National Day For Truth And Reconciliation:
Canada marked its first ever National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on September 30 to honour the lost children and survivors of the country’s indigenous residential schools, their families and communities.
- The aim of the holiday is to educate and remind the citizens of the history of indigenous children and remember their suffering.
- All citizens were encouraged to wear the colour orange to highlight how indigenous children were robbed of their culture and freedoms.
- Earlier this year, hundreds of unmarked burial sites of indigenous students, belonging to 215 children of the Kamloops Indian Residential school from Canada’s British Columbia were discovered. This caused a national outrage in the country and prompted Indigenous groups to call for a nationwide search for such mass graves.
- Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had after this concluded that such Residential Schools were “a systematic, government- sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples.” It further equated the operation and aim of such schools to a “cultural genocide.”
- Later, calls to action to honour the lost lives were delivered. Then, the Canadian Parliament legally approved this federal holiday.
