BLANKET BC SOCIETY ◊ GIVING BLANKETS TO THE POOR ◊ AND THE FIRST PEOPLES BLANKET CEREMONIES & HISTORY

◊🪞💎 In this archive, we will explore the First Nations’ ancient traditional “Blanket Ceremony,” which symbolizes protection (among many other meanings), and the tragic history of how this ceremony was inverted and weaponized by colonizers. Settlers intentionally gave blankets infected with smallpox with genocidal intent, transforming these ceremonies today into symbols not only of protection but also of resilience and survival.

◊🔑 I will also share a personal story from my own period of homelessness and my search for a safe blanket — explaining why I feel called to offer this archive.

How This Archive is Ethical Inspiration ◊ Not Cultural Appropriation

◊🌎 Through education about the First Peoples, anyone can draw inspiration from the values of their ancient ceremonies without appropriating their culture. This archive seeks to educate, honour Indigenous ethics, and inspire charitable giving. When we learn about the meaning behind blanket gifting, we appreciate rather than extract — acting with integrity, compassion, and responsibility.


◊⚖️ Cultural appropriation of the blanket ceremony would involve imitating sacred ceremonies, using sacred objects without permission, claiming authority or ceremonial roles one does not hold, exploiting traditions for profit, removing rituals from their cultural context, or extracting teachings in ways that harm Indigenous peoples. Ethical inspiration is different. It honours the teachings without misusing the practice.

◊💐 In this archive, I acknowledge the symbolism and history of blanket ceremonies without describing sacred songs, protocols, or rituals — all of which rightfully belong under Indigenous Elders.

About the Aboriginal First Peoples / Native American Blanket Ceremonies

◊💝 Blanket-gifting ceremonies appear across many Indigenous Nations — including Coast Salish, Cree, Lakota, Blackfoot, Haudenosaunee, and others — where a blanket is a sacred expression of protection, honour, transition, grief, or community recognition. To “blanket” someone means : You are held. You are recognized. You are protected by the Indigenous First Peoples.


◊🐺 Among Coast Salish peoples, spiritual blankets woven from mountain goat and dog hair were traditionally used for naming ceremonies, marriages, and healing rituals. Plains Nations relied on buffalo robes and later trade blankets as symbols of honour and the transfer of spiritual rights. Haudenosaunee condolence ceremonies used blankets to “wipe the tears” of those grieving. In Cree and Blackfoot communities, blankets mark generosity, service, and important life transitions.

◊❤️‍🔥 Although each Nation’s teachings differ, blankets commonly symbolize warmth, kinship, responsibility, protection, connection, and honour. Some carry lineage, song rights, ancestral patterns, or spiritual intention. Blanket gifting is deeply relational — filled with history, healing, and intergenerational meaning.

Inter-Cultural Blanket Ceremonies ◊ Blanket BC Society’s Ceremony

◊🤲 I was deeply moved to learn that Blanket BC Society received a traditional blanket ceremony, presumably from the local Coast Salish Nation. When Elders blanket someone — especially across cultures — it signifies trust, recognition, reciprocity, and spiritual responsibility.

◊🔑 A blanket ceremony offered to an organization like the Blanket BC Society expresses welcome, gratitude and shared responsibility. It honours their role in providing warmth to those in need — a value woven deeply through Indigenous teachings.

◊💎 In an inter-cultural setting, Blanket BC Society would not have been taught sacred protocols. Instead, the ceremony recognized their intention and acknowledged their service.

◊🎙 This ceremony may have involved placing a blanket on key volunteers while speaking about honouring intention, recognizing service as sacred responsibility, witnessing their work, expressing gratitude for their care to the unhoused, possibly acknowledging the painful history of smallpox blankets, and offering blessings for protection and continued service.

Colonizers’ Symbolic Inversion and Weaponization of the Blanket Ceremonies


◊🦠 In a devastating inversion, British colonizers in the 1700s weaponized the deep cultural significance of the blanket ceremony. Knowing blankets were sacred, they deliberately distributed smallpox-infected blankets from hospitals as acts of biological warfare.


◊🖤 Outbreaks followed, wiping out 50–90% of entire populations in some Nations. Indigenous communities have spent generations mourning, healing, and transforming the trauma of this betrayal of trust, culture, and life.

The Indigenous Practices of Healing & Transforming This Cultural Wound


◊💐 Each Nation holds its own healing traditions, but many share common threads that include reaffirming the blanket as sacred, carrying out community mourning rituals such as smudging, songs, and drumming, using storytelling as ceremony, revitalizing culture through language, education, and land-based healing, and honouring ancestors lost in epidemics.

◊🧬🧡 Many Indigenous leaders emphasize giving — of blankets, food, care, and resources — as a conscious reversal of colonial violence. “They used blankets to harm. We use blankets to protect life.” Through this restoration of the inversion, trauma becomes living medicine.

Two Experiences of the Blanket’s Symbolic Inversion ◊ A Modern Echo of History


◊🖤🖤 Twice in my life, I experienced inversions of the blanket’s meaning in settings where the blanket was claimed as sacred. These modern echoes show how symbolic distortion persists today. Though I am not First Nations and do not claim their historical trauma, my stories illuminate the theme. One incident occurred during a ceremony at a Coast Salish Longhouse; the other while receiving a blanket from a Catholic church during a period of homelessness.

