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Dr. Viola Robinson and Joe B. Marshall offer remarks at Frost Park.
Acadia First Nation and the Town of Yarmouth came together yesterday to recognize the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
People gathered in the afternoon at Frost Park, most wearing orange shirts, to listen to remarks from former Commissioner for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples Dr. Viola Robinson and retired Mi’kmaw Studies professor, UCB and Indian Residential School Survivor Joe B. Marshall.
Marshall described his experience in a residential school.
“Although they called the schools ‘residential schools’, schools being the key word, there wasn’t much schooling. There was a hell of a lot of work,” says Marshall. “We worked around the school and in it. There was building maintenance for the boys.”
He says they were forced to maintain the boiler rooms, remove and reinstall storm windows and shovel coal.
Robinson says the day is about more than reconciliation.
“Healing goes hand in hand with reconciliation,” says Robinson. “We’re here to talk about reconciliation, but before you talk about reconciliation, you have to talk about healing. And it’s not only healing for indigenous people, it’s healing for Canada.”
She says the national commemoration is a symbolic act but it needs to be followed up with actions of substance.
A Mi’kma’ki Friendship Bench for Frost Park was unveiled at the event.
There were also orange shirt painting kits and Every Child Matters Masks available at the event.
Later that evening, a screening of the documentary film “We Were Children” was held at the Rose Purdy Recreation Centre.
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Y95 Photo.