Women's Work, Women's Art: Nineteenth-Century Northern Athapaskan Clothing

Judy Thompson, Women's Work, Women's Art: Nineteenth-Century Northern Athapaskan Clothing. Gatineau: Canadian Museum of Civilization; Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2013. 307 pages. ISBN 978-0-773-54159-7. $59.95 paperback.Women's Work, Women's Art by Judy Thompson is an authoritative text that offers comprehensive study of Northern Athapaskan clothing and objects of adornment, contextualized within cultural-historical narrative. Thompson's knowledge and expertise gained during her forty-year career as museum curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, informed by extensive collaborative research with Athapaskan and Metis communities, together with her study of over 400 nineteenth-century Athapaskan garments in institutions around the world, make this book an invaluable resource. Thompson reframes knowledge of sub-Arctic cultures through broad overview of nineteenthcentury Athapaskan garment styles followed by detailed analysis that identifies the clothing traditions of twenty-three Athapaskan groups. This research breaks new ground in recognizing the heterogeneity of distinct aesthetic traditions and the richness of individual creativity.Thompson sets out the book's three main goals: to foreground the importance of women in clothing production; to describe the technology, design, and decoration of nineteenth-century Athapaskan clothing styles; and to reconstruct the distinct traditions of dress and self adornment of specific Northern Athapaskan groups. The arrangement is thematic; the contextual information in Chapter 1 provides an overview of traditional lifestyle and the key roles of clothing and self adornment. Chapter 2 presents women's work and art in the area of clothing creation, in detailed descriptions of use and preparation of materials as well as sewing and decorative art techniques. Chapter 3 discusses major Athapaskan styles and the designs of key garments. In Chapter 4 the dress and adornment styles of twenty-three Athapaskan groups are reconstructed. The Epilogue summarizes twentieth-century clothing and recent projects which aim to revive and preserve knowledge of traditional garments.Women's Work, Women's Art is an invaluable resource in multiple areas. As collaborative research model, grounded in the active involvement of Athapaskan community members, Thompson's decolonizing approach illustrates the importance of museum and community partnerships that centre the voice of First Peoples. In numerous trips to the sub-Arctic region, Thompson visited Athapaskan communities in the Northwest Territories, Yukon and British Columbia. Discussions with community members, in a community-based interview project, in which women, many of them elderly, recorded information about their lives and work, were central to this research (xxiv). Through Thompson, Athapaskan elders visited the Canadian Museum of Civilization to see collections connected to their cultural heritage. Thompson was also part of highly successful Athapaskan community projects to recover skills in making traditional clothing. The results of these partnerships are evident; the words of Athapaskan elders from across the sub-Arctic region are quoted throughout the text, creating work that extensively informed by Indigenous thought and community knowledge.As resource for the recovery of traditional knowledge, this text is handbook of Athapaskan clothing design and manufacture. Thompson's work with Dorothy Burnham, pioneer in Canadian and Indigenous textiles and expert in garment analysis and drafting patterns, brings unique skillset to the book. Burnham's to-scale drawings are brought together with detailed information about materials, their preparation, and garment construction and elaboration specific to distinct groups. …

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