Ottawa’s Aboriginal Day Parade puts spotlight on Indigenous culture in Canada

By Drew May

The Ottawa Aboriginal Day Parade on June 17 was a chance for Aboriginal people from across Canada to come together and celebrate their different cultures.

For Brenda Zonruiter, a Sixties Scoop survivor, it was the very first time she was able to fully take part.

Zonruiter only met her real mother and found out where she is from on March 30, after spending months looking for her. She said she was separated from her family on the day she was born in 1969. Meeting her mother for the first time was like a dream, she said.

“It was like ‘is this really happening?’ One of those things like, should I pinch myself just to see if this is real?”

The Sixties Scoop was a practice from the late 1950s to 1980s where Aboriginal children were taken from their parents and put in foster care or up for adoption to non-Aboriginal families.

Zonruiter first reached out to the Wabano Centre, an Aboriginal Health Access Centre in Ottawa, in July 2017 for help tracking down her birth parents and where she was born. She said she sent a message through Facebook Messenger to her mother at the beginning of this year and received a response. Zonruiter said she then went to visit her in-person and the reserve where she was born, Chippewas of the Thames, near London, Ont.

“It was really nice to be felt so welcomed when I told them what happened. And they’re like ‘well welcome back home’ and they had gifts to give me,” she said. “I was shocked, I felt so overwhelmed.”

Zonruiter said she decided to march in the Aboriginal Day parade because she can now say who she is and where she’s from. The 200 people marching in the parade started and ended at the Garden of the Provinces and Territories after marching through downtown. She wore a shirt with a purple armband that read “Taken from birth mother 1969. 48 yrs later 2018 found birth mother,” written on the back.

“I feel like I’m not alone anymore. I feel like I can actually talk to somebody and actually have a conversation about our background,” Zonruiter said.

She said she talks to her birth mother almost every day, either on the phone or on Facebook.

Mukwoh Land, the grand master of the parade, said Canada’s National Aboriginal Day on June 21 is about overcoming struggle and for Aboriginal people to recognize each other for who they are. While the Ottawa parade was started by his mother, Sharon Land Fisher, five years ago, he said it’s still in its infancy.

Zonruiter said she is still learning about the culture she was taken from as a child, which has been a constant process. She said she is trying to pass the culture and knowledge down to her two children.

“I’m still learning, still trying to pass it on to my children… Each day I learn something new, whether it be from friends that have put it on Facebook or stuff that I’ve read on my own.”

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