**Skawennati**, 2021. Photo: Paxton Phillips, COURTESY OF KOR Photo Studio.

Born in Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati belongs to the Turtle clan. She holds a BFA from Concordia University in Montréal, where she resides. In 2019, Skawennati co-founded daphne, a non-profit Indigenous artist-run centre committed to serving the needs of emerging, mid-career, and established Indigenous artists, along with three other artists based in Montreal. She can also be found in Second Life on AbTeC Island (coordinates 78 : 172 : 1011), an Indigenous-determined territory in cyberspace. On AbTeC Island you’ll find an art gallery, sets from Skawennati’s various machinimas, and meeting place to hang out in cyberspace.

Skawennati tackles themes of futurity, history and change as both an urban Kanien’kehá:ka woman and a cyberpunk avatar in her multimedia art. She is well-known for her machinimas — films shot entirely in virtual environments — and her work as co-founder of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research-creation network whose goal is to ensure Indigenous presence in the web pages, online environments, video games and virtual worlds that comprise cyberspace.

In 2020, Skawennati debuted her fashion collection Calico & Camouflage at Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto. Though she has been designing pieces for avatars to wear for many years, this collection marked Skawennati’s first major foray into creating clothing meant to be worn outside of cyberspace. This ResistanceWear joins patterns and clothing woven into the history of colonialization on Turtle Island in ways that have never been seen before.

Skawennati and I met over Zoom early in 2021 to chat about some of her recent work that has moved further out of cyberspace and back into the “real world.”

The Wampum Belts

**Skawennati**, *Intergalactic Empowerment Wampum*, 2019. From *Extending the Rafters.* Leather, sinew, beads. COURTESY OF Skawennati / ELLEPHANT

Sasha Sobrino
Three of your works really jump out: Calico & Camouflage, Generations of Play 3D and Wampums Belts of the Future. I’ve been thinking about the connections that exist not only between these works, but to the parts of your artistic practice that exist in cyberspace — these pieces are all very craft-based and materially very different from your films shot in Second Life.

Skawennati
One thing that I like about those three choices is that each of them come from a different part of my machinima practice.

Sasha
With Wampum Belts of the Future, I want to talk about the actual process of making the objects. Do you have any experience with beading? I know that you sew and that you have experience making clothing.

Skawennati
It was pretty much a fully new learning experience. It’s a different kind of beadwork. I have done beadwork in the past, but I’ve done raised beadwork — Iroquois raised beadwork and that kind of beadwork with the small little seed beads.

I found out there were people making wampum belts out of FIMO (polymer clay). They were recreating these traditional belts, with traditional colours, out of FIMO! If you are making a wampum belt out of FIMO, why are you sticking to traditional colours? I thought, that’s what I want to do: I want to make wampum belts of the future that have different colours. So,I bought some FIMO, thinking I would make beads. My first thought was to make all little people depicted on the wampum belt in different skin colours, like beige, chocolate and mahogany.

I was unable to make them. Whatever I did, I did it wrong. For example, I baked them on this wire like they told me to, and I could never get the wampum bead off of the wire. Ever. I just was like, all right, I’m not going to learn how to make beads for this project. There are lots of beads in the world, you know, and I also have to learn how to make the wampum belt!

I knew I had to have wampum belts in (my machinima) The Peacemaker Returns. The Peacemaker is the person who brought together the five (at the time) warring nations that then became the Iroquois Confederacy. And they created a wampum belt that is known as the Hiawatha Belt, or the Confederacy Belt. I made that belt in Second Life to be filmed in our machinima.

So then I finally developed my Intergalactic Empowerment Wampum Belt. I knew I wanted one of the figures to be fuchsia, because I love fuchsia, and because it was going to refer to the Sky People from Sky World in my film She Falls for Ages. There was a little connection between my two worlds. But I could not find fuchsia beads anywhere at all.

