Ceremony

After our late Elder, Wanda Whitebird, suffered a spinal cord injury she lost the use of her legs and thus could no longer crawl into a traditional sweat lodge. With her input and in collaboration with our disability justice partners, No More Silence attempted over a period of almost two years to create a lodge in a Toronto park. The City had called a meeting of Indigenous advocates professing interest in the Calls to Justice from the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in early 2020. It was Wanda’s desire to be able to hold ceremony for the community in a safe and accessible way and with no interference by the city officials and policing.

In a frustrating process over zoom we participated in a series of meetings with city staffers that we began jokingly to refer to as hoop jumping for reconciliation. While we initially thought our request for a site in Scarborough would be approved, with every new meeting another level of bureaucracy was introduced, and road block, after road block, so that Wanda eventually withdrew our participation.