Unusual Agreement Protects The Witness Blanket

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The Witness Blanket (photo by Jessica Sigurdson)

Indigenous concepts and Western legal principles have been united in an unusual agreement signed by artist Carey Newman and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

The agreement covers the protection and use of The Witness Blanket, an installation made from some 800 items collected from the sites and survivors of residential schools across Canada.

Written documents and an oral ceremony were given equal weight in an agreement that vests legal rights with the artwork itself, as a living entity that honours the stories of the survivors.

"Rather than trying to decide our rights, we put the rights with the blanket and the stories that were given to us by survivors," says Newman (Ha-Yalth-Kin-Geme), a Kwagiulth master carver from Vancouver Island.

"We were not negotiating against each other, but collaborating together in the best interest of the blanket itself," he says. "We didn't want to treat it like a transfer of property because I don't feel ownership of the blanket, I feel responsibility towards it, and I wanted to make sure the museum felt this too."

Rebecca Johnson, associate director of the Indigenous law research unit at the University of Victoria, says the agreement is unique.

"It has huge implications for me as a law professor because it models new and hopeful possibilities of seeing the law in its creative and expansive forms, not just as something that constrains and punishes," she says.

"It captures the heart of what's possible when people work together to imagine new ways of drawing on law, both Indigenous and Canadian, to move us in a new direction."

Restoration work on the piece is needed after several years of travelling. A new touring version has also been created. Its first showing is at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery from May 4 to June 23.

Newman is a visual arts professor at the University of Victoria, where The Witness Blanket was first presented publicly in 2014.

Source: Canadian Museum for Human Rights