[Note: Fuchsia pigment could not survive the heat of production, and so Skawennati improvised and used Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Nail Color in Flashy Fuchsia painted directly onto glass wampum beads.]

I’ve wanted to make a wampum belt for years. Years. I finally asked my cousin, Kathleen Dearhouse, to make a wampum belt with me. That way I could figure out how to make it myself.

Sasha
Your wampum belts of the future first moved out of cyberspace to accompany The Peacemaker Returns. It seems as though you’ve just continued to make more of them.

Skawennati
I love making them. And I love the idea of making a whole bunch of different ones all with different aliens. I don’t feel like it’s a series though. Like, I wouldn’t do a show of them, they would all be too similar. Sometimes I just move one alien around and I try different things. I wouldn’t call it a series. I don’t know what to call that. Experiments?

Sasha
I was wondering if the next one was going to be completely different and perhaps serve a different purpose. This is a belt for future relationships, for intergalactic partnerships with aliens, and I’m curious if you have a set goal of what kind of partnership each belt would be representing.

Skawennati
No, but that would be so smart if I had done that! I have six aliens, including human, and I put five on each belt. There’s the Twi’lek (from the Star Wars universe) and the Overlord is from (Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 science fiction novel) Childhood’s End. They’re all aliens from popular culture, except for the Sky People, which I imagined to have brightly coloured skin.

Sasha
These are very traditional wampum belts that were made in Second Life. You’re making something futuristic, but in a very traditional material way. And that flip seems like a natural continuation of your work. It seems to be doing the thing that you do all the time, which is messing with linear time. You’re playing with past, present and future — even in the materials you use. You’re making them in real life with non-traditional materials, you didn’t use traditional colours, you used a more contemporary style of leather and nail polish. These are all very contemporary elements supporting a very futuristic concept. Even as this work is brought out of cyberspace and into the real world, I’m still seeing the flowing together of past, present, and future.

Skawennati
I am happy that you see that.

Sasha
How are objects like the wampum belts actually made in Second Life?

Skawennati
In Second Life, you can make basic shapes, or prims. One of the shapes is a cube and you squash it, and stretch it, and then squash it again. Eventually, you get the same shape as a wampum belt. The next thing we do is apply a texture to that shape, which in this case was an image of a Two Row Wampum. Second Life allows you to make your prim flexi, and so we’re able to make it seem like it’s hanging in his hand.

I think it took longer to learn how to make it in Second Life than it did to learn how to make a wampum belt in real life. I watched my cousin for a short time. She strings the beads, she weaves them through. Once you see it, you get it. I learned how to weave as a kid. I learned how to bead. But I still think even a person who’d never woven anything could learn that a little faster than what we had to learn in Second Life. I mean, we had to start off learning how to walk around.

Sasha
I think of the wampum belts that have appeared in your machinimas, and you made those wampum belts in Second Life. So why make this one in the material world? Why not make it in Second Life?

Skawennati
Great question. There are a few ways to answer it, so I’ll try out a few.

The first is, why do we make anything? Us makers? We love to make. It’s just that thing in us that makes us want to make things. I want to make the things whether they’re in Second Life or in real life. I generally want to make everything.

A new answer that’s kind of coming out, is the idea of bringing things into the real world. That Second Life, or cyberspace, is my staging area, my studio, and my sketchbook. A place where ideas can be realized in a cyber function, if you will, but then moved into the real world. Because the whole point is changing the real world, is affecting the real world. That’s my point. That’s what I’m hoping for by making things. I think that’s one thing that artists do very well: we make things and then the world is changed. A little bit maybe, but potentially more than a little.

Sasha
How much of it was because it was important to make an actual physical object? There’s something more functional about the wampum belts.

Skawennati
Totally. It’s the same answer. The answer is that I wanted something in the real world. I wanted this thing that we could touch and we could imagine ourselves using the way our ancestors used their wampum belts. I wanted people to see this and feel they could use it, because that’s one thing that machinima can’t do. Machinima doesn’t convince people that it’s the real world. People don’t believe that whatever they’re seeing is actually happening, or that it could really happen now. If they see that object, the wampum belt, they can say: “I could touch this. My children could touch this. This could really happen.”

