National Day for Truth and Reconciliation: This History Matters

"Real learning, the kind that runs deep, doesn’t always agree with what we already think or believe. Real learning doesn’t always tell us what we want to hear. Sometimes it makes things complicated. Sometimes it makes us uncomfortable. Sometimes it leaves us with more questions than answers."

At yesterday’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation Assembly, I provided opening remarks to set the tone for our students.

Our school community gathered in the Withrow Auditorium, many wearing orange shirts, to reflect on the harm committed through Canada's Residential School System and its intergenerational impacts. It was a day for listening, remembering and committing to learn more.

There, students heard from our school’s Indigenous consultant, Dr. Kiera Brant-Birioukov, a Mohawk educator, researcher, writer and scholar of Indigenous education, raised on the Ridge Road in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. She shared how her great-grandfather, Leonard Rand, attended the Mohawk Institute residential school in Brantford, and how she made a conscious decision that the intergenerational trauma passed down through her family would stop with her.

She said: “When I realized I was going to become a mother, I was forced to look at the harm that I inherited from these schools, and the decisions I needed to make to stop the cycle of harm to be passed on through me.”

She recalled sending her son to school that morning in his orange shirt "with the privilege of knowing that he’s going to come home to me today, where he will be fed and loved, like every mother should have the opportunity to do." But that, she said, was "a privilege denied to the Mohawk mothers who came before me."

She asked us to approach this day not with certainty, but with curiosity, with the willingness to ask, “What if there's more here than the story I've given? What might I understand if I stopped assuming I already knew?”

Students also heard recorded survivor testimony from Chief Robert Joseph, provided by Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue, who recalled the dehumanizing treatment he received at the residential school and how he was totally broken when he left.

“I realized I had nowhere to go, no sense of values, no sense of purpose. This is the time when a young man should be all excited about his whole life ahead of them…”

I asked our students to try and understand not only what happened in the residential schools, but what it meant for that survivor who was a child at the time, not unlike our students are now. What would it be like for them if they were taken far away from their family’s traditions and celebrations, and weren’t allowed to speak their own languages at an age even younger than our students are today?

In our country, for many years, much of Canada simply did not listen to what Indigenous people were telling us about what was happening at the residential schools, and even denied it. But that began to change when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave thousands of survivors the chance to tell their stories. This gave Canadians the chance to listen. It changed further when schools accepted their responsibility to teach the history that could not be ignored, and more and more Canadians opened themselves up to learn. We are still learning.

After the assembly, students gathered in their classrooms to reflect on what they need to learn more about, why this history matters, and our responsibilities today as individuals and as a school community to further Reconciliation in our county.

Learning and growth take time. By encouraging our students to listen with open minds and empathy, and to ask questions with respect and humility, we take meaningful steps toward a more just and compassionate future for our country.