Morgyn McD-L'Hirondelle

In 2010, while I was at Rocklyn Residential School, I was given wood panels and watercolours to help calm me down after the first few nights.
Those painting sessions were the one peaceful part of an otherwise hellish experience. As we ready to leave Apsley behind its nice to try this art form again.

I love finding gorgeous ways to represent my root ancestry. This is one page from an ongoing family record book I keep full of info we might need down the line in my family.

Today, the sun burns bolder.
Something is coming.

I am now a vendor on shawishmarket.com/vendor/Nothing-to-Hide and I have created this artist blurb to describe myself and work quickly between events and sites. You can find a small catalogue of the kinds of supplies and works you will normally be seeing in my table bins, but also online too!

My home, my beloved river.
Eels Creek wrapped around my Nanas property as if the water itself cradled us in her grasp.
The plants and animals I have harvested on this shore will stay with me until my dying day. I hope to hunt them again one day or be hunted by them in our final resting grounds.
🏕🏞🧡

My first love was this river.
My Nana is selling it soon...
My hope is someone else will cherish her as I always have.

When I have a load of feathers I havent used for lures or other crafts, I like to make jewlery!Here are a few pieces I made using grouse feathers, epoxy, turkey feathers, a shell and a brass pendant and some wee scraps of fabric to craft wonder.

This quote feels more relevant here in 2025 than ever before:

"We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit."
—David Suzuki

From above, soon below lol

Call me one eye - if ye dare lol

You reached out to ask a few questions but thats the healing effect of our stories. Even the ones from my Metis family, and some from my Cree family work the same way.

You have potential.
Someone else does too.
Revel in them both, applying or encouraging them with purpose.

Its important that no ONE act like the arbiter of Anishinaabemowin.
In the past few years there has been dark animosity when explaining context for words and ways.
You listen with honor and show appreciation for what made it possible to KNOW my family stories. Its the #1 reason I LOVE sharing w you.

A thunderous spirit and a beautiful being, honestly, but more than that you are a storyteller and you will bring some amazing stories to light as you explore and learn even more! 🖖🥳

Its more than just nutrient rich compost -- thats for certain. 🥰
Its a way for my partner and I to lay to rest our pregnancy and grow our son with the land at heart. Its terribly difficult to tend the land once its been stripped of its fuel though, so, yes, it is also a gift of thanks to the land.

The sheer number of fungi here is astonishing and I love them all! Oh I cant wait to learn what kind of mushroom this is!! #fungi #mushrooms #foraging Maybe is it a #Toadstool?
(*do not eat what you cant ID!)

This is one of Simons favourite places to be and to work and I cant blame him. I laid our placenta to rest here with his help and we now work around it daily while working on hides and knowledge keeping too!

This place has every colour, texture and vibrance I could ever hope for. What a wonderland of inspiration...

I love that, of the 83 trees we have had to cut in this spot, only 10 were alive. None of the living trees would have thrived as they were. I've been here for 3yrs of clean up after prior owners milled it all. 2 huge 200+yo golden birch were nearly destroyed by gangly, burl sick cherry for instance.

The second "paint" should have read "paint brush heads" because we use bone tipping for some finer points on dyed stones and hides. Sometimes they make great piercing tools for tattooing (already dead) skins.

Cedar Hub Camp 🥰🏕
This spot is our smoke tanning pit, scraping zone, quail coop and a number of nicer trails hook up here as well! 15 years of mismanagement left this area full of pits and widow maker trees. Now? Its full of nutrient rich berms and structurally sound dead stands for use as habitats!

Coyote skulls. Two (left) from a farmer in Northern Ontario and the others; Western Labrador.
I love using the teeth in rattles and the skulls for making paint, knife and arrow tips, hooks, paint, buttons and jewlery.

The hide is soaking still - hard as rock in some spots but slowly softening. I look forward to my first time stringing up this mooz hide I was gifted.
🖤❤️🧡💛🤍

Holy this mooz hide is HUGE!
Thank you to Greg Garret and I will find something amazing to do with this piece 🥳🌟
I am thinking rattles, moccasins and drums firstly -- one day a canoe would be amazing.

Morgyn places a granite stone inside a small garden. The garden has sodalite and quartz hunks in varying sizes. There is a single, small cedar tree at the peak of the garden which has two arrow shaped stones, each pointing East or West.

We planted the cedar I took off Armor Hill and built a little person garden at its base filled it with crystals.
My dad spent years teaching me under cedars that grew on Armor Hill next to the archive, and now my children will hear our stories here in Cedar Creek under boughs of the same kind.

Holy moozes cripes!
I love hide tanning, but right now I gotta find a container big enough to fit the whole thing for soaking before I can string it up for cleaning / stitching up.

Spring is in bloom once again!!

Working on collecting punk wood this week! Our tanning pit will be billowing plumes of the richest stain in no time!! Ahh!! I am so excited for this cherry and how it will darken up some buckskin in particular 🤩

We need it more than can be said in 300 characters...

"Whitewashed Rapids" is a song about identity from the perspective of a Metis Nation of Ontario citizen today.
(Mine anyway...)
I sing about ancestry, loss of culture and ebbing pride in our many nations across Turtle Island. That its because of colonial politics, genocide and ongoing disconnection.

I have been making medicine bags for the past 22 years and I am my family medicine bag maker. I take pride in my work. It shows how much I have learned and what family and teachers I have learned from and who taught them.
My work is an example of their work as much as my childrens will be of mine...