The flag that inspired the upcoming commemorative walk. Photo courtesy Tom Roberts
A group of Prince Albert Indian Residential School survivors is planning a walk to heal from a school system that stripped kids from their families for nine months of the year.
The commemorative walk, which is planned to start in exactly three months, will be a very emotional task for the survivors of one of Canada’s largest residential schools. They’ll walk from the site of the school that housed them during the school year, and make their way back to their home communities.
Whether their final destination is as close as Prince Albert city limits, or as far as Stanley Mission, Tom Roberts with the Lac La Ronge Residential School Support Program says the walk will have the same meaning for everyone involved.
“We were taken away from our families, not by choice but by force,” Roberts said. He too was a student at Prince Albert Indian Residential School.
The idea for the walk was triggered by the simple phrase “coming home,” which was written on a flag at a residential school gathering in Stanley Mission last year.
A woman who had attended Prince Albert Indian Residential School told Roberts she words coming home “sent me back. It pulled something in me, it triggered something in me.
“We never left the residential school, we were taken,” Roberts recounted her telling him.
His response to this woman’s revelation was to plan a commemorative walk. The walk will take them back to their childhood, but it will also empower them to walk away.
“We leave the residential school on our own, on our own terms,” he said.
“It’s part of the residential school (support) program to help First Nations people who went to residential school try and leave the past behind and try to carry on their lives for the better of their communities. And if this is one way that they want to do it, that will help them, we will help them,” Roberts said.
So Roberts offered to turn that thought into a reality.
Roberts says they’ve chosen June 21, which is National Aboriginal Day, because June is a significant time for former residential school students. They would spend all of September through to June away from their family.
“June, we start counting the days and then we start counting the hours, and the night before we are to come home, nobody sleeps. You know, we don’t want to miss the bus and we are so happy we’re coming home and we’d be singing and playing all the way home,” he said.
The PA Indian Residential School’s buildings once stood on Prince Albert Grand Council grounds. The drill hall is now called the Allan Bird Memorial Centre.
The walk will carry on to Stanley Mission, with people taking shifts and relaying their way north.
They’ll camp along the highway as they go.