To honour and revitalize her culture Hailey George creates meaningful beauty as a Wet'suwet'en Dreamcatcher artist.
Traditionally the first dreamcatcher created by an artist goes to their teacher, Hailey said, so on a Father’s Day a few years ago, Hailey presented Dad, Peter, with her first.
And it’s not the last by any means.
With a decade of research behind her, Hailey’s mission is to share her knowledge to keep her culture alive, growing and thriving.
“This is my passion project to share culture,” Hailey said. “I use my creations to get back to my roots. The more dreamcatchers I do, the more I learn. I try and give them names in my traditional language and I don’t always know what those words are so that means I have to pull out my dictionary and translate it all and reference it and that means I have learned something new.”
Both Hailey’s grandparents are Lejac Residential School survivors.
“What they went through they said they would not put their children through so they moved off reserve and my dad and his entire generation are day school survivors and it’s basically the same thing the residential school survivors went through but these children were allowed to come home so they weren’t completely separated from their families like my grandparents were,” Hailey said.
“There’s a lot of trauma in my family and my dad worked very hard to break a lot of that before I came along but I can’t say that I wasn’t born into it and have had to do a lot of my own healing as well. I know they went through a lot of trauma at the residential school.”
Hailey has an active social media presence and has used her Facebook page to share her culture and her people’s teachings that survived despite the residential school experience and to show people the beautiful spiritual beliefs that people could tap into during times of grief or struggle to offer them some direction, she added.
“My wish for my people is justice and healing,” Hailey said. “I want our stories to be heard in a respectful way where it’s safe for our survivors to share their experiences and especially for us intergenerational survivors what I want is for us to be breaking all these generational curses, immersing ourselves in our language without shame, without fear – I want the revitalization of it. What I hear from many my peers is they don’t have access to it.”
Hailey has been fortunate enough to have access and spent the last 10 years learning all she could.
“So my goal is for them to learn as well,” Hailey said. “I’m very hopeful for that and that’s what I am using my dreamcatchers for – to bring back the art form and bring cultural awareness. I want to advocate for everybody who came before me. They survived so much and they worked so hard so this knowledge could be shared.”
Find Hailey on Facebook to get started at Facebook/SkiZaCrookedFeathers.