Poison Disguised As Medicine ◊ My Experience at the Coast Salish Longhouse


◊🌿🌘 The shíshálh Nation of Sechelt generously opened their Longhouse to host a visiting healer from Peru, Guillermo Arévalo, who was scheduled to lead ceremonies. The community tended the space, spiritually gathered cedar to generously line the floors of the Longhouse, hosted sweat lodge, and honoured Guillermo with a blanket ceremony in front of hundreds of participants.

◊🥀 At the ceremony, Guillermo’s assistant asked me for $75 toward his blanket. In a traditional Peruvian request for healing, I offered Peruvian Mapacho tobacco to Guillermo and described my ailment. Over three nights, Guillermo repeatedly called me forward separately from others at a later time, and gave me a drink he referred to as medicine.

◊🌺🖤 The effects soon mirrored symptoms of Brugmansia intoxication — disorientation, confusion, and loss of bodily control. While I was impaired, pretending to do hands-on healing on me, he touched me in a sexually violating way, between the legs.

◊⛴⚡️I spiraled into physical and psychological distress, attempted to leave, and eventually found myself on a ferry home to Vancouver, screaming, crying and flailing around dramatically in such a way which is not normal for me at all. I called a knowledgeable Curandero who was unrelated to these ceremonies on the phone for help, and he advised that my symptoms matched deliberate Brugmansia poisoning.

◊🖤 I was unable to get home on the ferry, and found myself returning to the ceremonies in my disorientation. When I then sought help from Guillermo’s students, they provided no meaningful response. His student Karen expressed irritation at my reports, and insisted my situation was not her concern, continuing to ask for money to provide for more blanket ceremonies for Guillermo. When I told him what had happened, he just laughed in a detached manner and said nothing else.

The Significance of This Event at the Longhouse

◊🔑 This was not a First Nations blanket ceremony harming me — it was a predator exploiting a sacred space. The shíshálh Nation offered generosity and welcome. Guillermo used their legitimacy and hospitality as camouflage to isolate and harm me.


◊☠️ He violated me, violated the community’s trust, and violated the sacred meaning of the blanket. What should have represented protection was twisted into a symbol of power imbalance, misuse of authority, and lack of proper relational accountability. His actions disrespected the community, the protocol, and the ceremony that honoured him.

Distortion Disguised As Charity ◊ A Harmful Blanket at the Catholic Church


◊🧊💎 A similar symbolic inversion occurred at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Gibsons, BC, when I was homeless, living in an unheated trailer. I requested a blanket from their winter charity program and was given a synthetic blanket sealed in plastic for over a decade.


◊🖤 When I opened it, it disintegrated into thousands of sticky fibres that filled the air, clung to my skin, contaminated my belongings, and impaired my breathing. Without stable access to showers, I couldn’t fully clean myself. When I returned to explain what had happened, their only reply was, “We will never get in trouble for that.” They did not offer another blanket.

The Significance of the Event at the Catholic Church


◊🚫 This violation stemmed not from predation but from negligence and apathy. Yet again, a blanket — meant to symbolize safety — became a symbol of harm. At a moment of vulnerability, when I needed warmth, I was given something unsafe and unexamined. Their dismissal denied dignity, accountability, and care. This heavily contrasts Indigenous blanket symbolism rooted in relational ethics and reciprocity.

Reclaiming the Blanket ◊ UNITY LIFE’s Reflection With Indigenous Healing Principles

◊🧬💐 This archive, in cooperation with BC Blanket Society, reflects core Indigenous healing principles not by replicating ceremony but by honouring relational ethics, truth-telling, reciprocity, and service. Indigenous knowledge belongs to Indigenous peoples, and the wisdom applied here draws only from what is publicly taught.


◊🕯️ In many Indigenous cultures, truth-telling itself is a ceremony — a way of restoring balance and witnessing pain. Naming harms and placing them in their broader context reflects healing approaches where truth becomes medicine.


◊🎁 Indigenous healing includes reclaiming symbols that were weaponized. UNITY LIFE mirrors this by reclaiming the blanket as an act of care — just as communities did this with smallpox blankets by their transformative ethic of generosity. Elders often say, “The antidote to colonial violence is giving back to life.”


◊💎🥋 By promoting and donating to BC Blanket Society, we participate in rewriting the meaning of the blanket — restoring it as a symbol of protection, dignity, warmth, and living connection.


◊🌐 Indigenous healing focuses on doing our work in community together rather than isolating it into privacy. This public archive reaches out to the collective, as it educates, honours, exposes predatory dynamics, and uplifts BC Blanket Society — supporting community safety and warmth.

Conclusion ◊ Supporting Blanket BC Society


◊🌞 The Blanket BC Society received an Indigenous blanket ceremony not as appropriation but as honour — a sign of trust and relational welcome. Their work reflects the spirit of blanket gifting without replicating sacred protocols.

◊💫🌈 Through our donations — whether money or thrift — we help shift the meaning of the blanket from weaponization to protection, from harm to care, from abandonment to reciprocity, and from scarcity to warmth. Together, we co-create a new, healed reality.