At least 600 people, wearing the emblematic orange shirt, gathered at Centennial Square in Victoria to empathise with the thousands of residential school survivors carrying the stigma of genocide and to mourn the countless more children who didn’t survive the ordeal.

I say at least 600 people because I couldn’t see the whole crowd from my standpoint. Judging from pictures on the news, the actual count may be closer to a thousand.

A traditional dance by indigenous performers.

Children from a local playschool participated in the event.

The event started with airs of festival, with songs and dances interspersed among ritual acknowledgement speeches, and for a while it could have been construed as a family-friendly event. But the wind quickly turned when Eddie Charlie, one of the event’s organisers, came forward to share his own experience, and from there several speakers would relate their own harrowing accounts.

This native elder had a lot on his mind when he recounted his experience of very nearly being assimilated by a society that would deny his people’s plight, until his own people very nearly rejected him.

The descriptions were graphic. The witnesses would speak of children being abducted by the authorities, and of being depersonalised just like prisoners. They would speak of children being beaten, degraded, molested and raped, and of course even killed. They would speak of the worst punishments being inflicted in a vicious campaign to snuff out aboriginal culture, down to their names, languages, culture, and folklore.

They would call it genocide, perpetrated by a colonialist mindset dead set on either assimilating or destroying indigenous peoples.

Naturally, a strong parallel was stressed out with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its own blatant campaign of genocide, hell bent on destroying its history, language, culture, and if need be, its very people.

Let it not be said that Canada stands out as a country where shit doesn’t happen and mistakes are never made. Not if the thousands of survivors struggling with the reverberating stigma of being very nearly weeded out by an invasive species have anything to say about it.