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The name Atira was chosen for the society by the founding board of directors in 1982, a year before the society incorporated. The Dinner Party, an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century art, was on tour across Canada at the time. The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from herstory. The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the individual women being honored. The names of another 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table. Atira was one of 1,038 women honoured at the table.

Taken from The Brooklyn Museum’s site, where The Dinner Party is on permanent display, Atira was known as "Vault of the Sky." She was Mother Earth and a member of the council of gods in the mythology of the Pawnee, a First Nation originally located in Nebraska. Atira was the wife of Tirawa, the creator god. For the Pawnee, Atira's earthly manifestation is corn, which nourishes them and symbolizes the life that Mother Earth creates.

"It was she who had brought forth life and it was into her body that all life would return at the end of its appointed time. Her symbol was the ear of corn, to represent the idea that, as the kernel is planted in Mother Earth (Atira) and she brings forth the ear of corn, so the child is begotten and born of woman."

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