Children’s shoes are being placed at the Giche Namewikwedong Reconciliation Garden at Kelso Beach in Owen Sound to honour and mourn the lives of 215 Indigenous children whose remains were recently discovered on the grounds of a former residential school in British Columbia.
On Friday, hundreds of pairs of children’s shoes were lined on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery as a tribute to the children. Similar public displays have been popping up across the country since.
Susan Staves Schank is a member of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation and chair of the Giche Namewikwedong Reconciliation Garden Committee. She says the committee recognized the need for a similar memorial in Owen Sound because a lot of people from Saugeen Ojibway Nation (Saugeen First Nation and Chippewas of Nawash) went to residential schools.
“Reconciliation means to restore or renew a friendship. The people of today didn’t do these atrocities. The people in the past did,” Staves Schank says. “But, for reconciliation for us as Indigenous people, we need them to understand the pain and to try to understand the past colonial legacy of residential schools.”
Staves Schank is inviting the community to place children’s shoes at the Giche Namewikwedong Reconciliation Garden at Kelso Beach. She plans to keep them there for 215 hours — nearly nine days.
“I just hope that it brings some sort of peace to people to have a place to go,” Staves Schank explains.
Staves Schank says she researched a lot about Canada’s residential school system in her work to establish the reconciliation garden and learned about the horrors and the legacy.
The remains of 215 children were discovered at the site of the former Kamloops Residential School using a ground-penetrating radar over the Victoria Day long weekend. It’s believed their deaths were undocumented.
The Kamloops school operated from 1890 to 1969, then the federal government took over from the Catholic Church and ran it as a day school until it closed in 1978.
“This was told several years ago by elders there, that these bodies were at the Kamloops school,” Staves Schank says. “I was very saddened of course, because that’s a lot of children. But, I am glad it is coming to people’s attention finally.”
The United Way of Bruce Grey has supported the development of the Giche Namewikwedong Reconciliation Garden at Kelso Beach. The organization’s executive director Francesca Dobbyn says the establishment of the garden grew out of the results of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a way of creating a space to educate the community about what happened in recent history and to own the decisions made by government and other organizations.
“And to give people a place to come together and talk about those issues,” Dobbyn explains. “The garden itself is built with benches and a circle. It’s all about people coming together to talk.”
The Giche Namewikwedong Reconciliation Garden is located at the south end of Kelso Beach Park, near the pedestrian bridge that connects to 1st Avenue West. It is located on traditional territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation close to the site of the original Nawash Village.