At glitzy reception, Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will come face to face with artwork representing ‘cultural genocide’

The Swiss cut chandeliers are being dusted off and silverware polished as Government House in Victoria, Canada, prepares to host a glitzy reception to fete the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

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A who’s who of Canadian leaders will descend on the 300-person ballroom of the stately mansion on Monday to shake hands and make acquaintance with the royal couple. But just beyond them will sit a powerful art installation aimed at showcasing an entirely different side of Canada’s relationship with its monarchy.

Reaching almost 2.5 metres (8ft) high, and stretching more than 12 metres long , the cedar frames of the Witness Blanket hold more than 800 objects, ranging from leather straps once used to beat children to a doll made of a rag and sticks by a child desperate to recreate the toy she was forced to leave at home.

Each object is an intimate window into one of Canada’s ugliest chapters: the residential schools where about 150,000 indigenous children were taken to forcibly integrate into Canadian society. A truth commission last year described the state-run schools as a tool of “cultural genocide”.

It was the same commission that inspired the Witness Blanket. “Truth telling and remembering requires remembering all parts of it,” said Carey Newman, the Kwagiulth artist behind the installation. “The very laws that enacted residential schools were signed off by our sovereign. That’s a really big part of how we got here.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Witness Blanket. Photograph: Handout

On Saturday, the duke and duchess along with Prince George and Princess Charlotte – who will make her royal tour debut – will land in Victoria for a one-week tour of British Columbia and the Yukon. The family’s packed agenda is punctuated with visits to First Nations communities and traditional ceremonies, in an itinerary that Kensington Palace said “will help celebrate Canada’s First Nations community, its art and culture”.

It is an emphasis that will force the royal couple to confront the uneasy, tumultuous relationship that exists today between many of Canada’s First Nations and the crown – one that stretches back to the first foundational contact with European colonialists and was later formalised through treaties.

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At Monday’s reception, the Witness Blanket will offer a first-hand look at how this relationship has played out over the years. “The blanket definitely speaks to the colonial history aspect of indigenous people in Canada,” said Newman, whose father was sent to a residential school. Objects collected include a piece of plastic from the last residential school in Canada, which closed its doors just two decades ago.

As news broke of the royal visit, Newman worked his contacts to put the piece on display for the royals, keen to use the atrocities of the past to highlight what is at stake as the next generation of royals prepare to take the helm of the fragile relationship. “They represent the future of our colonial relationship.”

During the treaty-making process, First Nations entered a relationship with the crown on an equal footing, said the Assembly of First Nations national chief, Perry Bellegarde. “We have that nation-to-nation relationship with the crown,” he said. “We hold the crown and monarchy in high regard.”

But the bond, predicated on peaceful coexistence and mutual respect, and which aimed to allow both nations to benefit from sharing Canada’s land and resource wealth, has since “been tainted and soured”, he said.

Canada is rated sixth in the world when it comes to the United Nations Human Development Index. “But when you apply those same indices to indigenous peoples, we’re 63rd,” Bellegarde said. “Obviously we’re not sharing the land and resource wealth of this great country.”

Indigenous peoples in Canada – who make up about 4% of the population – grapple with poverty, imprisonment and suicide rates much higher than those of non-indigenous Canadians. Aboriginal women are four times more likely to go missing or be murdered than other Canadian women. Many First Nations communities struggle with inadequate, overcrowded housing, with 132 communities currently under boil-water advisories because their drinking water could be contaminated.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

“We didn’t basically share all the land and resource wealth in Canada to perpetuate poverty and colonisation and genocide,” Bellegarde said.

The royal visit offered First Nations a critical opportunity to build key allies as they continued to seek the nation-to-nation relationship outlined in the treaties, he said. “We’re going to have to use every tool we can to repair the relationship we have.”

Others, such as Pamela Palmater, who heads the centre for indigenous governance at Toronto’s Ryerson University, demand more. “Canada has gone through a truth and reconciliation process where some of the churches have apologised for their role and Canada has apologised for its role. But we’re missing the biggest portion of the apology and it’s from the people who actually orchestrated it, which were representatives of the British crown.”

Palmater’s call for an apology was the focus of a keynote address at the British Library in April to a gathering of British academics studying Canada. “There can’t be any reconciliation until the British crown and its people know what happened, know what the intergenerational impact has been and take responsibility for it and apologise and do something to make amends,” she told them amid reactions of shock and, later, broad support.

She questioned whether this week’s visit would simply yield a series of photo opportunities using indigenous culture as a backdrop, or whether the royal couple would seek to address some of the tough issues. “It needs to move beyond the fun stuff to deal with the life and death issues facing First Nations,” she said. “This is their legacy. So what are they going to do to remedy that legacy?”