Overcoming trauma thread by thread: Cambria Harris’ healing journey after loss

Cambria Harris has always had an eye and passion for art.

“I’ve always kind of been an artist growing up, art has always kind of been my safety because I never really thrived in school growing up, being a kid in care,” Harris told Global News.

“I struggled with mental health myself, not being able to learn in a typical environment because of my anxiety and everything I was going through … So art was kind of an escape.”

“I think it can be a very healing and empowering process.”

Harris has put her artistic talents both on canvas and through a sewing machine. She has created countless ribbon skirts, each telling its own story.

“Everything I do has meaning, every piece has symbolism, every skirt I sew has some kind of different reason, different journey,” she said.

Harris has also sewn jackets and dresses with symbolism behind the creation, including creating a jacket to represent the National Day of Action for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Gender Diverse People.

“When I got the King Charles Coronation Medal, I sewed a jacket specifically for that,” Harris said.

“And those were forms of Indigenous resistance in colonial spaces, in spaces I myself was never allowed to stand in. And I think that’s what I wanted to get at, and what it meant to reclaim my space as an Indigenous woman and matriarch for myself.”

For Harris, it’s also part of her own healing journey from trauma. Her mother, Morgan Harris, was killed by a convicted serial killer in 2022. Her remains were discovered last year in the Prairie Green landfill, after a long push for the landfill to be searched that drew nationwide attention.

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“I felt like everything I was feeling I sewed into the skirts, thread by thread,” Harris said.

Harris says it’s not only a tribute to her mother, but also to her aunt, Crystal Harris, who raised her.

“(Crystal) just found out she had cancer a few days before finding out my mother, Morgan, was murdered. She had cervical cancer and it was already in the last few stages,” Harris said.

“During that time she had started giving gifts as final goodbyes to people, and one of my gifts was a sewing machine … And she said that she always wanted to see me sew because she always knew that I did art, that I always had aspirations of trying to sew.”

Crystal died on Feb. 15, 2023.

“One of her last dying wishes was wanting to bring my mom … home, and she never got that answer,” Harris said.

“So after she passed, I made that my journey, my healing journey to pay tribute to my mom, because I was busy grieving my other mom that I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye.”

Sewing memories of her lost loved ones into each thread.

“Just knowing I was healing that trauma within both of them, even though they weren’t there.”

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