In the Warp but not the Weft The lost children of the residential schools
This data visualization project uses an amerindian style of loomless weaving to show the damage done to the community by the lost children of the Canadian residential schools. I used the Canadian schools instead of the American because they have made an effort to research and apologize for these deaths. Very little research has been done in the USA for a corrective response.
This is a subject close to me as my Great-Grandmother lost the connection to her community when the family of her father who (when he died in the great war) took her from her amerindian mother away to family in California. It was not as brutal a cultural severing as happened to these lost children but it meant the data spoke to me in the pain of their silenced voices.
The research I found gave me the numbers I used for this project. However making a weaving using threads for the full 150,000 recorded children would have been beyond the span of time allotted to this project so I had to shrink the numbers. There was also the problem that we do not have a firm number of the children lost. The numbers range from the 3213 documented in the reconciliation report and the 5048 unmarked graves found, to the estimation of 24-42% based on survivor reports. Because of the need to scale down the project I chose the round number of 30,000.
Having chosen the numbers and scale for the project I had to figure the colours to use. The usage of a cream for the majority of the threads made sense for the schools stated purpose was to civilize (whiten) these children. An american Col. Richard Henry Pratt spoke of this purpose with the phrase "Kill the Indian to save the man" For the threads signifying the lost children I didn't want it to all be one colour as they came from many tribes and locations. I chose mostly natural looking colours except for the orange which I chose to add in as a reference to the Orange Shirt day which is a yearly commemoration of these lost children. I also wanted to speak to the locations by including among the colours some blues for the rivers and waters, greys for the mountains and greens for the forestlands.
The style of weaving I chose is loomless weaving where the threads of the piece switch between being the warp and the weft as the weaving progresses. This is a style associated with the southwestern US and often used for smaller projects like belts and sashes. I learned it as a pre-teen in an attempt connect to my heritage and felt that it would be the best way to show this data. By not using the coloured threads as weft it shows how these members of their communities were lost to future generations. The sheer physicality of these dangling hopes is a condemnation of these genocidal efforts.
Initially I was going to have it all weave to the right but I quickly saw that it would unbalance the piece and not create the feel I wanted. So I reversed the weaving and shifted to a split and weave to the center process that better showed the way that these communities were pushed aside by the dominant culture.
The feeling of loss and being pushed out of the dominant is much clearer with this split weave. However as I was limiting the length the full pushing did not occur in this piece. If I had made the choice to not split it into groupings approximating the number of generations that suffered under this it might have been more visually striking.
We understand our world, our communities, and our histories through the stories we tell and the art we produce. This piece of art is a visualization of the settler colonialism through erasure and replacement. They tried to erase these groups through a rigorous acculturation process that lead to death even among those who physically survived. They were murdering the communities and cultural groups. They may have returned aprox 120,000 people but they were not who they would have been if they had been raised in the hands of their parents and peers. If they had not been forced to suffer through these schools and known that the government of their location would prefer them different.
One of the notable stories of this effort is the orange shirt. One of these children was so happy to go learn that their grandparent got them a shirt of their choice to wear. It was bright orange and made them happy. They wore it once, on the day they were taken away. At the school they were put in dull uniform clothing and their bright, hopeful shirt was taken from them never to be seen again. It became a symbol of all that these schools took from their communities and is a rallying colour. It is worn yearly on a remembrance day, Sept 30th, to remind the greater community of these past horrors.
The completed project
Please when you look at this consider the loss and how we as americans can work on this sort of acknowledgement of our past sins.
Bibliograpics and other resources
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/cfe29bee35c54a70b9621349f19a3db2
https://nctr.ca/records/reports/
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/orange-shirt-day-uncovering-dark-history-residential-schools-canada?gclid=CjwKCAiArY2fBhB9EiwAWqHK6i1Tcir51uWpeWOPHq5rvB-spPzsxIVKVxx_EyrtYQsdV-UD76_jpBoCHI0QAvD_BwE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/residential-schools-findings-point-to-cultural-genocide-commission-chair-says-1.3093580
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/residential-school-deaths-report-1.3365319
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-residential-schools-kamloops-faq-1.6051632
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/indian-boarding-school-investigation-faces-hurdles-missing-records-legal-questions-n1273996
Turner Alta R. Finger Weaving : Indian Braiding. Cherokee Pub 1989.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerweaving
This project was made by Deirdre McLeod in the Spring of 2023. I dedicate it to the community my Great-Grandmother Anne never knew. All photos were taken by the Author.
Credits:
Deirdre McLeod