Indigenous People's Solidarity Group
The June 2023 Solstice ceremony at St. Matthew's Indigenous Healing Garden. (Marcelle St-Amant)
The Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Group (IPSG) was founded in 2018, as congregants and community members acted on the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We aspire to live in accordance with St. Matt’s Territorial Acknowledgement, now posted streetside, which recognizes 15,000 years of Indigenous history in this place as well as our commitment as settlers to the Land and its first stewards.
The IPSG hosts regular ceremonies and events—including book studies, Indigenous Song Circles, liturgies, and other activities—as well as oversees Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan/Healing Garden.
Anyone can join the gardening, reconciliation and spiritual events being held in the garden. Sign up for the St. Matt’s e-newsletter for regular invitations and reflections from the IPSG, and/or contact Outreach Coordinator Betsy Anderson to join. Keep up with our activities on Facebook.
Why We Wear Orange 2025 Campaign
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.”
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Elder Catherine Brooks at the Fall Equinox Ceremony 2024
The Sweetwater is Running
“Aambe ziisbaakadokaaning zhaadaa/Let’s go to the Sugar Camp” is the Anishinaabemowin language lesson for February 20th of Anishnabek Nation Language Commissioner Barbara Nolan’s 2026 Calendar. Regal Heights Neighbourhood Association’s John Keating found it to be so and began his 13th year of tapping local Maples over Family Day weekend.
Tapping in Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan with the Hippo School began on February 24th, which turned out to be the coldest day on the week’s calendar. Only the oldest children had the opportunity to be part of the process, greeting Garden Co-Lead Preston Walberg’s offering of Tobacco to Maple for its gift of Sweetwater with curiosity and John’s drilling with enthusiasm. The opportunity to take a turn pounding in the spile then watching how the bucket was attached closed the outdoor portion of the activity.
Inside, Garden Educator Maya Ferguson-Klinowski called all 3 classes into circles to hear Co-Lead Vanessa Barnes’s re-telling of the late Mississaugas of the Credit Elder Gary baa Sault’s story of how Woodpecker helped Maple relieve the itch of busy bugs under her bark with his sharp beak. All the creatures in the forest, including the youngest siblings, the two-leggeds, learned from Woodpecker of Maple’s sweet gift. Since Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan is not yet producing sap, John shared from what Maples elsewhere in the neighbourhood had offered so the children could taste the sweetness of spring’s first Medicine. He reassured the children that they could start checking the buckets on their walks as soon as the days grew warmer.
Celebrating the "sweetwater". Children from Hippo school help pound in the spiles in tapping. Pictures by Robin Buyers
“After such a cold and snowy winter,” said Preston afterwards, “it was a delight to share the first hints of an early spring with the little ones—the practices and stories of nature’s gift economy in Tkaronto and the Great Lakes region and the first taste of this year’s sweetwater.” If you too want to volunteer in Tuesday morning children’s programming, contact majentamaya@gmail.com to be included in the schedule.
When the Sugaring Moon rises in March, we expect warming days and cold nights to continue, bringing sweetwater to our buckets then to the great neighbourhood boil down on Springmount Avenue, where the ziibing/waterway known as Garrison Creek runs beneath. Perhaps this was once the site of a Sugar Camp. The littles are already looking forward to maple syrup from their own Camp for a Hippo School lunch.
On Sept. 23, 2023, the IPSG and Community History Project hosted a Why We Wear Orange Tea & Bannock gathering featuring Council Fire's Red Bear Singers. Red Bear Singers was founded to bring the healing of drum and song to Residential School and Sixties Scoop survivors and their families.
Pictures of Why We Wear Orange Day by Linda Wojciechowski