Threads of Hope: The Living Healing Quilt Project Kirsty Robertson University of Western Ontario
Canada has often been called a mosaic but I prefer the image of a tapest ry, with its many threads and colours, its beautiful shapes, its intricate sub- tlety. If you go behind a tapest ry, all you see is a mass of complicated knots. We have tied ourselves in knots, you might say. Too many Canadians only look at the tapest ry of Canada that way. But if they would see it as others do, they would see what a beautiful, harmonious thing it really is. Pierre Elliott Trudeau
is [quilted] pi ure represents our grandfather (Raksotha) Kaheroton Daniel Peter Nicholas who was born on April , and raised in Kaneh- satake Mohawk Territory, in Quebec. He, and his two brothers, Mackay and Ernest , were sent to Shingwauk Indust rial School in the early s. His younger brother, Ernest , died there and was buried at an undisclosed site at Shingwauk; he was years old. Our grandfather told us st ories of his time at Shingwauk. Digging for food in the garbage, working very hard on the farm and academics playing a very small part. When rules were broken, he said st udents were taken to the basement, tied up to the rafters or pipes and whipped. He wanted to go back to visit the school before his death in but our parents didn’t have the money to go. He would cry a lot when he oke of Shingwauk. Maybe if we could have taken him back there, our family would now know where his brother was buried. Marie and Linda David Cree, describing the quilt block created for their grandfather as part of the Living Healing Quilt Proje .¹
ESC .. (Mar(Marchch ):): –– Child Prisoners
contested histories of nation-building, trauma, Hand reconciliation through a textile? Opening this paper are two quota- tions, the fi rst from a former prime minister using the metaphor of a tapes- try to describe multicultural pluralism in Canada, the second describing a quilt square that documents a residential school experience greatly at odds with the harmonious spectacle of coloured thread described by Trudeau. e use of cloth and textile as a metaphor for the nation—fragmented yet
All quotations in this paper from participants in the Living Healing Quilt Project can be found at http://quiltinggallery.com/tag/living-healing-quilt-project.
| Robertson | united—has become a popular one. Writes Elaine Showalter, about the United States but with a comment that might be equally applicable to Canada: “ e patchwork quilt [has come] to replace the melting-pot as the central metaphor of American cultural identity. In a very unusual pattern, K R is it transcended the stigma of its sources in women’s culture and has been an Assistant Professor remade as a universal sign of American identity” (). But although quilts of Contemporary Art and other textiles might off er comfort, and present strong metaphors of and Museum Studies similarity amid diff erence, they are also easily torn and easily sundered. at the University of Even Trudeau notes that the harmonious whole of the tapestry is only seen Western Ontario. She as such by ignoring its knotted or fraught underside. recently completed a In this article, I look at the Living Healing Quilt Project (), orga- postdoctoral nized by Alice Williams of the Curve Lake First Nation (Curve Lake, fellowship in the Ontario) and sponsored by the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Department of Visual Reconciliation Commission. e project involved the creation of a series Arts and the Constance of quilts by residential school survivors and intergenerational survivors Howard Research and is made up of individual quilt blocks refl ecting on residential school Centre in Textiles at experience. I consider the as an intervention into the collected Goldsmiths College, stories making up the national fabric, wherein the knotted underside of University of London. an apparently seamless entity is revealed. To do this, the is read Robertson’s postdoctoral through a series of locales, institutional spaces, ideas, and metaphors. In work focused on the four sections—Fabric, Pattern, Piecing, and Binding—the is analyzed study of wearable respectively as a document of trauma, an intervention into mainstream technologies, immersive normative narratives of nation building, as part of a feminist rethinking environments, and the of quilts as emancipatory texts, and as a commentary on the role of sew- potential overlap(s) ing and handcraft in the attempted creation of docile and assimilated between textiles and Indigenous children. technologies. She Running through each of these sections is a consideration of how considered these issues residential school life produced a fractured sense of home, reconfi guring within the framework of the domestic residence as an institutional space characterized by the loss globalization, activism, of culture and language, abuse (emotional, physical, and sexual), and the and burgeoning disciplining of unruly bodies to the social norms of mainstream white “creative economies.” society (Grant; Milloy; Paxton; Smith). e institutional residential school She is working on was never a comforting domestic space. Forcibly removed from their land, her manuscript Tear homes, cultures, and kinship ties, for many residential school survivors Gas Epiphanies: New home is a site of irreplaceable loss. Brought into residential institutions Economies of Protest, where they were taught domestic arts that were in turn imbued with ideals Vision, and Culture in of Christian and white middle-class femininity (to which young Aborigi- Canada. nal women were told to aspire but could never achieve), young women learned to sew as part of a biopolitical project of assimilation, with the
| reads of Hope | goal of creating docile bodies living and working in a residence that was never home. Residential school experiences had long-term eff ects in the violence against Aboriginal women (and men) that rippled out over years and gen- erations (Emberley ; Smith). Likewise, the notion of a fractured home that I trace stretches far beyond the residential school itself. As the Hon- ourable Judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond notes, the phrase “domestic vio- lence” carries a double burden: “To First Nations people, the expressions ‘culture of violence’ and ‘domestic violence’ not only have their customary connotation of violence by men against women but also mean domestic (that is, Canadian State) violence against the First Nations” (quoted in Emberley ). Taking into account the multiple losses of home (such as dispossession from land, the removal of children to residential schools, the violent suppression of culture, and the patronizing intervention of the state into Aboriginal lives), the production of a series of quilts (those most domestic of objects) to speak for and address traumas experienced by residential school and intergenerational survivors can be understood as acts of reclamation, remembering, and healing. In short, the stages a “domestic intervention,” revealing those aforementioned seams in the national fabric. It presents a moving documentation of the experience of trauma and the process of redress and is also a powerful articulation of the knotty underside of Trudeau’s tapestry.
