Biigtigong Nishnaabeg artist graphic design work featured in the NHL
By Rick Garrick
THUNDER BAY — Biigtigong Nishnaabeg’s Jacenia Desmoulin looks forward to doing additional graphic design work for the National Hockey League team Chicago Blackhawks after designing the Native-inspired art for the Blackhawks’ Native American Initiatives webpage.
“I do have more work with the Blackhawks coming up and I really don’t know where that is going to lead so I’m kind of just living in that moment right now,” says Desmoulin, an office administrator at March of Dimes Thunder Bay and mother of two children who does graphic design as a hobby. “I have more work with the Blackhawks and I’m open to wherever that takes me.”
Desmoulin was contacted by Chicago Blackhawks advisor Nina Sanders, Apsáalooke scholar and curator of the Apsáalooke Women and Warriors exhibition on display at the Field Museum in Chicago until July 2021, after posting an image on Instagram.
“She contacted me through Instagram asking if I could create a website skin and if I had time for a phone call,” Desmoulin says, noting that she was told that the project had to be done quickly. “I had a week to pull everything together — everything had to be done before Nov. 1 because they launched the website on the first. I had a meeting with their team, with their creative directors, their communications director [and] the other people on the webpage.”
Desmoulin says it was important to get involved with the project because it was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“But also because they are taking an initiative to acknowledge Indigenous people,” Desmoulin says. “I was so lucky to be a part of that.”
Desmoulin began the project by designing a variety of graphic images for the Blackhawks to choose from for use on the website.
“For the first one I was just trying to create a tribal image,” Desmoulin says. “For the second one, it’s a bit smaller but it has the sacred medicines in it. I tried to do a lot of the teachings in the drawings I did for them.”
Desmoulin says the third design was created from an image Sanders had sent featuring a medicine bag from a museum collection.
“I took that medicine bag and I created this design from it,” Desmoulin says. “That is kind of the main image that is seen throughout the website — in the background, there is a red and white image that comes from that medicine bag.”
Desmoulin says she uses an iPad Pro and Procreate to create her graphic designs.
“Using iPad, it’s literally like drawing on paper except you have a lot more tools at your disposal,” Desmoulin says. “I have an Apple pencil and it’s just like drawing.”
Desmoulin says she taught herself how to use Procreate to create graphic designs, noting she had always been involved in doing art.
“For the most part, I do it for fun, and then people started asking for logos, business cards and t-shirt designs,” Desmoulin says. “And I use it to create designs for tattoos.”
The Chicago Blackhawks state on the Native American Initiatives webpage that they continue to grow in their commitments to honour and celebrate Black Hawk’s legacy by offering their platforms, making meaningful contributions, collaborating with Native American people and reimagining ways to support the many Native American people and communities they live amongst and alongside of. Black Hawk, or Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk, was an accomplished war leader and a dignitary from the Sauk (present-day Sac and Fox) tribe.