On Orange Shirt Day, a graveyard tour helps allies see parts of history that were never carved in stone

It seemed to be one of those autumn days that Ottawa saves for September 30. At the Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa’s east end, about 100 people gathered to remember and to take an unusual tour. The sky was bright, the air just warm enough for shirtsleeves and the trees were tipping into orange and red. Painted rocks and fresh flowers circled the memorial stone—a gray marker bearing a plaque for the children who never came home. “Put on your dresses of red and gold, for summer is gone and the days grow cold,” said Marie Wilson, former commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Wilson recited the line from the poem her father used to read to her by American poet George Cooper. Her voice carried over the hush of a warm breeze rising through the Children’s Sacred Forest at the cemetery. The forest was opened in 2023 to honour those lost to residential schools and the survivors who lived through them. Beechwood Cemetery is the final resting place of three men deeply entangled in that history. Two of them were architects of the residential school system and one man who fought to expose it. The ceremony was co-hosted by the Beechwood Cemetery and the Assembly of Seven Generations (A7G), an Indigenous youth-led, grassroots non-profit organization. A row of white chairs was set out for Elders and the elderly. A bubble machine sent glimmers of light drifting into the sun. The scent of sage floated through the crowd as a youth from A7G wove between the rows of people, in chairs or seated on the grass, carrying a smudge bowl. It began with a healing drum and a jingle dress dancer who spun slowly while holding a soft cradle board and a pair of tiny baby moccasins. Then a moment of silence. Former TRC commissioner Marie Wilson sits during a moment of silence at Beechwood Cemetery. Photo: Mark Blackburn/APTN. When it came, the only sound was the breeze rustling the trees and scattering red and gold leaves onto the stone path. “I just think that the trees put on the very best dresses for us today and have made themselves so beautiful,” said Wilson. She noted that being in a cemetery added weight to the gathering. “One of the things that is so beautiful about gathering in a graveyard is that it is by definition, sacred and it reminds us of all the loved ones in their lives. It often brings us together in a kind of reunion.” Wilson said she’s still in touch with fellow commissioner Willie Littlechild and feels the presence of lead commissioner Murray Sinclair, who has since passed into the spirit world. She recalled how the three of them once sat in a room and pounded out the 94 calls to action, after gathering “so much wisdom” from five years of testimony. As the non-Indigenous member of the team, Wilson said she felt like a stand-in to show that reconciliation involves everyone, and that the burden should not fall solely on Indigenous people. Her husband, former N.W.T. premier Stephen Kakfwi, also spoke. He is a survivor who spent eight years in a residential school and suffered both physical and sexual abuse. ‘When you’re helping your people, you cannot stop,’ Kakfwi told the people gathered. Photo: Mark Blackburn/APTN. He said he wasn’t naturally inclined to forgiveness, but then had a conversation with an Elder. “When you’re helping your people, you cannot stop. You have to help everybody. If you’re going do things for the Dene, you have to do it for Métis. You have to do it for Inuit, and you have to do it for non-Indigenous people,” he said. “And so that’s what I followed. I learned to forgive a long time ago… I got over the harms that were done me.” From the Sacred Forest, the crowd followed two tour guides from A7G, Amber Hein of Pikwakanagan First Nation an hour or so west of Ottawa, and Bianca Cipriano of Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, who led them down a grassy hill to the first stop of the reconciliation tour and the grave of Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce. Hein and Cipriano take turns telling his story. Amber Hein, left, and Bianca Cipriano guided visitors along the reconciliation tour. Photo: APTN. Bryce had served as chief medical officer for both the Department of the Interior (1904–1921) and the Department of Indian Affairs (1904–1914). As the first medical officer for Indian Affairs, he used data and medical reports to reveal the staggering death toll from tuberculosis in residential schools. His 1907 special report blamed the spread of disease on overcrowding, poor ventilation and malnutrition. Bryce’s efforts to improve them were blocked by superiors. By 1914, he was pushed out of Indian Affairs. He continued his work at the Department of the Interior until 1921, then published a whistleblowing pamphlet in 1922 titled The Story of a National Crime: Being a Record of the Health Conditions of the Indians of Canada, 1904–1921. The public largely ignored it. But today it is evidence the department knew children were dying, could have stopped it, but didn’t. According to the TRC, 4,000 children died at the schools from the time they opened in the 1800s, to when they closed for good in 1996. His voice is one of a number of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples who raised the alarm throughout the history of residential schools. ‘We need to take collective responsibility,’ says Susan Tollar of the residential school system. Photo: APTN. Bryce’s story resonates with Susan Tollar, a minister with the United Church, attending the Beechwood ceremony for the first time. “It’s very important for us to show that we are aware that we’ve done things wrong in the past, and we need to take collective responsibility as a society and try and make things better, make things right,” she said. She said that during the ceremony she thought of her own children and what it might be like to have them taken. It made her think of families in crisis around the world. “Similar things are happening right now in Ukraine and Gaza. And we need to stop that.” Linda Posthuma had attended before. She lives nearby and came to gather with others who are remembering and who want to make reconciliation happen. “I’m a mother and a grandmother and thinking about places that