ABSTRACT
In 2015, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission published the full extent of crimes committed over one hundred years by the Canadian government and churches in residential schools. Racial reconciliation is “a call for rhetoric and a form of rhetorical activity”. Hatch described reconciliation as a tragicomic rhetorical genre in which individuals take on different roles: oppressors assume the role of the comic; victims take on the role of the tragic. The Witness Blanket is a visual argument for networked reconciliation, an argument that viewers perform when interacting with it. Viewers can interact with objects, in much the same way that they can interact with survivors. The Witness Blanket powerfully demonstrates a vision of networked reconciliation that calls its viewers to listen and to innovate reconciliation. Just as individuals tore the blanket’s shards from their original settings, so the Canadian government tore approximately 150,000 Aboriginal children from their homeland, some never to return.
