#residential-schools

#residential-schools

B lack-clad white men stand at attention. They chant and hold crude banners with "D.E.I. IS HOW NATIONS DIE" and "MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW" scrawled across them. A man screams through a megaphone about "foreign blood" and "retak[ing] our nation" while his followers intone the words "honour," "heritage," and "triumph." This scene-from a video posted to white nationalist Telegram channels-is footage of a rally held in Toronto on May 3 of this year.

Minutes after being born, Ed Archie NoiseCat was thrown away. A janitor at St. Joseph's Mission School for Indigenous Canadians discovered the infant as he was preparing to burn the garbage. Ed's son, writer and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat, was an adult before he learned the full story of his father's birth. "My family never talked about it, and my father didn't really know the specifics around what happened when he was born and how he was found," Julian says.

The Greater Toronto Area marked the fifth annual National Day of Truth and Reconciliation Tuesday in a variety of ways Tuesday, including flag raising, sunrise and drumming ceremonies. The day commemorates the lives lost to Canada's government-funded, church-run residential school system and honours the survivors and communities affected by ongoing trauma. In a news release Tuesday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Minister of Indigenous Affairs and First Nations Economic Reconciliation Greg Rickford said government buildings across the province would be lit orange.

The former Mohawk Institute the longest-running residential school in Canada is now named the Woodland Cultural Centre and is preparing to open to the public for the first time as a museum on Sept. 30, National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. WATCH | Canada's longest-running residential school to reopen as a museum: Canada's longest running residential school, known as the Mohawk Institute, has reopened as a museum at Ontario's Woodland Cultural Centre

The day commemorates the children who died while being forced to attend church-run and government-funded residential schools, as well as survivors and communities affected by ongoing trauma. Tuesday is also known as Orange Shirt Day, a tradition that began in 2013 to honour residential school survivor Phyllis Webstad, who had her orange shirt taken away on her first day at St. Joseph Mission Residential School.

More than 150,000 children taken. That's really all you need to know about residential schools. In Canada, more than 150,000 Indigenous children attended these institutions between the 1870s and the late 1990s. There, they died, suffered, and ached-for their families, communities, languages, and ways of life. Today, there are more Indigenous children in care than there were at the height of the residential school system.

I was twenty-two, a recent graduate of a university named after Christopher Columbus. The Huffington Post had hired me to be their "Native Issues Fellow," essentially a glorified intern working mostly from behind a desk in New York City. My first headline, written in that tabloid-y left-of-centre HuffPost style: "Canada Just Confronted Its 'Cultural Genocide' of Native People. Why Can't the U.S. Do the Same?"

The statue of Sir John A. Macdonald on the grounds of the Ontario legislature will soon have the hoarding removed, reflecting ongoing dialogues about his legacy.