Folding Back the Covers on Canada’s History of Indigenous Dispossession: The Evolution of the KAIROS Blanket Exercise

In response to calls for public education by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Aboriginal Rights Coalition (ARC), a church-funded partnership supporting Indigenous rights, collaborated with Indigenous organizations to create a popular education tool aimed at raising awareness among Canadians about the Indigenous “land question.” Over the last 30 years, especially under the curation of ARC’s successor, KAIROS Canada, the KAIROS Blanket Exercise (KBE) has evolved: from a humble exercise performed in church basements; to a tool for animating local, regional, national, and international Indigenous rights campaigns; to an adaptable resource for teaching Indigenous-settler history; to what some envisioned as a movement toward truth and reconciliation. Following increased exposure during Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, demand skyrocketed, with thousands of exercises being performed in schools and other institutions across the country. Led by KAIROS staff and a network of Indigenous facilitators, settler volunteers, and Elders and Knowledge Keepers, this explosion fostered burgeoning engagement with Canada’s ongoing colonial history and proliferated diverse forms of relationship building and activism. In this article, the author traces the emergence and evolution of the KBE, using Indigenous and anti-colonial pedagogical literatures to consider its impact over time. Drawing on sharing circles and interviews conducted with ARC and KAIROS staff, volunteers, and network members, the author explores the opportunities, tensions, and contradictions that arose as the KBE shifted from its grassroots origins toward more standardized, monetized, and internationalized expressions. The article explores critical questions pertaining to Indigenous voice and sovereign storytelling, ownership and control, historic and ongoing complicity, un/settling questions of land and sovereignty, and dis/connections between education and concrete Indigenous struggles. The author concludes by reflecting on what educators, activists, and scholars might learn from the twists and turns of the Blanket Exercise initiative about shifting Indigenous–settler relationships.

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