Fabric Established in as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement, the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission () began its work in June . Following the example of the Aus- tralian reconciliation process, and s in other nations such as South Africa, Argentina, El Salvador, Chile, and elsewhere, such commissions record histories and confessions and promote healing and understand- ing outside of recrimination—they are supposed to allow people to move on. Much is said about the Canadian elsewhere in this special issue, including documenting the challenges already faced (among them the controversial resignation of Chairman Justice Harry Laforme in the early days, citing political interference from the Assembly of First Nations and biased voting on the part of the two other commissioners), the politics of apology, and the relative public obscurity of the Canadian in the mainstream media (Libin A). My paper takes a slightly more oblique angle, engaging with the as the background to the . In part, this
| Robertson | is because the impetus for the project lay not with the but almost entirely with Alice Williams. After Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s statement of apology to former students of Indian residential schools in June , Williams, a quilter who had already organized a similar collaborative quilt some years earlier for disappeared women in Vancouver, sent out a message to friends and family, asking for quilt blocks refl ecting upon the residential school experience. e call for blocks slowly spread across the Internet and from person to person. As the call was posted on quilting and Aboriginal community web- sites, sewers began contacting Williams and mailing the fi nished squares to her.² Although she never met most of the people involved, Williams received enough squares to sew three quilts: Schools of Shame, Child Prisoners, and Crimes Against Humanity. Each recorded, stitch by stitch, the trauma perpetuated by residential schools but also the possibilities for healing and hope for the future. Joanna Daniels writes of her square, which consists of an eagle appliquéd over a large yellow circle and feather: “ e eagle represents freedom and sees very far. e feather gives us guidance and we use it in our prayers. e yellow circle represents the light we look for and the blue represents the Circle of Life” (quoted in Williams). Once they were completed, the agreed that the quilts would travel with the commission and then reside in Ottawa when the work was com- plete. For Williams, these were working quilts, which provided comfort and help for survivors to tell their stories. “Each of the squares is a story,” she notes, “a story doesn’t have to be verbal, it doesn’t have to be read with words, it can be told with pictures.”³ us, the quilts parallel the work of the , but they are not reducible to it.⁴ Says Williams, “I wanted to see what I could do to help,” and she describes the process of sewing the quilts together as “sad, angering, but not debilitating … the opposite in fact.”⁵ At fi rst glance, the three quilts look like typical friendship quilts, a popular kind of quilt made up of squares sewn by diff erent people then joined together on a colourful backdrop. But, it quickly becomes apparent that these quilts are anything but typical. e background fabrics have
Interview with Alice Williams, October . Ibid. Quilters were asked to describe their squares. Most of them did, and that documentation travels with the quilts. However, the process was one where participants chose themselves what information to off er and decided themselves what was important and what was not. For this reason, some information, such as nation affi liation or full names, is occasionally missing. Interview with Alice Williams, October .
| reads of Hope | deep meaning for Williams, who notes that a mass-produced strawberry print represents the medicine and life-giving properties of strawberries and the plan of mother earth and creation when strawberries emerge each spring. Similarly, a print of stars represents the spirit world and people In another, who have gone to the spirit world, while a print of teepees represents, for Williams, life on the Prairies before the appearance of white men.⁶ If the against a teal backgrounds were chosen by Williams to broadly represent Anishinaabe culture, the blocks themselves are much more personal. In one (described background, an in the quotation at the opening of the article), a child hangs from a rafter at Shingwauk Industrial School, between two pine trees and above the embroidered purple wampum belt of the Iroquois Confederacy. In another, against a teal background, an embroidered mother bear holds bear cubs tight in mother bear one arm while warding off a gold Christian cross with the other. A third square shows three little embroidered girls, one crying, another hold- holds bear cubs ing a bag of colourfully stitched candy. Shirley Ida Williams (Ojibway and Odawa), now a professor, language consultant, and member of the tight in one arm Revitalization of the Nishnaabemowin Language Research Project, made this square, recalling her time spent in St Joseph’s Residential School in while Spanish, Ontario. In a write-up accompanying the square, she remembers using pennies her father gave her to buy jelly beans that she would share warding off a with her friends, one tiny bite at a time, when one of them missed home or had been beaten for disobeying or speaking her own language. White gold Christian material, split in half by a broken green embroidered line, represents “the lack of kindness, love and emotional support that we needed in order to cross with the grow mentally well” (quoted in Williams). A yellow line circles the girls and bonds them together. It is “the spiritual growth we got from each other in other. order to go on within the institution” (quoted in Williams). Even without the written stories that have been collected to accompany the quilts, the narrative impact of each block strongly conveys the traumatic existence of residential school life. ere are several blocks from intergenerational survivors, including one that incorporates a photograph of a young girl stitched onto a teal background. “My mom had many losses in her life, including losing me to the Fort Frances Catholic Children’s Aid in ,” writes maker Renee Linklater, whose mother Mavis Harrison Linklater was four years old when she was sent to St Margaret’s Residential School in Fort Frances and whose picture adorns the quilted square (Williams). Other squares remember those who have passed on or who did not make it through the
Interview with Alice Williams, November .
| Robertson | residential schools, the monotony of daily life, and the domestic chores given to male and female students. As a whole, the blocks of the quilts bear witness to the systemic physical and emotional abuses of residential school life and occasionally to moments of joy that could be found there. If read as a text, what might these quilts say about the legacies they stitch together—trauma, healing, belonging—and, ultimately, what might they say about the assimilationist practices of the nation state?
