Individuals and organizations responded with ceremonies and gestures of solidarity across Oakville as the news sank in of the discovery of the remains of 215 children buried in a Kamloops, B.C., mass grave.
In southwest Oakville, 215 orange ribbons appeared in the gardens of the Lighthouse Centre for Grieving Children, and 215 orange paper cutouts appeared in the road allowance in front of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Secondary School. Downtown, assemblages of children's shoes appeared in front of the Oakville Museum and Oakville Public Library, while over at town hall, Canadian flags flew at half-mast for one week. This week, the flags were still at half-mast at the Siemens Oakville office and Ford plant on the western edge of town.
On Tuesday, June 1, a small healing ceremony was organized by Grandmothers Voice, the grassroots organization founded in 2018 by Oakville resident Jody Harbour and Sherry Saevil, Indigenous Education Advisor for Halton Catholic District School Board. Elders from Six Nations led the ceremony at the group's newly established healing garden in Milton, using dozens of children's shoes collected from Oakville by two volunteers.
On the banks of Sixteen Mile Creek in North Oakville, another ceremony was organized Saturday, June 5, at 2:15 p.m. by Stephen Paquette, Halton District School Board’s Indigenous Knowledge Lead. Parks staff had mowed a path to the water and made a small clearing below the pedestrian bridge so the group could sing sacred songs that might help the spirits of the children journey peacefully to the spirit world. A pair of staff from the YMCA appeared with a box of face masks, an infrared thermometer and hand sanitizer to help the small group maintain COVID protocol. Four women with drums shared their healing songs while a cluster of quiet onlookers gathered above on the footbridge. As the group dispersed into the summer heat, six pink carnations floated downstream.
Angela Bellegarde, an Oakville resident and band member of the Peepeekisis First Nation in Treaty 4, says she hopes the gruesome discovery motivates more Canadians to confront the truth of our national history. "These are Canada’s children too," Bellegarde says. "How come you don’t know? It’s not a shock to us Indigenous people."
At Saturday's ceremony, Bellegarde shared how her great grandmother would say proudly that at least her child who died at residential school got to have a coffin. The small mercy of being allowed to reclaim your own child's body was not something taken for granted by Indigenous parents whose children were forcibly taken by a state and church focussed on "killing the Indian in the child.” It’s not known how many children died while attending residential school -- estimates range from at least 3,200 to 6,000.
Monique Craigen, a member of Grandmothers Voice and one of the drummers at the Saturday ceremony, reflected that the voices of the children whom Canada tried to forget would now be carried far and wide, and no one would be able to ignore them anymore.
An Oakville mom to Indigenous children, Shannon Park, said she was sorry she didn't have the opportunity to grieve together as she would have in Winnipeg, where she lived for 14 years. Her three-year-old lost his father to a drug overdose in May, and Park says she knows her former partner died of the intergenerational trauma that was passed on to him. "Even before his death, I knew it was quite possible it could happen to him. I noticed Winnipeg had this huge memorial for the children, and I wanted to be there so badly to be with my friends out there and have that cultural connection that I don’t really have in Oakville."
"For people who are only now listening (to the stories of residential school survivors), this is the tip of the iceberg," Park says. "I hope all this starts coming out more and more, and people will now listen to the people who have survived and what they witnessed."
For Dalia El-Farra, an Oakville mom who managed to collect almost 100 pairs of children's shoes for Grandmothers Voice on May 31, the effects of colonization on Indigenous people echoed with her ancestors' experiences in the Middle East. Asked what motivated her to collect shoes, she says, "I felt helpless, I didn’t know what I could do, and this was the least I could do."
"One of my learnings over the years is that I’m a settler on lands that are colonized, and that (fact) was very disturbing for me to learn because I’m Palestinian," El-Farra says. "Since then, I’ve been on a journey of learning and unlearning, trying to be respectful of the land I’m on."
Oakville Ward 1 Town Councillor Beth Robertson also drove around town collecting shoes for Grandmothers Voice. Reached by phone, Robertson says the news of the 215 motivated her to end her affiliation with the Catholic church after decades as a member. She says she could no longer stomach the underwhelming church response to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's request for a formal apology. "I just left the Catholic church -- this was like a final straw," she says. Of all the churches involved in Canada's residential school legacy, the Catholic church was the largest, running close to three-quarters of the 139 federally supported Indian residential schools that once operated in Canada from the 1870s to 1997. While the federal government and other churches involved in the residential school system have offered formal apologies, the Catholic church has not.
Pressed on what the Town of Oakville could do to act on the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action, Robertson said COVID-19 is partly to blame for the absence of a candlelight vigil or other collective grieving ceremony in response to the news. "I don’t know what my next (step) is, except for keeping the conversation going," Robertson said.
Sherry Saevil, one of the Grandmothers Voice founders, challenged Oakville residents to engage with the Truth and Reconciliation 94 Calls to Action and the 231 recommendations from the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. "They say the longest journey is from your head to your heart," Saevil says. "We're talking about 215 kids, but that’s not going to be the last one. Every residential school is going to need to be searched with ground-penetrating radar. Laying down children's shoes, yes, that is an act. But what are you going to do next?"
The closest residential school to Oakville was the Mohawk Institution, colloquially known as the Mush Hole because of the infamously insufficient rations its involuntary students were forced to subsist on. Survivors of the Mush Hole are working to raise $1 million they need to build a place for them to gather and heal. If you are in a position to contribute, please do so here.
Residential school survivors experiencing pain or distress as a result of their residential school experiences are encouraged to connect with the Indian Residential School Survivors Society that operates a 24-hour distress line at 1-866-925-4419.