About this Event
Featuring works by Daniel R. Elliott, Stz’uminus First Nation watercolour artist and descendant of residential school survivors. Daniel wants to take people on a healing journey. But first, he’s asking people to confront the history and impact of residential schools head on, and not look away. . .
Daniel says his words, included in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report by Murray Sinclair, nicely capture his intention with the exhibit:
“I think all Canadians need to stop and take a look and not look away. Yeah, it’s embarrassing, yeah, it’s an ugly part of our history. We don’t want to know about it. What I want to see from the Commission is to rewrite the history books so that other generations will understand and not go through the same thing that we’re going through now, like it never happened.”
Daniel received a grant from the First Peoples’ Cultural Council to paint this body of work, which takes viewers through a curve of emotions – from beautiful, pre-contact scenes, to the impacts of colonization, to the artist’s vision of how reconciliation can happen.
“My art is about helping people forge a new relationship,” said Daniel. “I’ve tempered all this pain and sorrow with hope. That was hard to do. I want to explore how this healing can happen, how we can bridge Canadian educational structures with Indigenous knowledge, how we can find a way to put that together in a good way.”
Daniel, whose father is from Stz’uminus First Nation and mother is Scottish, has always felt like he was straddling two worlds. In the 1990s, he went through a spiritually transcendent experience in a sweat lodge that allowed him to feel, for the first time, at home with who he is as an Indigenous person of mixed ancestry.
“I came face-to-face with a collision of cultures in the Spiritual realm,” he remembered. “All the negative messages that I heard throughout my life about Indigenous people were cleansed and dissolved from my being. This was my truth and reconciliation of my own being.”
The name of the exhibit, Winds of Change, comes from childhood memories of commercial clam digging on Cortez Island with his family on long, hot summer days. Reprieve came in the form of the breeze that signaled the tide change, which meant that soon they would be done for the day.
“It’s a change of direction,” he explained. “I want to help people to not look away, help people understand. Winds of Change is saying this with a loud voice through colour and texture.”
Daniel will be selling his book "Truth, Art and Reconciliation: The Winds of Change Project" in the lobby.
https://vimeo.com/841361917
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Malaspina Theatre, 900 Fifth Street, Nanaimo, Canada
CAD 0.00