Graham Lowes Transcript

GRAHAM LOWES: This evening I'm going to present to you on the Witness Blanket and the number of extensions of the Witness Blanket and what that is. If you're not familiar with the Witness Blanket, the Witness Blanket is a national monument put together by master carver Carey Newman to recognize the atrocities of Indian residential schools and it honours the children, Survivors, and symbolizes ongoing reconciliation.

Each piece on the Witness Blanket is a silent witness to some part of this story. Individually they're fragments of a disappearing narrative and together they're strong. They recount together — they recount for future generations the true story of loss, strength, reconciliation, and pride. When Carey was asked by the Truth and Reconciliation to create a piece in, I believe 2011, for when this project started, he wasn't really sure what it was, but over the next few years, he and his team went from coast to coast to coast collecting over 800 artifacts from residential school sites and churches and they're now woven together onto what is we see before us. It is a Witness Blanket.

It's about 40 feet wide, about 9 feet tall, and it is — every time I get to see it in person, it's truly — it's a just an impactful experience for me, and it has been travelling across the country for the last number of years. It's interesting that we're following the Musée de la civilisation as I believe it was there just last year. And the museum, Carey, and the Witness Blanket, we have a unique stewardship agreement. The Witness Blanket has been given its own legal identity.

We do not own the Witness Blanket and nor does Carey, but both Carey and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights work together to steward that relationship and to steward those stories and to care for those stories. That means that we do the conservation work around the Witness Blanket, but also work in collaboration with Carey and the Blanket to share those stories and make sure that those stories are accessible for all Canadians.

A couple ways that that happens: the first way that that happened was in some two-dimensional replicas of the Witness Blanket. They are — I should say that the actual physical Witness Blanket is no longer able to travel — it's been to Germany, it's been into the United States, it's been across Canada, taken down and set up for almost a decade now. And it is — with Carey we’ve decided to not travel the actual physical Blanket any longer, but we're going to be incorporating it into our core Gallery spaces here at the museum for as long as Carey, the Blanket, and the museum feel that is appropriate.

But there are Witness Blanket replicas out there; they're two-dimensional replicas — perhaps you've seen them — and I've just put together a list of where they're travelling to. They're designed to go into smaller centres, libraries, and smaller museums, and you can see that they are travelling around the country currently. If one of those is in your area I encourage you to see it; it is equally as impactful as seeing the physical — the real Blanket.

As well, there is a documentary of how the Witness Blanket was put together. When Carey and team put together the Witness Blanket they also collected Survivors — they went with a team of videographers and collected Survivor testimony. So along with the 800 artifacts they also have thousands of hours of Survivor testimony sharing their experiences, and it is equally powerful to hear from them and from — hear their voices as a part of this piece of work. And then over the last three years we have had the opportunity to build WitnessBlanket.ca, which actually is a way where you can hear directly from Survivors, and we explore the Witness Blanket through 10 stories of that.

I’m going let Carey introduce you to WitnessBlanket.ca and then I will share the website with you folks.  

VIDEO PLAYS: [Carey begins in Kwak’wala] On my father's side, I'm from the Kwakwakaʼwakw and Sto:lo nations in what is now called British Columbia. My mother's family are settlers of English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry. [Kwak’wala greeting] Welcome.

I am here to invite you to explore the truth and memories held in the Witness Blanket, an art installation made out of objects gathered from residential schools, government buildings, churches, and cultural structures across Canada. The stories here detail the experiences of residential school Survivors. Together they provide a glimpse into the trauma that colonialism sends rippling through generations. Some of them are heart-wrenching, some of them are courageous. All of them speak to the strength and resilience of Indigenous peoples and cultures.

In the oral traditions of my ancestors a witness has an important role to ensure that things are not forgotten. A witness watches, listens, and then remembers and shares with others what they have learned. So, as you explore these stories, I invite you to bear witness. It is important to note that this content can be triggering, so if at any time you feel the need to step away select the safe space icon which will immediately remove you from the experience and take you to scenes from nature. [Kwak’wala] and thank you for visiting.

GRAHAM LOWES: The Witness Blanket, like I said, was developed over three years. That development cycle started with sitting down with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Survivors Circle before we even started the project to identify the audience that we wanted and how we wanted to share these stories. They helped us to identify what the primary audience of WitnessBlanket.ca should be and that first is Survivors, as well as our secondary audiences, which is students in a K-12 setting. They helped — they guided us on developing a trauma-informed approach that Carey talked about where there is a safe space where you can step out of the experience when you're hearing heart-wrenching stories of survival and resiliency.

