Remembrance Day

Thursday, November 9. Today I attended a meeting for residential school alumni who are about to be recompensed for being sent away from their families back in the 1950s and ‘60’s. There were about 15 Inuit and 2 southerners (me and the government lawyer.) This is the first time that the government has ever sent a representative to this Inuit community for the express purpose of discussing residential school issues. There is a lot of pain, even after all this time, for the elders. The lawyer droned on for a good hour about the scale of compensation and who will get what and when. Near the end, I became aware of an elderly woman further along my row, who began to sob and then to wail. The other attendees did not move to console her. Having no idea what was culturally appropriate, I went over and sat beside her. The meeting was still in progress so I just sat there and rubbed her back.
I walked out of there feeling extremely conscious of my ethnicity and the baggage that comes with it here in the north. As a man had said in the meeting, 'All that pain didn't need to happen.'