A winding path took her from North to South and back again, learning and teaching, stitching together sealskins and lessons she learned along the way. Cheryl Fennel was born in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, where she lived until she was orphaned when one of her parents drowned and the other died in an operation. She and her eight siblings were separated and she was sent to Edmonton. She was adopted but her adoptive parents broke up and she ended up in an orphanage and then foster care. After high school, she applied for Indigenous teacher training in the North and became a school teacher, beginning her career in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

Living in Cambridge Bay was a transformative experience as Fennel had been away from her culture for so long. The local community embraced her and she went hunting and fishing with them. For eight years, she felt like family until she went back to Yellowknife to work in education policy. She ended up getting the chance to work with the Minister of Education who she was in teacher training with so many years ago. He asked her to develop and coordinate a community based teacher training program, a program which did well. When he became premier, she was his executive assistant for six months.

While they wanted her to go on to be an Assistant Deputy Minister, Fennel decided to go back to school at Royal Roads University and she did a Masters in Conflict Analysis and Management. She continued working while she was in school and she learned a lot about learning. She says, “We have to look at school as something that involves our heart and our head. Because without our heart, the head can become quite focused on something that maybe doesn't include people, it can just include formulas or whatever, but we're people and we're human and if we can learn to relate. When I was doing my master's thesis the one thing I got out of the whole thing was in the past in sales, people always said it's all about location, location, location. I came up with this statement: It's all about relation, relation, relation.”

Fennel ended up having to stop working when she got cancer and she had to stay home for a year. While she was sick, she ended up designing sealskin bracelets and a pair made their way to Tanya Tagaq who wore them when she wore a Polaris Music Award. Fans on Twitter were dying to know who made her bracelets and people wanted her to make some for them, too. She ended up making dresses for Tagaq, learning to sew from a friend.

Later, Fennel was asked to show items at Indigenous Fashion Week through Proudly Indigenous, promoting seal to help Inuit hunters whose livelihood was threatened by false narratives of the seal hunt. Recently evacuated from forest fires, she had less than six weeks to produce 15 outfits. “I think you have to trust your intuition and feel what it is that you love to do…. I really feel like all roads lead to the future and so all the roads that I was going down led to going to this latest venture which was to me the most incredible thing,” she reflects, thinking about how every person involved was Indigenous. The theme she selected was “Drums in My Heart”, thinking of the sounds of the drums she fell asleep to as a child. Each model had their own drumbeat and their movements symbolized transformation, celebrating their identity and culture.

It was a meaningful evening for her models and audience members alike. “Later, people from the audience came in, they were in tears, and said that really moved me because the entire show was all about the drums in your heart, not my heart, everybody's heart and what we need, what we can have, it’s such a simple symbol to show and an action to show that this is our journey in life. I read last week from some elder that the longest journey is about 18 inches from your head to your heart. I feel like that's the same for every single human being on the earth, though, that if we can make that journey from our head to our heart and balance it because we need our mind as well then we're going to be able to release that potential and become shining jewels on Turtle Island,” Fennel muses.

“Every person has the capability to release that beautiful shining side of themselves.”

When it comes to inspiration, Fennel draws it from the Creator and the ancestors. She reads spiritual writing and prays daily, something she feels makes her more intuitive and adds more flow to her art. If she feels blocked in her creativity, she goes for a walk or listens to a talk about spirituality. Nature is also a source of inspiration and she keeps every piece of seal knowing she will use it one day. She loves sharing the beauty of nature in her creations.

As far as obstacles, being taken away from her siblings and from Yellowknife was hard but Fennel didn’t face the same difficulties her siblings did, so it ended up being a mixed blessing. She did end up having separation anxiety and she learned about how to manage that through her education. Getting sick with cancer was another obstacle she faced and overcame.

If Fennel could give a message to her younger self it would be, “Don't put that extra stress on yourself. Don't worry about what other people think about you. Because if they're thinking something bad about you…that's their issue.”

To maintain her mental health, Fennel likes to go walking early in the morning, listening to positive talks and then to music for energy while she works. She takes breaks to regroup and collect herself as she works on things. Walking in nature, going to the markets and spending time with friends bring her joy. Prayer is important to her and she likes to pray for peace, children, unity, protection, steadfastness and for the ancestors.

The winding path that took her from North to South and back again had her learning and teaching and  making beautiful art from sealskins and the wisdom Cheryl Fennel found along the way. After great loss, she became a teacher and a designer, worked in the halls of government and learned life lessons overcoming cancer. She found it’s about it’s all about relation, relation, relation and it’s best to listen to the drums in your heart, that’s where you find the transformation.

Thank you to Alison Tedford Seaweed for authoring this article!