A monument to honour residential school survivors was unveiled in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square Monday.
It’s one of dozens of events in Ontario marking the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, including a ceremony on Parliament Hill.
The new spirit garden in front of Toronto’s city hall comes in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call for governments to establish publicly accessible, highly visible monuments honouring survivors and thousands of children who died in residential schools.
The garden’s centrepiece is a large turtle sculpture positioned in a reflecting pool that has the names of the 18 residential schools that once operated in Ontario inscribed on its north wall.
Beginning in the 19th century, more than 150,000 Indigenous children were separated from their families and communities and sent to church-run residential schools, where abuse, malnutrition and inadequate health care were rampant.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found the school system, which operated for more than 150 years, was a central element of a state-backed policy that attempted cultural genocide.
Ontario Regional Chief Abram Benedict says the lasting intergenerational impacts of the schools “must never be forgotten.”
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“Our unique Nations and cultures exist today because survivors of the residential school system fought to keep them alive — often in the face of serious personal harm,” Abrams said in a statement.
“They passed on the traditions, languages and teachings these institutions sought to destroy so that all of us today know who we are, where we come from and how we got here.”
Monday is also recognized as Orange Shirt Day, an Indigenous-led grassroots commemorative day recognizing the effects of residential schools.
The initiative began in 2013, inspired by Phyllis Webstad’s story of having the orange shirt her grandmother gave her taken away when she arrived at a residential school in 1973 at the age of six.
In a statement, Premier Doug Ford said a number of Ontario government buildings would be lit orange. He encouraged people to “learn more and reflect on this dark and disturbing period in our country’s history and acknowledge the intergenerational harm it has caused.”
The day is a federal statutory holiday, but not a provincial one in Ontario.
New Democrat deputy leader Sol Mamakwa, the only First Nation representative at the provincial legislature, said he aims to table legislation in his own Indigenous language to have the day declared a paid provincial holiday.
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