Artist Stanley C. Hunt looks over his work, one that means more to him than any other he’s ever made, which he says, should have never been created.
“I made this from my heart,” he said.
The towering six-metre Indian Residential School Memorial Monument is dedicated to a dark time in Canadian history. It’s meant to represent children who went missing, and died, in the residential school system.
Hunt, a Kwagu’l Indigenous carver from British Columbia, created the wooden monument in his own backyard.
“It was really tough to go through that tent door and go in there knowing that your every day you had these children on your mind, and every day you were trying to give them a voice.”
It began after he heard the news in 2021 that hundreds of unmarked graves had been found near a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.
Hunt says he felt the work needed to tell the truth about what happened.
The monument itself is nearly 5 m tall, and standing on a 1.2 m base, it’s 1.2 m wide.
Surrounding it are black squares, carved in the faces of children. He says every one is unique, because no two children are the same.
“I wonder what these children could have been. Who they could have become in their lifetime,” he says.
Perched atop is a raven, for the creator. He says it’s the largest raven he’s ever crafted, he says.
“He’s been created deliberately to help, to help us find our children and to identify them,” he says. “Not just find them.”
The monument has travelled across the country, finding a permanent home in the Canadian Museum of History. On Monday it will be available for the public to view.
“It’s emotional, it’s powerful,” says museum curator Kaitlin McCormick.
She explains that it’s surrounded by other Indigenous artwork, in the hopes of being a sombre space for reflection. Visitors will be welcome to touch it, should they need to.
“I think it’s going to give Canadians and visitors from all around the world an opportunity to bear witness to the history of residential schools in Canada and to have space to sit down and reflect on that,” she explains.
Hunt says it’s meant to be a raw and real piece of artwork.
It holds an upside down cross, as well as the acronyms ‘RCMP’ for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and ‘NWMP’ for the North-West Mounted Police, for the roles the institutions played in the residential school system.
“It’s a very dark time in our history. But I didn’t do it to insult anybody,” says Hunt. “It’s made to tell the truth. And that truth sometimes is very, very difficult for everybody. I know it’s hard for me to even say what the truth is. And if it’s hard for me to say that it must be really hard for people to hear that.”
He says he hopes it gives people a space to grieve.
“I think it’s important that our people can go and stand with it and hold it,” explains Hunt. “I hope it helps them.”
The monument will be available to the public starting on Monday, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation at 100 Laurier St., Gatineau, Que. starting at 6 p.m.