Statement

Wanda told me about a dream that had inspired her piece, and of the story of the “Star People” and the Ojibway belief that their people fell from sky to earth. She explained that the Milky Way is considered the Spirit Road and that when we pass away, our spirits travel that spirit road to return to their ancestors. The elder in her dream had said, “See the lights? That’s those kids going home.”

My piece is inspired by her painting, as well as her dream.  She had interpreted the lights in her dream as representing the children discovered in unmarked graves travelling the Spirit Road. Wanda also talked about how the northern lights are believed to represent ancestors dancing, and she wondered if brighter northern lights in the last year were a result of all those souls being finally released. I represented those children rising from the unmarked graves with dots of light in the darkness.  And of course the northern lights represent the ancestors, but also, they added an element of hopefulness to this dark time. The dark figure represents me as witness to these times, and simultaneously, it represents anyone looking at the painting. I feel that we all are grappling with this unspeakable history, and that attempting to process that history is a necessary step toward reconciliation.  

Wanda also told me the unsettling details of her mother’s experience in residential school, as well as her own traumatic school experience.  Then she told me that for her, "reconciliation will mean finding ourselves again so that we may walk that spirit road back to our ancestors again; balancing who we are in our hearts with who we need to be in greater colonized society.”  I chose to honour many of the things she told me by incorporating fragments of text in the under painting.