The Living Healing Quilt Project Kirsty Robertson University of Western Ontario

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 .. (March(March ):): –– Child Prisoners contested histories of nation-building, trauma, Hand reconciliation through a textile? Opening this paper are two quotations, the fi rst from a former prime minister using the metaphor of a tapestry 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 violence” 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

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