The Witness Blanket

Carey Newman

Vancouver Island artist Carey Newman has created a large installation called The Witness Blanket.  Newman created this piece in response to the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2010.  His father was a Residential School survivor.  Newman decided to gather artifacts from Residential Schools and then find a way to string them together.  He worked with a team that asked survivors to share pieces and their stories.  They visited 75 -80 communities and spoke with over 10,000 people.

Drawing on his Kwakwaka’wakw and Coast Salish heritage in which people are wrapped in blankets for ceremony and for support as well as his Settler heritage in which women made quilts, Newman chose the idea of a blanket to display and tie together over 600 objects and belongings.

Bricks, wood, braids of hair, Bibles, shoes, moccasins, hockey skates and other artifacts  are brought into one piece that is 12 meters long.  From a distance, it looks like a giant quilt but as one gets closer, the details become obvious.

The Witness Blanket

The original Witness Blanket is going through preservation procedures at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg after touring for several years.  However, a true-to-scale reproduction has begun touring again along with an in-gallery film, interpretive panels and a digital interactive capacity.

You can hear an interview that Rosanna Deerchild did with Newman here on CBC's Unreserved. 

In the interview, Newman explains that “…this collection [The Witness Blanket] of memories and those memories have the potential to unlock the memories of non-Indigenous people and draw them into this story and learning more about the colonial history of Canada.”  He feels that once you have had a personal experience of something, then you can begin to care about that subject.

On the CBC website linked above, it says that “Newman hopes that the belongings that make up The Witness Blanket will give people ‘a sense of that tangibility of residential schools’.  ‘All of those objects were in schools.  All of them are witnesses,’ he said.”

The replica is continuing its tour across Canada.  It will be at:  Mount Royal University, AB March 9 – April 30, 2020; Winnipeg Airport, MB  June 1 – Aug. 31, 2020; Simcoe County Museum, Minesing, ON Sept. 28 – Nov. 10, 2020; Woodland Cultural Centre, Brantford, ON Dec. 21, 2020 – Feb. 26, 2021 and other places across Canada. More dates can be found here. e