'Quilts for Survivors': How a social media initiative is offering comfort to residential school survivors

Wrapped snuggly in a quilt handmade by her childhood best friend, Carol Smith is overwhelmed with comfort.

After 45 years apart, Smith and her best friend Robin Chapman, have been reunited, brought back together by a Facebook group dedicated to supporting survivors of Canada’s residential school system.

“Robin said when I start feeling scared to wrap that blanket around me and pretend she's sitting there holding me,” Smith told CTV National News over Zoom, where she and Chapman were able to connect face-to-face.

“I love you robin… [I’m] happy to look at your face."

Smith and Chapman became best friends after meeting at the Kamloops Residential Institution. The two became inseparable, navigating the traumas of residential school after being ripped from their homes as young girls.

"I had no name. I was given a number. To this day I remember that number, it was 131,” Smith said.

Both women are still scarred by the experience, grappling with deep depression at several points in their lives.

"I used to wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and see someone waking up a kid and then that kid following them. I never knew where they went. I don’t even remember if they even came back,” Chapman said.

After the discovery of 215 unmarked graves were uncovered on the grounds of the former Kamloops Residential Institution last year, Smith and Chapman joined the Facebook group “Quilts for Survivors,” an initiative that relies solely on volunteers and donations to craft full-sized blankets for residential school survivors.

The group was started by Vanessa Genier, an Indigenous mother from Missianbie First Nation in Ontario. Built on Genier’s belief that “a quilt is love sewn together,” she began sewing quilts to honour the lives of the children who never made it home from residential schools, while offering comfort to the survivors.

The group, with over 5,000 members, started with a goal of making 18 quilts.

"But here we are almost 11,000 quilts later, and still going,” Genier told CTV National News. “We have over 600 people waiting for quilts.”

For Smith and Chapman, the quilts offer a symbol of comfort and advocate for sorely needed mental health resources for survivors.

“At the site where 215 babies were found; my hair was cut; my clothes were taken away and I was given a uniform,” reads a poem written by Smith, detailing her experience at the residential school.

“I had no name; I was given a number – 131; I was starved; I was slaved… no more hugs; no more comfort of home…I learned not to be Indigenous; but I am strong and resilient…I am proud of WHO I am; they couldn’t take ME away.”