For nearly a decade, Dr. Danielle Lussier has incorporated beadwork into her teaching to help her students engage in learning and open their minds to Indigenous ways of understanding the world around them.
Now, Dr. Lussier, astrophysicist Dr. Gregg Wade, and three junior researchers have joined forces with the McDonald Institute to create the Beading Astroparticle Physics project, which brings Indigenous Knowledge and perspectives together with western science to encourage meaningful conversations and journeys of mutual discovery.
“Beyond the obvious goal of creating beadwork to translate concepts in astroparticle physics, there are two main objectives for the project: The first is to ensure that Indigenous learners see themselves – and their ways of knowing – reflected in the academy; and the second is to introduce concepts such as beadwork for knowledge mobilization to non--Indigenous learners and scholars, to help them cultivate an openness of spirit to these ideas,” says Dr. Lussier, Queen’s National Scholar and Chair in Indigenous Knowledges and Perspectives.
“A third objective is to encourage people to think beyond the doctrine: we’re disrupting the visual status quo – of learning almost exclusively from books and computers – by encoding scientific knowledge into these beautiful objects that allow people to stop and think about Indigenous Knowledge systems and western science in a different way.”
A citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation, Dr. Lussier says that other Indigenous Peoples historically referred to the Red River Métis as the “Flower Beadwork People” because of beading’s importance to the community. Beading helps form a cohesive visual esthetic where community members not only recognize one another by the beadwork being worn but also identify the artists who created it based on the patterns, colours, and styles, she says.
“In my role at the McDonald Institute, I think about who feels invited into learning and research spaces, who may be excluded, and how we can meaningfully reduce barriers to participation in science.”
Beading Astroparticle Physics will also follow the tradition of transferring knowledge to the next generation with Dr. Lussier’s three children – Hugo, 14, Rosie, 13, and Opale, nine – collaborating in the project and sharing in the exploration through conversations with scientists, at workshops, and through visits to research sites.
The project arose from conversations with Dr. Alex Pedersen, PhD’18, Manager for Indigenization – Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Capacity Development at the McDonald Institute.
“In my role at the McDonald Institute, I think about who feels invited into learning and research spaces, who may be excluded, and how we can meaningfully reduce barriers to participation in science,” she says.
“That work naturally connects to broader questions at the institute about how we make astroparticle physics more accessible and create opportunities for people to engage with science in meaningful ways. It requires openness to approaches that move beyond traditional ways of teaching and learning, especially for topics that can feel abstract or intimidating.”
In the end, introducing beadwork brings a slower pace to learning and introduces concepts not found elsewhere in the curriculum, which, in turn, makes it highly suitable to introductory courses.
“Much of the time, the encoded information is not literal – it needs to be interpreted or read by the beader, so it’s a way of motivating students to learn deeper concepts and to think carefully about how they transmit information that they’ve learned,” says Dr. Wade, a professor in the Department of Physics and Space Science at Royal Military College who is cross-appointed at Queen’s
“The other element is that the students themselves need to be present. You can’t hold a cellphone and scroll social media and bead at the same time, so it really primes the students for listening and understanding.”
This slow art of beadwork has encoded all kinds of data and scientific knowledge – about family lines and networks, about relationships between people and to the land, and about more-than-human relatives like plants – and transferred it to the next generation.
“For example, beadwork might encode information about which flowers and plants grow where and in what season, so you bead a certain plant-relative on a garment and it helps remind the wearer that this is a plant that can be a helper,” explains Dr. Lussier.
“With this project, we hope to create similar touchpoints for astroparticle physics.
