The Prayer Vessel Project. Featuring Delores Purdaby, Patricia L Smith and Patricia Purdaby.
Neskonlith Elder Delores Purdaby is a master basketry artist of the Secwepemc Nation. She has survived both the Indian Residential School and Social Services ‘60’s scoop’ systems of ‘care’. Purdaby has mentored many Indigenous artists over the decades, ensuring the ecological and traditional knowledge passed down by Secwepemc women such as her mother and aunt live on through her community’s younger and future generations.
Believing that cultural understanding fosters love and acceptance, Purdaby is also extremely generous with her skills and knowledge within the Shuswap’s non-Indigenous community, leading many cedar root, birch bark and pine needle basket making workshops within and well beyond the public schools. In 2017, her tireless contributions and skill were recognized with the British Columbia Creative Achievement Award for First Nations Art.
Patricia L Smith is a fourth generation Canadian multi-disciplinary artist and educator of mixed western-European descent who has family members and loved ones of Indigenous descent. Prompted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work, she began researching Canada’s formation through systems of colonial oppression. While pursuing her master’s in Human Rights and Social Justice at Thompson Rivers University, Smith was invited by Dr. Mukwa Musayett / Shelly Johnson to assist in an Indigenous led arts-based research project to raise awareness of the ongoing crises of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQIA+ peoples. She then encouraged Delores Purdaby to contribute handcrafted elements to the project. Collaboration on a separate Prayer Vessel project began as Purdaby expressed the desire for some form of basket to contain people’s private reflections on and prayers for the missing and murdered and their loved ones.
One of Delores Purdaby’s four children, Patricia had previously studied art under Smith in high school. Now the mother of two young girls, her contributions in the Prayer Vessel project have been invaluable.