I’ve lived in Sault Ste. Marie where there was a residential school when I was even a child, and I want to live in a better way and I want our country to be better.” She, too, finds inspiration in Bryce. “There are people who have gone before us who have been courageous and that’s an essential thing for us to stand up, speak, do what we can,” she said. A participant in the reconciliation tour stops to read one of the TRC’s 94 calls to action that could be found along the route. About 100 allies took part in the reconciliation tour where they were guided along the paths of the Beechwood Cemetery. Photo: Mark Blackburn/APTN. The second stop on the tour was a tall memorial to Nicholas Flood Davin, the journalist and politician whose 1879 report recommended Canada adopt the U.S. model of industrial schools. That document laid the foundation for the residential school system. Davin claimed these schools would offer children maternal care and a Canadian education. “They delivered neither. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission later concluded the system amounted to cultural genocide,” Hein told the crowd. The third stop was William McDougall’s resting place. Born in 1822, McDougall was a Father of Confederation and John A. Macdonald’s minister of Public Works. He introduced the resolution that allowed Canada to purchase Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company and was appointed Lieutenant Governor of the territory. In 1869, he tried to enter via the Red River but was stopped by Métis resistance under Louis Riel. The Métis declared a provisional government to negotiate terms of Confederation that would protect their rights. Though the Manitoba Act was eventually passed, Ottawa sent a force of 1,000 troops to suppress the resistance, resulting in what many Métis call a “reign of terror,” said Cipriano. “Our struggles for liberation are intertwined,” said Yami Msosa, a longtime supporter of A7G. “When we think about the calls to action for the TRC or missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, Two-Spirit folks, September 30th, is an important day of mourning. “And you know, it’s a reminder that the work is not only today, but it’s every single day.” Her partner Alana Nugent agreed. “It’s a time to stand in solidarity with the folks that do this labor day in, day out and remind myself why it’s critical to also stay committed to that work 365 days of the year,” Nugent said. “I’m an Irish citizen, so I have at least the understanding of what it means to be hunted and persecuted for who you are. Like Yami said, our struggles are all intertwined.” Debbie Owusu-Akyeah, Emcee Josh Lewis, Yami Msosa, Alana Nugent at the reconciliation tour in the Beechwood National Cemetery. Photo: Karyn Pugliese/APTN. Debbie Owusu-Akyeah, who is West African, came to the ceremony with “a shared sense of colonial harm.” “As we’re trying to build movements towards liberation, I think showing up for Indigenous communities in either the smallest or biggest way possible are important to me,” Owusu-Akyeah said. “I wanted to come here today to learn and also to support the young organizers here today.” The final stop carried the heaviest weight at the grave of Duncan Campbell Scott. His polished grey slab lies flat, like a coffin carved in stone. A poet and deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932, Scott made residential school attendance mandatory. He knew the schools were filled with abuse, disease, and death. He had letters from nurses, teachers and parents in addition to Bryce’s warnings. Yet he did nothing because the fixes were deemed too expensive. His decisions entrenched the system for generations. History bent in another unexpected way at Scott’s grave—for child advocate Cindy Blackstock The guides reminded the crowd gathered around Scott’s grave that discrimination against Indigenous children didn’t end with residential schools—it continued through the Sixties Scoop, the Millennial Scoop and ongoing failures in the child welfare system. The grave marker for Duncan Campbell Scott at the Beechwood Cemetery. Photo: Mark Blackburn/APTN. In 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the federal government discriminates against First Nations children by underfunding welfare services they depend on and failing to implement Jordan’s Principle. It was Blackstock, executive director of the Child and Family Caring Society, who filed that complaint. Her interest in the connection between residential schools and the child welfare system led her to visit Beechwood in 2014 to find Scott’s grave. She challenged the cemetery’s traditional commemorative plaque, which told only one side of Scott’s legacy. Beechwood agreed to remove it the next day. It was from that moment that the idea of a reconciliation tour grew, focused not on erasing history but completing it and telling the missing chapters. Nick McCarthy, Beechwood’s director of marketing, communications and community outreach, says that thousands of people, students on school tours, government workers and others come out not only on Orange Shirt Day, but throughout the year. “The one thing that we do notice is the kids, the children who come on the school tour, they’ll sometimes bring their parents to come to this. So we get a lot of feedback that ‘my child told me, we have to come learn this,’” said McCarthy. “I think that’s really what it is when we’re thinking about how to make sure that we transition the future and ensure that we’re walking together towards reconciliation. It’s these kids who are understanding the truth now that are bringing their parents aboard and bringing their families along. So I think that’s really the beautiful aspect of this history day.” People on the tour were asked to fill out a petition calling on Prime Minister Mark Carney to follow the calls to action. Photo: Mark Blackburn/APTN. As the tour ends at Scott’s grave, the man who was one of the authors of the system the TRC called a cultural genocide, the present and future turn to face him defiantly. As many non-Indigenous people taking the tour told APTN News, the point is not guilt, but connection and finding the courage, like Bryce, to speak the truth. They came to hold the story and to help carry the weight of reconciliation as it moves forward. Continue Reading