In December 2025, I visited the McMichael Canadian Art Collection with my husband, a visual artist. The McMichael holds a special place in our relationship, a place where he, an American, met many of the Indigenous artists who survived colonization and its aftermath to make art exploring the heart of Turtle Island’s beauty, torment, and sources of healing. This art has been important to me for most of my life.
As a white girl born into the racist culture of a US/Canadian border town, I grew up hearing and reading stories of white beneficence toward “backward Natives.” My real education began with a teachers’ college friendship, not with an Indigenous person, but with a friend who during this period identified as a Black woman. Before we had words like settler, and intersectional feminist, and systemic racism, and cultural genocide, we didn’t address the obvious inequities in schooling that led many whites into professions and People of Colour into the less-than positions open to “minorities.”
I never forgot the things I learned from this beloved friend. Much later in life, when I tried to reconnect with her, I understood why we couldn’t. Too little awareness of my white privilege over the years of our young adulthood prevented her from trusting me. How could she be sure I was safe to know in middle age when I’d been so oblivious during adolescence and young adulthood? She couldn’t. I’d lived for years benefiting from the privilege bestowed on racism’s favoured white sons and daughters.
Something perhaps neither of us understood back then was the great potential we had for forging an authentic friendship. She didn’t know about, and I didn’t understand, the importance of an early event in my life that would lead me to the margins of life where the people I admired and empathized with created supportive communities to navigate the white racism that has created systems to ensure othering and less-than status. This personal event, a seven-month quarantine in a tuberculosis preventorium housing children exposed to TB, changed everything in my life, including my sense of belonging . . . to my white family and within my white skin.
Once I began therapy in my thirties, I found the courage to ask questions about this quarantine period, a subject forbidden in our household throughout my child and teen years. By the time I began therapy, I was well informed enough to know that a two-year-old toddler can’t survive in caged isolation without some kind of affectionate relationships. When I questioned the grandmother who raised me, she insisted this experience was of little consequence. When I asked my mother, her reaction – sudden tears – suggested she too had questions about quarantine and our subsequent estrangement.
I persisted, asking and witnessing her tears until these gave way to my mother’s recollections of her own time in quarantine, a far longer period than I endured, in the adult wing of the sanitarium with many war veterans dying of tuberculosis. I learned from these highly charged conversations that TB patients were considered dissolute, that they had somehow brought their illness on themselves through wayward behaviours that led to poverty and promiscuity. As a thirty-year-old mother of two young girls whose husband left her in the early days of her quarantine, my mother was easily convinced that she had somehow brought her misfortunes on herself. It is always easy to bully a victim of bullying. My mother had been bullied by her mother, the grandmother who became her stand-in when she was diagnosed with life-threatening TB and quarantined for two years.
Discovering this story – our attachment rupture story – helped me to understand why I’d led a very anxious life, why I found it impossible to concentrate during my early schooling, and why I felt so isolated even from those who professed to love and value me. But this story, our story, didn’t help me to understand how I survived being caged for seven months. I had a hunch there was another story, one my young self knew and longed to tell as much as I, the resourceful, adult Jane, longed to hear.
Supported by the therapeutic process, I was able to persist with my questions, working through mutual discomfort with my mother, and piecing together the parts of the story she had been holding for me without knowing I would one day need these pieces to understand who I’d become. One of these fragments slipped into my heart years after we’d began our question-and-answer dance. On a day ordinary in every aspect, she told me I was not the only child in the preventorium. There had been six First Nations children in isolation with me. I was the youngest. The oldest, she’d heard from the doctor who had treated us, had been about twelve.
All at once I could feel myself sprung from my cage to go on adventures with this tiny ad hoc family, perhaps after lights out or during staff lunch breaks. Suddenly I could imagine meaningful relationships saturated with affection and comfort, relationships that never had to be named or explained. We were prisoners together. Of course we bonded.
I learned very little about these Indigenous children in spite of making inquiries through medical records departments. “Destroyed long ago,” I was told, “when the TB Sanitarium closed and a proper hospital was built on its grounds.” In spite of my efforts to reconnect, these six children remained my family in imagination only.
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This status changes on the day I move through McMichael rooms full of Indigenous artwork in December 2025. A twelve-year-old, in charge and tenderly concerned for the younger ones, becomes as real as my own flesh. The girls and boys descending in age and height, and me, the two-year-old, spoiled and passed from hip to hip, are together again. I can hear our laughter as we share our secret, forbidden adventures. What precipitates our reunion?
As I walk through these dusky, silent rooms, I come upon a framed, cornflower-blue, beaded circle holding a pair of lungs, these beaded in gold and red.
As soon as I see this image, my eyes fill. For a moment, I fear I might howl.
I stumble forward, and, within inches of its beauty and its terror, I see this piece has a name: “Tuberculosis.”
Unaware of any place to sit in this Presence that contains my past, I stand before this masterpiece of paradox and sway to music heard a long time ago. Ruth Cuthand, this work’s creator, has conjured my past into the present with her symbol of the disease that has swept countless of its intended victims to life’s margins. Because she has created this beaded image of pain and isolation, a little of the suffering I shared with my six family members is healed.
I am, because of Ruth Cuthand’s art, re-membered into a family of quarantined children who are now beaded together for all time in my heart. This powerful artist neither needs or wants my thanks. Still, I give it in the way that I give daily thanks for all the sources of beauty and harmony shaping my life. Thanks to Ruth Cuthand’s vision and skill and ferocious re-membering work, I now have one more image of healing and wholeness.
To learn about Ruth Cuthand and her work, visit https://www.ruthcuthand.ca/
To see “Tuberculosis” visit: https://www.ruthcuthand.ca/reserving-series/
To learn more about the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, visit: https://mcmichael.com/
Until next time,
Jane