When Morinville’s St. Jean Baptiste Church burned down on June 30, artist Rachel Curry was there to bear witness to the loss. There, she also heard some fairly disparaging comments about the reason for the blaze, which is still under investigation.
“I was standing in the parking lot in the early morning hours while the fire department was still there and the buildings still in flames. A guy behind me said, ‘We'll burn the f***ing reserve to the ground.’ His exact words. I turned around and said, ‘Excuse me, did I just hear you right? We don't even know what the cause of the fire was and you're going to go burn the reserve to the ground,’” she began.
“There was a lot of heated conversation over that.”
Curry turned that conversation over to an online community called The Village that she’s a member of, and the result of that discussion was that more dialogue was needed.
In order to foster that dialogue, she began Sisters in Solidarity and the Solidarity Cross project. She originally wanted to start this in Kamloops, as it is the city where the unmarked graves of 215 children of the former residential school were found in May. Wildfires in British Columbia precluded that possibility.
Instead, she took one decorated cross bearing the words ‘Solidarity’ and ‘BELIEVE’ to the top of Mission Hill, one of the sites near where one of St. Albert’s two residential schools used to stand. She has done one session in Morinville already, and is expected to return there for another soon. Plans are in the works to visit other communities, too.
“We're asking families to come together and to bead and feather strings to attach on crosses to show their support.”
The plan is for each cross to then be donated to the respective community where it will “hopefully” hang in a place where the general public can see it.
She is also bringing together women of The Village who literally will come just to listen to people's stories. Approximately 30 women have already joined the movement, which she hopes will find a groundswell that carries itself around to bridging gaps of compassion between Indigenous and settler communities across the globe.
"We're calling on the women of the world, literally, to spearhead reconciliation in a different way where we're saying to people, 'We want to hear your story. We want to listen. We want to be part and parcel of healing.'"
Curry hopes to hear from more people who want to be involved. She can be reached via email at [email protected].