Pattern To begin this section, I return to the quotation in the introduction of this article: the “patchwork quilt [has come] to replace the melting-pot as the central metaphor of American cultural identity” (Showalter ). Such sentiments, in addition to others fi nding a more general narrative element to quilts, are widely found, including in the writing of George Heller (then-president and of the Hudson’s Bay Company), who wrote in the foreword for the exhibition Invitation: Quilt of Belonging in , “[A quilt] can also tell a story, or many stories, one for each of its component blocks” (quoted in Bryan ). He continues, “For over years Hudson’s Bay Company has understood the power, comfort and value of textiles” (quoted in Bryan ). Granting the Hudson’s Bay Company a central role in the building of the Canadian nation, Heller continues, not- ing that Hudson’s Bay point blankets (the well-known striped trademark blankets of the ) “have been used for centuries to solidify agreements, comfort those in need, and clothe even the hardiest adventurers during fi erce Canadian winters” (quoted in Bryan ). Heller notes that the point blankets brought together French and English Canadians in a utopian moment of cultural merging, “the taking of what works in one culture and creating something new for a new nation” (quoted in Bryan ). What Heller does not mention is that other enduring story that accompanies the blankets, one that describes instead blankets as carriers of dis- ease, as biological weapons used to spread smallpox and tuberculosis to Aboriginal communities, bringing not comfort but death, the destruction of community bonds, and an enduring legacy of attempted cultural anni- hilation (Waldman ). Clearly, for Heller such a premise has no place in the introduction to a volume that celebrates Canadian multiculturalism, but the tension between two readings of the Hudson’s Bay point blanket also clearly illustrates a seam in the fabric of Canadian nationhood and a pattern of disavowal and erasure. Invitation: Quilt of Belonging (a(a projectproject sponsoredsponsored byby thethe CanadianCanadian Museum of Civilization and the Hudson’s Bay Company) was organized by
| reads of Hope | artist Esther Bryan to bring together quilted squares, representing sev- enty-one Aboriginal groups and immigrant nationalities in a luscious and enormous patchwork quilt, created (as the inside cover of the project’s book catalogue proclaims) to provide “a lasting testimony to our country’s multicultural heritage and identity” (Bryan, unpaginated). Incorporating mementoes, traditional stitching techniques, beads, fur, porcupine quills, and antique fabrics, all beautifully made and professionally fi nished, the Quilt of Belonging ttranslatesranslates tthehe ddislocationislocation ooff ttraveling,raveling, ddispossession,ispossession, immigrating, and exile into a grand narrative of welcome and rebirth. As it happens, the Quilt of Belonging andand thethe were made simultaneously, creating two tightly interwoven but ultimately very diff erent narratives of identity and belonging. In the introduction to the catalogue for the Quilt of Belonging, BryanBryan speaks of traveling to Slovakia with her father. As her father remembers the places where he grew up, Bryan depicts the country and people as both alien and familiar and describes the uncanny sense of being at home in a place she had never visited or even known. For her, belonging is an essential human need and “Every person needs to know that regardless of colour, gender, age, abilities, physical attributes or temperament, his or her life is an equally valued part of the tapestry of life” (). From this experience, the Quilt of Belonging grew:grew: “Quilt of Belonging becamebecame anan invitation to make a textile mosaic, to piece together a non-traditional quilt in which each participant told his or her story by selecting both fabrics and design” (). She concludes, “I feel that we desperately need a positive image of what the world should be, of how it can be” (). e squares of the Quilt of Belonging ooffff eerr aann i ninterpretationterpretation o fof benign nationhood that contrasts with the experiences depicted in many of the blocks created for the . Many of the descriptions included in the catalogue that documents the making of each block of the Quilt of Belonging ccelebrateelebrate tthehe ssurmountingurmounting ooff aadversity,dversity, ttellingelling ttalesales ooff llostost jobs, diffi cult immigration processes, fi res, divorce, loneliness, theft, and, notably, of the missing generation of Aboriginal peoples whose families are now attempting to revive lost languages and cultures. In each instance, adversity tends to be overcome through teamwork and community spirit, both illustrated through the creation of the squares. Writes Bryan, “We need to understand our responsibilities as members of a society in which we are connected to one another and where every action or inaction aff ects someone else” (). e result is a quilt, four rows high and over a hundred feet in length, with the bottom (foundational) row made up of blocks representing Inuit, First Nation, and Métis nations and language groups.⁷
| Robertson | Above, three rows include a block for each nation in the world (as of January ) with Canada in the centre at the top, represented through a single-beaded maple leaf (the beads referring to Canadians “clustered in a few urban centres or sprinkled across great distances,” Bryan ). A remarkably ambitious project, the Quilt of Belonging ppresentsresents a storystory of Canada that both celebrates diff erence and folds that diff erence into the master narrative (or pattern) of a reassuring and tolerant nationhood. is quilt imagines the nation as a comforting presence—and in doing so replicates the model of assimilation and silencing that creates the seeming intractability of tolerance in Canadian self-imagination, here made visual, and patchworked into a colourful quilt in which all are accepted. Like the , the written descriptions accompanying the blocks for the Quilt of Belonging in tthehe ccatalogueatalogue acacknowledgeknowledge tthehe aattemptedttempted annihilannihilationation and assimilation of Indigenous peoples in Canada, and both celebrate the sur- vival of Aboriginal cultures against all odds. Where the interpretations diverge is in the Quilt of Belonging’s’s reworkingreworking ofof dispossessiondispossession intointo a mistake that all Canadians (Aboriginal and otherwise) overcame in the creation of a unifi ed nation (although it should be pointed out that this interpretation resides in the texts accompanying the blocks rather than in the blocks themselves, which might have had other unrecorded meanings for the makers). For example, the Dogrib contribution to the Quilt of Belonging, made of traditionally sewn caribou hide and beaded fl owers, is accompanied by a story (told in the third person) of the sewer’s mother who was unable to make the traditional string used to sew hunting mitts “because she had married soon after returning from a residential school” (Bryan ). Rather than focusing on this detail, the story quickly turns to one of heroic indi- vidual persistence as Celine Mackenzie Vukson’s mother’s eff ort to take apart and put together a used piece of string becomes the driving element of the narration: “With only fi ve inches of string left intact, she copied the sample inch by inch until she was satisfi ed that hers matched the original” (Bryan ). e pain of loss is replaced and written over by the victory of perseverance, a mantra that applies to the narrative of nation-building that is mobilized through the Quilt of Belonging. A major part of the research for the Quilt of Belonging ininvolvedvolved worworkingking wwithith the Assembly of First Nations, the Department of Indian Aff airs, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, band chiefs, and Royal Commission reports to decide how to compress First Nations bands, Métis, and Inuit groups into the seventy-one available quilt blocks that made up the foundational row (Bryan ). Notably, Alice Williams was involved in this project as well, creating the Ktunaza First Nation block (Bryan ).
