Big  land  pottery 

Title:  Mom, The Residential School Survivor

Artist:  Cookie Lethbridge

Description:  Jane, my Inuk mother was born in Labrador in 1927.  At age six she was taken from her parents and sent to an Inuit Residential School called Lockwood. Those schools were set up to “take the savage out of them.”   On her first day there her head was shaved, not because of lice but shaving a person’s head takes away their identity.   Mom’s first job at the residential dorm was to skim the maggots that rose to the top of the boiling water as their food was being cooked.  There “they created a wound deeper than midnight and darker than blue.   All throughout her life she relived the memories trapped in her brain. There she learned the rules for the hungry and rules that were cruel.  The trauma was carried down through the years.”  Excerpts from a song for our mom written and performed by my brother Kirk Lethbridge. Album. “Ghost in my Window.”   This sculpture has been very healing for me, her daughter.