ECS and ESST Students View the “Moving Forward, Never Forgetting” Exhibit

On Wednesday, March 4, Education students viewed an exhibit at the Mackenzie Art Gallery entitled “Moving Forward, Never Forgetting,” which features newly commissioned works, performances, and living Story Keepers as well as pieces from the Mackenzie Art Gallery collection that portray the stories of Indigenous people’s experiences in residential and public school systems and other experiences of assimilation. The exhibit offers a space where viewers can enter into dialogue about the effects of assimilation on Indigenous peoples.

During their curated tour, students collectively created a scroll, imitating the unfolding-in-time “Story Scroll” piece by former teacher, David Benjoe. This scroll will be used to help grade school students develop their scrolls. Students cut out images that represented who they are today and who they hope to be in the future from coloured paper and pasted them on the brown scroll.

David Brown, an ESST 317 student, responded to viewing the exhibit, saying that moving forward is not about “forgiving and forgetting…we need to understand and remember what happened and work hard to ensure events like this never happen again.”

The exhibit will be shown until April 19, 2015. For more about the exhibit see the Mackenzie Art Gallery website http://www.mackenzieartgallery.ca/engage/exhibitions/moving-forward-never-forgetting