CRC Staff Enact Blanket Exercise
Office of Social Justice
As he faced a corner of the room, Mark Charles’s words bounced off the walls and back to the people standing on folded blankets behind him.
The words he was reading came from the U.S. government’s apology to Native Americans, a scarcely noticed section of a 2010 Department of Defense appropriations bill.
The reading came at the end of what is known as a Blanket exercise, an interactive retelling of the history of relationships between Native Americans and other Americans.
It helps participants – in this case staff at the Grand Rapids office of the Christian Reformed Church – to understand why reconciliation is needed and how to move toward healing.
Charles, a Navajo and member of the CRC’s Board of Trustees, led staff through the exercise, which begins with participants, who represent Native Americans, standing and moving around comfortably on blankets that represent North America.
As the history is narrated, the blankets are gradually folded into smaller and smaller squares, coinciding with events in history that saw Native Americans decimated by disease and forced off their land.
“The exercise really brings home how Native Americans were shuttled about without regard to their wishes, similar to the way that people with disabilities can be shuttled off into institutions,” said Mark Stephenson, director of Disability Concerns, who participated in the activity over a lunch hour at the end of February.
“It helped to depict how people are dehumanized and made into the enemy,” reflected Esteban Lugo, the director of Race Relations.
The Blanket Exercise, which was originally developed for a Canadian audience and has been used by the Centre for Public Dialogue and other Canadian agencies for several years, was adapted for the United States by Erica VanEssendelft, policy analyst and advocacy fellow for the Office of Socal Justice, and others.
“This could never be just an exercise for Canada,” VanEssendelft said.
“Our histories with First Nations and Native Americans run parallel to each other. I am grateful for the opportunity to help contextualize the exercise to the American CRC context.
She said the Blanket Exercise is “just one more step in the journey of reconciliation with Native Americans.”
