Collective truth: Witness Blanket weaves together tales of Canada's residential school system
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When Carey Newman was in his early teens, his mother sent him to family counselling with his father.
By that point, the future artist and his dad, Victor, had a history of conflict that had begun when Newman was a little boy. Growing up, he was vaguely aware of some of his father’s past experiences as a residential school survivor and how they may have contributed to certain eccentricities: his refusal to eat certain foods, for instance, or how he would tell the story about having his hair shorn off the day he was taken from his community in Alert Bay, B.C., to the Sechelt Indian Residential School in the 1940s. But, for the most part, it was something he rarely talked about with his children. When the two entered counselling, other details began to emerge.
“We had known that things had been really difficult for me and him since I was about six or seven years old,” says Newman, in an interview from the University of Victoria where he teaches visual arts. “That was the age he was when he was taken to residential school. So it became really clear that our relationship had broken down (at the same age) he lost his father figure, when his only parental role models were residential school supervisors.”
A Kwagiulth from the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation and Coast Salish from the Sto:lo Nation, Newman would eventually become an artist and master carver, as his father was before him. When he set out to research and collect items for his ambitious art project, The Witness Blanket, Newman and his father travelled from that first school in Sechelt and another site in Mission, B.C., where his father’s second school, St. Mary’s Indian Residential School, once stood. They finally went to Alert Bay, which is where his father was first taken from his home, family and culture. It was a personal story that revealed a much bigger one about the intergenerational shadow cast by the residential school system.
“The struggles that we had faced were not accidental, they were not just a personality conflict,” Newman says. “It wasn’t him being mean to me. It wasn’t me being a bad kid. It was something that was taken away from our family by his experience going to residential school. I didn’t really need to know all the details. I just needed to know that was the original cause. I grew up from that point knowing much more about, and being curious about, residential schools.”
In 2013 and 2014, Newman or members of his team visited 77 communities throughout Canada and interacted with 10,000 people, many of whom had their own stories to tell about residential schools. Nearly 900 items were reclaimed from the sites of the old schools, from churches, band offices and universities. They include everything from old black-and-white photographs of survivors and a strap used to beat children to seemingly innocuous items such as bricks, door hinges and shards of dishware. The 12-metre, 13-panel Witness Blanket was created in 2014 after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission put out a call for commemoration initiatives. Newman, a multidisciplinary artist who works in totem-carving, painting and sculpture, settled on the theme of a woven blanket, inspired by the sort that Indigenous people use in ceremonies or as gifts.
“I landed on this idea of gathering these items from schools across the country and telling the whole story through the tangibility of pieces that came from the places, but also the individual stories attached to each of the items,” he says. “I was thinking ‘How can I tell a story this big?’ It didn’t matter how big I made the thing, it would never be big enough to come close to telling the whole story. Even as it is, where we have pieces from almost every residential school or something from somebody who went to almost every residential school, it is still just a fraction. But it starts to approach that magnitude and it illustrates the connection between the schools across the country and how intentional they were; from the way they were built to the way they were run, to the types of experiences that were repeated through the stories that survivors told us.”
The Witness Blanket toured the country for nearly four years. The inevitable wear and tear on it put a stop to its travels, and it’s now being conserved at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. But the second phase of its life is now underway thanks to a true-to-scale replica that arrives at Mount Royal University’s Riddell Library and Learning Centre on March 9. The exhibit, which is open to the public, will include new interactive features and a film.
John Fischer, director of MRU’s Iniskim Centre and a Cree from Cowessess First Nation, Sask., says the installation is a continuation of an educational institution “on the pathway to decolonization and reconciliation” that needs to revisit the legacy impact of these schools and “understanding where we’ve been historically in Canada.”
The original Witness Blanket came to Calgary in 2014, where it was exhibited at the old public library. Fischer went to see it with his mother and they were shocked to find an old photograph of survivors that featured her aunt.
“I personally felt connected to that piece and what it meant in terms of memories, in terms of loneliness and isolation and how that traumatized generations of Indigenous peoples,” Fischer says.
Newman says the individual stories conspire into something much more powerful than the sum of its parts.
“I liken it to this idea of collective truth,” he says. “We don’t have to examine the veracity of every word when there’s thousands and thousands of words that testify to something. I also think there is something to that tangibility of something that came from a place. All of these pieces came from residential schools. When you bring all those things together, you are bringing together memories. You are bringing all the things together that the pieces themselves witnessed. It’s telling the story a different way than words, or video or people can.”
The Witness Blanket will be on display at Mount Royal University’s Riddell Library and Learning Centre from March 9 to April 30. The display is open daily to the public. Visit witnessblanket.ca.
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