Heavy hearts, happy hearts

The marchers arrive at St. John's Park at almost exactly the minute predicted. They arrive in a great orange wave, all wearing shirts the same colour. They arrive led by the drum, and the riders on horseback, and the tendrils of smudge that curl over Main Street, cleansing the path to the park where the powwow is underway.

"Are we all going to fit into the park, guys?" one young woman gasps, laughing as she surveys the scene.

In a way they do, in a way they don't. For hours, the people flow into the park from all directions. They flow by the hundreds, and then the thousands. They flow until the fields show less green than orange, until lines for the porta-potties stretch into the dozens, until the whole park is alive with laughter and conversation.

The crowd looks like Manitoba. It contains faces of all ages, all races. Most of the people here are Indigenous, but on this day they are joined in solidarity by people of all nations; a movement, generations in the making, to call for a way forward, to call for action on reconciliation, to call for justice for Indigenous people.

National Day for Truth and Reconciliation

Sept. 30, 2021: Today marks the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, which asks all Canadians to reflect upon relationships with Indigenous people, remember the harms of the past, and focus on ways to commit to healthy and positive growth throughout all communities today.

The following gallery captures how some are honouring the day.

Eight youths on way home from residential school killed in 1972 plane crash

The cloudless blue sky above Bunibonibee Cree Nation is what Sarah McKay remembers most vividly about June 24, 1972.

McKay, who was 13 at the time, was too excited to keep her eyes off it. After cleaning up the house so it felt welcome, she spent much of the day tilting her chin up to the blue, in anticipation of her big sister’s return.

The start of the summer holidays marked a special reunion for the loved ones of students from Bunibonibee, formerly known as Oxford House, who were sent to residential schools and parallel learning institutions in southern Manitoba during the academic year.

Families arrived at the airport in the remote, fly-in community that day for the long-awaited homecoming of Margaret Robinson, Mary Rita Canada, Ethel Grieves, Rosalie Balfour, Wilkie Muskego, Iona Weenusk and siblings Roy and Deborah Sinclair.

A sense of hope in Indigenous community

The hope Indigenous teen Miyawata Stout has for her future is one that is now three generations strong and forges links with her grandmother, a residential school survivor.

Miyawata, 15, is a student at Kelvin High School and, while she has a couple of years to go before graduation, she wants to become a physician.

But she admits the discoveries of unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools across Canada in the spring and summer took its toll.

Kamloops, 215. Brandon, 104. Marieval, 751. The number of graves and locations grew with each passing week.

Portraits of survivors, tales of strength

Since 2013, Sept. 30 has been known as Orange Shirt Day — to honour the children who survived Indian residential schools and to remember those who did not return home.

It is also now the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, which asks all Canadians to reflect upon relationships with Indigenous people, remember the harms of the past, and focus on ways to commit to healthy and positive growth throughout all communities today.

Here are six inspiring stories of Manitoba survivors of the residential school, day school, and child welfare systems:

Club welcomes Indigenous perspectives into huddle to strengthen community bonds

Brandon Alexander has first-hand experience of what it's like to be treated like a second-class citizen.

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers safety was 17 when he and a friend, driving home from the city fair in his dad's Cadillac, were surrounded by dozens of cops, their shotguns drawn and aimed at the two teen boys.

Alexander was just minutes from his home in a safe and respected community in Orlando, Fla. He was asked six or seven times where he had been and what he was doing; each time it was as if his answer — which Alexander relayed calmly, something his parents pressed on him to do if he was ever pulled over by police — didn't matter. They never asked for identification or if they could search his vehicle, but they did so anyway.

When the police noticed an empty gun holster in the car — Alexander's dad owns a registered firearm but purposely removed it whenever his son borrowed the vehicle — the intensity heightened. Overwhelmed by what was unfolding, Alexander's pants started to slide down as cops were searching him, creating a natural reaction by the teen to pull them back up.

Archivists, elder work to carefully preserve Indigenous trauma's origins

The old stone house sits on the northern edge of the University of Manitoba campus, overlooking a bend in the Red River. Inside the house is a room lined with gifts given to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: an eagle staff, a poem from a residential school survivor, a painting of a wolf affixed to a frame of soft leather.

It is here, at a long table lit by the late-afternoon sun falling through the window, that Sylvia Genaille sits, resting her fingers on a white folder. Beside her is a cardboard box filled with dried yarrow and sage, medicines harvested from the garden outside and used to smudge the folder before it is sent away. A cleansing.

“That will clean up any negative energies around here, because sometimes we really need that," says Genaille, an Anishinaabe elder.

There is so much pain in these records; but in the act of collecting them and sharing them with those to whom they belong, there is also hope. And as Canada prepared to mark the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation on Sept. 30, a new federal day of observance, it is important to know how this knowledge is preserved.