Needling at patriotism and protest

We all sort of forgot about celebrating Canada Day last weekend, up north, on a farm. No fireworks, no flags, no impressive array of themed party foods in the American way. That doesn’t make us UnCanadian, a term that doesn’t have any of the gravitas of UnAmerican. We may stand down from celebrations while remaining upstanding.

I feel a complicated gratitude about my Canadian citizenship, what with my settler-ancestors basically occupying traditional Indigenous territories. An inordinate number of maple leaf flags on a vehicle or house feels a bit aggressive and any big show of patriotism makes me itchy.

I started school in the U.S. All I remember about Kindergarten was learning to pledge allegiance to the flag while facing said flag, hand on heart, and also learning America the Beautiful and The Star-Spangled Banner. Then going home. I’m sure there were crafts but I’m thinking they were about all that too. Our rented house had American-eagle emblem wallpaper in the dining room and a flag mount at the front door. To Canadians, that’s a lot of patriotism.

Starting back in my East Vancouver elementary school, I was far more interested in singing “God save our gracious Queen” to that portrait of the bosomy, bejewelled young Elizabeth that hung in every classroom and in the auditorium. There was O Canada too, and the Lord’s Prayer for a while. These days it’s just the anthem and mostly for sporty public events but ask anyone around here and it’s a good bet they will not know the updated lyrics. (As if we need a daily reminder of the anthem, the first four notes of O Canada are blasted from a horn heard all over the city centre every day at noon.)

But what’s going on down south of this border has got my rapt attention and I’m not the only one. “Two-thirds of Canadians think the American democracy will not be able to survive another four years of Trump at the helm,” according to a January 2024 poll by the non-profit Angus Reid Institute. Further, “a Trump victory has many predicting dire consequences for both sides of the 49th parallel” with half of Canadians polled reporting they worry that the U.S. “could be on the way to becoming an authoritarian state.”

I am compelled to work out these big-picture worries in a joyful kind of making. These days the source of the most relentless anxieties is the fear-mongering that stokes disinformation, anti-immigration, genderism — all the human-rights-violating -tions and -isms. Currently I’m needling at it, layering up those worries through trending heavy hashtags in a weighted blanket, part of an ongoing series of Discomforters. 

But it’s not all solo projects. In 2019 I joined a needling army of joyful resistors to the Trump presidency, in the Tiny Pricks Project (@tinypricksproject), curated and created by a maker in my corner of the world, Diana Weymar. Her invitation via social media to contribute to the public-engagement project resulted in a tsunami of more than 5,000 stitched sentiments. Galleries on both sides of the border were filled with Trump’s angry tweets and comments rendered impotent in stitches and embellishments.

Being a part of that and other public craftivist projects started, for me, while living in central Mexico in the weeks leading up to the largest one-day march in American history on Washington. A grassroots social-media campaign had people all over the world taking up needles and hooks and stitching up pink pussy-hats, in comedic reference to the rape-y comments of the President-to-be. The pink sea of 2.6 million marchers on the day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017 remains an iconic image. It is yet to be seen which hat will be more enduring: the for-profit, mass-manufactured MAGA hat that his son-in-law claimed raised $80,000 a day during the 2016 campaign? Or the hand-stitched pussy-hats made singularly or in groups, and worn or gifted to marchers around the world?

That depends on who writes the history, and who owns the media.