When Alisa Parenteau started working for the Treaty 8 Tribal Association, she had no idea that she would take on the task of painting a mural that would span nearly 100 feet across the association’s building.
The closest she got to that was doing graphic recordings, which is a way of taking notes during a meeting through drawings and design elements.
“I never thought I’d do something like the mural,” said Parenteau.
Treaty 8 had a sign on the exterior wall next to an empty lot with the number of children’s remains that had been found at residential schools, ensuring that people didn’t forget about what happened to Indigenous people and their children. After that sign went up, racist graffiti started defacing the wall.
Alisa said that around then, the organization decided that a mural would be a solution to the graffiti problem.
“The idea was that if there was art on the wall, people wouldn’t try and deface it,” she said.
Alisa has several creative outlets. She does a lot of beading, including earrings, hats, and making beaded jibbetz for Crocs.
However, she was inspired to put her name forward to paint the proposed mural after a rather vivid dream.
The vision was to have a Dene woman, who Alisa said traditionally came across as very stoic, dressed in bright yellow and blue, holding a medallion that depicted an Indigenous person shaking hands with a non-Indigenous person.
Alisa said the medallion was a token given to those who originally signed the Treaty 8 agreement.
The design also features the shape of Treaty 8 territory in yellow, and deep green forests in silhouette as the background.
“I saw it so clearly in my dream,” she said.
The Dene woman isn’t meant to represent any one person; she is a strong figure that represents the land and its people.
While she had never taken on anything of this scale before, the organization, along with her friends and family, had confidence in her.
She got to work plotting out the image, using the lines of the cinder blocks as a graph to help her scale up the image to fit the wall.
“I was pregnant when I did the mural, so I had to be up in this lift and wearing all the fall protection,” she said with a laugh.
“It was so hot and I was so pregnant.”
The mural came out pretty much exactly how Parenteau pictured it from her dream, she said.
Parenteau lives in Dawson Creek, but every time she makes the trip to Fort St. John, it makes her happy to see the mural.
“It was a really great experience, I’m so grateful I got the chance to do it.”
It’s not the first time there’s been a mural on that wall. Back in 1984, when Fort St. John hosted the BC Winter Games, that wall was one of several chosen to have a sports-related mural painted on it.
The mural that was on the Treaty 8 building was one of the last to be painted over in 2008 and the wall remained blank until Alisa did her mural.
Alisa said she’d like to try doing another mural someday, but maybe when her son is a bit older.
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