2024 Emerging Leader Award recipient Cheyenne Rain LeGrande.
Cheyenne Rain LeGrande was putting the final touches on mîkisak ᒦᑭᐢ in Alex Decoteau Park for Edmonton Spark in late May when MacEwan’s photographer stopped by. “Can I do a quick wardrobe change?” asked the Nehiyaw Isko artist and recipient of MacEwan University’s 2024 Emerging Leader Award.
For LeGrande (Fine Art ’16), donning platform boots emblazoned with Cree syllabics and a floral dress in colours that complemented the almost 50 gigantic pink, purple and baby blue blown-glass “beads” in her installation went beyond changing clothes. Each photograph with the larger-than-life, nine-and-a-half-foot-tall beaded “earring” was a performance that tells a story.
“My main practice is performance art, but I dabble in everything – fashion, installation, photography, video, sound and more,” says the artist from Bigstone Cree Nation. “My work is often considered Indigenous futurism, and that’s a really big honour.”
Reclaiming traditional practices and culture is at the heart of Indigenous futurism, explains LeGrande. “For me, it takes a traditional practice, expands on it and pushes it into another timeline, using technology or other things I have access to today.”
In her 2019 performance work Mullyanne Nîmito, which explored her Nehiyaw femme identity, she created a contemporary pop version of the fancy shawl commonly worn by powwow dancers. LeGrande’s shawl is made from 3,300 beer/pop can tabs and a hybrid platform shoe that reclaims and reimagines the moccasin.
“When my auntie taught me how to make moccasins, I was honoured and thankful, and took that teaching and created a hybrid, removing the sole, stretching the hide onto a piece of wood, and shaping it into a moccasin platform shoe that functions as wearable sculpture,” explains LeGrande.
In her most recent piece, she has taken the fancy dance shawl in another direction, incorporating LED lights to represent the Northern Lights and stars. The shawl will have its chance to shine in her next project, which has her following in the footsteps of her Juno-nominated mother, Connie LeGrande (whose stage name is Ciwkas), and writing a half-Cree, half-English original pop song. Both the song and her glow-in-the-dark wearable art will feature prominently in a future video performance that will incorporate many ideas – being a Nehiyaw alien, loving yourself and coming from the stars.
Even as a child, LeGrande says she was always creating, drawing and painting. There was no doubt in her mind that she wanted to be an artist.
“But I thought an artist was someone who only painted,” she says. “While I was at MacEwan, I learned how fluid art can be – that it’s not just one thing, that art is expansive and goes beyond objects and canvasses, and can be used to express and release.”
For LeGrande, studying art was a time of working through intergenerational trauma and healing and toward where she is today – a place where her work is about intergenerational resilience and joy.
“I feel so lucky to be here and to get to create and tell my family’s stories,” says LeGrande, who often teams up with her mother and fashion designer brother to create together.
One of the biggest lessons her mother taught her, says LeGrande, is to love herself.
“I want to be able to give that to my community as well. When I’m performing and creating art, I’m trying to share love with anyone who needs to feel that, and many do because of everything my people have been through.”
She hopes that receiving an Emerging Leader Award will mean spreading that message of love even further.
“I don’t feel alone in receiving this award – this is for all my Indigenous kin. Having a community and support system – my family, my Indigenous kin and the queer community – and others to look up to is so important, and I hope to be that for other young people. I feel lucky and thankful that my ancestors have been through so much to bring me to this point. I’m living my dream.”