Empowering women of colour through fashion and more arts stories you might have missed

Here at CBC Arts, you won't just find our original content — we also bring you the best art posts from across the entire CBC network.

These are the week's can't-miss stories:

Toronto woman couldn't find underwear for women of colour — so she created her own (CBC Toronto)

If you're white, you probably don't think twice about the shade of "nude" underwear. But if you're a woman of colour, the disparity is obvious: "nude" means "beige" in the fashion world. After years of unsuccessful searching for nude underwear that was actually representative of a diverse range of skin tones, Toronto's Chantal Carter Taylor decided to take matters into her own hands. Her company Love & Nudes is Canada's first brand of nude lingerie marketed to women of colour — and she hopes to empower them through the clothing line. Her message is simple: "Just be your own beauty."

'There's so much healing going on': Inuit tattoo revival reaches Ulukhaktok (CBC North)

The tradition of Inuit tattooing is one that had been largely lost to time — until Hovak Johnston made it her goal to revive it. Johnston says the special art hadn't been practiced in three generations, but she's travelling around northern Canada in hopes of tattooing as many people as possible and helping them find their stories and symbols. "It's not just tatooing them, not just putting ink in them," she told CBC North. "There's so much healing going on."

Filmmaker whose hit TV show Mohawk Girls celebrates Kahnawake fears eviction from her community (CBC Montreal)

Tracey Deer has lived in the Quebec territory of Kahnawake her whole life, and her TV series Mohawk Girls is set and filmed there. But after marrying her non-Indigenous husband last year, she now faces eviction from the community over their controversial residency law — an unspoken rule that "Mohawks marry Mohawks." It's the second time Deer has been forced to leave Kahnawake — she was evacuated from the reserve during the Oka crisis in an experience she describes as "shattering." But now, it's her own people who want her to leave.

'It's on national TV, it's all over Canada': Indigenous designer's dresses hit Junos red carpet (CBC North)

This year's Junos featured all the giltz and glamour you'd expect from Canada's biggest music awards — but it also featured trailblazing Indigenous-made designs. Tanya Tagaq, Tiffany Ayalik and Leela Gilday all rocked the red carpet with custom outfits by Tishna Marlowe, a fashion designer originally from the Northwest Territories and now based in Alberta. Not only did they look great, but the clothing had deeper meanings as well: Tagaq's red dress honoured missing and murdered Indigenous women, while the beadwork in Gilday's dress reflected her Dene identity. Slay, queens!

Ethiopian refugee living in Edmonton takes his own story to the big screen (CBC Edmonton)

Zekarias Mesfin's journey to Edmonton was a treacherous one. Born in Ethiopia and orphaned at 14, he walked first to Sudan then to Egypt, crossing the Sahara Desert on foot in the hopes of eventually making it to Israel — but he was arrested and jailed along with a car full of other refugees. It was the United Nations Commission on Human Rights that helped him eventually get to Canada, where he now lives with his wife and sons. But Mesfin hasn't left his past behind — he wants people to know what he went through. So he's turned his story into a movie, Ewir Amora Kelabi, with the help of Sabisa Films to give audiences a firsthand look at what drives refugees to cross borders illegally in hopes of finding a better life.

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