Estrella Racoma Whetung

Topic

Mnidoo-mkwendamwin: Beading and Restitching with Ancestral Threads of Memory

School of Indigenous Governance

Date & location

• Thursday, April 30, 2026

• 11:00 A.M.

• Clearihue Building, Room B007

• & Virtual Defence

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Andrea Naomi Walsh, Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria (Supervisor)

• Dr. Heidi K. Start, School of Indigenous Governance, UVic (Co-Supervisor)

• Dr. John Borrows, Department of Law, UVic (Outside Member) 

External Examiner

• Dr. Sherry Farrell-Racette, Visual Arts Department, University of Regina 

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Jamie Lawson, Department of Political Science, UVic 

   

Abstract

This work was created to go beyond the study cultural mnemonic devices and into the realm of documenting how to make ancestral knowledge encodements that synthesize research through Indigenous beadwork, textile, other fibre arts. Beading is Indigenous resurgence that connects me to my ancestors, and this research delves into what that means in a grounded wholistic way through my intersecting lenses of being a chronically ill neurodivergent Two-Spirit Mississauga Nishnaabe Lucbanin artist and scholar. Conceptualizations around the body, mind, spirit, land, and material expressions of culture are often thought of as separate entities due to colonization, so a foundational part of this work examines approaches to Indigenous ideas of wholeness in community and identifies what forms of decolonization and resurgence can facilitate reconnection with the spiritual. Beads come together and interplay with one another in similar ways that gained wisdoms do within the research process. While the overall design that is created through knowledge is powerful and important, so is every stitch that makes that design come into being. Each relative who collaborated on this dissertation brought a prismatic array of experiences and played a powerful role in shaping the trajectory of the ancestral knowledge encodement of this work in the Ngwaagan Regalia (2025). Throughout the dissertation are ancestral knowledge encodements—created through historical inspiration, depictions of relatives, tea-visits with kin, and narratives shared by family and community members. The encodements created and embedded into this written dissertation take the forms of photographs, historical images, digitally stitched collages, digital mixed media illustrations, paintings, and diagrams. I have chosen to honour this tradition of weaving in the threads of previous generations and connecting it to those in the future through integrating ancestral mkwendamwinan (memories) in the same way that I am including contemporary conversational dbaajmownan (stories).