Threads of Hope: The Living Healing Quilt Project

Canada has often been called a mosaic but I prefer the image of a tapestry, with its many threads and colours, its beautiful shapes, its intricate subtlety. If you go behind a tapestry, all you see is a mass of complicated knots. We have tied ourselves in knots, you might say. Too many Canadians only look at the tapestry of Canada that way. But if they would see it as others do, they would see what a beautiful, harmonious thing it really is.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau

This [quilted] picture represents our grandfather (Raksotha) Kaheroton Daniel Peter Nicholas who was born on April 1, 1901 and raised in Kaneh-satake Mohawk Territory, in Quebec. He, and his two brothers, Mackay and Ernest, were sent to Shingwauk Industrial School in the early 1900s. His younger brother, Ernest, died there and was buried at an undisclosed site at Shingwauk; he was 7 years old.

Our grandfather told us stories of his time at Shingwauk. Digging for food in the garbage, working very hard on the farm and academics playing a very small part. When rules were broken, he said students were taken to the basement, tied up to the rafters or pipes and whipped.

He wanted to go back to visit the school before his death in 1967 but our parents didn’t have the money to go. He would cry a lot when he Spoke of Shingwauk. Maybe if we could have taken him back there, our family would now know where his brother was buried.

Marie and Linda David Cree, describing the quilt block created for their grandfather as part of the Living Healing Quilt Project.¹

Child Prisoners

How might one read contested histories of nation-building, trauma, and reconciliation through a textile? Opening this paper are two quotations, the first from a former prime minister using the metaphor of a tapestry to describe multicultural pluralism in Canada, the second describing a quilt square that documents a residential school experience greatly at odds with the harmonious spectacle of coloured thread described by Trudeau. The use of cloth and textile as a metaphor for the nation—fragmented yet united—has become a popular one. Writes Elaine Showalter, about the United States but with a comment that might be equally applicable to Canada: “The patchwork quilt [has come] to replace the melting-pot as the central metaphor of American cultural identity. In a very unusual pattern, it transcended the stigma of its sources in women’s culture and has been remade as a universal sign of American identity” (169). But although quilts and other textiles might offer comfort, and present strong metaphors of similarity amid difference, they are also easily torn and easily sundered. Even Trudeau notes that the harmonious whole of the tapestry is only seen as such by ignoring its knotted or fraught underside.

In this article, I look at the Living Healing Quilt Project (lhqp), organized by Alice Williams of the Curve Lake First Nation (Curve Lake, Ontario) and sponsored by the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The project involved the creation of a series of quilts by residential school survivors and intergenerational survivors and is made up of individual quilt blocks reflecting on residential school experience. I consider the lhqp as an intervention into the collected stories making up the national fabric, wherein the knotted underside of an apparently seamless entity is revealed. To do this, the lhqp is read through a series of locales, institutional spaces, ideas, and metaphors. In four sections—Fabric, Pattern, Piecing, and Binding—the lhqp is analyzed respectively as a document of trauma, an intervention into mainstream normative narratives of nation building, as part of a feminist rethinking of quilts as emancipatory texts, and as a commentary on the role of sewing and handcraft in the attempted creation of docile and assimilated Indigenous children.

Running through each of these sections is a consideration of how residential school life produced a fractured sense of home, reconfiguring the domestic residence as an institutional space characterized by the loss of...