Sharon Eadie had a smile on her face as the people filled the seats for the evening’s guest speaker at the Morris Multiplex Sept. 25.
“We would be really happy if there were 50 people,” she said. “My husband told me to expect double that.”
The facility organizers had set out 120 seats, with extra chairs stacked at the back. Five minutes before the speaker was to appear, that stack was half its original size.
Eadie is the chair of a seven-person Truth and Reconciliation committee formed in 2021 from the congregations of the Lutheran Church of the Cross and Morris United Church.
“Tonight’s event is for people to make connections,” she explained. “We believe people want to do something, but don’t know how to get started. We want people to sign-up on our mailing list to explore options.”
The board invited author, Winnipeg Free Press columnist, and professor of Indigenous studies Niigaan Sinclair as a guest speaker for the evening.
Lionel Mason opened the evening with a land acknowledgement in a song. The beat of the drum carried the Indigenous lyrics that translated as “gather today to talk about sharing this land and our lives together.”
Mason, a resident of Morris, attended the Assiniboia Residential School in Winnipeg as a youth. He left behind a secure, loving home in St. Theresa Point, Manitoba at 13 years of age when he entered institutional living.
Eadie, as master of ceremonies, opened the event by sharing that “our journey began in the fall of 2021 when Pastor Leslie Poulin brought forward a recommendation from the Lutheran Church of Canada to explore how reconciliation was taking place locally.”
Sinclair opened his presentation by calling the day an epic Wednesday. The Morris speaking engagement wrapped up a day for him that also included presentations and events in Selkirk, Winnipeg, and Winkler,
“Survivors of residential schools brought us here today,” said Sinclair.
He described the park dedication ceremony he had attended in Winnipeg a few hours earlier. It recognized the June 24, 1972 plane crash on Linwood Street that took the lives of eight residential school children.
“I was beyond moved,” shared Cheryl Demarcke, president of the Morris and District Chamber of Commerce. “I was never aware of the plane crash that took the lives of those eight residential school children. Sinclair was right when he said if it was eight white children, we would have heard about it. Empathy comes from knowing.”
Sinclair’s week was full of events that celebrated Indigenous stories, all leading up to the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation Sept. 30. Also known as Orange Shirt Day, it recognizes and remembers the tragic history and honours the survivors of Canada’s residential school system.
Sinclair’s presentation was part history lesson, part genealogy, part social characteristics and statistics of the Indigenous population, and part success stories for Indigenous peoples.
This was not Sinclair’s first trip to Morris to speak. On a freezing cold January in 2013, he visited the community to deliver a gift of a coffee and donuts to Reed Turcotte, then editor-in-chief of the Morris Mirror newspaper.
Sinclair’s aim then was to start a conversation with Turcotte about derogatory comments he’d made in an editorial about Indigenous people.
Sinclair never met with Turcotte on that trip, but a voice from an employee at the Subway restaurant next door befriended him with the question, “Are you cold? Want to come in and warm up?”
That 30-minute warm-up in the sandwich shop led to meetings with the mayor, the school principal, and a piece of carrot cake at the local library to talk to people about an incomplete story.
“You, Morris, helped me get started,” shared Sinclair. “Truth and Reconciliation is challenging. How do we do it? I will be blunt: we are in this together.
“Orange Shirt Day is a really good job … how are we going to live together when we take the orange shirt off?”
Local librarian and long time Morris resident Claudia Schmidt commented that it “was a very positive evening. Listening to the bad stuff is important. The positive stuff, like an Indigenous premier and the Indigenous youth achievements Mr. Sinclair told us, was something I want to hear more about.”
