There will be a public unveiling of the new residential school memorial monument on Saturday, Sept. 19 at noon, behind the Sechelt (shíshálh) Nation offices at 5555 Sunshine Coast Highway.
The community is invited to come to the ceremony, where the monument will be dedicated to students who attended the local residential school, and their families.
The sculpture stands over 1.6 metres high and depicts a shíshálh Nation child being taken from the protective arms of its grandmother.
Carving the piece was emotional for Halfmoon Bay artist Michel Beauvais.
A member of the Kahnawake Mohawk Band, Beauvais spoke with family members about the effects of residential school on his maternal grandmother before starting to carve.
He found that her residential school experience was much longer and more brutal than he once imagined.
“After you speak to people here in Sechelt and people who’ve been to residential school, you’ll realize that brutal is the appropriate description,” Beauvais said.
Those stories and the 80-million-year-old stone itself, brought to the Coast from shíshálh Nation territory on Texada Island, gave Beauvais the inspiration he needed to create the memorial sculpture.
“The piece is cloaked with a thunderbird, the Sechelt crest, and on one side I stretched out the wing and it stretches out and reaches for the child. The idea behind that is the bond may have been stretched, but not broken,” Beauvais said.
Beauvais hopes the sculpture, and commemorative plaque that will be installed along with it, encourage people to talk about the residential school experience and start to heal from it.
“They need to talk about what happened and understand to make them whole again,” Beauvais said.
In addition to the public event on Saturday, Sept. 19, the shíshálh Nation also held a special event on Sept. 17 to honour former residential school students who have passed away and a private ceremony for shíshálh Nation members on Sept. 18.
