‘Community-based knowledge through beadwork’

Painful Beauty: Tlingit Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience
by Megan A. Smetzer

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2025
$34.95  /  9780295754086

Reviewed by Katy Dycus

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Megan Smetzer’s Painful Beauty: Tlingit Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience brings the cultural contributions of Northwest Coast Indigenous women to the fore. By making visible the matrilineal heritage of beadwork, specifically, Smetzer explores a singular, wearable item through which cultural expression looks to the past and to the future at once. Intangible cultural values, tradition, and history become tangible in the form of beads.

Painful Beauty takes as its premise the “complex history of Tlingit beadwork as an expression of the resilience of Tlingit women’s cultural practices despite the pervasive social, cultural, and economic pressures of settler colonialism.” Tlingit women from the nineteenth century onward contributed to the revival of other artistic and cultural expressions such as weaving – once considered an endangered artform – beginning in the late 1960s as Indigenous rights movements gained momentum.

What we see through the centuries is the generational continuity of community-based knowledge through beadwork. Beads ensured continuity at a time when cultural practices were actively suppressed by colonialism. Today, Indigenous artists use historical pieces to inform their own work. They acknowledge connections to the land, to ancestors and oral histories, and to historical and contemporary innovation in terms of materials and ideas, as well as their own experiences. The contemporary artists Metzer mentions in her book represent those who use beads “to challenge and transform public comprehension of the ongoing effects of centuries of colonialism across North America, including along the Northwest Coast.” Beadwork is, in effect, part of an ongoing dialogue about Indigenous knowledge and artistic productions before and after contact.

The resistance and resilience of Tlingit women in Southeast Alaska and British Columbia is visible in these collections. Smetzer provides fine examples, both textually and visually, of what has been preserved through the ages to demonstrate the workmanship and craftsmanship of women who have remained invisible for their contributions for far too long. On display in Smetzer’s book are material artefacts such as octopus bags, dance collars, tunics, moccasins, hats, and ceremonial regalia – pieces prized for both their function and aesthetic value by Indigenous members and colonial settlers alike.

The word resilience, which Smetzer includes in the book’s title and which recurs as a common theme, remarks on the many ways in which Tlingit women adapted to new markets and materials for the economic survival of their communities. One example is how Tlingit women created souvenirs for the tourist trade, where the cycle of production was tied to the seasons; women worked to produce goods during the winter, such as moccasins – which combined both Indigenous and introduced materials – and sold them to tourists in the summer (alongside their work in canneries and other places of natural extraction). The making of moccasins “supported the passing on of Tlingit worldviews in ways that also worked within the new economic structures introduced through the federal policies of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board,” Smetzer notes.

Moccasins and other beaded items made reference to local flora, fauna and landscapes, such as seaweed, lichens on a rock, or the water of a receding tide (“People of the tide” is a direct translation of the word Tlingit). Even bead colors acquired local meaning. Essentially, bead working became a marker of place. And women’s beadwork became critical during the Great Depression and war years, when so many men were away. Indigenous women could essentially feed their families while empowering them through the regalia they made. This empowerment was rooted in Indigenous trade networks, as established by women’s crafts. By the twentieth century, for instance, beads and beadwork flowed freely between the coast and the interior. “The trade in beads often preceded the arrival of European fur traders into a region,” Smetzer writes, “with this new medium extending and acquiring intangible values and meanings within local communities.”

Women also seamlessly incorporated into their beadwork styles and designs which represented new wealth and opportunity through foreign governments, such as the shape and detail of beaded tunics that imitated nineteenth century Russian and American naval uniforms. These designs indicated not only innovative creativity but the appropriation of foreign aesthetics. Moreover, that which was assimilated into fabric stood as a subtle form of resistance: Indigenous women gently resisting assimilation into colonial settler society. In Tlingit cultural history, the word resilience is often paired with resistance. Smetzer repeatedly remarks on the idea that “Tlingit women were creating new tangible forms as a means to further reinforce intangible rights and privileges in ways unintelligible to outsiders,” who often misunderstood the meaning of certain patterns or symbols within the context of the clan. Women therefore practiced – through aesthetic form – a quiet, persistent, and patient form of resistance.

Painful Beauty also takes into consideration cross-border history and relations. Smetzer explores the Kwakwaka’wakw and the Tlingit in relation to one another; the former based primarily on Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland coast of British Columbia, while the latter is historically from southeastern Alaska, coastal British Columbia, and the Yukon. Both are Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast but with distinct geographies, traditions, and languages.

What distinguishes the two groups most, besides geography, is the potlatch – what was and continues to be central to social, economic, and cultural ways of being for Northwest Coast Indigenous groups. The Tlingit potlatch was never outlawed, whereas in Canada, they were outlawed in 1885 under an amendment to the 1876 Canadian Indian Act. The punishment for holding potlatches in British Columbia was forced relinquishment of regalia and jail time, a risk most members weren’t willing to take. As a consequence, Tlingit communities outproduced Kwakwaka’wakw in terms of beadwork, partly because potlatches were allowed to continue, allowing for experimentation and the incorporation of new forms of regalia throughout southeastern Alaska. In addition, Tlingit produced more beadwork due to long-standing relationships with interior peoples and the fact that settlers and museum collectors didn’t value beadwork as an authentic expression of Tlingit material culture.

In Painful Beauty Smetzer discusses the art, tradition and sovereignty of the Northwest Coast while connecting those ideas to a broader discussion of aesthetic practice as colonial conciliation. Indigenous women artists for the past 150 years, Smetzer writes, valued beadwork for its economic and social value, and for the way beads could stand in for cultural values to be carried across time and space. Tlingit women’s resilience and resistance shaped their communities historically and up to the present and hold promise for the future. In writing this book, Smetzer represents both the beauty and the pain inherent in beading practices in Tlingit territory. It is her “hope and belief that the beauty of beading has the power to contribute to the healing of that pain.”  

[Editor’s Note: Megan Smetzer’s book Painful Beauty received the Charles C. Eldredge Prize by the Smithsonian American Art Museum]

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Katy Dycus holds a Master of Letters from the University of Glasgow and currently writes for the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University. Her essays and reviews appear in Appalachia, Harvard Review, Hektoen International, World Kid Lit and Necessary Fiction, among others. [Editor’s Note: Katy Dycus recently wrote about archeological work taking place in Haida Gwaii’s Karst Caves, originally published in Mammoth Trumpet, but republished in The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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