Special Newsletter: Indigenous Rights & Resources

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The Capitol Theatre is joining the many voices of Canadians, artists and arts organizations in reflecting on the recent discovery of 215 children buried in unmarked graves at the Indian Residential school in Kamloops. How can we, as a country, reconcile this recent past? We must commit to learning the past and listening to Indigenous voices now.

The last Residential School closed in 1996, a mere 25 years ago. This is not ancient history. It is our responsibility and the path forward to listen to every word that former member of the Canadian Senate and First Nations lawyer, Murray Sinclair, said in his role as the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Collectively, if we fulfill the 94 Calls-To-Action of the Commission, we will be on the right path to finding the truth, growing, understanding and memorializing.

Please consider donating to the Indian Residential School Survivors Societ y
or the Downie Wenjack fund

215 pairs of children's shoes have been placed on the steps of Touchstones Museum and surrounding City Hall here in Nelson, to honour the 215 Indigenous children who never made it home from the Kamloops Residential School. The discovery of these remains is not a revelation. Indigenous people have been telling these stories for years. This is simply a call to action that can no longer be ignored. This memorial was organized by Christopher Yates who is a Director of the West Kootenay Metis Society and Lesley Garlow, the Indigenous Educator at Touchstones Museum.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Project” is a systematic effort to record and analyze the deaths at the schools, and the presence and condition of student cemeteries, within the regulatory context in which the schools were intended to operate.

Read The Report

Kamloops Aboriginal Friendship Society (KAFS) is a non-profit society, dedicated to empowering Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities in Kamloops and the surrounding area. KAFS offers programs and services for urban Natives, including:· access to healthcare and wellness initiatives, outreach programs for children, youths, adults, elders, and families, childcare, counselling, community-focused programs and spaces, food hamper/nutrition programs, and much more. In other words, KAFS is community mainstay offering all-encompassing services to both Indigenous Urban Peoples, as well as anyone in need.
KAFS is in dire need of a new building. Currently, the existing building infrastructure has aged poorly and is being used beyond the end of it’s lifecycle. In addition, the centre is unable to adapt and expand programs in response to the needs of the local urban Aboriginal community. As a result, KAFS is raising funds to finance the construction of a new Friendship Centre, which in addition to the above mentioned programs, will also include on-site affordable social housing units prioritized for elders, single mothers, and Indigenous families.

DONATE HERE

The IRSS is a provincial organization with a 20 year history of providing services to residential school survivors.
The Indian Residential School Survivors Society began in 1994 as a working committee of the First Nations Summit. We were known as the Residential School Project, housed out of and as a part of the BC First Nations Summit. Our work was primarily to assist Survivors with the litigation process pertaining to Residential School abuses. In more recent years our work has expanded to include assisting the descendants of Survivors and implementing Community education measures (Indigenous & Non-Indigenous).
IRSSS provides essential services to Residential School Survivors, their families, and those dealing with Intergenerational traumas. These impacts affect every family and every community across B.C. and Canada. This fact is most evident in the Corrections Canada Services-the numbers of First Nations people incarcerated, Child and Family Services child apprehensions, the high number of people on social assistance, unemployment and underemployed, lower levels of education, the lowest number within an ethnic minority of “determinants of health”, the list of impacts is extremely high while the services available to effectively assist impacts of Residential Schools remain quite low.

DONATE HERE

Developed in 2001, the goals of Where are the Children? Healing the Legacy of the Residential Schools are to: acknowledge the experiences of, and the impacts and consequences of Canada’s Residential School System on Aboriginal peoples; to create a public and historical record of this period in Canadian history that could be easily accessed by Canadians; and to promote public awareness, understanding and education of the history and legacy of residential schools. Through documentation, acknowledgment and education, the goal of the exhibition is also to assist in promoting understanding and reconciliation in Canada about residential schools.

Watch the Video Testimonials

Indigenous Canada is a Massive Open Online Course from the Faculty of Native Studies that explores Indigenous histories and contemporary issues in Canada.

From an Indigenous perspective, this course explores key issues facing Indigenous peoples today from a historical and critical perspective highlighting national and local Indigenous-settler relations.

Learn About UofA's Free Indigenous History Course

The Capitol Theatre acknowledges that it operates on the traditional unceded territory of the sn̓ʕay̓ckstx Sinixt Arrow Lakes and the Yaqan Nukij Lower Kootenay Band peoples.

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