Students learn indigenous history by reenacting colonization in unique blanket exercise

Three dozen high school students in stocking feet wander quietly over colourful blankets spread across the floor. They are roaming their land. It is centuries ago, and they inhabit a vast place that will one day be known as Canada. “You represent the indigenous peoples, the people who have been here for at least 10,000 years,” their narrator tells them.



“Long before the arrival of Europeans, Turtle Island was your home, and home to millions of people like you.” In reality, they are students from five Toronto Catholic high schools engaged in the Kairos blanket exercise, a powerful interactive lesson that teaches indigenous history through re-enactment. The morning begins with 13 blankets, a script and a circle of teenagers. It will end with a new perspective of Canada that for too long has not been taught. As the 45-minute session unfolds, students with numbered scrolls take turns reading in the voices of First Nations people, describing their lives, how “everything on the earth is to be respected” and how events affect them. Their observations are punctuated by the arrival of Europeans and what follows, from the time of the earliest treaties that begin the process of appropriating their land, through colonization, forced assimilation and resistance. Some students hold coloured cards handed out at the beginning of the exercise. Throughout it, they are asked to leave — one group representing the millions wiped out by smallpox, measles and other diseases brought by settlers, another for those lost to starvation. Later, there’s a chilling moment of silence to honour children torn from their families and forced to attend residential schools many miles from their homes. With each encroachment, blanket edges are folded back as indigenous lands shrink. By the end, what remains is a fraction of the original population, several crumpled blankets strewn across the space and some dislocated students on the bare wooden floor. In the talking circle that follows led by elder Bob Phillips, an aboriginal educator of Mi’kmaq heritage, some teens speak about the injustice. Others remark on how much they hadn’t known. Many are speechless.