It's been an appallingly slow process to improve the heavily biased and often ignorant history taught in school to even begin to tell a more complete story. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was published in 1996, but the apologies and settlements will be ongoing for generations to come.
This year will remembered as a traumatic one for many reasons, but I don't think we will soon forget the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops residential school at the end of the school year has ballooned to a total that has yet to be confirmed but is being quoted as high as 6509.
Here is a map of how extensive the system was. These horrific findings are not a surprise, but the rising counts of bodies between covid waves has coaxed along with a national conversation, marking September 30th as the first national marking of the long work that is Truth and Reconciliation.
My daughter participated in her school's organization of the day, wearing an orange shirt in honour of Phyllis Webstad. Like my daughter, her proud memory of being dressed up by her family for the exciting first day of school. Unlike my daughter, she arrived and was stripped of all of her clothes, including that beloved orange shirt, and it was never returned to her. Now we wear orange to recognize the harm done to Phyllis and countless others by the residential school system, and affirm our commitment to reconcile, apologized, and learn from the admission of the truth of systemic racism, and our need to turn this trauma to growth.
It is an embarassment and an affront that Premier Legault denies that systemic racism exists, and that . The coroner's report of Joyce Echaquan's death underlines the need for acknowledgement of systemic racism.
Here is a link to a document called Myths and Realities of Indigenous People from the Quebec commission of human and child rights.
Coming from the University of Manitoba, that has been proactive in indigenous education of all students, there is a National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation
