In Honor of REDress Day May 5th 2025

Introduction to the REDress Project

The REDress Project is a powerful and poignant art installation created by artist Jaime Black-Morsette, aimed at raising awareness about the ongoing issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada and beyond. By using red dresses as a symbol, the project invites viewers to reflect on the absence of these women in society and the cultural significance of the color red in Indigenous communities. Each dress represents a life lost, a story untold, and serves as a haunting reminder of the systemic violence faced by Indigenous women. The installation has gained national and international attention, sparking conversations about Indigenous rights, gender-based violence, and the importance of remembrance and healing.

My experience with REDress

I will be sharing an essay I wrote in 2023 that delves deeper into Jaime Black-Morsette's work as a whole, exploring how her artistic expressions contribute to the discourse surrounding Indigenous issues and the broader implications of her art on society.

How to Support the REDress Project

If you would like to contribute to the REDress Project or support Jaime Black-Morsette, consider the following options:

• Donations: Financial contributions can help sustain the project and support related initiatives. Visit the official REDress Project website for donation options.

• Art Purchases: Purchasing artwork from Jaime Black can directly support her and her mission.

• Spread Awareness: Share information about the REDress Project on social media and within your community to raise awareness about the issues it addresses.

• Volunteer: Look for opportunities to volunteer at events or exhibitions related to the project.

Contacting Jaime Black

To reach Jaime Black for inquiries or collaboration opportunities, you can visit her official website or social media profiles:

• https://www.jaimeblackartist.com/

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REDress: Voices for the Invisible by Nicole Clayton

Elements of the best activism art couples a visual brilliance with a rendering of powerful messaging that stays with a viewer long enough to either persuade a point of view or move a viewer to action. Fantastic art provides candy for the mind or sparks joy, warmth, compassion, or sorrow directly from the soul. Many artists use art as transformational means to address the problems most dear to them.

Activism through art has the capacity to inspire change through the use of the artist’s platform, which invites the audience to help solve the subject’s problem. Jaime Black-Morsette is one such artist who has been deploying her REDress project installations since 2010 to bring awareness to the disproportionate number of missing and murdered Indigenous American women and girls in the United States and Canada. The visual and symbolic imagery Ms. Black-Morsette presents illuminate the tragic problems within her community, and communities across the neighboring nations. Her project gives voice to marginalized people and acts in service to halt the silence of traditionally invisible victims.

I first came across the REDress project in an unlikely manner: while watching a miniseries from Canada about contemporary Quebecois life that intersects with a contemporary First Nations community. Although a fictional mystery, the story illuminated real life issues within this microcosm and did so by showcasing Ms. Black-Morsette’s REDress project within the series.

Intrigued, I had to know more about the artist and the work. Jaime Black-Morsetteis a Red River Méstis artist, of mixed European and Indigenous American ancestry, and has lived amongst the communities in the bordering areas of Canada and the northern plains of the United States. As a woman with natal ties within the community, Black-Morsette's art aims to raise awareness of pressing Indigenous problems and to visually relay the disproportionate nature of crimes against indigenous women–400% more likely than any other Canadian– to go missing or be murdered.

The REDress project's primary visual vehicle of this activist work is to hang red dress installations in honor of aboriginal American women and girls that never return home after becoming the victims of trafficking, abduction, and murder. Often, these vivid and bright red garments are hung from trees. The visual nature of the red is often juxtaposed against white snow or stark natural backgrounds which create a visual element of haunting emptiness. As the wind blows through the dresses, one cannot help but be educated on the reason the dresses are missing their persons.

Installations of red dresses hung orderly in museum spaces without any fuss or ornament are absent and still. The simplicity of the dresses visually cannot be separated from its messaging: a daughter, sister, wife, or mother is not coming home today. When asked about the color red, specifically, Black-Morsette says that in native culture red is the only color that the spirits see.

