The 100 Mile House Quilts for Survivors organization celebrated a milestone last month.
On Wednesday, June 26 the 100 Mile House Quilts for Survivors group handed out its 250th quilt to Ernie Combes with a traditional smudging ceremony at Dancing Quilts. Quilts for Survivors is a group dedicated to creating quilts for residential school survivors and Indigenous people suffering from intergenerational trauma from the schools to promote healing and reconciliation. After the quilt was smudged it was placed upon Combes' shoulders, itself a high honour in indigenous culture.
"When we blanket someone, that means they're almost as close as they can get to the creator being on Earth - like so we call this Mother Earth," said Murray Casey, the manager of the Stemete7uw'i Friendship Centre who attended the event to drum and take part in the smudging ceremony.
After the presentation of the quilt, Casey sang and drummed two songs, a Secwepemc honour song as well as Teddy Bear, which is dedicated to the 215 children found buried in unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in 2021.
Lisa De Paoli is one of the lead volunteers with the 100 Mile House Quilts for Survivors program and has been a resident of 100 Mile House for around 15 years. De Paoli says that she never knew about the horrors of residential schools growing up, but instead learned about it while working at the South Cariboo Family Enrichment Centre, much to her horror.
"When I came here, and started to experience that, and understand that, and start to get to know Indigenous people here, it just made me kind of want to do something to help," De Paoli said.
De Paoli connected with the larger Quilts for Survivors movement - specifically Vanessa Jenier, a First Nations woman out of Timmins, Ontario. Jenier wanted to do something to relieve the sorrow and pain that Indigenous people faced around Canada, especially after the unmarked graves were discovered in Kamloops, and decided to make some quilts for local survivors she know. She asked her Facebook friends and fellow quilters to donate some quilting blocks and was overwhelmed by the response.
"So she wanted to make, you know, maybe 10 to 15 quilts to give to residential school survivors that she knew in her surrounding First Nations community," De Paoli explained. "And she was overwhelmed by blocks."
De Paoli had approached Jenier about starting a similar initiative in 100 Mile House and was welcomed with open arms. She teamed up with Faith Andre, owner of Dancing Quilts, who agreed to let De Paoli and a team of other quilters use the shop on the final Monday of each month to work on the quilts. In their first year in 2022 they made 100 quilts, in 2023 they made 150 and aim to create 175 by the end of 2024.
As for Combes, receiving this quilt was also a milestone for him. He came to 70 Mile House in 1990 without knowing much about his culture or heritage, hailing originally from the Stolo nation in Chilliwack.
However, in recent years Combes has been able to reconnect with indigenous culture and language through attending the Stemete7uw'i Friendship Centre and learning indigenous rituals.
When asked about what he felt about being blanketed, he said it "feels great."
