Notre Dame Students Honour and Remember Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Thursday, 22 October 2020 at 16:57

Students at École Secondaire Catholique Notre-Dame in Woodstock paid respect to missing and murdered aboriginal women on Thursday.

WOODSTOCK - Students at École Secondaire Catholique Notre-Dame in Woodstock paid respect to missing and murdered aboriginal women yesterday.

They held a special ceremony and a moment of silence as cohorts of students looked at pictures of 200 missing or murdered aboriginal women.

Resource Librarian Rose Sabourin says École Secondaire Catholique Notre-Dame is a legacy school for the Downie Wenjack Foundation and this is Downie Wenjack week.

"This was actually a project that we had decided to do in the Spring time but because of COVID, we were not able to do it then. Because we are a legacy school for the Downie Wenjack foundation, we decided to do the two together. General the Downie Wenjack week is October 17th to the 22nd and we have a call to action and we are supposed to do something towards reconciliation. Gord Downie named it ReconciliAction, so we can bring to light what has happened at residential schools and we decided to do the two things together and we are doing our commemoration of missing and murdered indigenous women this week."

Sabourin explains why it is so important for these students to recognize murder and missing indigenous women.

"It's extremely important because they are students, these things happened to students in the past, they were young children, they were taken away from their families, they were stripped of their culture, identity and language and we as a French speaking school, have the right to speak our language. We speak French, we are full French school and we revel in that, because we are allowed to speak the language that we choose to speak and these indigenous students were not allowed to do that."

Sabourin says they only had enough room to post pictures of 200 missing or murdered indigenous women, when in reality their are over 4000 of them in Canada. The ceremony featured remarks from the Principal, a moment of silence, a prayer, each cohort would walk around the circle of photos of missing and murdered aboriginal women and also a poem.