Bent box will gather the gifts of survivors

A box crafted with the pain that one grandmother suffered while attending residential school sat in the centre of the first sharing circle hosted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the TRC’s inaugural national event in Winnipeg June 16 to 19.

When Coast Salish artist Luke Marston started working on the box, he asked his mother to tell him stories about his grandmother’s time at residential school at Kuper Island. B.C. His mother told him that when his grandmother was a young child, she was grabbed by a nun and thrown down the stairs, breaking her fingers. Her hand was never cared for and her fingers healed in “a cramped position.”

“I remember seeing that as a child but I never knew the reason why her hands were like that,” said Marston
On one side of the Bentwood box Marston depicts his grandmother’s experience, her bent fingers and both hands held up in supplication.