Kwikwetlem First Nation's Holds Walk of Peace and Reconciliation

As with all First Nations communities throughout British Columbia, and most of Canada for that matter, the Kwikwetlem people suffered then their children were forced to attend Residential Schools. Recently the Kwikwetlem people held their second annual Walk for Truth and Reconciliation. This event is intended as a day of reflection but also an opportunity to share their experiences with the Tri-Cities community.

Geoff Scott – Local Journalism Initiative

While recent TV series such as CBC's Bones of Crows and APTN's Little Bird has shone a light on Canada's shameful past in trying to "assimilate" the First Nations people across these lands. Few Canadians have really been educated in the operation of residential schools and the motivation behind these institutions that were constructed and managed in partnership between the Canadian government and the Catholic Church with the expressed purpose of destroying First Nations Cultures.

Not only were children forcibly taken from many homes, under threat of prosecution, many family members, brothers and sisters, were split up and sent to different schools in order to maximize their isolation. Most were no longer permitted to speak their own language and were beaten they were caught not speaking in English.

The darken side of Canada's residential school history that seldom gets told are the stories of physical and sexual abuse that is known to have taken place. The shear number of grave sites that have been found all over Canada that are connected to residential schools would indicate that these are not only the graves of children who died in the "care" of the residential schools but possibly also the bodies of infants that were the result of sexual abuse.

The fact that death rates from Tuberculosis inside Residential Schools was in many cases ten times greater than the surrounding population. As early as 1907, chief medical officer of the Department of Indian Affairs, Peter Henderson Bryce identified residential schools an ideal vector for TB transmission, going as far as to say it was "almost as if the prime conditions for the outbreak of epidemics had been deliberately created".

Lena Faust, a PhD student at the McGill International TB Centre in Montreal, and Courtney Heffernan, manager of the Tuberculosis Program Evaluation and Research Unit at the University of Alberta, acknowledged in 2021 that the high death rates at residential schools was no accident, but the result of deliberate neglect that was part of Canada's broader genocidal project.

Kwikwetlem's Walk for Truth and Reconciliation event, while attended by over 200 people, was not extremely well publicized, with the only notification being a posts on the Kwikwetlem First Nation web page and Facebook page. Tri-Cities Community TV hopes to work with the Kwikwetlem First Nation to bring this event to Town Centre Park next year in the hopes of increasing the public's awareness of the shameful part of Canadian history that needs to be fully acknowledged before there can be any real reconciliation.

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