National Truth and Reconciliation Day is not a holiday, Okanagan Indigenous leaders caution
Global News
"To the average Canadian it’s ‘Wow, I get a holiday, clap my hands, I get to sleep in or I’ll get to go golfing or go shopping or whatever I do on normal holidays.’”
WARNING: This story contains details that readers may find disturbing. Discretion is advised.
“Never again.”
Those two words are on a memorial in the South Okanagan, marking where local Indigenous children were once loaded into cattle trucks before being taken to residential schools in Kamloops and Cranbrook.
They’re also the two words one of the men who survived being taken from his family in that very spot and all the traumas that followed will reflect on Sept. 30, the first Truth and Reconciliation Day.
The new federal statutory holiday was approved last year by Parliament, and is intended to offer a moment for reflection. But Jack Kruger, a residential school survivor living in Syilx territory, is among those who are dubious of the messaging.
“What are we reconciling? I would like to know. I cannot celebrate that day,” Kruger said. “I can’t celebrate when I’m alive and they’re dead.”
Kruger speaks frankly and regularly about the friends he lost and the horrors he experienced while in the residential school system. He alleges he saw sexual abuse and violence, knows of children who died at the hands of those who were supposed to care for them. He talks about it all so he can be the voice of those who didn’t survive.
It’s not easy to do, but he wants to make sure nobody loses sight of what happened to so many boys and girls, just like him, in those years.
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