From Nova Scotia VOW ~
“Peace Knot Bombs” is a collective textile art work made by over 50 women from across Turtle Island. Initiated in Nova Scotia, the resulting banner memoralizes victims of military violence inflicted upon communities and families due to endless and accelerating armed conflicts. In a post Covid world, we hope to display the banner and raise questions and share information about the weapons industry, militarism and disarmament. Knot Bombs was completed for the Kjipuktuk Remembers: White Peace Poppy Ceremony that took place in the Peace and Friendship Park on November 11, 2021.
We hope to display the banner in various venues across Canada, beginning in Nova Scotia. At the display, postcards of the banner with a description and information will be available and participants will be encouraged to mail the postcards to politicians expressing their views on Canada’s military spending. In 2018 this spending rose to $32 billion, while environment and climate change spending has flatlined at $1.8 billion.
The project is a cloth banner (89 by 59 inches) made in several stages in order to work around covid restrictions. We met on zoom and cloth pieces were sent to participants by mail and returned by post as well. There were three phases to the project, which included over 50 squares of individual design framing two birds, mother and child, that swoop over a darkened and broken city scape. Along the lower border, bombs falling from 19 fighter jets rain down on those buildings – each jet represents $1 billion to be spent on the procurement. The feathers of the birds are embroidered in English and Arabic and carry the names and ages of Yemeni children killed by a bomb attack in August 2018; 38 children died and 40 were wounded when a Lockheed Martin Bomb hit their school bus on a school trip. Over 70% of the population, including 11.3 million children have been displaced in the relentless bombing that included markets, hospitals and civilians. Canada is profiting from selling billions in arms to Saudi Arabia, a profit steeped in sorrow and suffering.
As our group of women were finishing this banner, 80 girls were killed in a school bombing in Kabul, in a country that has been at war for over 30 years. Rather than winning ‘hearts and minds’, the women and children have been handed broken hearts and a horrific future. The spirits of children found on Turtle Island on Residential school property call to the world. Gaza is in flames and the Ukraine is shattered. Whether Afghani, Yemeni, Ukranians-the scale of loss balances the grief of a mother equally. How do the lives of those that take to the skies with honour under the wings of patriotism outweigh the lives of those waiting for clean water? We must remember and witness over and over again in any way that we can.
This is a banner that witnesses and denounces the famine of courage and strength in a politics of compromise and concealment in ways that are direct and indirect. Nova Scotia Voice of Women for Peace does not have the answers to the endless armed conflict that continues to plague the planet, but through commemoration and an ethic of love and care stitched into this banner, we hope viewers will explore the connection between arming the world and the suffering of families.