In this excerpt the Friday shows examines the experience of Project of Heart through the voices of traditional elder Willy Bruce and student participant Violet Roseheart from Elizabeth Wyn Wood Alternate Site.

Also heard is POH coordinator Sylvia Smith as she indentifies what she believes is the “missing ingredient” in the historical narrative taught in our schools.

Click on the player below to hear the audio excerpt; it’s a concise piece that runs about three minutes.

Project of Heart coordinator Sylvia Smith and colleague Warren McBride provided an “in-service” to 8 Catholic School Board teachers.Organized by Jane Wharton, Intermediate/Secondary Creative Arts and Native Studies Consultant with the OCSB,  the workshop was held at the Odawa Native Friendship Centre.

During the 2 hour workshop the teachers learned how to incorporate aspects of Canadian history into a learning module which would provide agency and action in the path towards reconciliation.

As their choice of an Indian Residential School to commemorate, the group decided to team up with Frederick Banting Alternative School and commemorate the Spanish IRS in southern Ontario.

Vince Kicknosway from Odawa concluded the workshop with a ceremonial smudging.

Click on the image to see a slide show from workshop.

Photo by Bruno Schlumberger of the Ottawa Citizen

Picking up on the theme of “heart” the Ottawa Citizen recently ran this Valentine’s Day interview with Project of Heart coordinator Sylvia Smith. It is a well-written article that makes for as a useful introduction to what the project is all about.

Click on image to see slideshow from Frederick Banting event

Students at Frederick Banting Secondary School in Stittsville participated in Project of Heart as part of their Lifeskills and Aboriginal Studies courses. They chose to commemorate the Spanish Indian Residential School – formerly Wikwemikong – in Manitoulin Island.  The tiles were smudged by Willy Bruce, who is a Native veteran and Carrier of the Aboriginal Vetern’s Eagle Staff.  Students participated in an Honour Song at the Drum and listened attentively to Willy as he shared the Traditional Teachings on values that should govern our choices in life.  As well, Willy gifted an Eagle Feather to the Banting Staff to honour all the young warriors who gave their health or lives as a result of the IRS experience.

As the social justice component of the project, students signed up to be witnesses to the proceedings of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal on First Nations Child Welfare.

John Curry from the Sttitsville News covered the event; a scan of the newspaper coverage can be seen here.

Project of Heart graduates from across the National Capital Region gathered at Rideau Hall this past month to help the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) launch its “five year journey” to educate Canadians about the residential school era.

In a two day program culminating with a  “Witnessing the Future” encounter hosted by Governor General Michaelle Jean, POH participants David Choiniere, Kheyahna Meekis, Evana Smith, Emianna Vargatoth and Daniel Wiggins were recognized for their contribution to remembering the students who died in the care of the Mohawk Institute, a notorious residential school located in southwestern Ontario.

In preparation for the ceremony, POH students joined in a workshop along with youth from across Canada brought together through the TRC. They included five older youth affiliated with Canadian Roots, an organization working with young people to address the pressing need for reconciliation around the issue of residential schools, as well as ten young people who are grandchildren of IRS survivors. Together, the students produced clay sculptures to present to survivors as gestures of reconciliation.

Click on the photo above to see a photoset including images from both the prepatory workshop and the “Witnessing the Future” event itself.

The First Place students were reacting to what they had learned about the experience of being aboriginal during the Residential School era in Canada. The empathy they felt with the story of the abused students of their chosen school — Poplar Hill Residential School in Northern Ontario — showed clearly in the care and creativity with which they crafted their memorial tiles.

The competed tiles were smudged in a ceremony that included invited survivor Violet Kakekapetum from Sandy Lake First Nation. Click on the image to see a photoset from the event.

The social justice component of their POH project saw First Place students poster downtown Ottawa in support of the campaign to find missing indigenous teens Maisy Ojick and Shannon Alexander.

Students from art teacher Emily Park’s classroom joined with others students to participate in Project of Heart.  The five-part learning module saw students research contemporary Mohawk artists, and, as part of the social justice component of the unit, students learned about the students of Attawapiskat and their struggle to get a commitment from Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl to build a new school.

The Wyn Wood students signed a petition created by the Attawapiskat students calling for federal action on this basic children’s right…the right to an education on par with the rest of Canadian students.

