Honouring the Spirit of Our Children: Voices from the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership Family of Elders
July 1st marks the anniversary of the Confederation of Canada. On this day, the Conservation through Reconciliation Elder’s Lodge share a collection of voices to honour the spirits of the children who never came home, to unite us in building a better future for generations to come, and to bring us back into balance with Mother Nature. The CRP family of Elders is taking this opportunity to say what is needed to be said in a good way.
We are humbled and are gracious for these gifts that the Elder’s Lodge have shared with us today.
Elder Marilyn Capreol, Shawanaga First Nation Ojibway band member, Huron Robinson Treaty
Acknowledging the lands and waters of Indigenous Nations before us, we are humbled to imagine the gentle wake of the canoes and the blades of the paddles gently marking the waters.
We are reminded of using the land in a good way – leaving only a soft footprint on the land and caring for the gifts she provides.
The wind in the trees is working in unison, continuing to sing the songs today as it did in the hundreds of years past. We acknowledge these sacred gifts of Mother Earth in our local territories of the Indigenous people.
This day is just as sacred as any other day. And many do not understand that balance. We must give it a name to acknowledge what a beautiful woman Mother Earth is.
I will sing the spiritual traveling song through the two minutes of silence that those babies were never gifted before. We still have children from our community that were never located. Our grandmothers are still sitting on their porches waiting to see the dust fly at the end of the paths. We are not alone. There are thousands of relatives waiting.
This is not a time to argue about the children or the purpose of why they left. It is a time, instead, to look for the positive, to understand why they’re lifting up their spirits. Nothing is going to be easy for the next little while, but we must be strong and work together to bring things back into balance.
So, July 1st is just like June 30th or July 2nd. Every day is sacred.
Elder Albert Marshall, Moose Clan of the Mi'kmaw Nation
I’m feeling very encouraged. Not only are we making inroads, but we’re beginning to transform the political landscape as we work towards being of one mind in reference to our natural world. I think that is something that has been missing for so long.
Politically, our natural world is not seen as a subject, but rather, it is considered an object. I think a lot of progress has been made through the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership. And I think we should keep that conversation going.
We have to work together for the common good. While we may have different points of view or opinions, overall, our objectives are the same. I think it is important that Canadians understand that we are coming with a different perspective based on the responsibilities our ancestors have left for us.
When we think about the past year, during the pandemic, we were given the opportunity to do some reflection. And we did, and we’re still doing it. There is a reason that truths are coming out now. Though the revelations are tragic, they brought forth truths and we cannot have reconciliation without truth.
The truth is now in front of us. We cannot undo it, but we can learn from it. By learning from it, we are going to work on the transformative change that will be needed for the spirit of our ancestors’ Treaties to come to light. The Treaties are not just between humankind but are very much based on how human beings must live together without compromising the ecological integrity of the lands and waters for current and future generations.
Not only do we need to be reflecting, but what we are feeling and seeing through this reflection will transform into action. And that action must be for all of us to come together as one, even with our differences in opinion, and ensure that the journey forward is based on lessons learned from the past.
Elder Larry McDermott, Shabot Obaadjiwan First Nation
The spirits of the children who never returned home have come to remind us that they are here. They remind us of a trauma that occurred.
Beyond that, they remind us of life itself. They remind us of the need for us to come together to heal the conditions that allowed for children to be considered expendable and built systems to get rid of the “Indian Problem”.
It is time for us to embrace the Calls to Action for reconciliation, including the call to acknowledge the harm we have done to our Mother Earth. Together we need to heal our Mother. When we heal our Mother, we heal each other.
We have to look at the way we’ve been living on this land. Getting rid of the “Indian Problem” was to exploit the life of this land, over and above natural law. When our ancestors came together to share this land, the agreement was to share it within natural law.
This agreement was guided by the Dish With One Spoon Treaty, which was the largest Treaty in Canada’s history and is at least 900 years old. We need to get back to the way we came together. We need to honour what our ancestors agreed to.
