October 2nd, 2023

When we went around in a circle I could not say anything about being the person representing the children who died at residential schools. I knew I would cry. So I talked about the other thing that struck me. Seeing the numbers. Watching us get moved and thinking how one of us represented so many people.

But I wondered the whole time why I had an X on my card. The fear I felt for half an hour about what that X meant is a only a fraction of a fraction of what any child felt every day at a residential schools. I knew the second I heard those with yellow cards were those going to residential school that I would represent those who died. As I stood on the blanket I thought of the stories of horror I’ve heard from survivors. Of the bodies found. I thought then of how many children the card I held, and thus I, represented. How many lost there were from what we know. And I thought of all the times my classmates moved off the blankets. And then the numbers hit me. I felt numb so suddenly. My partner is a grandchild of a residential school survivor. His grandmother was represented by two of my classmates. And she, like described in the exercise, lost all connection to her nation.

Image of people in a classroom, some sitting in a circle, other standing fixing blankets
Image taken from UNBC Ed Twitter, picture taken by Christine Ho Younghusband
Image of people in a classroom, some sitting in a circle, other standing fixing blankets
Image taken from UNBC Ed Twitter, picture taken by Christine Ho Younghusband
Image of people in a classroom, some sitting in a circle, other standing fixing blankets
Image taken from UNBC Ed Twitter, picture taken by Christine Ho Younghusband

There are things that I don’t know about where I came from. Family that seemed to change country so much we do not know where our last name came from. But my partner only found out he was Indigenous from an Ancestry test. His mom searched, and it took months to learn her mom was born in Nova Scotia, that she was Mi’kmaq and was taken away very young. I don’t know the pain of Indigenous peoples who have lost their culture, their families, their identity. But I think about having a last name where I can only guess the origin, and I think of people who have only guesses to questions they may never get answers to because of Canada’s history with Indigenous peoples.

I think the blanket exercise struck me because I learned a very baseline history of Indigenous peoples of Canada. I learned about people being moved and losing land, about residential schools and the horrors they held, but that was all I knew until I came to university. I then started to learn about the numbers behind the stories, but nothing struck me. Saying numbers are like facts, and while we can hear them and think “that is truly awful” and know how awful it is. But until it is simulated, that does not sink in. I have only one comparison: the Holocaust and WWII. My grandparents grew up in Nazi occupied Germany. I heard stories of bombings, soldiers pushing children out of the way when walking down the street and one incidence of a Jewish family being pulled from their hiding spots in a home down the street. The Holocaust was always very real to me, but much of what the Blanket Exercise was about was just a fact, a story that I did not really feel the full emotion of until I was watching people move off blankets.