For the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, CTVNews.ca spoke to several Indigenous leaders about feelings around the day more than a year since the suspected gravesites made world news, and in the weeks following Queen Elizabeth II death that took over the news cycle during a month when decolonization is meant to be top of mind.
This time last year, the Woodland Cultural Centre, a museum and Indigenous education centre on the site of a former Ontario residential school, was receiving about 50 to 75 visitors a day.
Following 2021 mainstream media coverage of identifying more than 2,000 suspected graves of children buried at more than 140 former residential school sites across the country, the public came to the centre and left shoes, moccasins and stuffed toys at the steps of the former Mohawk school to commemorate the children that died. There are no longer dozens bringing those items.
It’s also meant to emphasize the conversations that need to happen all year long about how institutions continue to harm Indigenous people through systemic discrimination steeped in colonialism that remains engrained in the fabric of Canada as a nation, several leaders and academics who identify as being part of Indigenous communities told CTVNews.ca.
Eve Tuck, professor at OISE at the University of Toronto, is Unangax̂ and a member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska. "We have seen in very recent weeks an example of grief that is modelled by the state. I think we can look to Indigenous forms of collective grief and collective expressions of support and love."
"We do pay a great deal of honour and respect to those who went through that tragedy. I also worked in both provincial and federal prison systems, for most of my career. I was fortunate enough to help create with a number of Elders and Indigenous program officers, a substance abuse treatment program for Indigenous men who are federally incarcerated.
"My grandparents both attended residential schools. And my mother, her health was impacted. She was part of the tuberculosis epidemic that came out of the residential schools at that time. She was also a part of day school. "I will continue to be asking that. My grandparents weren’t allowed to speak the language, they were taken away, they were punished, so for me, that part will not be addressed until our children can go to school already fluent in their language."
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