There was a sea of orange in River Mill Park today to mark Orange Shirt Day and the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation.
Orange Shirt Day, established in 2013, is a grassroots, Indigenous-led day to honour residential school survivors and remember those that did not.
Today was the first time a National Day of Truth and Reconciliation has been observed in Canada. The federal statutory holiday was enacted by Parliament and also “honours the lost children and Survivors of residential schools, their families and communities. Public commemoration of the tragic and painful history and ongoing impacts of residential schools is a vital component of the reconciliation process,” the federal government notes on its website.
In Huntsville today, dozens of people marched from the High Street municipal parking lot behind the Algonquin Theatre to River Mill Park where Indigenous speakers reflected on their experiences and spoke to the need for reconciliation, for the need for acknowledgement of past wrongs and for action.
Mayor Karin Terziano opened the ceremony with a land acknowledgement statement.
Dave Rice, a helper of the Wasauksing First Nation near Parry Sound followed, saying “this is a day of celebration.” He urged people to listen to one another, and respect one another, this planet, and all its living things.
He invited Rodney Stanger from Timiskaming First Nation to lead the crowd with a traditional Round Dance song.
Joyce Jonathan Crone, a Mohawk from the Iroquois Haudenosaunee Nation and co-creator of the Hope Arises Project shared a prayer in English “not in my Mohawk language because that was taken away from me and I can’t speak my language.”
The prayer began: “To be a human is an honour and we offer thanksgiving for all the gifts of life,” some of which are mentioned in the prayer, and ended “and most of all we thank you, Great Spirit, for giving us all of these wonderful gifts so we will be happy and healthy every day and every night.” (Hear the full prayer in the recap video at the end of this post.)
Later in the event she spoke about her grandfather’s experience at the Mohawk Institute, a residential school in Brantford, and said of the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, “What we do beyond today and the actions that you take will truly demonstrate that every child matters. We can bring thousands of lost children home through our actions of acceptance, aligning as allies, and our attitude of change. I challenge each of you today to pledge to walk your talk, to participate in building bridges of healing and equality.”
The Hope Arises Project hung orange ribbons in River Mill Park earlier this week. “The orange ribbons are in honour of Indigenous children who are being unearthed across Canada. Thousands of children were forcibly taken from their homes, stripped of their culture, language, values, and identities. Ribbons will be added each time children are found. May you be the voice for the voiceless,” explains a sign displayed at the event. Attendees were encouraged to take a ribbon from a basket onstage to hang on a tree on their own properties.
A Métis speaker, Nicole Herrick, said she is “just learning what it means to be a Métis woman” and spoke of her experiences learning about her heritage later in life, a heritage that her Métis mother never spoke of while she was growing up. “It has taken me decades to become a member of the Métis community, I have struggled my entire life to find my identity as a Métis woman.”
The event was organized by Huntsville Public Library staff.
“The intergenerational trauma that was experienced by [residential school] survivors and families of survivors is a real and ongoing issue that is happening in Indigenous cultures across Canada,” Cara McQueen, who works in Community Outreach and Engagement and Adult Programming at Huntsville Public Library, told Doppler previously. “It’s important for non-indigenous people to recognize that we may not be directly responsible for how things played out in the past but we are responsible for how we act today.”
You can find additional resources on the Huntsville Public Library’s Reconciliation and Me page.
See the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action here.
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