Culminating the morning’s program was a commemoration ceremony overseen by Mohawk Traditional Teacher Paul Skanks. Paul is of the Turtle Clan and is a band member of the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, Quebec. Grandfather Paul provided a teaching of the Thanksgiving Address for the students and also taught them to greet each other in Mohawk.  Participants experienced a “smudging” before Paul smudged and offered tobacco for the newly decorated wooden tiles.  Joining the students in the ceremony was Grandmother Arlo Fayant, a Cree from Peepeekisis First Nation in southern Saskatchewan.  Fayant was the first member of her family — for four generations– to be spared the IRS experience.

The SUNTEP students brought extremely compelling imagery to the exercise which commemorated the students who died at the Lebret Indian Residential School at Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan. Click on the adjacent photo to see more examples of her class’s work.

Russell Fayant of the SUNTEP program and Christina herself have also responded through verse to the ongoing colonial project of cultural extinction, as experienced by their Métis community. Christina’s poem can be read here and Russell’s here.

We are a family of four, including two children aged 14 and 12, and in August 2008 we set out from Ottawa on a year-long round-the-world back packing adventure.  Before leaving, we decided to participate in Project of Heart.  We received the wooden tiles and agreed to keep in contact with the Project of Heart team in Ottawa.

POH would send us, via email, several names of children who had died while attending Indian Residential Schools in Canada and we would choose an appropriate location in the world to dedicate and decorate these blocks in those children’s memory.
Days before embarking on our trip we met with local Indigenous teacher and cultural worker, grandmother Greta Neepin who cleansed the commemorative wooden tiles by performing a smudging ceremony.  Grandmother Greta welcomed us into a journey which would see us safely through many experiences.

At several locations on our travels we took out the blocks and introduced the story of Indian Residential Schools in Canada to other world travelers.  At an Indigenous Akha village in northern Thailand overlooking a beautiful valley we explained to others the tragedy of tens of thousands of Indigenous children losing their lives as a result of the Indian Residential School experience.  In the City of Udaipur, Rajasthan we met  Sophie Staughten, an Australian woman doing research with local Indigenous people there.  She was shocked at learning about the number of Indigenous children in Canada dying while in the “care” of the Residential School administrators.

• Maisie Shaw, 14 years old, died at Port Alberni Residential School.
• Albert Gray, died at Ahousat Residential School.
• Maggie Seward, only 6 years old, died at Kuper Island Residential School.
• Carolyn Joseph, died at Kuper Island Residential School.

These are just four names of the young people who died in the Indian Residential Schools, the names that we traveled with.
In northern Argentina there  is a beautiful little town close to where that country meets with Paraguay and Brazil.

The town is named Puerto Iguazú, named for its location near the amazing Iguazú waterfalls, and it was in it that we decided to dedicate and decorate our Project of Heart wooden tiles to honour the above mentioned children.

“What would we put on the tiles?” we asked ourselves.  We had been carrying them for almost eleven months. They had covered the distance of 40,000 kilometers, once around the globe.  They had entered and left sixteen different countries and they needed the correct decoration to suit our long “lost” Indian Residential School children.

The Guarani people are the Indigenous people of the Iguazu area, and we decided to explore the town to discover art from which we could gain inspiration. We found Guarani  designs on belts, purses, and beautiful fabrics. Spurred on by this rich legacy, we knew we finally had a visual language with which to decorate our much-travelled tiles.

We completed our Project of Heart tiles and then photographed them.

We hope our story and photographs do justice to these children, children who had families and were loved by their communities–children who died because of inhumane treatment at the hands of the church officials with funding provided by the Canadian government, my (our) government.

Our thanks go to Sylvia Smith for providing us with the information, and the opportunity to participate in Project of Heart, and also to Greta Neepin for helping keep us safe during our long journey.
-Warren McBride

Led by POH co-founder Louise Madaire, the group met to do some research and find out a little of the Unitied Church’s complicity in carrying out the government’s “genetic engineering” project.  A map of the IRSs across the country show which denominations and which locations the schools resided.  Participants then met on a second evening to decorate the tiles and decide on a social justice issue to confront head-on. Click on the image to see the photo set from the two evenings.