Catherine Brooks at Fall Equinox ceremony. Photo by Marcelle St-Amant.
Elder-in-Residence
Thanks to funding from The United Church of Canada’s Embracing the Spirit grant program and generous gifts from the community, Elder-in-Residence Dr. Catherine Brooks/Peduhbun Migizi Kwe (Early Morning Eagle Woman) brings her experience as a Counsellor grounded in Indigenous Tradition, and as an educator, consultant, and community worker to St. Matt’s St. Clair West neighbourhood.
A member of the Nippissing First Nation (Bird Clan—Red-tailed Hawk) raised in Toronto, she is also a member of the Bear Medicine Society who sits with the Turtle Clan in the Long House at Oneida Settlement. She is a Traditional Counsellor at Anishnawbe Health Toronto.
Elder Catherine advises the Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Group at St. Matt’s, leads Ceremonies in Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan/Healing Garden, and guides Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members who seek her counsel.
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Elder Catherine Brooks has been telling her mother’s stories of children giving one another rides in the kitchen dumb waiter up and down the floors of Spanish River Residential School this September. When Catherine and her brother were growing up, their mother spoke only of finding fun at school. She didn’t want them to be afraid, not in Toronto, where she’d moved with her white husband.
But Elder Catherine also shares stories her mother told her once she was grown, of servitude, poor food, and violent punishments. Sometimes she shares what her mother only spoke of on her deathbed: the pain of being unable to protect herself or her sisters from sexual abuse.
At Monday’s Remembering the Children gathering on Parliament Hill, it took 80 people to carry the 60 metre banner that named more than 6,000 children who died at the church-run schools. How is it that we can even speak of these institutions as schools when their schoolyards are graveyards?
How do we speak of what survivors carried forward into their lives when they had children of their own?
“I felt a sadness in her,” Elder Catherine says, “all her life.”
“Education is the key to reconciliation,” TRC Chief TRC Commissioner Murray Sinclair baa said often. “Education is what got us here and education will get us out.”
As Elder-in-Residence for the Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Group, Dr. Brooks urges us to tell the truth about Canada’s past, and demand an end to the inequities in health, education, and economic well-being that Indigenous, Metis, and Inuit people experience today.
“Ally,” she reminds us, “is a verb. You must act for reconciliation.”