VANCOUVER -- The residential school system is a grim part of Canadian history that one British Columbia carver has turned into a tangible monument to honour Indigenous children.
Carey Newman, the son of a residential school survivor, has spent 18 months travelling across Canada, gathering stories and artifacts for a powerful art project called “The Witness Blanket.”
The exhibit, which is on display at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, lays out the belongings and memories of Indigenous children who were taken from their families and forced into residential schools.
“In my Coast Salish culture we use blankets to honour, to uplift, to protect,” Newman explained to CTV National News.
Despite being an artist and master carver, Newman says he initially struggled with the project.
“It seemed like every idea I came up with, I’d done before or was too small,” he said. “Eventually I came up with this idea of gathering objects from all of the residential school sites.”
Throughout a period of 18 months, Newman and his team visited 77 communities across Canada. They filmed their journey as they spoke with nearly 10,000 survivors and gathered 887 artifacts, like a small shoe that was found in a forest near the site of a burnt-down residential school.
Newman says that some of the items displayed in the exhibit have been donated, including a pair of braids that represent how Indigenous children were stripped from their culture, starting with the presentation of their hair.
The CMHR is sharing stewardship of the exhibit, as Canada reckons with the discovery of the unmarked burial sites of more than 200 Indigenous children at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.
“I hope people take that sadness and turn it into empathy and then turn it into action,” says Isha Khan, President and CEO of the CMHR. “Indian residential schools constitute genocide. We didn’t learn that in schools, many of us, we need to catch up.”
