The wayfinding mosaic that sits on the first floor of building 9. Amanda Erickson/The Griff

A new initiative from the kihew waciston hopes to eliminate the struggle of locating the centre through art

Evan Watt

Photo by Amanda Erickson

Since its construction in 2019, the kihêw waciston Indigenous Centre has been serving the students of MacEwan, both as a place of academic and cultural guidance for MacEwan’s Indigenous students. There’s just one problem: until now, it’s been difficult to actually find.

“Students kept getting lost trying to find their way here, because there’s only one stairway and one elevator. And in the elevators in Building 9, they sometimes will only take you to a certain floor, and it’s a whole thing,” says Jaycee Meneen, the Indigenous Initiatives Lead at the kihêw waciston. 

The fact that students and visitors were struggling to locate the centre was a problem that had been on the staff’s radar for some time. They initially discussed placing stickers on the ground in the shape of arrows or eagle tracks. It wasn’t until Larysa Hayduk, director of the Ukrainian Resource and Development Centre at MacEwan, came to Meneen and told her that their centre was working with an artist on their own project, and this artist could create the very wayfinders the kihêw waciston was looking for using their own medium of mosaic tile art. 

The project kicked into gear almost immediately. “The first step was we needed to talk to our knowledge keepers to come up with a design, because the design wasn’t even discussed yet,” says Meneen. She and the knowledge keepers bounced a couple of ideas around before landing on the final design. First, they thought maybe a tobacco pipe, but that was too small and intricate for the mosaic medium. Then they thought maybe a bear, or bear tracks — but that’s the University of Alberta’s logo. 

It was knowledge keeper George Desjarlais who pointed out the obvious. 

“At the very end, literally, George just kind of says, ‘We have a logo, why don’t we just use our logo?’”

The logo of the kihêw waciston, a medicine wheel depicted on the outline of a turtle, ended up being the perfect signage for the wayfinders. It’s colourful, meaningful for the centre, and the perfect subject for the mosaic medium.

 kihêw waciston staff and students were invited to come in and create what ended up being a total of twenty-four mosaic wayfinders. Each one is individually hand-crafted and ever so slightly unique, including one important detail that might be missed at first glance: many of the mosaics have tiny belly buttons. This detail was not a happy accident, but instead an important and meaningful addition. It comes from the phrase nitisiyihkâson, which means ‘what is your belly button name?’ Meneen explains. 

“That’s saying ‘this is me,’” she says. “My belly button is connected to this person, which is my mom and my dad. So it’s those familial ties and where I come from, but also your community ties. And so [the mosaics] all have these little bellybuttons, which are so beautiful, and it’s a way of being like, this is your way home.”

That, Meneen says, is the core foundation of the kihêw waciston. “Students can find their way home here, because that’s what kihêw waciston is.”