| reads of Hope | ough the diff erence is subtle, many of the stories that accompany the present the trauma of residential schools and the victory of persistence more holistically—not as one writing over the other but as an ongoing process of witnessing and healing. For example, in a square that is part of the Schools of Shame quilt, what initially looks like a conventional star pattern in blues and browns, incorporating fabrics with Aboriginal motifs, becomes a story of survival. e received patterns of moccasins, paw prints, and feathers are reinterpreted by quilter Fran Kakegamick. She writes, e moccasins represent the child who was taken away from her family. e dark blue and black with the moccasins was where I was placed, a place called Mush Hole, the residential school I attended (Brantford, Ontario). e bear paws repre- sent the tracks the lost child went on during the seven long lonely years. e outer blue represents the blue sky, yellow the sun and happiness upon leaving the school. e feath- ers are what make me strong after all those years. (quoted in Williams) Told in the fi rst person, this celebration of persistence does not reduce the complexity of lived experiences of Indigenous peoples into the coming- into-being of a unifi ed nation, nor does it erase the traumatic experience of the residential school or the healing of a fragmented subject. In short, I see a signifi cant diff erence in the way that healing is positioned as a completed act in the Quilt of Belonging and asas a prprocessocess in tthehe . us, my goal here is not to position one quilt as somehow better than the other but, rather, to understand how the interpretation of each one adds to the understanding of the other, particularly when it comes to the way that stories and fi rst-person accounts are used to create the overarching message of each quilt. Jenny Edkins might off er some insight here. In her work on trauma, memory, and politics, Edkins contrasts the linear time of the nation-state, wherein events are slotted into well-known and rehearsed narratives, with that of what she calls trauma time. Trauma time, suggests Edkins, acts as a disruption of linearity and, hence, as a disturbance requiring the invention of new master narratives of national- ity in order to incorporate and smooth out the traumatic event. is is a process that takes place through constant reinvention and reinvigoration (xiv). Importantly, “Sovereign power produces and is itself produced by trauma: it provokes wars, genocides and famines. But it works by con- cealing its involvement and claiming to be a provider not a destroyer of security” (xv). In part, the illusion of shelter is maintained through the
| Robertson | rewriting of trauma into a “linear narrative of national heroism [… in which] the state conceals the trauma that it has … produced” (xv). Such logic might be found in the Quilt of Belonging’s’s earnestearnest attemptattempt toto bringbring together all members of the nation into a single patchwork. And tellingly, Reminiscent one might fi nd a similar passage from trauma time to linear time in the duplicitous relationship between church and state in the formation of of domesticity, residential schools, the state’s subsequent role in the suppression of tales of abuse, and fi nally in a government apology and attempt at redress tradition, and through the . Interpreted in this sense, the Quilt of Belonging aactscts asas a comforter,comforter, female labour, covering over the myriad instances where belonging is either a lie or is not enough. Even a cursory comparison with the illustrates the quilts have their limits of national belonging that the nation-state holds out to Indigenous peoples. In folding trauma time into the linear narrative of the nation-state own nothing much is changed. e tapestry remains intact, the knots fi rmly suppressed by the “beautiful, harmonious thing [… Canada] really is,” to history that recall Trudeau’s words. makes them Piecing Equally important, however, is the fact that both the and the Quilt ideal documents of Belonging useuse quiltingquilting ttoo cconveyonvey ttheirheir mmessages.essages. AAss a ffeminineeminine ccraft,raft, redolent of domestic space, quilting remains a marginalized art form. through which Why use quilting to, on the one hand, celebrate nationhood and, on the other, to record instances of abuse, redress, and hope? If this paper has to imagine been, to this point, one about the fabric of the nation, in the second half I’d like to turn away from the construction of the nation through textiles peoples sewn to look instead at the medium of fabric itself. Reminiscent of domestic- ity, tradition, and female labour, quilts have their own history that makes together and them ideal documents through which to imagine peoples sewn together and unraveled. unraveled. Just as the Quilt of Belonging isis ddescribedescribed aass iiff iitt ppatchesatches ttogetherogether the stories of millions into a celebration of unity, thereby healing the fragmented nation, there is a feeling too that the should heal those who worked on it, off ering some sort of balm to the pain and suff ering caused by residential schools. Indeed, the idea that sewing and craftwork can promote healing is a remarkably strong one, found in psychology textbooks (though not Freud who argued that handwork actually made women hysterical [Plant]), in conservative manuals of feminine etiquette, and in feminist tracts of emancipation. Judy Elsley, writing in about the use of quilting in feminist literature, illustrates this last interpretation
