A Handbuilt Life with Beatrice Deer

Beatrice Deer is a musician, designer, seamstress, mother, podcaster, interpreter, and advocate for the Inuit community, and quite possibly our most multi-hyphenate guest yet. Half-Inuk and half-Mohawk, she grew up in Quaqtaq, Nunavik, and moved to Montreal 19 years ago. Heather has been a fan of her music for a long time, so when Beatrice came into the studio with a suitcase full of incredible handmade pieces, we knew this one had to be on video. Heather and Beatrice cover a lot of ground. Beatrice shares how she found her own voice as a songwriter after years of believing she could only write lyrics, and how a bandmate's encouragement and a secondhand guitar led to her writing an entire album in three months. She explains how throat singing works (it's a game, and the one who breaks the rhythm loses), and talks about her latest album, Inuit Legend, including "Epidemic," a song about the 1952 measles outbreak that took her grandmother's life. Then they get into sewing. Beatrice tells the story behind the coat of arms she embroidered and beaded for Governor General Mary Simon to wear to King Charles's coronation, and walks us through pieces she brought in: a garment in Hudson's Bay colours reclaiming that history, the stage looks she dreams up at night, and a beaded amauti she made while pregnant with her youngest. She also talks about hand-sewing a caribou skin amauti for the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, the parkas she made her kids every winter (Transformers, Strawberry Sho