In the realm of the living, red is also symbolic of violence and blood. Thus, red is the visual energy that serves to unite those who have been lost to the spirit world to lead them to their ancestral lands and the families they left behind remaining in this life. The spaces that the REDress occupies, Black-Morsette tells us, offers mourning families a place of rejoining the spirits in homecoming. Ms. Black truly marries activism in which the visual and the contextual elements create a powerful message as a persuasive call to action. 

Gendered violence is certainly not a novel variety, however why do we find the crimes against our northern neighbors so extreme? First Nation women are victimized at a higher rate than are their female Canadian counterparts. Interestingly, white women in Canada are most likely to be murdered (or suspected of being murdered) by their male romantic partners between 60-70%. In terms of indigenous women and girls, these same Canadians tend to be murdered by acquaintances instead, at a rate of seven times more than of other Canadian women and girls. These are men that the victims may have recognized, but would not have considered friends.

If we evaluate habitable area data, and we are generous, about 15% of the land in Canada is occupied. Half of the country is covered in boreal forests and the subarctic and arctic climates are punishing. Many theories point to extractive industries in Canada that bring in groups of men that live in “man camps” for extended periods of time.

Whether exploring or extracting, corporate interests bring laborers that work in harsh climate conditions and perform long hours of dangerous work for the sake of obtaining oil, gas, and minerals. The indigenous women and girls that surround these temporary encampments are profoundly at risk for being abducted and murdered. The vast tracts of wilderness are cited as burial grounds in which disturbances would rarely be noticed.

The activism that artist Black-Morsette evokes is a call to literally “redress” this serious problem: to remedy this. Ms. Black-Morsette provides the REDress installations to visually educate outsiders about this extremely troubling issue. The art also serves as a space in which those who still search and mourn for their loved ones can gather and share their stories. Activism in this method provides visual please for justice and closure to the estimated 6,000 women and girls’ families that have been reported missing or murdered, especially on native and rural lands.

Not only have the women and girls disappeared, but often police are generally not supportive in investigating their reports of missing loved ones or those that may be the responsible parties. Calls through local channels remain unanswered. To a people who have been murdered for sport historically and then marginalized for over 500 years, the perceived silence and criminal acceptance on behalf of the police and political institutions can no longer be brooked by the indigenous communities and their allies. REDress project organizers and supporters intend to focus on finding loved ones (and their remains), addressing the criminal elements of the deeper gendered violence against women in these communities, and to demand urgent solutions to the staggering loss and violence within aboriginal American communities.

There are a number of converging issues which impact the women and girls that go missing in the northernmost border of the United States and throughout Canada. The Indigenous communities are treated as peripheral; most populations are rural and can count on having some of the highest rates of poverty, alcohol and addiction rates, and unemployment. When police are called to investigate missing women and girls, families often find an apathetic police response.

Whether outright racism, a desensitized police force, or simply a lack of resources, the families of these indigenous women and girls have little recourse. Media owned by outsiders fail to disseminate crucial local information. Those protecting corporate rights culminate in many rural pockets of murder and loss that continue to this day. The answer to the violent end of Canadian and American Indigenous women’s lives deserves more than silence from the authorities who are charged in their safekeeping. 

REDress activism, through thoughtful and emotional presentations of visual red dress installations, brings forth awareness, education, and dialogue about a serious problem in the contemporary borders of the United States and throughout Canada. Starting through a grass-roots approach, REDress amplifies gendered violence within Indigenous American communities. Arkadelphia artist, Sam Blackmon, says of art “a line can make a thought” and if so, Jaime Black-Morsette is likewise creating important and impactful art with messaging from simple, yet bold red dresses.

As an activist and artist, she successfully melds a powerful visual representation for voices unheard and shows us of a history often untold. REDress honors women and children that have been heartbreakingly victimized and shines a light on persistent and ongoing colonization remnants and the profound ripples still felt in ethnic indigenous enclaves around the world. Her approach to solving this problem is conveyed in the striking visual elements contained within this achingly beautiful art.

Stay strong in this fight, my heart is with yours. AP