Residential Schools Ceremonies
Written by Jeremy Zafran on 1 October 2021
Approximately 100 Kahnawakero:non gathered for a ceremony to celebrate the birthdays of all the children who were forced to attend residential schools. Curran Katsirorokwas Jacobs was one of the organizers:
“It was really beautiful, we got a lot of positive feedback from the families of some of the survivors and the survivors themselves. It was, I think, it achieved what we want it to, to make them feel special and important.”
Jacobs saying that it was emotional:
“It brought some tears to people’s eyes, I think it’s a different kind of feeling this year. It’s no so much reliving the past in a negative way, but kind of, there were a lot of tears, because wow, people are actually talking about this and are recognizing us and it was really beautiful. It even gave me goosebumps at some point, listening to stories that I had probably had never heard before either, because now talking about birthdays was a different lines that our survivors were talking about.”
For Nina Segalowitz it was a very personal journey on Orange Shirt Day:
“It was extremely emotional, both my parents went to residential school. I don’t have a chance to go there (to their schools) so to be able to go to Shingwauk it was really emotional when I got there, actually, I became physically ill, my body just reacted to the space.”
Segalowitz joined Al Harrington, his son Nation and Jessica Dinowitzer in Sault Ste-Marie, Ontario on Wednesday at the former Shingwauk Residential School. They then went to Parliament Hill in Ottawa yesterday and walked to Confederation Park.
