An Indigenous woman hopes to create awareness about residential schools by walking across Canada.
Last year, Jazz Lavallee and her supporters walked to B.C. from Manitoba.
Now, she is on her way to Nova Scotia.
Lavallee and Virgil Moar left Winnipeg from the site of the former Assiniboia Residential School carrying a backpack filled with items representing the children that died at the former Kamloops Residential School in B.C.
“We love and we care,” she told APTN News before setting off on her 3,500-km journey. “It’s the same deal as last year; I just don’t want it to die out.
“I want our children to know that there’s people that care and will walk a million miles.”
She and Moar and their supporters walked to Kamloops following the discovery of 215 unmarked graves there. This year, they’re going to stop at former residential school sites along the way.
“It’s not something you just go to sleep and forget about the next day,” Lavallee says. “It’s us that keep it going.”
Moar attended a residential day school. And his mom is a residential school survivor.
“They hid my dad in the bushes when they were coming for residential school (children). They took rations away from my granny and grandpa because of that,” he says.