I love machinima. Everything about it. I love making it, even with the headaches that it can give you. I love the meaning it conveys. I know not everyone gets it. It does not touch everyone. It does not speak to everyone, not by a long shot. Whereas objects and fashion, it’s much clearer. Everybody understands. Clothing is very political. Even when you choose to wear nothing, it’s a political statement.

On Design and Camouflage

**Skawennati**, Exhibition *Calico & Camouflage: Demonstrate,* ELLEPHANT, Montreal, 2020. COURTESY OF Skawennati / ELLEPHANT

Sasha
Can you tell me more about the process of making this collection? I read a bit about the fabric design and how the calico print was drawn from doodles you had done as a child.

Skawennati
It’s true. I always used to draw that little tulip as a kid. It came back to me when I needed it. We used that flower, created an Illustrator file, and sent it off to get the fabric printed. That was the first fabric I did for the piece Dancing With Myself (2015). For the camouflage, my team and I looked up a couple of tutorials on how to create camouflage and then we made it. I made sure to include a digital camo, because we’re in cyberspace.

Sasha
Making xox’s shirt for Dancing With Myself (2015) was the first time making this clothing outside of cyberspace. Did you know that you were going to be making something bigger from that?

Skawennati
xox has been wearing that same shirt for like 10 years. I definitely started to think that she would have other items of clothing like that. In Words Before All Else (2017-2021), she wears a bikini top with that pattern, and she’s going to have a kite with that pattern. I didn’t start thinking of it as a series at that point. But when I sat down and said okay, I’m going to make a collection with the calico print, it as a no-brainer that it was going to be the same calico print. I did choose different colours though, so her actual shirt is not in it.

I don’t know how to draft my own sewing patterns. What I really wanted to do was copy the actual army pants that I had. So I did first try to reverse engineer that pattern with my cousin Kathleen, and I didn’t want to cut up my pants! But it didn’t work out. These are amazingly engineered pants actually. They’re made to go to war! There are so many components to them and I got to the point where I realized I just couldn’t make these pants.

I looked everywhere for a pattern and eventually a friend found one for me that was perfect. I didn’t need all that incredible engineering. For example, I could have zippers, I didn’t have to have buttons on the pocket, or an extra flap. I realised that all of these little elements were beyond my abilities. I just knew I wasn’t going to be able to make all eight pairs of pants with all those details.

Kathleen helped me with the ribbon shirts. I did have a research assistant, her name is Kahentawaks Tiewishaw, come over to help me back before the pandemic started. Her favourite thing was ironing! That was great because the truth about sewing is it’s seriously, majority ironing. Unbelievable.

**Skawennati**, *Calico & Camouflage* - 8 different outfits, 2020. Textiles: Ribbon Shirts, Cargo Pants, Shoes, Face Mask (optional), Protest Sign. Photo Credit: Daniel Cianfarra. COURTESY OF Skawennati / ELLEPHANT

**Skawennati**, *Resistance is Fertile*, 2020. From *Calico & Camouflage*. Shaped Archival Pigment Print on Aluminium. COURTESY OF Skawennati / ELLEPHANT

Sasha
This collection has been labelled ResistanceWear and that it provides a uniform or an outfit for protesting. Are you imagining that this project will keep going? I can’t imagine that there’s going to be any mass production of this collection, but with it being conceptually a uniform, that is kind of implied.

Skawennati
You think so? You said with it conceptually being a uniform, it implies that it will be mass produced?

Well, I wasn’t picturing that. A couple of people have asked me that. That they can imagine a large group of people all wearing this, which is so cool. I didn’t imagine that. I didn’t think of that. I was thinking about the runway and the fashion show, and I was so excited by that. I wanted to see those ribbons flowing. The ribbons became so exciting conceptually. They symbolize our continuation. There’s one pair of pants which I love so much. It has a ribbon fringe that goes all along the side seams of the pants.

