Almost 1,000 take to Iqaluit streets for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
CBC
About a thousand Iqaluit residents, nearly all in bright orange T-shirts or hoodies, walked down the main street of Nunavut's capital on Thursday for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
Leading the march was Jack Anawak carrying an orange and white flag with an "all children matter" banner in memory of the children found buried near residential schools earlier this year.
This display was a proud gesture from a man who survived years in residential school and has been among the forefront of those fighting since the early 1990s to have their traumatic experience recognized. But rather than focusing on reconciliation, Inuit need to decolonize and rise up, he said.
"I think we have to assert our rights that were always there. We've fallen under colonialism. We went through a period where we were basically in a cage," Anawak said.
"We were not allowed to talk Inuktitut. They tried to do away with our culture. They tried to do away with our language. Without a process of being conquered we just got taken over … we just have to say enough is enough."
Anawak was born in Naujaat, Nunavut. When he was eight years old, he was taken hundreds of kilometres away to the Sir Joseph Bernier residential school in Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut, on Hudson Bay's western coast.
There, Anawak said he witnessed his classmates being beaten with the sharp end of a long ruler and pushed into a corner to wear a dunce hat.
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