Thanks to a pair of NSCAD staffers who created a student art project a decade ago, November’s G20 Summit in Rio will be showcasing a small but mighty piece of Mi’kma’ki.
The G20’s theme is “Building a Just World and Sustainable Planet.” Part-time instructor Sabine Fels received a call this summer to let her know as part of Canada’s participation in Brazil, they would be including a video interview she did about Project of Heart in Ottawa in 2022, when she was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence.
Project of Heart, founded in 2008 by Ottawa teacher Sylvia Smith, is an ongoing nationwide collaborative art project and intergenerational artistic journey commemorating the lives lost, and generational trauma, of Indian residential schools in Canada. Smith was awarded the Governor General’s History Award for Teaching Excellence for Project of Heart in 2011.
‘A fabulous way to engage students to learn about Indian Residential Schools’
In 2014, Sabine Fels was coordinating the ArtsExpress program at J.L. Ilsley High School in Spryfield when Jude Gerrard—from the Millbrook First Nation, a former public school teacher, and then the student services consultant for the province’s Department of Education—brought Project of Heart to her.
Fels now teaches pre-service teachers as a course instructor in NSCAD’s Art Education program; Gerrard became the university’s first-ever ombudsperson in August 2023.
“I’m from Germany, I’m a white European woman. I can’t do that project without someone like Jude Gerrard,” says Fels. “I coordinated the project, found money and supplies, created a layout, I made phone calls, I sent e-mails. Jude would come in with the students and government officials and he would do the fact-based historical parts.”
“I thought it was a fabulous way to engage students to learn about Indian Residential Schools,” says Gerrard. “I spent some time with a number of classes, giving a little bit of history of schools in Canada, specifically with the Sipekne’katik school,” the Maritimes’ sole Indian Residential School that closed in 1967. “With the engagement that we had, it ended up getting the English students, the art students, the woodshop students.”
“To work collaboratively is a whole different way of working, because you need to pay respect to all the contributors,” Fels says, “but at the same time you need to push the project forward.”
Moving beyond a relationship of separation and violence to one of understanding
Participants were given small wooden tiles—1 x 1.5 inches—to decorate with paint and markers in honour of lives lost in or affected by the system. The tiles are laid out in rows, a circle surrounding seven embossed eagle feathers on a blood-red background with additional feathers on the edges of the 2- by 1.3-metre black frame.
“For me, art has always been a way to educate folks. I know, working in the public school system itself, there wasn’t a deep knowledge of what has gone on in this country,” says Gerrard. “I walked the students through a smudging ceremony, explained the medicines, explained the significance of the eagle feather itself to Indigenous people with respect to resiliency.”
The resulting piece, steeped in history and emotion— “It was not like producing a piece of art. I felt deeply distraught throughout the entire process,” says Fels—had a stint on display at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia during the ‘Power of the Arts Forum” before landing in the permanent collection at the Millbrook Heritage Centre. Gerrard built an additional frame that allows visitors to contribute tiles themselves, making it a living project.
“The ill effects of the Canadian Indian Residential School system are not over, it is ongoing,” says Fels. “What happens in communities—even though it may be a generation or two back, there was significant fallout in families.”
“When we look at what’s just,” says Gerrard of the G20’s theme, “it’s about having Indigenous and non-Indigenous people walk that path to reconciliation. I struggle with the word ‘reconciliation’ itself, we think of it in a really colonial way in Canada. I always hear the same things: healing, moving forward, mending past harms. By definition what that means is there was a good relationship, and something broke that and we had to mend it. If the relationship was never good in the first place, is it really reconciliation? Conciliation, maybe.
“If you look at how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission defined it, as creating mutually beneficial relationships—it wasn’t about mending a relationship, it was about creating a relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people,” he continues. “We have to move beyond that relationship of separation and violence, and to one of understanding as the treaties in the province of Nova Scotia laid out.”