Destiny Seymour and Mamie Griffith

Winnipeg, MA TEXT Pamela Young

In Anishinaabemowin, “aabijijiwan” means “it flows continuously,” like rippling water. Interactions between Indigenous traditions and new technologies ripple outward from the University of Manitoba’s Aabijijiwan New Media Lab, which opened in 2021. Here, labs containing animation, VR and green screen equipment, along with 3D printers and a laser cutter, border an open space where a beading workshop or sage-wrapping session might be in progress. Interior designer Destiny Seymour led the conversion of 372 square metres of standard-issue academic space into Aabijijiwan. “Renovations are challenging,” she says. “You have an existing box, and you’re dealing with ideologies that don’t necessarily fit in that box.”

But Seymour, who is of First Nations descent on both sides and identifies as Anishinaabe, was well equipped to transform this box into an appropriate vessel for its contents. At the University of Manitoba, she completed an undergraduate double major in psychology and anthropology and a masters in interior design. Over more than a decade with Winnipeg-based Prairie Architects, she designed interiors for many Indigenous schools and community buildings.

Her inability to find textiles reflecting the Indigenous cultures of her own region took her career in an unexpected direction. Patterns on museum artifacts such as a 400-year-old elk antler scraper tool inspired Seymour first to sketch, and then to take a silk-screening course.

OPPOSITE Destiny Seymour’s Indigo Arrows textile collection draws from Anishnaabe Indigenous artifacts and motifs. Seymour and Mamie Griffith’s firm Woven Collaborative brings a similar culturally informed perspective to the design of architecture, interiors, and furniture. In 2016 she left Prairie Architects to focus on her Indigo Arrows textile collection. Her table linens, pillows and quilts rapidly attracted a following—Seymour and Winnipeg-based garment manufacturer FREED recently introduced a line of home textiles for Urban Barn, a chain with stores throughout western and central Canada. In 2018 Seymour and architectural designer Mamie Griffith (Dene) founded Woven Collaborative; the studio’s mission is to “respectfully reflect local Indigenous cultures & identity within architectural forms, interior spaces, furniture, and textiles.”

Seymour and Griffith selected an earthy palette of purple, ochre and sage to lend warmth to the Aabijijiwan New Media Lab. To director Dr. Julie Nagam, co-director Dr. Jaime Cidro of the affiliated Kishaadigeh Collaborative Research Centre and other members of the (mostly female) client team, it was important for the space to feel welcoming to women and children. Seymour designed a curved screen in reclaimed elm wood that, during a workshop, affords a breastfeeding mother some privacy while still enabling her to follow the presentation.

The lab’s drum stools are a type of custom furniture that Seymour has incorporated into many other projects. However, she says that upholstering them in Pendleton blanket wool—as she has done until recently—always felt like a compromise. Although the blanket patterns are inspired by North American Indigenous motifs, they are not genuine expressions of specific Indigenous cultures. In partnership with Winnipeg-based Anishnaabe beading artist Cassandra Cochrane, Seymour and Griffith recently generated an alternative for use on future drum stools. Like the Aabijijiwan New Media Lab, it is a fusion of tradition and technology: Woven Collaborative has vectorized a floral pattern by Cochrane, and is now offering it in three colourways, printed on durable, easily disinfected commercial-grade vinyl.