Walking with Our Sisters powerful experience
More than a dozen faculty, staff and family members from STM attended the Walking with Our Sisters final installation in Batoche on Friday, Aug. 16. The event was a commemorative art installation of more than 2,000 mocassin vamps in honour of missing and murdered Indigenous women
By Dr. Gertrude RompréResponding to an invitation by Elder Maria Campbell, members of the STM Community volunteered and participated in the Walking with Our Sisters Closing Ceremony on Aug. 16.
According to the River Women Collective, who organized the event in Batoche: “Walking with Our Sisters (WWOS) is a community-led collaborative art installation of over 2000 pairs of moccasin vamps (tops) created and donated by hundreds of caring and concerned individuals to honor the lives of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women. The large collaborative art piece is not so much an “exhibit” as it is a memorial. It is much more than an art installation. It is ceremony and it creates a space so that the community can come together for an act of honouring and remembering.”
STM participants were honoured to be part of this moving memorial. They volunteered for a variety of tasks ranging from making tea for Elders and visitors to caring for the actual installation which was, for the first time, located outdoors on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River.
The closing ceremonies in Batoche mark the culmination of the installation’s six-year journey throughout Canada. Participants at the Batoche event came from as far away as Arizona and Mexico and from across Canada.
“This was a privileged moment for us to stand in solidarity with those who are missing and have been murdered, their families, and the wide circles of people impacted by their loss,” said Gertrude Rompré, STM’s Director of Mission and Ministry.
“The day was one of the most profound in my life,” she continued, “I truly felt like we were walking on sacred ground.”
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