Game of kings and queens get Native touch

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What would your chess set look like?

If someone asked you to design and create the checked board and its 32 pieces, what materials would you choose? What story might you tell?

Many Quebec Native artists assigned the task to create a chess set by Montreal's First People's Festival chose to remember.

They fashioned kings, queens, bishops and the other well-known pieces of the universal game to tell stories of their people's beginnings and struggles. In making the figures and the boards, some walked the path to a traditional way of life.

"I wanted to represent something of the old culture," said Christine Sioui Wawanoloath, peering through a glass case at her small blue and white board topped with fantastic figures and shapes carved from deer antler.

The pieces tell the story of Klooskombe, the greatest mythological hero in the Wabanaki culture.

"Hardly anyone knows him now," she said. "We lost the oral tradition, so we weren't told or taught" about it.

The Wabanaki story of creation "is very beautiful," said Sioui Wawanoloath at the Biblitheque nationale du Quebec during the opening of the exhibition of seven chess sets. But she said the characters have lost much of their meaning as the tales have faded into history.

"I know a little. I would like to know a lot more."

While her chessmen, including magic worms, mammoths, the earth and the sea, are scattered across and alongside the board to depict the chaos of creation and of life itself, Jean-Pierre Fontaine's robed figures carved from caribou bone confront one another in two neat rows on a yellowed board that looks as old as the story it tells.

One side is the Church, whose king is a large white cross and whose queen is an open bible. They face Tradition, led by a drum-headed king and a queen of snowshoes.

"For me, the game of chess represents a spiritual struggle between two beliefs, two ways of doing things, and that's what mixes us up these days. A day-to-day struggle-check or checkmate," said Fontaine in a quote in the exhibition.

Tom Bulowski's internal turmoil-between the ways of his grandmother and his 21st century urban life as a graphic artist and web designer-is represented by the buckskin and bead-wearing kings and queens of his chess set, who are flanked by smaller braves with shoulder-length hair, also shaped from earth-colored clay. But then come the knights-jagged edges and curves fashioned from the jaws and teeth of beavers, trapped by Bulowski's northern Quebec relatives.

"This was the first time I practised art with my culture" as the subject, said Bulowski. "I tried to find out something about my culture, because I'm young," he adds.

For Steve McComber, the project was an opportunity to build on a recent exchange between his Fabulous Thunder Hawk Dancers and the Le-La-La troupe of the Kwakwa'wakw Nation on British Columbia's West Coast. His soapstone pieces represent First Nations cultures from the East-including a Mohawk warrior and Tadadaho, a chief of the Iroquois Confederacy-and the West-salmon and Tsonoqua, the giant woman of the forest who spirits away children to eat. The board is a single piece of wood carved in the shape of a turtle, Turtle Island being a Native American name for North America.

Jacques Newashish fashioned a game whose beaded board-made by a woman in his community-can be rolled up and easily stored in a birchbark basket, along with the leather pouches that hold the pieces, a necessity in the nomadic lifestyle of his Atikamekw people. Placed on their starred squares, his chessmen-carved from moose antlers-turn their round faces skyward with hopeful expressions.