It looks like I'm teaching on National Day for Truth and Reconciliation day again.
It's an interesting 'holiday' in Canada, and like Christmas, I have big issues with it being one day a year to
be nice to everyone so we can be grumpy old farts the rest of the year. The world would be better if it was part of our daily lives because the past really sucks. Bad things happened. And they are going to keep happening until we get a dialogue open. To share the hurt without placing blame is really really hard. And I'm not qualified to address the deep stuff.
But I am teaching textiles that day, so I like to open up the dialogue by sharing my experiences with the traditional Coast Salish spinners and weavers.
It's an amazing tradition where most of the yarn manipulation is done by hand. There is the assumption that using hands instead of tools to make cloth makes it more primitive - but I've noticed that the fewer tools a culture uses to make cloth, the more intricate and beautiful the cloth is. More of the weaver is embedded in the cloth.
And that brings me to the biggest lesson I learned when visiting with these craftspeople - because textiles capture a specific time and emotion in the cloth, they are like time capsules. Every time warp meets weft, that moment is locked in the cloth until the end of its life. Same too with every twist to make the yarn to weave the blanket. And for that reason, it is vital that the craftsperson has the right emotion and intent when creating cloth. This emotional awareness is as much a part of the tradition as the technical skills - perhaps more.
I don't describe it well, but it feels right.
It's also received well by the students as it offers a safe place to get to know the
local traditions and offers a safe starting place for the conversations we so need to have in this space. A conversation topic that doesn't start from a place of guilt or blame which are the two quickest ways to turn a conversation into a cross monologed.
Anyway, some
books I get from the library about local textile traditions (and I would love suggestions I can ask the library to order in as they don't have as many as they could)
- Knitting stories : personal essays and seven Coast Salish-inspired knitting patterns by Sylvia Olsen
- Working with wool : a Coast Salish legacy and the Cowichan sweater by the same
- just about any textile book by Sylvia Olsen
- Salish blankets : robes of protection and transformation, symbols of wealth by Leslie H. Tepper (Author), Janice George (Author), Willard Joseph (Author)
- (and the now very politically incorrect book) Salish weaving, primitive and modern
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