| reads of Hope | very simply when she notes that “Sewing is one way for women to begin the process of self-reclamation because it represents, more than other activities traditionally associated with women, a powerful and elemental symbol of connection” (). It is this understanding—of quilting as a meta- phor for empowerment and agency—that drew much scholarly attention through the s and s. However, if there is an obvious antecedent for the , it is not a feminist text. Rather, it is the Project, known more popularly as the quilt, a project that, in moving the critical gesture of quilting away from a feminist metaphor for women’s writing and towards making, profoundly altered the interpretation and use of quilting as critique in contemporary western society. e Project quilt grew out of a moment of rage and loss. In an oft-repeated story, quilt founder Cleve Jones asked those marching in the annual Harvey Milk memo- rial parade in San Francisco to carry signs, each printed with the name of someone they knew who had died of . e signs, pinned to a wall at the end of the parade, resembled a patchwork quilt, creating the kernel of an idea that turned into one of the most well-known memorial projects in the world. Van E. Hillard repeats this story, but nevertheless asks again, why was a quilt used to create this memorial? He concludes, “ e mixture of emotions out of which the Quilt sprung—grief, fear, and, not least rage … are fused in an emotionally charged political protest that generated Jones’s desire for domestic comfort, recognition and continuity—feelings symbolized by the traditional patchwork quilt” (Hillard ). Since (and leading up to) the quilt there have been hundreds of such projects, where, on the one hand, the act of quilting is seen to mend or repair lives that have been torn apart and, on the other, to draw atten- tion to certain issues through non-threatening means (Hillard ). is double purpose can be found in a number of politicized projects, among them the Amazwi Abesifazane: Voices of Women project designed to help Indigenous women in South Africa whose voices may not have been heard through the South African but whose stories are recorded in a series of embroidered squares (Becker), or the Clothesline Project, not quitequite a quilt but a series of shirts hung on a laundry line, each commemorating an act of violence against women (Julier ). Laura Julier notes, “[ e Clothesline Project] provides an opportunity to further understand the ways in which collaborative texts may function to enable speech rather than silence individual voices, and the ways in which space may be made and honored for private acts of healing at the same time that they move into the realm of public speech and collective action” (). In repurposing
| Robertson | a domestic craft for political means, quilting (to draw on bell hooks) is seen to perform “a gesture of defi ance that heals” (hooks ; Julier ). e plethora of quilted memorials and interventions (just a tiny percentage of which are mentioned here) speak to a need to do something, to remember, I return, then, and to heal. And what has inadvertently occurred through the success of the quilt as a memorial is the idea that quilts are ideal documents of to Hillard’s remembering and that they will promotepromote hehealing.aling. Understood through the legacy of the quilt, the stitches and question, Why blocks making up the can be seen as a memorial for what hap- pened at the residential schools and asas an actact of healinghealing forfor thethe sewers.sewers. quilts? Additionally, if “quiltmaking enacts a process of healing, because [the quilters] are no longer passive victims who are torn,” one might assume that quilt-making will provide a powerful form of redress (Elsey ), par- ticularly given the conclusion of Elsey’s statement, that “In turning being torn into tearing, quilt-making turns object into subject: active creation replaces passive victimization.” How effi cacious quilt-making as healing is in practice is a little muddier: “It’s not going to heal with the snap of the fi ngers,” says Williams.⁸ I return, then, to Hillard’s question, Why quilts? On the one hand, the comfort of quilts provides a powerful metaphor for mending and heal- ing. But underlying such positive aspects is the pull of the feminine and domestic history of quilting. Many of these quilts build on loss, they make it intimate, and they make it domestic—in other words, they bring loss home. One advertisement for memory quilts, for example, suggests that they “bring comfort and warmth and provide … a loving reminder of family and home” (Patchwork Memory Quilts ), while another suggests that the recipient of a memory quilt will “wrap [himself/herself] and keep […] warm with memories” (Memory Quilt Gallery ). In playing up the notion of home, warmth, and comfort, it is implied that the nature of the relationship between quilt, home, and family is always a comforting one. As such, these descriptions of memory quilts are at odds with the writing of Elsey and other feminists who characterized domestic space as a place of oppression and quilting as an act of agency and community building. But such interpretations might be worth revis- iting in the case of the . Sewing a quilt for the loss of a loved one might well bring with it a process of healing and grieving, but that seems very diff erent from the , which is a grieving project, yes, but also one that grieves for a sense of home and belonging that for those attend-
Interview with Alice Williams, October .
