Create art and join a conversation at Paper Birch

By Chris Putnam

In the first two weeks of March, the University of Saskatchewan (USask) community is invited to the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery to try a new twist on an ancient art.

Paper Birch 2025 is a collaborative exhibition and art-making event organized by Indigenous Student Achievement Pathways (ISAP) and the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery. From March 3–14, the gallery is hosting an exhibition of artwork submitted by Indigenous USask students. During the first week of the show, the gallery welcomes anyone—Indigenous or non-Indigenous—to create birch bark-inspired crafts and artwork that will become part of the exhibition.

From 10 am–2 pm each day, visitors can follow templates to create traditional birchcraft items such as bowls and utensils, or they can invent their own works of art. Instead of birch bark, the creations will be made from old geologic maps.

“I think it’s a good opportunity to engage with people you wouldn’t normally talk to in an environment that you wouldn’t normally be in,” said Lexus Neil, a Métis third-year psychology student at USask who is volunteering at the art-making sessions this week.

ISAP—a mentorship, learning and community-building program for Indigenous students in the College of Arts and Science—has an annual tradition of organizing an art creation and dialogue project around Indigenous Achievement Week at USask (March 10–14, 2025).

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Each project aims to honour traditional Indigenous making and teaching practices while sparking conversation and new ways of learning.

“(For this year), we thought of the idea of birch, as this material has been so important to sustenance on the land and was also important to the colonization experience in terms of watercraft, containers and also early map-making,” said Dr. Sandy Bonny (PhD), team lead of ISAP.

One problem: birch bark is expensive and winter is the wrong time to harvest it. The team found an alternative when they learned of a pile of outdated geologic maps in the USask Department of Geological Sciences. Rather than destroy the maps, the department donated them to ISAP.

The unorthodox material is a perfect fit for the project, said Logan Martin-Arcand, an ISAP programming officer and a Nehiyaw/Denesuline theatre artist.

“(In the theatre), when you’re creating sets or costumes, you have to be resourceful. And there’s a similar spirit when it comes to Indigenous making, where we’re making things traditionally and also contemporarily out of the materials that we can get our hands on. And so that might be making things out of duct tape or it might be making things out of beads, or it might be making things out of porcupine quills, or making things out of geologic maps. And so being able to just take something and then turn it into something else definitely aligns with my theatre background, but it also aligns with my Indigeneity.”

The maps, which show subsurface mineral and resource deposits, have an added symbolic meaning in a country where resource extraction projects have often disregarded or failed to benefit the Indigenous peoples of the land.

“Birch containers were used ubiquitously for storing and feeding and transporting goods. And so creating them out of geologic maps and having them be empty in our installation is kind of a reflection, in my mind—and other people are going to take different things away from this—of empty promises in Treaty spaces that maybe we need to have conversations about addressing,” said Bonny, who is also a geologist and artist.

KC Adams, recipient of the 2022 ohpinamake Prize for Indigenous Artists from USask, will kick off the week with a talk in the gallery at 11:30 am on Monday, March 3. Adams will discuss her use of birch bark as an artist and the material’s other present and historical uses and meanings.

The organizers hope it will be the first of many great discussions among visitors to the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery during Paper Birch. Seven USask courses plan to participate, connecting the project to concepts and dialogue in disciplines as diverse as political studies, social psychology, land-based education and Cree language learning.

Neil, who has participated in the last two annual ISAP art projects, said the conversation and atmosphere is what keeps her coming back.

“I always feel like there’s a community that ends up being built in these areas. It always feels very welcoming, and I know sometimes it’s hard to make friends on campus. So it’s a good opportunity to do that.”

Everyone is welcome to join—whether they have artistic talent or not.

“There’s different activities for people to do, so people can kind of choose their difficulty level. But as long as you have the dexterity to sew, you will be able to make a container easily,” said Martin-Arcand.

Paper Birch 2025 is supported in part by funding from SK Arts.

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