Margaret Noodin is a Plains Cree artist whose beadwork transcends the category of embellishment and enters the realm of narrative textile art, most notably through her expansive and emotionally resonant story-blankets. These blankets, beaded with exquisite detail and imbued with cultural memory, serve as living texts in the tradition of oral storytelling, preserving and communicating Cree cosmology, family history, and communal resilience. Based in Saskatchewan and descended from the James Bay Cree, Noodin has devoted decades to the meticulous handcrafting of these large-scale beaded works, blending traditional techniques with a contemporary sense of storytelling that engages deeply with the lived experiences of Indigenous people in the plains of Canada.
Story-blankets are not new inventions within Cree artistic practice. Historically, animal hides and later cloth were used as narrative canvases—spaces where dreams, visions, hunting stories, kinship lines, and spiritual teachings could be recorded visually through quillwork, pigment, and eventually beads. Noodin builds upon this tradition with a sense of reverence and renewal, transforming each blanket into a multi-layered narrative woven from threads of memory, resistance, and beauty. Her materials are deeply considered: wool or cotton bases often dyed with natural pigments such as sage, wild rose, or onion skin; antique or handmade seed beads sourced from other Cree artists or passed down through family; and edging made from smoked moosehide or reclaimed leather, stitched in ways that echo traditional clothing construction. Nothing in a Noodin story-blanket is arbitrary; every element, from bead size to stitching angle, is intentional and often symbolically loaded.
Each blanket can take months, sometimes years, to complete, and most are collaborative projects in spirit if not in execution. Noodin often begins by consulting elders, listening to stories, songs, or historical accounts passed down orally. These narratives become the conceptual framework for the beaded scenes she later creates. In her renowned piece Askiy Is Speaking (The Earth Is Speaking), she beaded an expansive landscape across a deep green wool base, showing not just a physical terrain but a cosmological one. Trees bend as if whispering, rivers are outlined in beads that shimmer between blue and silver, and animal figures—bear, elk, eagle—move through the design like guardians. The entire piece is bordered with syllabics in Cree, each stitched letter spelling out teachings related to land stewardship and ancestral respect. The story told is not linear but cyclical, meant to be read like a journey taken in spirals, returning again and again to core truths.
Noodin’s technique involves both applique-style bead embroidery and contour beading, which allows her to create dimensional effects that make her figures appear alive within the blanket’s surface. She layers her beads in ways that echo topography—ridges and valleys, shadows and light, the tactile experience of moving through the land. Her use of color is subtle and intentional. In the blanket Mothers of the Sky, a visual retelling of Cree creation stories centered on Sky Woman, she uses gradations of blue and amethyst beads to represent different layers of the celestial world, while amber and ochre beads trace the descent of the spirit into physical form. The figure of Sky Woman herself is beaded with a radiating pattern that suggests both movement and transformation, surrounded by small bead-stars stitched in constellations familiar to Cree astronomy.
Many of her story-blankets also carry personal family histories, blending the mythic with the autobiographical. In My Grandmother’s Bones, Noodin stitched a skeletal tree whose roots stretch into a beaded map of Saskatchewan’s residential school system. Tiny black and white beads form schoolhouse shapes interwoven with red-stitched names—some representing survivors, others the names of children who never came home. Alongside this powerful visual testimony, she beaded a small blanket within the blanket, representing a comfort object passed down through three generations of women in her family. This layered storytelling allows Noodin’s blankets to function simultaneously as public reckoning and private healing. They are archives that speak, repositories not of static data but of lived, felt, and enduring histories.
The scale of her work reinforces its ceremonial quality. These are not objects to be hung and forgotten, but pieces to be displayed, read, and interacted with—sometimes even worn, as in the case of her Windspeaker Cloak, a story-blanket shaped like a ceremonial wrap, worn by dancers during community gatherings. This performative dimension aligns with Noodin’s belief that beadwork is not merely a visual medium but an embodied practice, a way of animating story through movement and presence. In interviews, she has often said that the blanket “lives” more fully when it is near people—when it is touched, spoken about, and seen in use, rather than sealed in sterile gallery conditions. This philosophy challenges Western conventions around preservation and display, asserting instead that art made from community must stay within community to retain its power.
Despite the highly specific nature of her subject matter, Noodin’s work has found resonance far beyond Cree audiences. Her story-blankets have been featured in major exhibitions of Indigenous art across Canada and internationally, including at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. Critics and curators alike have noted the extraordinary intricacy of her technique, but also the emotional clarity and ethical force of her storytelling. Her work bridges aesthetics and activism, offering a tactile rejoinder to colonial historical erasure by making Indigenous narratives not only visible but felt—bead by bead, stitch by stitch.
Margaret Noodin’s story-blankets are, above all, acts of cultural continuity. They thread together past and present, language and land, grief and celebration. Each one is a carefully stitched affirmation that stories matter—not just as artifacts, but as lifelines. Through her beadwork, she reminds us that memory can be a material, that art can hold history, and that blankets can speak as powerfully as any book or monument. Her work is not only a continuation of a legacy but a creation of one, designed to wrap future generations in the warmth of their own stories.