The lines that cross over the children represent the silencing of the children who were unable to speak about the abuses they were enduring.BottomīOTTOM – The ancestor smokes in the sacred lodge. Children were not permitted to leave and, therefore, the buildings became their prisons. The building, rendered from a photograph of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, is included because often these buildings represented the institutionalized system of abuse and assimilation. As Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated in the Statement of Apology on June 11, 2008, the objective of the residential schools was to “remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures.” The children shown here are taken from historical photographs, with artist renditions of other children. MIDDLE – This section of the window represents the “sad chapter” of the residential schools era, where more than 150,000 children were forcibly removed from their homes and often subjected to unimaginable and horrific abuses. The dove with the olive branch brings an offering of hope for the beginning of reconciliation and the renewal of the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the rest of Canada. The snow falls and the moon glows from a northern sky. The circles moving up and out from behind the drum represent the transformation that governments and churches made, from taking initial positions of denial, to acceptance, and finally to acknowledgement and admission, paving the way for an apology. The drum dancer sounds the beginning of the healing. The broken glass also represents the shattered lives, shattered families and shattered communities that resulted from the government policy of forced assimilation. The shattered glass represents the breaking of the silence in the 1980s as survivors from all over Canada began to speak openly about what happened to them at the schools. TOP – In 1990, Phil Fontaine, then Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, and later National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, became one of the first Aboriginal leaders to speak publicly about the abuses he suffered as a child at residential school.
The title is in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibway) and includes, within the deeper meaning of the word, the idea that everyone is included and we are all looking ahead for the ones “unborn”. The title of the piece is “Giniigaaniimenaaning” translated into English means, “Looking Ahead”. It is a story of Aboriginal people, with our ceremonies, languages, and cultural knowledge intact through the darkness of the residential school era to an awakening sounded by a drum an apology that spoke to the heart hope for reconciliation transformation and healing through dance, ceremony, language and resilience into the present day. “The story begins in the bottom left corner of the glass, with your eye moving upwards in the left panel to the top window, and flowing down the right window to the bottom right corner.
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