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.”

Elder Catherine Brooks at the Fall Equinox Ceremony 2024

UPCOMING EVENTS

November 30th: 12:00 to 4:00 p.m.: We Are All Water Protectors: Community Art-Making Workshop with tiny cultural centre artists, h kryworuchko & Aysia Tse: The first of 3 workshops to bring the youth-led vision for this installation at 729 St. Clair W. into being. Learn basic copper finishing techniques to capture your memories of water as you join in collective art-making in the St. Matthew’s Community Room. Potluck. Free.

The We Are All Water Protectors community art project is creating a new outdoor classroom for Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan National Healing Forest that invites people to reflect on their relationships with water, Toronto’s “lost rivers,” and our shared responsibilities as water protectors. The centrepiece will be a metalwork installation created in conjunction with emerging artists h kryworuchko and Aysia Tse and their tiny cultural centre pop-up intervention project focussed on “our collective decolonial futures.”

Sweetwater Moon reflections

Gitchi miigwetch to Elder Peduhbun Migizi Kwe/Dr. Catherine Brooks for leading our Women's Sweetwater Moon Lodge Monday night, and to Fire Keeper Michael Buyers for working with the Fire in the Good Way he was taught by Elder Asayenes/Dr. Dan Smoke. We spoke; we cried; we toasted one another with Sweetwater from Sheila Moll’s sugar bush in a dozen or more languages, from Anishinaabemowin to Yiddish. We know Creator will hear us, and honour us as women, as daughters, mothers, grandmothers.

We were thrilled to welcome our Latinx sisters from Brazil and Mexico, and to speak at the Feast table of how we might collaborate more deeply in the coming year: un Pueblo; una Tierra; una lucha como familiares.

Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan has featured plants grown by the agricultural nations of the Americas since its inception, including those important to north-south, pre-colonial trade routes. Watch for opportunities to have conversations about bird, butterfly, and human migration and the question of borders come summer.

The next afternoon, the Hippo School children heard the story of how the Maple fed Woodpecker and then the People facing famine, as learned from Elder Gary Sault of the Mississaugas of the Credit. Noojimo’iwewin Gitigaan Crew Lead Vanessa Barnes led the children in recreating the relationship between Maple and Woodpecker with hand gestures, sharing a photo of a Red-Crested Woodpecker and pointing out where sap still dripped from the Norway maple where we had tapped.

The children then had the chance to sample the sap, the light syrup made from that sap, and a dark syrup boiled down over an open fire by the Regal Heights Residents Association. "Boil" and "steam" were the words of the day, and all variations of sap and syrup were declared "yummy." As they went on to their next activity, the children gave four shouts of "chi miigwetch" to thank the Maple for its gift.

Thank you to all women who attended the Sweetwater Moon Lodge, with additional thanks to IPSG members Betsy Anderson and Sheila Moll, who set up the Parlour and led the clean up. We are also grateful to Susan Noakes and John Keating for their help in tapping our two trees (only one successfully), and their guidance in producing syrup.

Celebrating the "sweetwater". Children from Hippo school help in tapping.

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