Beauty is not only for the young. In most any Aboriginal Elder, man or woman, will tell you: The most beautiful thing about a woman is her power to bring a new life into the world. Through time and colonization, Indigenous practices regarding childbearing and childbirth have changed but in recent years there has been a revitalisation and rebirth (no pun intended) of traditional views on motherhood. There is a renewed respect for the role of mothers and grandmothers that had been lost because of colonisation and the Residential school system. Our sense of identity as Indigenous people has evolved so significantly that our relationship and understand of beauty has changed quicker and more drastically than the rest of the North American population in the last 70 years. Assimilation, shame and fear, slowly turned into reaffirmation and pride. Today mothers and elders are seen as beautiful individuals, inside and out. While Canadian and American societies spend millions and millions on anti-aging and ways to stop the biological clock, Aboriginal peoples embrace aging and view it simply as a natural stage of life, one that brings respect and wisdom.

Standards of beauty – now, there’s a truly subjective issue! While it’s an easy enough task today to consult fashion archives from recent years, the challenge becomes far more complex to try and chart as elusive a topic as shifting concepts of beauty among indigenous peoples, especially as they applied to a distant past when oral tradition was the primary form of history. Add to that the need to approach such an elusive subject with numerous different Aboriginal nations, each with its own, often-complex history, customs, tradition – and therefore, inevitably, standards of beauty. It’s a safe bet that some grey areas may well remain, even under the most arduous scrutiny. Yet, these quibbles aside, the subject remains an interesting one which undoubtedly deserves attention, if only to debunk some myths that have lingered on for far too long! Keywords: race, indigenous, ethnicity.