Once again this year, unable to gather for the Annual Gutsy Walk for Crohn’s and Colitis, we walked in the Pacific Spirit Park today in memory of Jodi and all those who are bravely suffering from these debilitating diseases.
Walking in the Pacific Spirit Park yesterday my thoughts were of the 215 children whose remains have just been discovered buried on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. These children, some as young as three, were taken from families across British Columbia who they never saw again and died often far from home and were then never accounted for.
What a tragic, shameful and heartbreaking part of our Canadian history. On Friday, the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs (UBCIC) said it mourned alongside the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc. “There are no words to express the deep mourning that we feel as First Nations people, and as survivors, when we hear an announcement like this,” wrote Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the UBCIC. “Today we honour the lives of those children, and hold prayers that they, and their families, may finally be at peace.”
I send my heartfelt condolences to all the families and ask that you to keep the memory of these beautiful lost children in your thoughts as they will always be in mine.
666+: Day XLII – The journey continues as described in my Shame and Prejudice post two days ago.
Today we visited an exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, Shame and Prejudice – A Story of Resilience. It was created by the brilliant artist Kent Monkman as a project for the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in 2014. Kent is a Canadian First Nations artist of Cree Ancestry whose maternal Grandmother was a survivor of the Brandon residential school in Manitoba. He writes, “I could not think of any history paintings that conveyed or authorized Indigenous experience into the canon of art History…Could my own paintings reach forward a hundred and fifty years to tell our history of the colonization of our people?” The answer is that with his moving and powerful paintings indeed they have. He is a true master in the same tradition as Giotto, Caravaggio and Picasso.
I could write so much more about how this exhibition has affected me particularly after the completion of my leaves drawn to represent the children separated from their parents by the US Government. After seeing Kent’s work today and seeing his painting The Scream with the children being taken from their parents by our own Canadian Government and placed in residential schools hundreds of miles away from their families and homes, I realize that my own work is no way complete.
Today I have reembarked on the leaf drawings once again so that the final piece will include an acknowledgment of our own shameful history to represent how Canada failed the children of this country in a manner as cruel and inhuman as the treatment of the children of families seeking asylum by our neighbours to the south.
thechangingpalette 