| reads of Hope | ing residential school was sundered before it could come into being. e memories included in the are not warm ones. And while the same might be true of the quilt, there is nevertheless in the comments of Hillard and others a sense that quilting a block to represent the loss of a loved one does bring with it a sense of comfort and closure. Recalling the earlier quotation from Judge Turpel-Lafond on the double meaning of domestic violence for Aboriginal Canadians, what kind of mourning and healing is possible when the loss applies not just to a family member, lover, or friend but also to culture, language, and land? As David Johnson writes (about the case of the Griqua in South Africa), residential schools may be closed but land is at once lost and not lost—it is not dead in any sense, making mourning always an incomplete act.⁹ John- son’s article considers land claims, which are not analyzed in this paper, but the central question that he asks is one that might equally be applied to lost culture or language. “Is it possible,” Johnson asks, “to mourn something you want back?” (). In a number of the blocks included in the the burden of loss and the power of survival are strongly articulated. In a poem sewn into one of the blocks, that includes the repeated verse “She never said a word / She kept it inside,” intergenerational survivor Kinaskomitin Ekosani (Moneca Sinclaire) writes of her mother’s inability to articulate her experience of residential schools. “Unfortunately my mom left into [the] spirit world without ever having spoken about her life … the stories I learned from her attending residential school were from residential school conferences where I met [people] who knew my mom,” she writes (quoted in Williams). Sinclaire’s block speaks to the stories that will go untold at the , more personally speaks to a sibling lost in childhood and others lost later to addiction, and speaks to the ongoing impact of the schools and the lack of closure off ered by the act of quilting. Sinclaire describes the practice of writing the poem and making the block as “diffi cult, [but] a very good process as it has enabled me to put my mom’s spirit to peace.” But the poem speaks eloquently of an unfi nished process of mourning, of the loss of Sinclaire’s mother’s experience through her refusal to speak, and through her daughter’s always partial understanding of her residential school life. Johnson’s question brings into focus an incomplete act of mourning that becomes productive through a refusal to bring fi nality to that process. In other words, the politics of healing and advocacy so important to the quilt perhaps do not wholly apply to the . But, equally, neither I would like to thank Claudette Lauzon for bringing Johnson’s chapter to my attention.
| Robertson | does the feminist project of using quilting as a metaphor for emancipa- tory politics that can repair the fragmented and marginalized (female) subject. e falls somewhere in between. It is neither a memorial nor a statement of liberation, although it does contain both of these elements. Rather, the is something more akin to a memorial in the process of becoming and is also an intervention into domestic space wherein the nation and its boundaries of belonging are reimagined. e quilt doesn’t reclaim the nation as a space of potential belonging but, rather, unravels the very premise on which such claims might be based. Interestingly, the language feminists used to write about quilts in the s and s and the way in which the possibility of healing through quilting is discussed in the quilt are both markedly similar to the language with which the reconciliation process of s is described. All are concerned with naming, with remembering histories that threaten to be erased, and with answering in the positive Gayatri Spivak’s now seminal question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (yes, because the is listening). As Yvette Christiansë argues, “ is nonjudicial body [of the South African ] was to provide a space for the victims of all forms of apartheid-gener- ated violence to speak in a venue that accorded them the respect of being listened to—and hence assist them in their move from the status of victims to those of speaking subjects” (). e question then becomes whether or not an act of speech, either in words or through a quilt block, can unravel decades of abuse and attempted assimilation to turn an incomplete act of mourning into an agonistic set of possibilities. In the fi nal section of this article, I examine this question specifi cally through the act of sewing. Obviously linked to the through the stitching of blocks, and ostensibly to the act of healing through the practice of quilting, sewing also played a more sinister role in residential school life, ranging from domestic chores to cases of abuse. Residential school survivor Randy Fred notes: e elimination of language has always been a primary stage in a process of cultural genocide. is was the primary function of the residential school. My father was physically tortured by his teachers for speaking Tseshaht: they pushed sewing needles through his tongue, a routine punishment for lan- guage off enders … e needle tortures suff ered by my father aff ected all my family. My dad’s attitude was “why teach my children Indian if they are going to be punished for speaking it?” (quoted in Haig-Brown )
| reads of Hope | e immensity of what has been taken becomes apparent here. Will sym- bolically unpinning a tongue held in place by sewing needles release a language, a culture, and a childhood that have been stolen? Will making Purity, piety, a memorial quilt for an incomplete act of mourning have any eff ect? obedience, Binding In the late nineteenth century, as residential schools were being established domesticity, across Canada, “fancy sewing became an even more important signifi er of the feminine” (Phillips ). Sewing was an important part of the education selfl essness, of Aboriginal girls in the residential schools, where education consisted of strongly inculcating domestic chores (that is, cleanliness is next to Godli- sacrifi ce, ness) (Anglican Church of Canada website). Laundry and sewing were often part of the overt “gender assimilation” that, according to Katrina personal Paxton, indoctrinated young Aboriginal women into domestic workers (rather than domestic goddesses), training young Indigenous women in cleanliness, homemaking for later employment in white middle-class homes (Paxton ). Writing of the Sherman Institute, an Indian boarding school in Cali- meekness, fornia opened in the late nineteenth century, Paxton notes the parade of white middle-class women (supplied by the ) who worked to instill reverence of the “cult of true womanhood” and the ideology of “separate spheres” into young Aboriginal women attending the school (). Purity, piety, obedi- motherhood, ence, domesticity, selfl essness, sacrifi ce, personal cleanliness, meekness, reverence of motherhood, and dedication to the family were spatially and dedication organized in the residential schools through the separation of boys and girls. Symbolically, such ideas were introduced through the ideology of to the family separate spheres of public and private space where men and women should be found (Paxton ). As Julia Emberley argues, the imposition were spatially of hierarchical divisions between public and domestic space on hunter/ gatherer societies was an important tool in dismantling Indigenous kin- organized in ship relations and in imposing European forms of political governance (). While domestic chores at the Sherman Institute (and many residential the residential schools in Canada) were originally included in the curriculum to off set costs, they were quickly folded into the ideological and moral training schools through of Aboriginal youth, particularly through lessons in sewing and laundry (Paxton , ). the separation Canadian-Danne-Zaa artist Brian Jungen comments in a recent article showcasing his work (Nike Air Jordans turned into Haida-style dancing of boys and masks) that it is always assumed that he sews his own work because of romantic ideas of the handmade and “Indian folk” (Sheets ).¹⁰ Indeed, girls. I would like to thank Ahlia Moussa for tracking down this source for me.
