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Weaving Reconciliation Green Cloth
| ~~Laurel Wood - |
I am an occasional weaver and love to use/reuse bits of fabric from other people’s lives in my weaving, weaving pieces of worn or out-of-fashion garments and other textiles back into beauty. I have woven rugs from cast-off blue jeans, worn wool socks and old blankets. A favorite project was a table runner for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. The runner incorporated their names in the pattern draft and used many colorful silk shirts and a piece of my mother’s wedding dress in the weft.
I am very pleased to have this opportunity to gather together members of my community in Sioux Lookout, Ontario to participate in collecting threads and weaving a panel of Weaving Reconciliation.. The theme of this World Cloth is very appropriate to our community of about 5,000 which is made up of approximately half Euro-Canadian and half Ojibwa and Cree people. Sioux Lookout is a service centre for 23 remote First Nations communities to the north and so our ‘community’ includes the people in those places either through residency or by constant visiting (at this time of year by a winter road).
First Nations people in Canada are actively seeking healing and reconciliation from the consequences of years of residential schooling and the abuses (physical, sexual, cultural, and emotional) that occurred in these institutions. They continue to struggle with ongoing issues of systemic racism.
The Sioux Lookout Anti-Racism Committee was created about 15 years ago by a group of native and non-native community members to try to improve relations between the groups. Each year the committee facilitates a Race Relations Week in March, around the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (March 21). Community members and groups are encouraged to host events throughout the week.
I hope to facilitate a gathering during Race Relations Week that will symbolically unite our hopes for reconciliation through the gathering and tying of threads. When our threads are gathered, they will be tied to those collected in other parts of the world and people will be encouraged to contribute to the weaving of the panel. I believe the cloth we create will contain diversity, love, pain, hope and prayers and connect us to other caring people throughout the world. |
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