To try to answer your question about where this collection would go, it’s the same answer as with the wampum belts: it doesn’t matter where it’s going to go.

Sasha
You’ve been doing this clothing design in cyberspace for a really long time, and then there’s this jump to the real world and designing clothing there. Can you talk about some of the differences between the two?

Skawennati
There’s definitely some differences. For example, to make a ribbon shirt in Second Life we needed to figure out how to make the ribbons hang from the shirt. This is not obvious! My team figured out that we could create a plane in Photoshop that is transparent except for two ribbons on either side. Then that texture is placed on a prim, which is also transparent, and it is attached to the body so that it looks like it’s on the shirt. I now believe with infinite resources that you can make almost anything in Second Life look like something in real life. But, I still think you cannot make a ribbon fringe on pants.

What I was describing to you with the ribbon fringe and having each of the ribbons move separately. Each fringe would not be able to wave separately; they would all be attached, which would not look good at all. So there’s a lot of things that are exciting about making the clothing in the real world. Like even my choice to use matching metallic thread for each colour of ribbon. It’s this beautiful touch that I love so much and that does not have the same meaning in Second Life. It’s not luxurious in Second Life, but it is in real life.

On Labour and Value

Sasha
Have you noticed any difference in the reception of your work, perhaps influenced by the apparent weight of physical labour?

Skawennati
There is an obsession with labour when making art. Maybe for good reason. I’ve been asked to do crits with students, and I’ve noticed that they have to tell me how long it took them to do whatever piece they’ve made. I remember caring about that too. Not for marks, but more, oh, have I worked hard enough on this piece for it to be considered Art? I don’t feel like that anymore. Now I know that art is your experiences, and your interpretation of experiences, your offering, and you bring all your life with it.

Having said that, I have noticed a different kind of excitement with the non-virtual based work. I think audiences have more experience thinking of real-world items as art, and feel more comfortable relating to them. The amount of labour was not at all a part of why I felt I needed to make a wampum belt. And I also think it’s not a good way to measure the worth of a piece of art.

Sasha
That makes sense to me. I’m thinking also about the preciousness of objects and the way that people ascribe value to the labour of the artist. Does this practice of moving objects out of cyberspace and into the real world destine them to become precious?

Skawennati
Most likely, but that’s okay too. Around 20 years ago, I made a beautiful quilt as a gift for some people. It was made of silk dupioni. I designed this gorgeous quilting pattern. It was really beautiful. Then, the woman I gave it to says a couple of days or weeks later, “I’ve put your quilt on my bed. And the cat was sleeping right on it.” And I thought, she lets her cat sleep on the quilt I made her? This precious quilt?! I thought to myself, it’s not yours anymore. You gave it to her, you know?

And it’s a little bit how I feel about my artworks too. I need to make them, and that’s the first need. And the second need is that I need others to see them. That’s the only way they really become, you know? I definitely have that part of my artist’s being of wanting other people to see the things I’ve made and like them, or even just react to them. I don’t care if they’re precious objects that never get touched, or if they’re totally fondled by the cat and other people. That part of it I can’t control and don’t want to control, thankfully. I’m done with that. I just want to be able to make my things and show them to people.

Sasha
How do you define an object?

Skawennati
Well, I guess that question is asking me if an object is something we can physically hold in this world. Because we have objects in Second Life. I mean, when you create a new object, the default title is “object.” So how do I define an object? It’s a good question. The thing is, I feel there are parallel worlds. I feel like cyberspace is a kind of — not a parallel world, but an extension of this world. So, there are digital objects and there are physical objects. And what is exciting to me is that they’re starting to go back and forth across that line, you know, across the portal.

The show at AbTeC Gallery was called A Thread that Never Breaks. This show was supposed to be a textile show, held in Toronto in spring 2020 but the pandemic meant it would have to be changed. The curators, Lisa Meyers and Sage Paul, asked me if we could talk about some other way to present this work. So I brought them into Second Life, which they had not been in, I don’t think, and they got it.