| Robertson | as Ruth Phillips notes, historically, Native sewn regalia are triply dis- missed as feminine, Native, and also inauthentic (in that sewing tends to be associated with Western white femininity). However, Phillips also notes that in the nineteenth century, sewing and other handcrafts were part of an important strategy of resistance: “Native peoples often chose to combine souvenir production with other subsistence strategies rather than accede to government plans to transform them into a class of small farmers and wage laborers” (). While in part the making of souvenir goods corresponded with mainstream aims to transform native popula- tions into “a new artisanal class of commodity producers,” assimilation via such processes was by no means total. In fact, sewing, beading, and embroidery became important ways of ensuring the continued vitality of visual cultures that might otherwise have disappeared (Phillips ). None- theless, Phillips notes a double bind here: while souvenir art may have been at least partially subversive, sewing was used to coerce Aboriginal women to adopt the model of their white counterparts while still remaining able to create the souvenirs needed to decorate Victorian parlours. is indoctrination of young women into domestic work in many ways mirrored the emergence of the ideal bourgeois woman and the rise of the nuclear family as a hegemonic formation in nineteenth-century Canada (Emberley ). Middle-class women, notes Emberley () were “agent[s] of imperialism and capitalism,” called upon to produce and reproduce the system through child-rearing, daily living practices, household man- agement, and reproduction. “ e domestic sphere,” she writes, was a “signifi cant site for the colonization of First Nations women and children” (Emberley ). ere is a double rupture here. First, Aboriginal female children were inculcated into bourgeois norms from which they were excepted by their ancestry and the colour of their skin. erefore, any eff ort to attain bour- geois normalcy was doomed to failure. Second, the bourgeois female’s role within the domestic home and family was similarly out of reach for Aboriginal women because kinship ties had been broken by the place- ment of children in the residential school—the term “residence” echoing that of the home in semantics only. And while outside of the institution sewing might have been a strategy of resistance (though associated with romanticized notions of folk culture), within the institution sewing was a weapon, both symbolic and, as noted by Randy Fred, physical. In the block created by Marion Beaucage of the Wikwemikongsing nation for the , a young girl kneels scrubbing the fl oor. Above her
| reads of Hope | Crimes Against Humanity
are written the words “Domestic Diva” and below the number for the number of the residential school in Spanish, Ontario. Beaucage recalls, During my stay at the residential school, domestic chores were performed on a daily basis … Each girl rotated chores in diff erent areas of the residence (e.g., kitchen, laundry, dining room, etc.). Washing, waxing and polishing hardwood fl oors were a weekly Saturday chore. It was a task for the younger children. Cleaning the fl oor was done silently and in unison which required team work … A nun would oversee the work to make sure the fl oor was done properly. e fi nal stage to complete the cleaning was polishing the fl oor. Dust rags were tied to the girls’ stocking feet to serve as polishers. is activity required sliding the feet along the fl oor like a skater’s stride. is was the fun part of the chore because talking and playing tag in a quiet manner were allowed.
| Robertson | Beaucage’s contribution to the is one of the few that paints residen- tial school as a positive experience. She concludes by noting, Some of the work ethics that I acquired upon leaving the residential school were responsibility, following directions, working and playing as a team, punctuality, good work habits and staying on task. I was able to practice these values in my adult years which supported me to become self-suffi cient in my endeavours. In the daily domestic chores assigned to her, Beaucage fi nds a certain sense of solidarity with her peers and a sense of accomplishment. Domestic chores as well, however, could become a form of abuse. e aforemen- tioned poem by Moneca Sinclaire calls attention to her mother’s “spic and span clean” house, in a verse that also notes her mother’s inability to make friends and a crushing agoraphobia. Excessive cleaning is often associated with post-traumatic stress and other anxiety syndromes. Another block contains embroidered fl owers made by Aboriginal children at the Academy Road Residential School in Winnipeg and saved by Megan McLeod’s mother when the school closed down in the s. It is one of only two blocks made by contributors who did not directly or intergenerationally experience residential school life. McLeod, who col- laborated on the quilt block with Moneca Sinclaire and another woman, Kim Morrisseau, writes in the accompanying text that she hopes the square will provide a “tangible reminder of residential school students’ embroidery stitches,” and that “beauty can be created in unlikely places and can endure.” Although she admits that others may fi nd very diff er- ent meaning in the embroidered cloth, for McLeod the disciplinary act of making the embroidery has been separated from the beautiful object that has emerged—four embroidered fl owers that remain as nameless clues to the processes of inculcation into bourgeois norms that went on in the schools. Emberley refers to the residential schools as the “site of an extraordi- nary ‘policing operation’ (qua Foucault) inasmuch as they set out to regu- late Aboriginal children’s bodies to the assimilatory objectives of colonial dispossession, transforming those bodies into agricultural and domestic labourers” (). Simultaneously, an idea of Canada as a domestic space was exacerbated through the turning of the government into a patronizing, disciplinary father fi gure through the Indian Act that made Aborigi- nal peoples wards of the state. us, the embroidered fl owers saved by Megan McLeod speak to the imposition of Victorian ideas of domestic- ity on Indigenous cultures; they speak to an ongoing intervention of the
| reads of Hope | state in Indigenous lives, and they speak to suppressed cultures that in the mainstream are often either romanticized or thought of as disappeared and extinct. In part, such stereotypes add to the impact of the , a sewn project that documents traditional cultures thought to have disap- peared, contemporary cultures revitalized, and domestic practices of the handmade, the three bound inextricably together. Over the next fi ve years theLiving Healing Quilt Project aandnd e Quilt of Belonging wwillill uundertakendertake vveryery ddiffiff e rerentent j ojourneysurneys a cacrossross C aCanada.nada. e e will travel with the and will be used as working quilts to encour- age others to tell their stories before the commissioners. e Quilt of Belonging ttoooo wwillill ttravelravel aacrosscross tthehe ccountry,ountry, ffromrom OOntariontario ttoo tthehe MMaritimes,aritimes, through Nunavut and the Northwest Territories before landing in Surrey, British Columbia, to be part of the Cultural Olympiad. e celebra- tion of nation amid the spectacle of the Olympics seems in many ways an appropriate venue for the latter quilt. e idea of a tolerant multicultural nation fi ts well with Olympic ideals, as does the celebration of diff erence amid unity. As the gets underway, the will tell a very diff erent story, perhaps one summed up well by Cindy Peltier of the Wikwemikong Nation: “My square represents Turtle Island [North America/the Indig- enous world] because residential schools not only aff ected the survivors, but all of Turtle Island, and the healing and reconciliation has to encom- pass survivors and families and Turtle Island” (quoted in Williams).
