A scarf journey

The scarf journey

Six stages, about ten minutes, one scarf that becomes yours. The story quotes its sources by name; each flower opens when you learn one true thing about it; the cloth you compose is a printed cloth, the way the object always was.

The journey is online, on your own phone or computer, in English and Ukrainian.

Make your scarf The six stages

Opens the journey in English or Ukrainian · about ten minutes

Illustration: women of several generations in bright printed floral headscarves, hand in hand on a field path in autumn.
Illustration: women of several generations in printed floral headscarves on a field path in autumn.
The object

A thin printed cloth with two names — хустка · kokum scarf (Plains Cree kôhkom, “your grandmother”). Nobody has published where the Prairie scarves were made or how they arrived; the story of women trading and gifting them lives in families on both sides, and the one peer-reviewed study records it as memory.

What is documented, what is remembered →

The six stages

What happens on the screen, in order.

  1. Begin

    Where this stands: who made it, what it is, and that nobody has endorsed it — a screen you read before anything else.

  2. Story

    Four chapters with every source named: the cloth, the flowers that were here first, the land since 1891, the word and the memory.

  3. Motifs

    Seventeen motifs; three are open, fourteen open when you answer one question from their card.

  4. Compose

    Arrange your flowers on a printed square: four grounds, three symmetries, three densities, and a design number that rebuilds it exactly.

  5. Meaning

    Name the scarf, choose three words, write what it means to you — your words, labelled as yours.

  6. Your scarf

    A keepsake with your name; on a shared tablet a QR code sends the scarf to your phone; an honest path to a printed scarf — no scarf has been printed yet.

Make your scarf Opens the journey in English or Ukrainian · about ten minutes

Where this stands, September 2026

Who made it
A community project started at UAFest. Ukrainian-Canadians made it: the words, the drawings, the code. It is a prototype.
Status
No Indigenous community or organization has endorsed or partnered in this project yet. We have asked for community review; it has not begun.
Voices
Every Indigenous voice in the story is quoted by name from something that person published. The words you attach to each flower are yours: creative prompts written for this app, and no tradition.
Printing
No scarf has been printed. We asked four print shops for prices; one has answered with a price list; we have placed no order.
Funding
Nothing submitted, nothing awarded.
Language
The journey is in English and Ukrainian. This website is in English, French and Ukrainian.

The story chapters quote published authors by name. Corrections from the communities described here outrank anything we wrote.

info@uafest.ca What an Indigenous co-author would decide →

Seventeen motifs

Three are open when you arrive — sunflower, kalyna, wild rose. Each of the other fourteen opens when you read its card and answer one question about it. A card says what the plant is, where it grows, who is recorded using it and where we read it; it makes no claim of symbolic or traditional meaning. Where we found no record for a plant, the plant stayed off the scarf.

Open at the start

The kokum scarf: what is documented Print and embroidery: two different objects

How to take it home

On a shared tablet the last screen shows a QR code. Scan it with your own phone: it opens this exact scarf, with the same design number, and you save the keepsake there. Nothing is saved on the tablet. On your own phone the keepsake saves directly.

Want it on cloth? No scarf has been printed yet. Leave one email in the app, or write to info@uafest.ca with your design number in the subject, and we write once — when a printed scarf from your design is real, or to tell you the path closed. One letter, no newsletter.

Write with your design number

Sources on this page