They helped guide the languages that we chose, how we approached that, encouraging us to not sugarcoat it while at the same time balancing the needs of students and writing it in a way that all students from kindergarten right through grade 12 could find pieces of WitnessBlanket.ca accessible to them in their classroom. And so, it was a profound experience to sit with that Survivor Circle a number of times through the Covid years.

We had just started the major work on the project and Kamloops residential school, they found 215 there, where Carey's shirt came in and that gave us a significant amount of pause in how we approach this and what we were going to do and the significance and why this was important, and it really changed our trajectory and how we did that. But again, it was guided by that that partnership, not a rubber stamp of the Survivors Circle but a partnership with the Survivors Circle, and helping us to shape and share their stories and how do we care for those stories.

So this is the Witness Blanket website. The site has a few different elements of it. One of those elements is to simply explore the Blanket where it has the Blanket in its entirety. You can take a look at that, and you can zoom in on each of these objects and they'll talk about where they're from and what they are and how they're — the significance of them. So, you can find all — examine each of those pieces on the Witness Blanket website. The other part of it is the story site. The way that we've approached this is we selected 10 objects, again in partnership with the Survivors Circle, to explore different themes of what was lost in residential schools.

One of the most powerful parts of encountering the Witness Blanket in person is to see that object and to connect to that object in some way. Personally, for me one of the first things that stuck out to me was actually this mush hole bowl. My personal connection was that we had similar yellow bowls when we were camping and that was the one time of the year we got Froot Loops or some other sugared cereal, and I have very positive memories of a very similar yellow bowl that we would camp with my family.

And that's my personal connection to this, but when you start to understand that this same yellow bowl was an instrument to cause harm — part of the genocide that happened against Indigenous people, it kind of it really changes is the way that you view that and recognize the difference in experiences for children in Canada for those living in the residential school system.

Each story, like I said, explores a different theme. This story of the mush hole bowl talks about the food that was lost and how food was lost. One of the things I will mention for the teachers in the audience is that when we worked with the teachers from across the country on this, one of the things we did was ensure that the first two paragraphs here up until the first Survivor testimony are not trauma inducing for a younger year’s audience — recognizing that the Survivors asked us to make something that all students from kindergartens to through grade 12 could do, and that's the writing in this first section here.

Each of the sections is witnessed by a number of Survivors, listed right up here, and they will share their testimony here. I won't share any videos with you because I don't know where you're at today and I want to make sure that we're — if you do enter this space that you're aware of the trauma informed and the ways that it can impact you and the ways that we want to enter into those stories. There's a lot of script here. Each of the bowls is located — I'm just going to quickly walk through the different things — where it is, where the residential school it came from, the site location.

There's quotes, Survivor testimonies woven throughout videos, as well as numerous primary source artifacts or images from residential schools, so if you're a teacher looking for a resource to explore with your students, there is a number of great resources here that you can use to have those conversations. As well as each story is full of reflective questions, and I'll talk a little bit about how that approach was informed.  And then a statement from Carey and then an opportunity to explore more stories on that.

Also alongside that we have a teacher’s guide and I'm going to go through that in a little bit greater detail in a little bit, but that teacher’s guide is there available for you. The teacher’s guide was written with a group of teachers across the country, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous teachers, recognizing those two audiences that we wanted to meet, and to help teachers who are not sure where to start with bringing Survivor testimony into the classroom. So that's where that is.

The teacher’s guide is broken up into four different parts: building empathy and understanding, building a classroom culture, community connections, and pathway of reconciliation. So when we designed this we followed the Inzovu Curve, which is an approach developed from the Kigali Memorial where we wanted to create a way where students experience this in — they can deal with difficult topics, but they're also having a moment where they can reflect and then get into it deeper. And so that — the teacher guide outlines how to do that, how to build that with your class, as well as find moments of hope.

We see that in the resiliency that folks offer as well as then find a way to move towards action. That looks like for us the building empathy and understanding. It starts by building a classroom culture where students are able to reflect and talk to each other, taking their learning out into the community, building community connections, as well as building pathways of reconciliation. So, recognizing where they're at on their journey of reconciliation. It's all outlined in the teacher’s guide and it's all available for free.

Coming up we have educator workshops if you are interested. The WitnessBlanket.ca project was supported by Telus and they continue to support us in developing free and delivering free educator workshops across the country, both virtually and in person. We're working right now with Carey on an augmented reality version and a projection mapping of the Witness Blanket so it can be projected in schools and gymnasiums and different places like that, as well as they're working with Camosun College on virtual reality.