Colourful trade blankets hang on the walls of a Montreal gallery as a striking symbol of beauty emerging from the pain of residential schools and the generations of trauma they inflicted.
They are the work of Ida Baptiste and Lara Kramer, a mother-daughter team behind the exhibit titled Ji zoongde’eyaang (To Have a Strong Heart) showing at MAI, a multi-media cultural space.
Baptiste is an Anishinaabe Oji-Cree artist and Ojibwa language teacher living in Rama, Ont. She was just four years old when she was taken to Brandon Indian Residential School in Manitoba.
She recalls crying as she arrived at the school and the fear she lived with for years.
“The boys who tried to run away were made to carry a hundred-pound bag of potatoes,” she says. “And the principal would stand there with a horse whip to use if one of them fell down. I remember seeing that, and the fear I had, thinking ‘Why am I here?'”
Those are memories she tried to suppress for years, but that she now shares with her daughter by her side.
The duo first teamed up during the pandemic, in 2021. Kramer, a performer, choreographer and multi-disciplinary artist, was asked to design two public billboards to be exhibited in downtown Montreal. The images feature Kramer cloaked in a trade blanket, the kind used in the fur trade. Through oral tradition, countless stories of their use as fabric of biological warfare to infect Indigenous people with small pox have emerged.
Kramer reached out to her mother for help designing two trade blankets and adorning them with jingles that symbolize healing.
“It was really these notions of healing, grounding ourselves in history and moving forward together that I wanted to explore,” says Kramer.
After that project was over, she realized there was much more to be done and came up with the idea of the exhibit. They dedicated hours to the project, working together with Kramer’s own children playing around them. In those moments, the two artists thought of the bonds residential school severed across generations.
“I didn’t grow up in a real family,” says Baptiste. “When I had my own children I was able to give them a foundation when they were little, but when they became adolescents I was fearful and scared, so I ran away from them not fully realizing the impact that would have on my family.”
One of their trade blankets now on display is in honour of Baptiste’s mother, Kramer’s grandmother. All of her 14 children were taken away, either during the Sixties Scoop or to residential school. Another blanket depicts what Baptiste calls her spiritual journey, with lines representing generations past, present and future.
But there is more than the blankets to this exhibit.
As Kramer looked (or “snooped,” as she put it) around her mother’s home, she uncovered a series of paintings Baptiste completed in the 1990s. She convinced her mother to include those in the project.
“I felt that this is the moment. Maybe 30 years ago, it wasn’t time, but in the current climate, and where she is on her journey, it is now time.”
The paintings depict children, left without a voice in their schools. One is of a child on a swing on a background filled with numbers.
“We all had numbers,” says Baptiste. “Mine was 64.”
Ji zoongde’eyaang is on until Nov. 19 at the MAI (Montreal, arts interculturels).
All embedded images show the exhibit at the MAI created by Ida Baptiste and Lara Kramer, and were provided to CTV News.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
