Native women on a walk to remember
B.C. grandmothers to ask Ottawa to create national day for residential-school victims
By CASSANDRA SZKLARSKI
Thursday, May 26, 2005 Page A9
Canadian Press
At the age of 6, Louise Hall ran away, blindly throwing herself into a harsh Manitoba winter in a desperate bid to escape daily beatings at a Northern residential school.
Forty years later, Ms. Hall, now a grandmother, is hitting the road again, this time with the strength of a survivor.
She is one of eight aboriginal grandmothers embarking today on a 4,500-kilometre march from Kelowna, B.C., to Ottawa in an effort to convince the federal government to designate May 26 as a national day of healing for victims of residential school abuse.
"We're all survivors and wanting to make that change in our lives," said Ms. Hall, a member of the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation, about 45 kilometres west of Brandon, Man.
"We're hoping that people will hear us and that the government hears the cries of the grandmothers."
The trek is expected to take four months to complete, and the women will have little more than camping gear and sheer will to keep them going. Ms. Hall said they are hoping a kind volunteer will offer to provide support by following along in a car.
"I'm prepared to get blisters on my feet, I'm prepared to be really, really tired and achy and to have water splashed on me during rain when the cars go by," Ms. Hall said. Most of the other participants are in their 50s, she noted.
Canada already celebrates National Aboriginal Day on June 21, but it is considered to be a day to celebrate native culture, not to talk about the decades of abuse -- meted out in the name of "Christianizing" aboriginal children -- or its impact on Canadian society.
A national day of healing and reconciliation would focus on mending the pain inflicted on aboriginals and educate non-natives about Canada's history of government- and church-run residential schools, said Percy Ballantyne of the Grand Rapids First Nations, 400 kilometres north of Winnipeg.
"It didn't only affect our people, it affected society as a whole; we're paying for the effects of residential schools," he said.
Mr. Ballantyne is organizing a simultaneous walk in Manitoba, where native communities will make a 1,066-kilometre, seven-day journey from Fox Lake Cree Nation to the provincial legislature in Winnipeg.
"Hopefully it's going to open up the eyes of Canadian society, because we are not a threat to anybody," Mr. Ballantyne said. "We just want to go on with life."
The cause, which has attracted scant attention in Canada, has earned the sympathy of activists as far away as Australia, where May 26 is also a national day of healing for Australian aboriginals, a form of atonement for historical injustices against the country's indigenous peoples.
Willow Aliento, an Australian partly of Canadian aboriginal ancestry, plans to lead supporters in a sit-in at the Canadian High Commission in Canberra to press the case of Canadian aboriginals.
Many Western native communities have been celebrating May 26 as a national day of healing and reconciliation since 2002, but it has never earned a formal designation from the federal government.
Other events planned for today include demonstrations in Victoria, Edmonton and Moose Jaw, Sask.
Each community has local organizers that tailor events to local issues, said Maggie Hodgson, a member of an Edmonton group that will include Muslims and Japanese people in events.
Others say the day is also key to helping survivors, many now over 60, open up about the physical and sexual abuse the may have endured as children.
About 100,000 children between 4 and 18 attended residential schools, many of them against their will, in every province and territory except New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.
"A lot of first nation people don't want to talk about it because it still brings back painful memories," said Harry Ferland of Manitoba's Grand Rapids First Nations.
"If you keep it down, it stays inside and it wants to come out. It comes out in ways that you don't want it to. If we can allow it to come out in healthy ways then that's what we're looking for."