I told them that there’s a number of ways that we can show this work here. We can take pictures of it. We can create objects. For example, this shawl that you have, we can create the shawl in Second Life and place it somewhere. Then we invited the artists into Second Life. One artist, whose piece was all beadwork, made oversized beads. Her work is all tiny little beads, but you couldn't quite see them super well in Second Life. So, she was just playing and she made a whole arrangement of gigantic beads that avatars would sit on.

And so the show became something else. They were based on pieces that were already selected for the show. Some did end up as beautiful photographs, and some ended up being whole installations that never would have existed otherwise.

Sasha
So it really catered to cyberspace, to that medium.

Skawennati
Yeah. And that’s what we’re calling transmediation. I am transmediating when I’m making something in Second Life first and then putting it in the real world. But it feels more that transmediation fits better when going the other way. When you have something you recognize, like a textile object, and then you try to transmediate it for cyberspace. That being said, it can go both ways.

On Digital Craft

**Skawennati**, *Becoming the Peacemaker (Iotetshèn:’en)*, 2018. Machinimagraph from The Peacemaker Returns, inkjet print. COURTESY OF Skawennati / ELLEPHANT

Sasha
Are these pieces examples of digital craft? Is crafting digital, or has craft become digital?

Skawennati
Let me answer it this way. I have made several wampum belts in real life that were started digitally. I found this cute little site called “Create Your own wampum belt.” And you could just click on a white or purple bead, and it had a grid for you. You placed these beautiful little beads into an arrangement and then you could print it up.

So eventually, I showed this pattern to a wonderful designer who I had met through AbTeC. And I said, can you do this for me with this design that I made? And that’s what you see in The Peacemaker Returns. Vox had asked me to make an exhibition for children and I was just making the movie.

And at one point, they told me that they were expecting a whole exhibition, not just a movie. We brainstormed what else would be in the show. That’s when I made the first wampum belts of the future — the wampum belts that are in the movie were on display. That way, the children could look at them in real life. I feel like the connection between digital and craft might be that we can sketch digitally, and then produce the item in real life, from those digital sketches.

When I made Calico & Camouflage, I realized that I needed more skill in fitting clothing. I’m not sure if that’s what craft is. I've also been quilting for years, since I was like 18 or 19. And I mention that because I’m just trying to think of the connection to the digital with quilting. People will digitize images, print them onto fabric, and use that to create quilt blocks. I’m not really sure what the digitization of craft is, but I think that there’s all kinds of things you can do, if you want to.

On Barbies and Avatars

**Skawennati**, *Dancing with Myself,* 2015. Diptych: machinimagraph, photograph; inkjet print. COURTESY OF Skawennati / ELLEPHANT

Sasha
I’ve read that Generations of Play 3D is about representations of past, present and future through a lens of play.

Skawennati
I feel like it’s more about playing with dolls. I don’t feel like it’s playing with time because it’s so linear. The cornhusk doll comes from the past, so I place her on the left of the timeline. The Barbie doll is from the sort of present and she’s in the middle. The cornhusk doll is what my ancestors played with, a Barbie doll is what I played with, an avatar is what my descendants will play with. I play with xox too, but it’s happening more now in general. My kids play with avatars, in a sense. They don’t call them avatars though, their characters in video games.

Sasha
I don’t hear the term avatar often from younger generations. I do look at emojis and filters as kinds of avatars though.

Skawennati
There’s definitely a continuum. Even with Zoom. Like I was thinking, are we in cyberspace right now? Yes, of course we are. And is this an avatar? You can add filters and do things to make your background different, which is kind of cyberspace environmental-ish.

