A World Made by Women
Ashley Callingbull Burnham
A Celebrity Voice Against Abuse BY ANYA MONT IEL
actress and activist, had just been named the 2015 winner of the Mrs. Universe pageant, held in Belarus on August 29. She wasted no time in using her new platform to speak out on First Nations’ issues, and especially against the abuse of Indigenous women. “Did you really think I was going to just
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sit there and look pretty?” she said on Twit- ter after a controversial first day with her title. “Definitely not.” Burnham, better known by her maiden
name Callingbull, is not a new face to Na- tive people in Canada. The 25-year-old is a model, actor and motivational speaker from the Enoch Cree Nation of Alberta near Ed- monton. (She was featured in the Fall 2013 issue of American Indian, for her collabora- tion with Native photographer Anthony “Thosh” Collins in the Re:appropriation Proj- ect, a series of photographs meant to define authentic Native fashion.) Burnham has competed as a jingle dress
dancer at powwows since her youth and is a professionally trained dancer in tap, ballet, pointe and jazz. As an actor, she had a recur-
or the day, the young lady from the Enoch Cree Nation of Alberta trended higher on the internet than Justin Bieber or Kanye West. Ashley Callingbull Burnham, model,
ring role on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network show, Blackstone. She has also spo- ken at numerous schools and First Nations reserves about her own life as a victim of childhood abuse. As she told an Alberta newspaper, her
stepfather physically and sexually abused her from an early age. “I was so young,” she said, “I didn’t know what was wrong, what was right. He started abusing me physically and sexually. I was only five, I didn’t know what to think and my mother didn’t know about it.” When Burnham and her mother moved
back to the reserve, she told her family mem- bers about the abuse, and they pressed charg- es. After the lengthy court hearings, her step- father received only minor punishment. “By the time everything was done I was a teenager and I felt like I really hated myself and like I was worthless,” Burnham recalls. “They sent me to therapy and that didn’t help.” Instead she found healing through learning about her Cree culture from her grandparents and practicing her traditional ways.
E SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 39
PHOTO BY ANTHONY “THOSH” COLLINS
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