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Clouds above Fort Calgary stifled the sky on Saturday, shedding tear-like raindrops as people marked the third National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
“The inclement weather is a perfect blessing in our culture,” Hal Eagletail, a member of the Northern Dene TsuuT’ina Nation, told a crowd.
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“It’s like a lubricant between this world and the spirit world, so this weather is very appropriate for the children and the names behind me we’re going to be talking about.”
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More than a hundred people, most of them wearing orange, gathered at the event, where Indigenous elders, city leaders and youth spoke about the day’s significance on a stage flanked by an orange screen bearing the names of residential school attendees who never made it home.
“On behalf of my council colleagues, I stand before you today to address a grave injustice that shaped our nation,” Mayor Jyoti Gondek said, addressing the crowd.
The federal statutory holiday was introduced in 2021 as thousands of potential unmarked graves near former residential schools were being unearthed.
The holiday also coincides with Orange Shirt Day, an Indigenous-led movement to raise awareness of the legacy of residential schools which borrows its name from an experience of a residential school survivor, Phyllis Webstad, where her orange shirt she had excitedly bought before being admitted to residential school was taken away by the school and never seen again.
The residential school system, overseen by the federal government alongside the Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches from 1831 to 1996, forcefully separated children from their families in an effort to assimilate them into the dominant culture.
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Children were stripped of their cultural identity and punished for speaking their languages. Many were abused. Some even died. Their trauma has been passed down to younger generations, and with further abuses through the child protection system, it has taken shape in various forms, including addiction.
Their plight has been exacerbated by several barriers to progress that exist even today.
“It’s hard to talk about residential school,” said Peter Weasel Moccasin, an elder and knowledge-keeper in the Blackfoot Confederacy.
“Before you heal, you get quite angry. You don’t know who to express it to. That was the journey of my life.”
He talked about how he was abused for not being able to speak English fluently, how he was constantly made fun of for being Indigenous, for being unable to defend himself, and how his pain seeped into his behaviour as an adult and manifested itself in anger and addiction.
“I’m still healing today, still learning today,” he said. “But it’s been a wonderful journey. I’ve met a lot of good people to help me out. It’s not impossible to heal.”
Listening to him in the crowd was Alanah Quintel. She was attending the event for her grandmother, who lost her brother in residential school.
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“We don’t know where the heck he is still to this day,” she said.
Quintel endured the pain of attending residential school through her parents, whose trauma would spill into their interactions in the form of anger.
“They never really liked to share their experiences,” said Quintel, who also attended a residential school operated by Blue Quills in Cold Lake, Alta., from age 3 to 6, but didn’t experience the kind of abuse her parents or grandparents faced.
For her, reconciliation means “remembering those young kids who got killed,” which is partly achieved by such events.
Quintel watched as dancers celebrated their culture on the stage, as drummers filled the air with their beats.
“To be here, it’s actually nice,” she said.
Among those drummers was Johnny Powderface, who is a member of the Stoney Nakoda Nation and part of the Chiniki Lake Singers.
He learned about residential schools from his father, who he said would be whipped for not being able to speak English.
“That’s probably the experience I’m OK with sharing,” he said.
For Powderface, reconciliation means patching relationships between Indigenous communities and the broader Canadian society. It means going to reserves and helping them fix their houses, and purify their water, which has long been known to be toxic.
“These kinds of events are good,” he said. “But I think the next step is to work with the Indigenous peoples on their land.”
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