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| Robertson | Christiansë, Yvette. “Passing Away: e Unspeakable (Losses) of Post- Apartheid South Africa.” Loss: e Politics of Mourning. Eds. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian. Berkeley: University of California Press, . –. Edkins, Jenny. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge , . Elsley, Judy. “ e Colour Purple and the Poetics of Fragmentation.” Quilt Culture: Tracing the Pattern. Eds. Cheryl B. Torsney and Judy Elsley. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, . –. Emberley, Julia. Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal: Cultural Practices and Decolonization in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, . Glaspell, Susan. “A Jury of Her Peers.” Lifted Masks and Other Works. Ed. Eric S. Rabkin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, . –. Grant, Agnes. Finding My Talk: How Fourteen Native Women Reclaimed eir Lives After Residential School. Calgary: Fifth House, . Haig-Brown, Celia. Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residen- tial School. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, . Hillard, Van E. “Census, Consensus, and the Commodifi cation of Form: e Project Quilt.” Quilt Culture: Tracing the Pattern. Eds. Cheryl B. Torsney and Judy Elsley. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, . –. hooks, bell. Talking Back: inking Feminist, inking Black. Boston: South End Press, . Johnson, David. “ eorizing the Loss of Land: Griqua Land Claims in Southern Africa, –.” Loss: e Politics of Mourning. EEds.ds. DavidDavid L. Eng and David Kazanjian. Berkeley: University of California Press, . –. Julier, Laura. “Private Texts and Social Activism: Reading the Clothesline Project.” English Education . (December ): –. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: e Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers , . Libin, Kevin. “Chairman’s Exit Leaves Commission in Disarray; Native Abuses Panel Rudderless Weeks In.” National Post (( OOctoberctober ): A.
| reads of Hope | Malarcher, Patricia. “Stitching a World.” Surface Design Journal .. (), unpaginated. Memorial Quilt Gallery. “Original Quilts.” . www.originalquilts.com/ memorial_quilts.htm. Milloy, John S. A National Crime: e Canadian Government and the Residential School System: –. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, . Patchwork Memory Quilts. “Keeping the Memory Alive.” . www.patch- workmemoryquilts.com. Paxton, Katrina. “Learning Gender: Female Students at the Sherman Insti- tute, –.” Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences. Eds. Cliff ord E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, . –. Phillips, Ruth. Trading Identities: e Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, –. Seattle: University of Washington Press; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s , . Plant, Sadie. Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. London: Fourth Estate, . Sanders, Mark. “Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women Before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Loss: e Politics of Mourning. EdEds.s. DDavidavid LL.. Eng and DDavidavid KaKazanjian.zanjian. Berkeley: University of California Press, . –. Sheets, Hilarie. “Critic Picks, Brian Jungen.” news (Summer ): . Sherlock, Maureen P. “Piecework: Home, Factory, Studio, Exhibit.” e Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production. Eds. Joan Living- stone and John Ploof. Cambridge: Press, . –. Short, Damien. “Reconciliation, Assimilation, and the Indigenous Peoples of Australia” International Political Science Review .. ((OctoberOctober ):): –. Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford:Oxford: OOxfordxford , . Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Cambridge: South End Press, .
| Robertson | Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” e Post-Colo- nial Studies Reader. Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffi ths, and Helen Tiffi n. London and New York: Routledge, . –. Stull, Gregg. “ e Memorial Quilt: Performing Memory, Piecing Action.” American Art .. (S(Summerummer ):): –.–. Tornsey, Cheryl, and Judy Elsley, eds. Quilt Culture: Tracing the Pattern. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, . ———. “ e Critical Quilt: Alternative Authority in Feminist Criticism.” In Contemporary Literary eory. Eds. G. Douglas Atkins and Laura Mor- row. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, : –. Trudeau, Pierre Elliott. e Essential Trudeau. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, . Waldman, Carl. Atlas of the North American Indian. New York: Facts on File, . Weyeneth, Robert R. “ e Power of Apology and the Process of Historical Reconciliation.” e Public Historian . (Summer ): –. Williams, Alice. “Summary for the Living Healing Quilt Project.” Living Healing Quilt Project: Promoting Healing One Stitch at a Time. . http://quiltinggallery.com/tag/living-healing-quilt-project. Williams, Shirley Ida. “Shirley Ida Williams.” www.trentu.ca/faculty/ml/ booklaunch/author.html.
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