Banff murals explore Indigenous connections across the Rockies – Canada.Com

Jul 16, 2023

Tania Willard’s story of this place starts with a basket.

While exploring the collection at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in May, the Secwépemc artist found inspiration in a cedar root basket much like the ones she studies from her own First Nation and others in B.C.

“This was a really beautiful, dramatic design and I think deeply about some of these ideas embedded in that medium,” said Willard. “I drew every single stitch from that basket from the original, from a photograph, and made that into a stencil.”

The artist spray-painted the stencil onto an 2.5-metre-square aluminum box on the grounds of the Cave and Basin National Historic Site, just outside Banff.