During my childhood, my father would pile us into his Desoto and take us for Sunday drives on gravel roads to the Oneida settlement outside London, where farmers in this agricultural heartland of southern Ontario offered us baskets of apples and pears.
In 1840 the Oneida Nation in New York, facing certain annihilation, migrated to other parts of the United States and Canada. They bought land in southern Ontario and became part of the Six Nations. By the 20th century, the Oneida Nation in New York, which had once held six million acres of land, had only 32 acres left.
My parents’ friendships with First Nations communities was reflected in their political support for anti-racist and anti-colonial causes, including support of Palestinians after their dispossession of their land in 1948. It is from my parents’ example I trace the origins of their children’s social justice activism.
In 1989, the Embassy Cultural House collaborated with the Near East Cultural and Educational Foundation of Canada to present a powerful exhibition entitled Faithful Witness: Palestinian Children Recreate their World.
Accompanying the children’s drawings were Assia Habash, director of the Early Childhood Resource Centre in Jerusalem, and Jacqueline Sfeir, a psychologist from Bethlehem, who presented a lecture, Children and State Violence, at Western.
Echoing that earlier exhibition, A Child’s View from Gaza opens at Citi Plaza’s Art Fusion Gallery, 355 Wellington Rd., and runs there through Sept. 20. It then travels to various sites around London until Oct. 12. For locations, visit cjpme.org. Presented by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), the exhibition focuses on artworks representing the impact of Israel’s 2008-09 Cast Lead Operation.
The works are a result of art therapy which, through the creative process, helped the children in Gaza deal with the trauma of the Israeli assault. This collection of poignant images by children ages 5-14 offers a powerful window into their lives.
What is striking in these images is that very little has changed from the conditions represented in the 1989 exhibit in London.
CJPME, a national advocacy organization, has been touring these art works by children across Canada.
This revealing exhibition challenges the Harper government, which has strongly positioned Canadian Foreign policy in favour of Israel. This unconditional support of Israel dismisses our country’s previous approach in which Canada had tried to pressure Israel to respect international law. This exhibition of recently gathered works of art from Gaza is in direct response to those violations, from a place which tragically is in an on-going state of turbulence.
These works remind us to be ‘faithful witnesses’ – something that a previous generation confronted us with similar painful images.
Canada has not been able, as part of an international community, to ease the situation in Gaza; rather in some ways the situation has become worse. Exhibitions such as A Child’s View from Gaza offer us a learning opportunity. Londoners and others across Canada are again having a unique opportunity to consider the impact that the Israeli military has on Palestinian children, denying them the possibility of a childhood full of play and laughter.
London-based mixed-media artist and winner of the Governor General’s Award for Visual Arts (2001), Jamelie Hassan has exhibited widely across Canada and internationally. Her survey exhibition Jamelie Hassan: At the Far Edge of Words, organized by Museum London, is presently on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto until Oct. 14.