‘These babies are coming home’: a spirit walk from Winnipeg to Kamloops

MEDICINE HAT, AB. – Clad in an orange shirt, an Every Child Matters facemask and carrying a blue backpack, Jasmine Lavallee paid a visit to the Saamis Tepee in Medicine Hat, Alberta Thursday.

The southeastern Alberta city marks the halfway mark of her spirit walk to honour children and survivors everywhere.

On Sept. 1, Lavallee left from the site of a former residential school in Winnipeg.

She’s bound for the former residential school site in Kamloops, where the mass grave containing the bodies of 215 children were discovered in the spring.

She wants to bring awareness to the horrors of residential schools and make sure the outpouring of support from the spring and summer doesn’t fade away.

“We can’t let this awareness go. We can’t let it be a trend on social media. This is not a trend,” she says. “People have to know everywhere what happened here. It hurts, it hurts so much because this is our home, this is where we’re from. We can’t let it die out. To make a better tomorrow we have to face what happened yesterday.”

She says the support as she’s walked along the Trans-Canada Highway has been amazing and that people are going out of their way for miles to meet her and her handful of family and friends supporting her on the journey.

She’s had so much support her timeline for the walk had been heavily disrupted. She had planned to be in Kamloops Oct. 15, but now hopes she’ll get there about a month from now.

Never leaving her side on the journey is a backpack filled with children’s moccasins. She wanted to take moccasins “home” to Kamloops, but Lavallee was having trouble getting people to send any to her.

That changed after asking someone in Winnipeg to make a pair.

“He’s like come back in three hours. Three days later we came back he was the third stitch away from being completed. I started asking him who taught him, he started naming his aunties and my mom says where are you from?” Lavallee recalls. “He looked at me and said Kamloops, B.C. My mom said ‘if you need another sign to keep going, go.’ And then the following day the moccasins started coming in from all over Manitoba. So I carry them, to us they represent the children. We’re taking them to Kamloops, B.C. but in this case, these babies are coming home.”

She encourages people to keep talking about the history of residential schools in Canada, to keep posting about it and keep bringing it up.

“It’s going to annoy some but the truth hurts,” she says.

You can keep up with Lavallee’s on her Facebook page 215+ I Wanna Come Home.