Emily Chan
She is enrolled in the Fond Du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Their team name, “Kwe,” refers to an Anishinaabemowin term for women.
During snow sculpting competitions, teams work through the night, staving off the cold with plenty of hand warmers and hot coffee. The work actually begins weeks, or even months, before a competition.
For States in 2023, they planned their design for their snow sculpture ahead of time. They decided to focus on the craft of knitting to give prominence to women, with a design featuring knitting needles, balls of yarn, and knitted fabric.
Unfortunately, Thompson had to forfeit at the last minute because of a family emergency. Kelly Thune, winner of the World Championships in Stillwater, stepped in to help. They chiseled away at their mound of snow for 40 hours with only an hour or two of sleep per night.
The team has done similar pieces in earlier years. During the 2021 state competition, they carved a jingle dress, which was inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The sculpture won the People’s Choice award. Thompson herself was a jingle dress dancer, and the sisters’ grandmother was a jingle dress dancer as well.
“The jingle dress specifically was made during the last pandemic, which was the flu pandemic of 1918, and it was created because somebody had a vision that if people would dance with this jingle dress on, that it would bring healing. So, we wanted to bring healing to that,” Friedli explained.
In 2022, their sculpture for the Indigenous Arts Festival in Mankato, Minnesota, depicted a bison and a shawl dancer to honor Indigenous women who have gone missing or were murdered.
For this year’s Minnesota State Snow Sculpting Competition, Team Kwe created a piece that illustrated two characters, Wenabozho and his brother, Dadibaajimad, on a journey beyond the realm of the living.
The figures are from a traditional Ojibwe story. The sculpture was a homage to Jim Denomie, an Ojibwe artist who died in 2022.
