First Nation makes new home for children's shoes left last year on Parliament Hill

A First Nation in western Quebec has made a new home for the shoes that were left on Parliament Hill last year as a memorial to the children who never made it back to their families after attending Canada's residential schools.

On Thursday, elders, students and other community members gathered on a hill standing tall above the Grade 1 to 11 school in Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, an Algonquin First Nation located 136 kilometres north of Ottawa. 

It's on that steep hill, within a large circle of painted orange stones, that the shoes that accumulated in front of Centre Block were buried inside birch bark baskets marked with local students' handprints. 

After they were removed from Parliament Hill last October with the guidance of Algonquin elders, "they needed a place," said Alison Commando, a local educator in Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg. They were buried on the hill this spring. 

The Parliament Hill memorial took shape after the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in B.C. announced it had discovered more than 200 suspected burial sites near the former Kamloops residential school.

It was one of several memorials with shoes and children's toys that appeared across the country, after the discovery sparked a national reckoning involving Canada's historic and ongoing treatment of Indigenous people.

Jenny Tenasco, a residential school survivor in Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, is among the elders who agreed the shoes needed a proper final resting place.

"It's gonna be another way of respecting the children and part of healing," she said. 

The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation estimates, based on death records, at least 4,100 children died at residential schools across Canada, and that many were likely buried in unmarked and untended graves at schools or school-related cemeteries. 

The true number is likely much higher. Murray Sinclair, the former chair of the commission, has said as many as 25,000 children may have died at the schools.

Tenasco attended the Cecilia Jeffrey residential school operated by the Presbyterian Church in Kenora, Ont., located nearly 2,000 kilometres away from Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg. 

She recalled the pain she felt while being taken away by bus after having some teeth removed, and the agony of being separated from her older sister by fence. 

"We were never allowed to speak our language," she added. "Those were stolen words."

Commando, the guidance counselor at Kitigan Zibi Kikinamadinan School — which is connected to the hill site via a walking trail — welcomed class after class to the top of the hill on Thursday. Kids of all ages helped her form the circle of stones.