Of Needlework and Nebulae

The otherworldly beading creations of Margaret Nazon

- Pamela Young

MARGARET NAZON grew up near Tsiigehtchic, a Gwich’in settlement in the Northwest Territories. For most of the year, she and her family would hunt, fish, and trap in seasonal camps, returning to their Tsiigehtchic log cabin for a week at a time, once around Christmas and once in the summer. In the community, she would watch her older sister and her friends’ mothers stitch beads into floral designs on velvet, stroud, and moose hide after their chores were finished for the day. At their invitation, she began learning how to decorate bracelets, headbands, and moccasins. But she didn’t particularly like beading.

“I was doing the same thing as everyone else,” she recalls. The women in the community taught her that flowers and geometric patterns were the only suitable choices of subject matter. They determined which colour combinations were acceptable: leaves had to be outlined with rows of dark-green beads and filled in with light-green ones; yellow and black were the only options for flower centres. She remembers experienced beaders requiring their students to tear out and redo any work that did not meet their standards of neatness and precision. Their rigour may have stemmed from the rules that apply when living and travelling in nature: “When you’re out on the land,” says Nazon, “you’ve got to follow tradition, otherwise you could get lost, you could starve, something could happen.”