Meet The Only Snow Sculpting Team In The United States Made Up Entirely Of Indigenous Women
For many years, artists have crafted beautiful and intricate masterpieces out of the winter elements of ice and snow.
The sport of snow sculpting allows artists to show off their skills and creations. It also provides an opportunity for people to tell cultural stories within their works and honor their roots.
A trio of women who call themselves Team Kwe is the only snow sculpting team in the United States made up of entirely Indigenous women, to their knowledge. The winter of 2023 was their first time competing in the National Snow Sculpting Championships.
Heather Friedli, the captain of Team Kwe, has spent 15 years of her life as a professional snow sculptor.
She is joined by her sister, Juliana Welter, a karate teacher, and friend, Maggie Thompson, a textile artist. All three women are based in Minnesota.
The small world of competitive snow sculpting is dominated by men, so being an all-female team makes them special.
The field also lacks Indigenous representation, so the women use their snow sculpting designs to highlight their Anishinaabe roots and share stories of their people.
“Traditionally, in the Ojibwe culture, storytelling season is when there’s snow on the ground,” said Friedli. “For us, telling a story is important.”
The sisters are first-generation descendants of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, while Thompson is of Ojibwe descent.
Andrei Stepanov – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
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She is enrolled in the Fond Du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Their team name, “Kwe,” refers to an Anishinaabemowin term for women.
During snow sculpting competitions, teams work through the night, staving off the cold with plenty of hand warmers and hot coffee. The work actually begins weeks, or even months, before a competition.
For States in 2023, they planned their design for their snow sculpture ahead of time. They decided to focus on the craft of knitting to give prominence to women, with a design featuring knitting needles, balls of yarn, and knitted fabric.
Unfortunately, Thompson had to forfeit at the last minute because of a family emergency. Kelly Thune, winner of the World Championships in Stillwater, stepped in to help. They chiseled away at their mound of snow for 40 hours with only an hour or two of sleep per night.
The team has done similar pieces in earlier years. During the 2021 state competition, they carved a jingle dress, which was inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The sculpture won the People’s Choice award. Thompson herself was a jingle dress dancer, and the sisters’ grandmother was a jingle dress dancer as well.
“The jingle dress specifically was made during the last pandemic, which was the flu pandemic of 1918, and it was created because somebody had a vision that if people would dance with this jingle dress on, that it would bring healing. So, we wanted to bring healing to that,” Friedli explained.
In 2022, their sculpture for the Indigenous Arts Festival in Mankato, Minnesota, depicted a bison and a shawl dancer to honor Indigenous women who have gone missing or were murdered.
For this year’s Minnesota State Snow Sculpting Competition, Team Kwe created a piece that illustrated two characters, Wenabozho and his brother, Dadibaajimad, on a journey beyond the realm of the living.
The figures are from a traditional Ojibwe story. The sculpture was a homage to Jim Denomie, an Ojibwe artist who died in 2022.
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