A Million Chips Falling as “Tears for Our Children”
- Ayesha Anderson
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
Robertson, J. (2026). A million chips falling as “Tears for Our Children” [Wood carving]. Created in memory of the Indigenous children who never returned home from residential schools. Photograph shared with permission of Master Carver Grizzlybear Ma'llas Jackson Robertson.
Within Indigenous understandings of place, home is not simply geographic location. Home can exist through memory, ceremony, language, family, spirit, and relationships to land carried across generations. The carving A Million Chips Falling as “Tears for Our Children” reflects this understanding of place as both physical and emotional, a place of mourning, remembrance, healing, and return.
As millions of cedar chips fell during the carving process, my grandfather described them as “tears for our children,” honouring the Indigenous children who never returned home from residential schools and whose remains continue to be discovered in unmarked graves across Canada. The carving itself became a ceremonial place of remembrance rooted in cedar, story, grief, and ancestral connection.
Reflecting on Gord Downie’s Secret Path and the story of Chanie Wenjack, I think deeply about the longing Indigenous children carried for home after being separated from their families, lands, languages, and communities through residential schools. Chanie’s journey was not only a physical attempt to return home, but also a yearning to reconnect with place, belonging, family, and love (CBC Arts, 2016).
I connect profoundly to this idea of coming home through my own family history. Last year, my great-grandmother Julia, a residential school survivor and missing Indigenous woman, her remains were finally brought home through a coming home ceremony after being missing for many years. That experience transformed my understanding of place. Home is not simply a structure or destination, home is family, ancestors, cedar in the air, ocean water, language, memory, and the feeling of belonging.
Through this carving, the children who never made it home are remembered and honoured within place itself. The cedar, the carving, and the fallen chips become witnesses to grief, survivance, ceremony, and Indigenous resurgence. In this way, the artwork becomes both memorial and place, a space where memory, spirit, and home continue to live.
References
CBC Arts. (2016, October 23). Gord Downie’s The Secret Path [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGd764YU9yc
Robertson, J. (2026). A million chips falling as “Tears for Our Children” [Wood carving]. Personal collection.
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