Oakley Rain Wysote Gray, Bleeding Heart Cape – M’st No’gmaq (All My Relations), 2021

Central to Bleeding Heart Cape is its use of symbolic colour and materials. The red that stains or appears in the piece is not decorative alone—it is blood, sacrifice, and grief but also endurance. Black evokes the recorded colonial laws and documentation: the Indian Act, inscriptions, official power. White, often part of the palette across Gray’s work, signals both contrast and aspiration: a longing for freedom, a purity of future identity unmarred by oppressive law, but also the danger of erasing trauma. The juxtaposition of white with blood and ink implicates appearance—at first glance perhaps clean, but stained; masked, but bearing history.

Beadwork and traditional Mi’kmaw visual forms such as curves and waves anchor the piece in lineage. They function not as ornament but as memory and storytelling. The red cape’s silhouette, a garment wrapping protectively around the shoulders and heart, draws the personal into the communal: loss is collective rather than private, reshaping community and compounding intergenerational trauma. The phrase “all my relations” signals that each life and each wound connects across families and across generations.

The cape’s wearability introduces a performative dimension: whoever wears it carries its burden. The body becomes the site of both vulnerability and witness. Visually, the work demands attention; culturally, it demands recognition. Moreover, in the context of conventional fashion—runway, display, and consumption—the piece subverts the emphasis on beauty, prestige, and consumption by insisting that the aesthetic must also carry a message, history, and ethics.

Unlike works that mobilize anger as their primary register, Bleeding Heart Cape’s power lies in its elegy, its mourning, its willingness to pause and feel. Yet, it does not settle into grief. The work asserts both presence and identity through the language of kinship; “all my relations” resonates as a declaration of Indigenous continuity and relational responsibility. Nor is the image passive. There is deliberate agency in the creation of the piece; in the selection of colours, symbols, and narratives; and in making visible what colonial systems sought to obscure.

The work anticipates the risk that wearable art might commodify pain—that fashion could aestheticize rather than honour trauma. Gray addresses this through intent: the piece is grounded in education, remembrance, and representation rather than spectacle, standing explicitly against appropriation. By embedding narrative in every detail, by rooting the piece in the community memory of Listuguj, residential school stories, and ancestral loss, the work resists superficial reading.

Ultimately, Bleeding Heart Cape is a somatic, relational act of mourning, of bearing history, and of encounter. It asks the viewer to feel, to remember, to acknowledge. It asks the settler viewer to recognize their responsibility in the red garment’s blood, its ink, its shape. The cape is about loss, but it is also about love, relationships, endurance, and the refusal to be erased.