By Jeff Rooney
DUNNVILLE—Amid all that was happening at the Mudcat Festival, some community members gathered at Grandview Lodge on Saturday, June 14, 2025 for an experiential workshop to explore the nation-to-nation relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada.
The Kairos Blanket Exercise was facilitated by Jodi Vander Heide-Buswa who, with over six years of experience, has led over 20 blanket exercises. She provided participants with an immersive journey through the complex relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada.
The program was created in response to the 1996 report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and has been used for over 20 years as a teaching tool across Canada.
Kairos Canada explains, “The blanket exercise is based on using Indigenous methodologies and the goal is to build understanding about our shared history as Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada by walking through pre-contact, treaty-making, colonization, and resistance.
“Everyone is actively involved as they step onto blankets that represent the land and into the roles of First Nations, Inuit, and later Métis peoples. By engaging on an emotional and intellectual level, the blanket exercise effectively educates and increases empathy.”
As the exercise progressed, the physical space and the blankets were systematically reduced to represent the historical impacts of colonization, including the loss of traditional lands, the residential school system, and ongoing challenges facing Indigenous communities.
Vander Heide-Buswa shares that one of the most powerful components of the exercise is the “take away.” This moment of the workshop involves participants having a baby doll they were holding taken away to experience viscerally the “60s Scoop,” where Indigenous children were taken from their parents.
One of the participants summed it up by stating, ”When they started removing blankets and asking people to step off, representing the loss of traditional territories, it became very real, very quickly.”
As the afternoon wound down and Vander Heide-Buswa was asked what the most common thing she hears is during this exercise, she said without hesitation, “We weren’t taught this in school.”
To learn more, visit kairosblanketexercise.org.
