West Coast master carver Carey Newman (the artist known as Ha-yalth-kingeme in his Kwagiulth community) is known for his totem poles, objects created by chipping away the pieces. A few years ago, he decided to go in a different direction by collecting old, discarded, broken pieces of residential schools to compile them into one larger, newer, and far more beautiful whole.
He calls this new creation the Witness Blanket, a large-scale art installation that features hundreds of items reclaimed from residential schools, churches, government buildings, as well as traditional and cultural structures from every province and territory. He said that it recognizes the atrocities of the Indian Residential School era, honours the children, and symbolizes ongoing reconciliation.
“My father went to a residential school. I grew up knowing a very little bit, just that he went and a couple of small stories about his time there, but nothing dramatic. None of the trauma that he would have gone through. It’s always been on the periphery of my life. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released their call for commemoration initiatives, I started to think about what I could potentially create around honouring my father but also residential school survivors from across the country,” he said.
He estimates that he and his team have travelled more than 150,000 km to visit the sites and the survivors, to hear their stories, and to gain their trust in order to collect these items that represent both immeasurable pain and the path of continuing healing.
Some of the objects are pieces of the buildings themselves such as actual bricks or the ‘Girls’ and ‘Boys’ signs for the washrooms or the doorknob from the St. Paul residential school on the Blood Reserve. There’s an Anglican prayer book written in Inuktitut from a church in Iqaluit and a rock from the sweatlodge at Lejac residential school in Fraser Lake, B.C.
There are far more personal pieces such as a West Coast drum and drumstick, or a dilapidated child’s shoe. It was retrieved from the wooded area near the site of the burned-down Chooulta residential school formerly operating in Carcross, Yukon.
There’s even pages of diaries, photographs and human hair. When Newman’s father, Victor, was a child, he and his little brother were playing outside when a priest approached, saying that he was there to take them to school. Neither of the boys’ parents were there to stop them from being taken to the remote community of Sechelt where their heads were shaved upon being admitted to the residential school there. Victor’s two daughters grew their hair for a year and then had the braids cut off to add to the collection, a way of honouring him and all the children who went through that shared experience of suffering.
The collection extended into thousands of objects. The Witness Blanket has been on tour since 2014 but the mileage hasn’t been easy. Now needing preservation from further disrepair, the original is held in storage at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. What’s on display at the Musée Héritage Museum is a faithful life-size reproduction.
The delicacy of the objects is inversely proportional to the immense emotional and historic weight of the overall piece.
“When you come up with an idea, you don’t necessarily think through those details. Once you get out there and start gathering pieces, gathering stories, you start to realize that really the importance or the value of the work is going to rest in those stories. We put a plan in place to do the best I could to preserve the integrity of the provenance of the pieces and create an archive of sorts that would preserve the stories.”
To make the project more accessible to the public, an extensive website (found at www.witnessblanket.ca) is online and an app is also available.
