYRMC: Your #hopeandhealingcanada project has been exhibited in public spaces across the country. How did this project come to light and what does it represent for you as an Indigenous artist?

TM: The project started when the unmarked graves [in Kamloops] were announced in early summer of 2021. [Today,] the work has been exhibited at over 150 public spaces: galleries, museums, art centers, city halls, libraries, and archives across Canada. 

Nothing is ever wasted in this body of work. I was a sculptor prior to this but there’s no way to express something as momentous as addressing decolonization or reconciliation in a non-confrontational manner through sculpture. In my mind, I couldn’t figure out a way to do that, and certainly after Kamloops, there was no way for me to figure out how to do that. 

I was actually fixing a crocheted blanket that I’d made for one of my sons. And as I was doing it, my husband and I were talking, and I realized, “I can mend this. I only know a couple stitches, but I can fix this crochet piece because it’s a material.”

What a great avenue for conversation because it’s really difficult to get pissed off at yarn. We all have pleasant stories about things like yarn – grandmothers have made us things, we purchased something for a baby – so, I thought it was a great way to start conversations about decolonization.

I chose the color red to use within that body of work because it’s a racial slur, but it’s also one of the most powerful colours. There’s really no other colour that I could have used, aside from black, that would be as powerful as this, but it’s also common among us. People tend to think of blood as being red, and so it was the right color to choose, not my favorite colour, but the right color to choose. Then I learned how to crochet different stitches. I learned how to knit. I learned how to weave.

TYRMC: What is the process of exhibiting this work? 

TM: When the work goes to a specific place, I install it. And then after my contract, which is generally three-to-six months, the work is shipped back to me from wherever I’ve installed it. Each time it comes back from a community, I add more crocheted lines onto it. So, if it happens to have been in the sun, you can actually see that some of the work is faded and some of the work is not, which is wonderful.

I noticed that some people, especially as the years have gone by, have said, “This is frayed, shouldn’t you replace it?” Well, no, that’s the point. We can fix that. I can fix it. And there’s no point in throwing it away, it’s still usable. Then it becomes something about an Indigenous worldview as well – using everything and not being wasteful.

Every community it’s been to, it started a conversation about how that institution is looking at its own infrastructure, how it addresses who is welcome and who is not. Each line that I add, or each addition I make to each one of those pieces addresses another community moving forward, trying to move forward, trying to reconnect with all of the people within their community. The point of this body of work was to start conversations in these places about who’s telling the story. Whose stories are they? Who is welcome, who is not, and if there are unwelcome groups, why?

My job is not to decolonize these places – that’s not the job of any Indigenous community. It’s the job of the institution. I want them to look at that and as they’re taking apart that framework that they’ve built themselves on, [think about] how they can rebuild that framework to include everyone. I think that’s what has become most important to me in this body of work. I always think about the conversations that are started, and I think it’s wonderful that those conversations happen. That’s the point of artwork –  to make tough discussions and tough conversations less uncomfortable.

To find out more about Tracy-Mae and her work, please visit traceymae.com. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.