While I didn’t grow up in a family of slipper-wearers, I have become one over the years if only because I am inordinately fond of moccasins. Before you judge me a fashion victim, consider this: there are the readily available, mass-made variety worn as street scuffs by college kids and festival-goers. And then there are these hand-stitched and embroidered deerskin ones, made precisely to fit my feet by an Ojibwe elder that are simply next level. Handmade moccasins had seemed a near-unattainable luxury to me until one summer a couple years ago when on the way to a rental cottage, we stumbled upon a gem of an Indigenous art gallery. The gallery, which is just up the street from the town marina in an old, warehouse-style building with a dashing, contemporary, sail-like metal roof, is owned and operated by an Anishinabe entrepreneur named Tracey Pawis.

Source: thestar June 03, 2017 15:00 UTC