How survivors fought to create Canada's first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation

WARNING: This story contains distressing details.

Eddy Charlie, a member of the Cowichan Nation and a survivor of the Kuper Island Residential School off the east coast of Vancouver Island, says he was first moved to speak out about his own experiences at residential school after overhearing a group of students at a research library dismiss their impact. 

"I heard some people talking and one of the students said, 'I can't stand these Indigenous people. I wonder why they keep talking about residential schools. It doesn't make sense. It happened so long ago.' And he said they should forget about this and stop talking about it," Charlie said. 

"And I just felt sadness but also a rage because these were 150,000 children that were taken away from their homes against their will and placed in residential schools far from their families."

Thursday marks Canada's first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation — a statutory holiday to observe the impacts of the Canadian residential school system, a system funded by the government and largely administered by Christian churches from the 1870s until the last school closed in 1997.

Marking this day was a recommendation of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but became a reality because of efforts from survivors like Charlie, and the national reckoning on deaths at residential schools sparked by the discovery of potential unmarked graves in Kamloops, B.C.

The commission, which was active between 2008 and 2015, documented the history and impacts of the residential school system. Survivors gave testimony about the lingering effects of the school system, the trauma they suffered, and often the physical, emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of their educators.