Flags will be flying at half-mast at all Prince George schools to honour the memory of 215 children who were discovered at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops.
School District 57 Board Chair Trent Derrick recently spoke with MyPGNow.com
“I think this will be the first of many more sights found. The calls to actions have found that those sites be discovered and if we want to change the system the most important thing is to recognize the wrongs that they are so that we don’t repeat them again.”
As a first nation’s leader himself, the discovery is heartbreaking.
“I feel the pain of the Kamloops Indian Band and what they are going through right now. I think it just opens the eyes to the genocide that Canada has played towards their Indigenous people.”
Acting Superintendent Cindy Heitman mentioned that the healing process starts now for their students.
SD 57’s boundary map stretches all the way to Valemount and the Robson Valley, the issue will hit home for Indigenous families.
“There are schools in Valemount that actually overlap with the Kamloops School District so we do have families within our school community who will be directly impacted by this news.”
Heitman believes it’s key for the board to address the issue head-on with the student body.
“In order for us to move forward, we need to tell the truth, we need to talk about the truth and we need to honour the truth and how do we educate our students and our community around what happened in our schools.”
In addition, the B-C Teachers Federation is asking its members to wear orange shirts to class this week, to honour the memory of the children buried in a mass grave in Kamloops.
President, Teri Mooring told MyPGNow the situation comes with a cloud of profound sadness.
“It’s important that we all face what happened in our residential schools and this discovery is confirmation to what aboriginal people had been telling us for decades.”
“There is just profound sadness. I don’t think any of us could imagine having our children taken away from us and sent to a school away from us and not to return.”
The school was run by the Catholic church between 1890 and 1969 and had students from across B-C.
The Truth and Reconciliation Report documented the deaths of at least 32-hundred children at residential schools.
Several First Nations leaders including BC Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Terry Teegee are now calling on governments to help search other former residential school sites, to see if more bodies might be found.
Supports Resources:
? National Indian Residential School Crisis Line:
1-866-925-4419? Indian Residential Schools Survivors Society:
1-800-721-0066? Indian Residential Schools Program: https://t.co/Igmy2V44Jc (First Nations Health Authority)
(2/5)
— BC Friendship Centres (@BCAAFC) May 31, 2021