These children are reminding us how out of balance we became, with one side thinking it was far superior to the other. This one side thought it was better than Mother Earth, herself. This creates grief and problems for everyone, and the only way that our descendants will have a future is if we do the heavy lifting.
We need to change the way we have been relating to the life-givers, to Mother Earth. This has to happen immediately. We shouldn’t be celebrating a way of life that has been harmful. What we should be doing is pausing, reflecting, and envisioning a way of life that honours our children and the Seven Generations to come. It is going to take some time to pause.
It is time to take, with sobriety, the responsibilities we have for sharing this land. For this little time we have as human beings on Mother Earth, we are responsible for passing down a better future to the next generations. This was the original intention of our Creator.
Holy Walking Woman Paulette Fox
I really want this message to go out to the young people. They’re looking for something, which means there is something empty inside. Their parents or grandparents went to boarding school where something had to die. That is the part of themselves they are trying to figure out.
It is not their fault, or the fault of their parents or grandparents. That is a real big truth and a reckoning. This is what’s happening to our young people. They feel abandoned.
At the core of our identity is this silence; something that inhibited this really important healing conversation. For those whose experiences may have involved parts of them dying, I can only imagine what this recent dialogue is invoking for them.
We don’t want violence. But we don’t want silence either. For so long, it has been the silence that our young people, the next generation, could never put their finger on. But now the floodgates have opened.
That is what I feel when I see these violent reactions. The image perpetuated by the media is that of the “Angry Indian”. But I see deep into the root of that perception as a survivor. This is captured in the Indigenous knowledge that my Elders did not hold back. They had courage. They were brave. To still speak the language in spite of. To continue the customs in spite of. To pick the medicines in spite of.
We have a disability, but only because of our demographic. It has crippled my family on my mother’s side. My mother and her family were targeted. My grandfather was hidden by the Elders until he was about 13 years old. The Indian Agents stopped looking for him and threatening his parents. He was adopted into a family within our community.
Because of his upbringing, my grandfather was protected by his adoptive parents, and they taught him the ways of healing. He earned his own helpers in the Spirit World. Many people would come from all over with horse and wagon in the middle of the night, or in the dead of winter, to bring their sick loved ones to my grandfather. And he lived very humbly. Still to this day, he is called upon from the societies for his help and guidance.
But my mother and her siblings were told that my grandfather was the devil himself and that each one of them were going to pay for his sins. I was raised with very little knowledge of my grandfather and the teachings of the Niitsitapi.
My grandmother’s parents would set up a teepee in front of the residential school so that my grandmother could still learn the teachings. It broke my grandmother’s heart to lose her children at boarding school. My family was inflicted with this disease and illness. I think about how we still have it today. But at the same time, we still have our language, our customs, our medicines, and our songs.
I hear these statistics that in Western Canada, one in four children didn’t make it home. I think about all the odds stacked against my family, myself, and my people, and I could not be prouder. I couldn’t be prouder to be Niitsitapi today. I couldn’t be prouder to pray in my own language and to speak my own language. I couldn’t be prouder of my parents and of all of the animals that have gifted us and that have sustained us through this dark period.
It has been a very dark period of silence. Our young people deserve more. They deserve better and they deserve the truth, because they represent the pure, honest light that Creator has given us. We don’t want our young people to defer to violence, but we also need to frame the intense and the subtle violence that goes on. Today, it is as alive and well as it was years ago. And we feel just as silenced.
I think of the children who never made it home. In a way, we are all one voice. That voice is saying “we are here”. We’re here and we didn’t go away.
Canada’s Indian Residential School Survivors and Family Crisis Line is available 24 hours a day at 1-866-925-4419.
For additional resources please see below:
Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program: https://www.fnha.ca/what-we-do/mental-wellness-and-substance-use/residential-schools
National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation: nctr.ca
Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action: http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf