How the Indigenous Blanket Exercise Broke Through my Ego

I had pegged myself as an ally to Indigenous people, but I hadn’t done the deep emotional work that the label implies.

In January 2020, the charity I worked for held a week-long staff gathering in Ottawa, where my department participated in an Indigenous Blanket Exercise. And boy, did that not go as I expected.

The Blanket Exercise is a workshop in which participants enact centuries of history from an Indigenous point of view. It is meant to shine some light on lesser-known, uncomfortable facts about Canada’s past and foster reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

“So… there’s the Blanket Exercise on the second day.” I pointed out to a colleague of mine days before the gathering.

I had always been sympathetic towards Indigenous issues, but this workshop was promising to be everything I hate. The thought of acting out sensitive events with strangers weighed so heavily on me that my unwillingness was beginning to border on hostility.

But, holding on to my optimism, I had been scouting for someone who could make this exercise in any way less daunting to me.

“I already did it once,” he replied. “Some people cried during it,” he added with an eye roll.

“Really!?” I snickered. “Good God.”

So much for taking the uncomfortable out of it, I thought. Well, what’s a few unpleasant hours in the name of career advancement, right?

The day came, and soon I, along with about 30 other staff members, had to gather near a circle of chairs in a conference room. Employees had come in from all over Canada; I didn’t know half of them.

An Indigenous woman greeted us. She worked with the charity organization called KAIROS, which first developed the Blanket Exercise in the 1990s. She mentioned a few things, one of which was that she wanted to collect our tears in a paper bag. “I consider tears as offerings,” she explained as she put the paper bag on the floor. My judgmental instincts kicked in; I ignored them as best as I could.

Next, our attention was drawn to the short narrative texts being handed out, which we were to read out loud.

By one of these coincidences that inspire belief in cosmic forces, mine turned out to be about the very phenomenon which, out of all Indigenous issues, had always affected me the most: missing and murdered women.

Tss. Just my luck, I selfishly thought. Number 16. At least it’s still far ahead.

A few seconds later, we were all up, stepping on coloured blankets that were lying on the floor. They represented the territories that Indigenous Peoples occupied before the arrival of the European settlers.

Shortly after, we enacted our first piece of history: Indigenous Peoples sharing the land, meeting the new settlers, and establishing collaborative relationships with them.

The Indigenous woman’s colleague, a Christian playing a settler, passed out a few pieces of paper. Seconds later, those with a card like mine were told to go back to their seats. We had gotten sick with a disease never encountered before.  And well, that was it for us.

Thank God, I thought. I was too relieved that my role was over to feel even a shred of sadness for my character. But now that the pressure was off, I would be able to listen to the rest of the story with more empathy.

Other traumatic events succeeded my demise. Throughout the scenes, more people got sent back to their chairs. We were told about uprisings, deceptive treaties, and the murder of rebels.

It was around that point that the exercise started to chip away at my already fragile sense of control.

Despite my best effort to suppress any emotion that wasn’t passive, almost absent-minded compassion, I found myself pondering over the lives that had been destroyed or cut short. Thinking how easy it had been to ruin everything for hundreds of thousands of people. Being struck by how efficient declarations, stories, and beliefs had been in destroying valuable human potential forever.

I went from feeling uneasy to alarmed as I felt tears welling up inside me. Really? I snarled at myself. How ridiculous is THAT? I couldn’t fathom being one of them; a person who cries in front of strangers without shame or restraint, and then spends way too long explaining how amazing of an epiphany they just had.

I softened almost immediately, realizing that being too hard on myself was a sure way to make myself cry. It’s okay. Emotions are healthy. Just neutralize them until you can go recover somewhere else. ALONE.

Have you ever tried that technique? Did it ever work?

I looked up and saw, still standing on a blanket, a girl crying silently. She was the one who had arranged for our group to take part in this exercise. As I saw her face contorting with pain, I tried holding on to some sense of calm dignity. This is her story, not yours. You are a spectator. You care from a distance and then you go back to your business.

The funny thing is that nothing, out of everything I heard that morning, was new information to me. I didn’t have precise knowledge of the historical facts: the specific dates, the official names, or the corresponding treaties. But I had heard of it all: the illnesses, the deceptions, the executions…

However, I had always experienced Indigenous history as bits and pieces, studying one event at a time. That day, I was living it as a never-ending succession of horrors, which felt like I was both trapped on an express train headed to Hell and hit by it repeatedly. And yet, this fast-paced, can’t-make-it-stop kind of experience seemed, at times, unbearably slow.

The pain kept making its way up my throat. In an ultimate attempt to hold back the tears, I tried shaming myself: Your supervisor is here. The head of Public Affairs and Communications is right in front of you. The guy you laughed at criers with is somewhere on your left. Do NOT cry in front of these people. It would be unprofessional and ridiculous.

In the end, none of these save face strategies were good enough to downplay the intensity of what I was experiencing.

About 30 minutes in, I caved in.

I would love to say that it was the result of my inner wisdom breaking through to me. That as I accepted the depth of what I was feeling, I was naturally freed from the fear of appearing weak or unbalanced.

But it was more a matter of my ego losing the fight against the inescapable nightmare of people being ripped away from each other, their homeland, and their way of life.

I kept crying as those who were still standing were, save very few exceptions, sent back to their seats one by one. My piece about missing and murdered Indigenous women, which I read as a puffy mess, concluded the transition between the historical and the contemporary.

The mention of Indigenous women and girls being at a higher risk of physical and sexual assault provided a fresh sense of absurdity. The last few narrative texts focused on hope for the survivors.

The workshop was now coming to an end. After everyone had shared their thoughts about what we had just gone through, the Indigenous woman picked up a tambourine and started playing it while singing a song, sending everyone off with love and kindness.

The ordeal was over; we were free to try and carry on with our day. In my case, I aimed to try and reconcile myself with emotions I had considered useless and shameful. It wasn’t so difficult of a task in the end; I went about my day feeling a lot more fulfilled than I had excepted.

Though it can be a painful experience, the Indigenous Blanket Exercise is crucial for a safer, fairer future, as it has the power to bring about the most important change of all: a quiet shift within us. A kinder, more open-hearted look at what Indigenous people have gone through. A sense of personal connection to them.

This workshop made something clear to me: while public apologies and official recognition are essential for a country like Canada to improve its relationship with Indigenous Peoples, they’re not nearly enough. For true reconciliation to happen, we need to be open not just to learn about Indigenous history, but to understand who Indigenous peoples are in the present time.  We need to be willing to do things their way, even for just a few hours in a conference room.

And depending on who we are, that might be more that we’re willing to handle.

But that makes it all the more necessary.