It’s hard to believe that between 1870 and 1996, when the last Residential School was finally closed, more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children attended these institutions. How many of them died? We are still waiting for answers.
This is another Holocaust—the Canadian Holocaust. So many children, some as young as four, were lost forever.
We came to Canada in 1982, a family of four with one more on the way—our third child. Canada was our dream come true. And now I can’t comprehend that in such a civilized country, Residential Schools were still operating. During the same time my children were safely going to school—schools that we chose for them—other children were being taken away and robbed of their futures.
I painted After a Long Day a few years ago, maybe more. At the time, I was thinking about the Highway of Tears—Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert in British Columbia—where so many Indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered.
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