by Kirsty Robertson
English Studies in Canada (Aboriginal Redress and Repatriation) 35.1 (March 2010), pp. 85-108.
"In this article, I look at the Living Healing Quilt Project (LHQP), organized by Alice Williams of the Curve... more
"In this article, I look at the Living Healing Quilt Project (LHQP), organized by Alice Williams of the Curve Lake First Nation (Curve Lake, Ontario) and sponsored by the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The project involved the creation of a series of quilts by residential school survivors and intergenerational survivors and is made up of individual quilt blocks reflecting on residential school experience. I consider the LHQP as an intervention into the collected stories making up the national fabric, wherein the knotted underside of an apparently seamless entity is revealed. To do this, the LHQP is read through a series of locales, institutional spaces, ideas, and metaphors. In four sections—Fabric, Pattern, Piecing, and Binding—the LHQP is analyzed
respectively as a document of trauma, an intervention into mainstream normative narratives of nation building, as part of a feminist rethinking of quilts as emancipatory texts, and as a commentary on the role of sewing and handcraft in the attempted creation of docile and assimilated Indigenous children."
This paper received the Priestly Prize, awarded by the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English for the best essay published in ESC: English Studies in Canada in 2009-2010.
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