I think “avatar” is a bit dated perhaps. And by dated, I mean that maybe it refers too much to what I think it is. And it doesn’t refer enough to these other things like emojis. I also think that the movie Avatar sort of ruined it. I love the word avatar though, I think it’s so pretty. And it has such strong meaning for me. I like that I feel I have a relationship with my avatar, you know? So that’s also at play.

Sasha
The relationship you have with xox is also something I want to talk about. You’re both different, but the same, and you have this relationship with her and to her. Do the dolls in Generations of Play 3D represent different versions of you or different versions of her?

Skawennati
Actually, I don’t know if my avatar is a different person. It’s confusing. I did a presentation with xox, and one of the things I said at the beginning of the presentation was: “You all have to get used to the pronouns, because I will be using ‘I’ and ‘she’ interchangeably.” I talk about her, but then I talk in the first person as her sometimes. I think we’re not super separate. She is an extension of me. I’ve definitely created … well, I haven’t definitely created her. I kind of have, but she was already created by Linden Labs (the creators of Second Life), and I customized her. I customize my avatars for the machinimas, and she’s customized to represent me in the way that I like seeing myself.

It’s confusing. With Dancing with Myself, a diptych where it’s me and her, a photograph and a machinimagraph, I talk about how that represents not just me wanting to be an avatar, but my avatar wanting to be like me as well. I find that most people think it means that I want to be my avatar. But just like how the android Data in Star Trek wanted to be human, and Pinocchio wanted to be human, I think perhaps the avatar would like to be human and get to eat and taste and fuck and enjoy all the things about the body that we can enjoy. Then there’s us, who get cancer or vomit, or cramps or headaches, and we’d love to not have to experience that, like an avatar. The grass is always greener on the other side.

Sasha
Do you feel a connection to the dolls?

Skawennati
I definitely feel a connection, but I think that because they’re small I don’t feel the same as I do with Dancing with Myself. That piece is life-sized. And I loved making the avatar really big so that it felt like we could be interchangeable, or we could have a relationship. With the dolls no, they’re not me. They’re my dolls. They’re my toys. The relationship is like that.

But there is something about imagining an ancestor playing with that doll. I didn’t play with cornhusk dolls. The most play I ever had with a cornhusk doll was making the outfit for that one. I’ve made a few in my life, but they weren’t my toys. But maybe that’s what the avatar actually is: it’s a doll. Have you heard me talk about my Barbie dolls? How I felt about them when I was little?

Sasha
I’ve heard you talk about Barbie dolls and how much you like Barbie dolls.

Skawennati
In the 70s, when I was a little kid, we lived in poverty. I didn’t know that we lived below the poverty line. We always lived in our own house, we owned it. We had food on the table every night. My dad had a job. We all had toys and I had 11 Barbie dolls! I had my Barbie. She was blonde. She was white. I loved and adored her. The only thing I didn’t like about her is that she couldn’t stand on her own two feet, I had to hold her upright. And getting her clothes on and off. Sometimes you have to take her head off just to get her shirt on and then replace her head.

I just loved her so much. When we were in the car, Barbie was in her spaceship, you know? Or in the backyard, we had a garden, and Barbie was either in the forest or maybe on the beach. For me, Barbie was empowering. She was actually what Mattel, as I later read, wanted us to feel when we play with Barbie. Her boobs? No problem. I didn't look at her and think oh, I can never be beautiful like my Barbie. That was not at all what was going on for me. I was like this girl rocks, look what she can do!

Sasha
Do you look at xox as another kind of Barbie?

Skawennati
Absolutely. I even believe that Linden Labs said to their programmers: “Okay, we need like a default guy and girl in here.” I know programmers, and I know how they work, and they would have been like, “Well, boss, what do they look like?” Who else? Barbie and Ken! I believe they just used the generic Barbie and Ken as their prototypes. I often talk about it in my presentations — that here was Barbie, but now, in cyberspace, she could walk, run and fly. And you never have to take her head off to dress her. You just click and she’s dressed.

I didn’t think that at first, but looking back I’m like, Oh my god, it was exactly Barbie play. And better.