Kamloops Residential School Memorial. Photo via Erin O'Toole. May 31, 2021.Kamloops Residential School Memorial. Photo via Erin O'Toole. May 31, 2021.
Chatham

Walpole Island walk planned in honour of 215 Indigenous children

A walk is being planned on Walpole Island on Friday in honour of the 215 Indigenous children that were found in an unmarked, undocumented burial site at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

Walpole Island First Nation member Tina Aquash is organizing the event. Bkejwanong Territory is also recognizing Friday as a Day of Mourning.

The walk will start at 2 p.m. from the Bkejwanong Kinomaagewgamig School, located at 651 Tecumseh Road in Wallaceburg and finish at the Residential School Monument on Walpole Island.

Aquash said residents from across Chatham-Kent are welcome to attend the walk and said that non-First Nations members have already been reaching out and asking what they can do to help. She said the outpouring of support from surrounding communities over the past week has been extremely appreciated by Walpole Island residents.

"I said sure, we'd love to have you join us because that just says that the story is being heard from the children... With us doing this walk, it's kind of saying that we're their voices," she explained.

Following the heartwrenching discovery, Aquash said it's been a very difficult week for the First Nations community with a lot of different emotions.

On Walpole Island, Aquash said the mood is one of heaviness and sadness with the story of the 215 children bringing up a lot of inter-generational trauma for many residents.

"Myself, I am a daughter to a residential school survivor and it brought back a lot of triggers with what my dad must have gone through. I think about if he didn't make it home I wouldn't be here, neither would my family. I have three children, so I think about that," she said. "While I was speaking to other people in the community, I heard a lot of that. It was just a lot of sadness, a lot of heaviness.  It's been a hard week for all of us. A lot of tears, I've had tears myself. I think my eyes were very heavy all weekend after I heard the news. I went and sat with my father one night, not very often do I see him shed a tear...and it was very difficult to sit with him and have him share with me some of the stories that he had and that brought back a lot of memories."

On Friday, a drive-by vigil is also planned at the Tecumseh Monument in Thamesville from 9 a.m until 8:30 p.m. People are encouraged to bring children's shoes, teddy bears or flowers and volunteers will take the items from the car and place them at the memorial site.

Those are just some of the many vigils and memorials taking place across the country to honour the lives of the 215 children.

However, once those are done, Aquash said she believes that more education is still needed on the history of residential schools and thinks that the topic should be more prominent in Canadian school curriculums.

She is also encouraging people to do their own research and take the time to learn about the dark past of residential schools in Canada — how they've played a part in systemic racism and how their impact is still being felt in Indigenous communities in the present day.

"To me, that's a big part of Canada's history, are the residential schools," she said. "This goes back to the early 1800s and the last school that closed was in 1996. So that's a big part of our history. I've had non-native people say that they had no clue this even happened."

In a statement on Facebook, Denise Stonefish, chief of the Delaware First Nation at Moraviantown, also expressed heartbreak over the generational impact that residential schools in Canada have had on Indigenous peoples.

"Knowing that these children were not returned to their families to be given the proper ceremonies to start their spirit journey home, we share our sorrow and grief. We know and have an understanding, as we too had children in the care of these government-funded, church-run residential schools," she said. "There is no way to make this pain go away. This was genocide under the guise of the federal government’s great assimilation plan and not caring to invest in the health and safety of these children, an expense that neither the government nor the residential school wanted to incur. A true figure of these children who had died while in the care of these residential schools will never be known. Generational losses to all our Nations."

Read More Local Stories