Never forgetting the children of Indian residential schools

With each new unmarked grave discovery, Jerry Ackerman’s grief and sadness grew.

“Michael Harris, the journalist, has said the nation is in a tsunami of shame, and I share that shame,” he told his wife Ellie, in their Annapolis Royal home.

She says her husband has been “deeply, emotionally, wounded” by what happened to children and their families in the past as a result of the Indian Residential School system.

Not only were children forced from their families, but they were forced from their culture and backgrounds as well. Many have described the residential school system as trying ‘to kill in the Indian in the child.'

Many children never returned home. Some died of disease or died while trying to run away, it’s been said.

In many cases, parents never knew what happened to their children.

Residential school survivors have talked about the physical, sexual and mental abuse that they, as children, were subjected to.

An estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children attended residential schools between the 1860s and 1996.

Since May, more than 1,300 suspected unmarked graves have been discovered at the sites of some former residential schools.

That such a terrible thing could have happened to just

Annapolis Royal resident Jerry Ackerman has been deeply troubled by what happened to children in the residential school system. As Canadians, he says, we must never forget the wrong that was done.

“The nation is in a tsunami of shame, and I share that shame.” Jerry Ackerman

one child is bad enough, let alone thousands of them.

And so Jerry Ackerman, who turns 90 this year, decided to put his grief on display, so that others could have a way of displaying and sharing their grief as well.

One day in early July he went to the Frenchy’s in Digby and bought as many pairs of children’s shoes as he could find.

He then lined them up on the concrete seating at the amphitheatre in Annapolis Royal in honour of the native children who died in residential schools.

“He also flies the Mi’kmaq flag on our property. We’re right next to the amphitheatre, so the flag flies on our property but it really overlooks the amphitheatre,” his wife says, saying about the display he created, “It’s been a memorial by him and an effort to draw people’s attention to the tragedy that we need to face as a country.”

There have been other similar displays of shoes in other places in Nova Scotia and in other places in Canada.