On the morning of September 30, people will begin gathering at the south entrance of the Maskwacis Mall. Registration opens at 9:30 a.m., and then they will walk — together, in the open air, dressed for whatever central Alberta weather decides to offer — to the TRC Monument. There, guest speakers and singers will take over, and bagged lunches will be handed out to everyone who came.
It is a simple plan, and that is part of its power. The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is a federal statutory holiday, but in Maskwacis it is observed as a community gathering, not a ceremony staged for outsiders. There is no ticket, no fee, no barrier. Organizers with the Ermineskin Cree Nation Events Department and the Maskwacis Cree Tribal Council are asking only that people show up and dress for the weather.
To understand why this particular walk matters, you have to understand the ground it crosses. Maskwacis is Alberta's largest Indigenous community, made up of four sister nations: Ermineskin, Samson, Louis Bull and Montana. It was known as Hobbema until 2014, when the community reclaimed its Cree name — maskwacîs, meaning "bear hills," the traditional name for this stretch of country. The Ermineskin Cree Nation, Reserve #138, is one of those four, a Treaty 6 signatory whose reserve was established in 1885, with a land base of roughly 25,000 acres and a registered population of nearly 4,900 people.
And it is the site of one of the largest residential schools ever to operate in Canada. The Ermineskin Residential School ran from 1895 until 1975, just west of what is now Maskwacis, drawing children not only from Treaty 6 territory but from Treaties 7 and 8, from British Columbia and from Saskatchewan. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report, quoting survivor Doris Young, called the schools plainly what they were: "a war on Aboriginal children." Around 150,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families and forced into Canada's residential schools, where abuse was rampant and Indigenous languages and ceremonies were banned. The Catholic Church oversaw roughly 60 percent of the 139 schools.
Few people embody the long arc from that history to this walk more than Dr. Wilton Littlechild. An honorary chief of the Ermineskin Cree Nation, Littlechild was taken from his grandparents at age six and sent to the Ermineskin school, staying until the ninth grade before being transferred to another institution in Edmonton. He went on to become a lawyer, an athlete and a commissioner on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission itself, and it was Littlechild who spent roughly seven years pressing for the Pope to answer Call 58 of the TRC's 94 Calls to Action — the call for a papal apology for the Church's role in the schools.
That work brought the world to Maskwacis. On July 25, 2022, Pope Francis came to the former site of the Ermineskin Residential School — the only residential school he visited on his Canadian pilgrimage, which he described as a "pilgrimage of penance." He stood on Ermineskin land and said he was "deeply sorry" for the Church's "catastrophic" involvement in the "cultural destruction" of Indigenous peoples. Chief Randy Ermineskin, speaking in the weeks before the visit, was clear-eyed about what an apology could and could not do. "He will apologize and then he leaves and we're left holding the bag," he said. "There will be much work to be done after." He also warned that the visit would "open wounds again," and the community arranged mental-health supports for survivors during and after the event.
That is the work the September 30 walk continues. The TRC Monument stands as a physical marker of a history that the surrounding community has never been allowed to forget, and the walk to it is a deliberate act of remembrance — moving at the pace of a crowd, past the everyday landmarks of a modern reserve, to arrive at a place built to hold grief and memory. The Maskwacis Mall itself is part of that everyday life: in August 2024, Chief Joel Mykat cut the ribbon on a new First Nations Bank of Canada branch there, an Indigenous-owned financial institution opening in the heart of the community. The walk begins at the mall and ends at the monument, tracing a line from the present back into the past.
The guest speakers and singers at the monument will carry the ceremony. The bagged lunches will feed whoever comes. And the invitation — issued by phone through the ECN Events Department at 780-585-3741 and the Maskwacis Cree Tribal Council at 780-585-0016 — extends to anyone who wants to walk. That openness is the point. Reconciliation, as it is practiced here, is not a lecture delivered to outsiders; it is a community holding its own history in public, and leaving a place at the table for anyone willing to show up and walk the distance.
For those who come, the instruction is straightforward: arrive at the south entrance of the Maskwacis Mall by 9:30 a.m. on September 30, dress for the weather, and walk. The rest — the speakers, the songs, the lunch, the quiet at the monument — will be waiting at the other end.