Ontario marks inaugural National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
CTV
For residential school survivor James Bird, the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation represented an incredible moment to work toward healing, but he wanted Canadians to remember why it was being marked.
"Let us never forget, ever, that this day happened because children's bodies were found," Bird said at a ceremony Thursday at the University of Toronto's Massey College.
Numerous Indigenous communities have reported finding hundreds of unmarked graves this year at former residential school sites.
Chief R. Stacey Laforme, of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, told the Massey College ceremony that he wrote a poem the day the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Nation in Kamloops, B.C., announced that ground-penetrating radar had detected what are believed to be 215 such graves.
"I sit here crying, I don't know why," Laforme began. "I didn't know the children. I didn't know the parents, but I knew their spirit.
