Oskenontona Philip Deering sees working with beads as a way for people to connect with each other, predating modern language – even going back millennia.

Deering, whose store in Kahnawake provides this essential part of Aboriginal beadwork to the community, is known to many simply as Beadman.

“We don’t have as many customers as we need to stay afloat, so I’m going on the road,” he said. CBC Montreal Let’s go.

Before the pandemic, he regularly visited Indigenous communities in Quebec and Ontario, and traveled to the Atlantic provinces and Manitoba to sell his pearls.

It was when he was invited to visit the Cree communities of James Bay that he was given the nickname.

“The first community I went to, they said, ‘Hey, Beadman is here! says Deering, who has been selling pearls full time for two decades.

“They started calling me Beadman, no one knew my name.”

The nickname stuck, enough that when Kahnawake closed it opened a boutique in Montreal called The Beadman Emporium.

The emporium is now part of the Métèque art space in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, where the exhibition Pearl by Pearl is currently on display.

The exhibition is a collaboration with Native-Immigrant Art Hive, where Deering is a cultural performer.

“We can sell on the Internet, and with COVID we actually have to… but you want to see the colors right there and touch the pearls, look at the quality of the pearls,” Deering said.

He says beading has been a “community tradition” in his family for generations.

Her great-great-grandmother sold pearls at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto in the late 1800s, and her mother did the same almost a century later.

During the industrial revolution, “all kinds of jobs or lifestyles that people gave up. People had to find new skills, new trades to work, ”said Deering.

“Meanwhile, the beading was kind of a fallback position”

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It was seeing her mother doing her beadwork and traveling with her that he learned its meaning.

She would stop in other Indigenous communities along the way to purchase more beadwork to increase her stock before it reached Toronto.

He learned from his mother: if you want to sell pearls, the best way is to visit people.

Young artists breathe new life into tradition

While he said interest in the craft seemed to wane towards the end of the 20th century, a new generation of artists reinvigorated the practice.

“There are new types of pearls that we’ve never seen before … Once the powwows reopen, you will be able to visit and find that beadwork is a booming business right now.”

He points to pearls tens of thousands of years old found in Africa and the Middle East to show that this is a tradition long observed around the world.

These beads go beyond ceremonial purposes, he says – they were used to record events before humans had the words to describe them.

“Human language is a symbolic process, it requires the ability to think symbolically. And beads can also be a symbol,” he said.

“As an Iroquois people, we used beads to record our treaties and agreements and also to use them for various social gatherings and invitations. The list goes on and on.”

He says beadwork illustrates “our ability to work together in harmony.”

The Pearl by Pearl exhibition continues until December 6 at Métèque (5442 chemin Côte-Saint-Luc), more info here.

Listen to the full segment on Let’s Go below: