In May of 2021, when the unmarked graves of 215 children had been discovered at the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc Residential School in Kamloops, we were in the midst of completing a 6-week Indigenous Allyship workshop (expertly and compassionately designed and facilitated by Pulxaneeks of Heart to Heart to Indigenous Relations Consultation). While there’s certainly no possible way to prepare for such a horrific discovery, the team fully recognized that we needed to put into practice what we had started to learn through our work with Pulxaneeks.
Like so many others across what is called Canada (and across the world), we considered how best to channel our outrage and heartache into something helpful and constructive – how to advance our responsibility to become practicing allies. While seeking to avoid meaningless virtue signalling, we were keenly aware (in large part thanks to the workshop with Pulxaneeks) that saying or doing nothing out of fear of discomfort would be a fundamentally worse outcome.
With some direction and encouragement from Pulxaneeks, and some help from design students from Vancouver Community College, we’ve undertaken the task to keep a record of the discoveries made. The purpose of this series of ‘infographics’ is to both maintain a current record of how many children never went home, but to do so in a way that can be shared to raise awareness, and to hopefully maintain pressure on our politicians to continue to make it a priority.
Please feel free to save and share these wherever you like (no attribution needed). If any corrections are needed please reach out to info@ballentinemedia.com. If you’d like a copy of the working Adobe Illustrator files to maintain your own version, we’d love to share them with you.
All data sourced from National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation website.
