Mashkiki or Medicine cloth is two 10ft lengths of cotton muslin, embroidered with white cotton floss, and imbued with plant based medicines. Plant based medicines and the knowledge thereof has been undergoing a revival. But for Indigenous people, we have always remembered these medicines and their purpose in our lives.

We have relationships to plants which came here as invasives and are now in balance with all else, finding their purpose, and us finding them within our purposes as well. In addition to the obvious ice symbolism, his cloth of white with white embroidery pays tribute to several aspects of the modern revival of traditions and living histories.

The cloth is white, and the foss is white. These knowledges went undercover for many, many years, much like how snow blankets the landscape and hides the plants. But just like the snow over a landscape, a blanket does not mean they have fallen out of existence, just like the knowledge went undercover and never out of existence. Plant medicine and needlework both have a relationship in the persecution of mother-knowledge that was called “witchcraft” throughout Europe, with that mentality existing and encouraging ongoing genocides of traditional peoples throughout the world within the colonial project. The cloth is imbued with many of these medicines between the floss and the cloth with the fragrance as part of the key identifiers of species. This is pertinent in how we come to identify plants on the land – we use all of our
senses but scent is a key for proper identifcation of similar species.

Mashkiki Cloth
Terre Chartrand and Jean Marc Raymond
With Brittney Baldwin and Alexis Bierman

Two 20ft lengths of cotton muslin
Cotton and foil embroidery floss
Poplar
Copper