Discovering the sun on Earth

2021

During the last 60 years of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, more than 2 thousand ships were condemned for the illegal trafficking of abducted Black forepersons. Names and information was recorded for 91,491 people found held captive of these ships. Among them 30,926 were children. 

This pieces serves as a memorial and final resting site for these children. Limestone boulders stand in place of an ancestral stool. The stool is a symbols of unity, kinship, mutual solidarity and support of the community members. They provide a sense of belongingness, scared obligations, rights, loyalty and obedience. It gives a community its group identity with the land which has nurtured it and provides it with not only its sustenance but also its link with its past and future. The stool binds the people together in time and space and supports their belief in their community as a living and organic entity, a family with a continuous past, present and future.

It is impossible to begin to understand the experiences of these children and lay memorial to them in a foreign land unknown to their ancestral history. Similarly it impossible to have this piece without acknowledging the land on which it stands. This piece and it's sourced limestone are on the ancestral homelands of the Wahpekute and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ peoples. 

be not abandoned of this place

be laid to rest

in skies of purple and gold

so that ships may

fly backwards

on prairie dog barks

Installed at Franconia Sculpture Park with special help and thanks from Michele Caron-Pawlowsky, Helen Dolan, Milan Warner, and Sammy Jean Wilson. Limestone donated by Rivard Stone.