Honourable senators, on Saturday, September 27, I will be in Potlotek Mi’kmaw Nation. I will be there to honour Eleanor Mitchell. At 83 years of age, Eleanor is Potlotek’s last surviving member of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School.

Eleanor, like many other Indigenous children, was subject to a cocktail of government policies and legislation that sought to tear apart the Mi’kmaq’s most fundamental institution, the family unit.

The Shubenacadie Indian Residential School opened in 1929. Eleven years later, the federal government implemented a centralization policy throughout the 1940s. Centralization often involved the forceful removal of Mi’kmaw families from once-independent and self-sustaining communities. Government thought it was better to manage Indians from two communities rather than many.

Annie and John Batiste, Eleanor’s parents, were forced to leave Potlotek through centralization. In dire need of reliable work, her parents brought her to the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. She was 6 years old.

Three years later, Eleanor reunited with her family. She later married William Mitchell, and they raised their children in Boston. In 1992, with her children grown, Eleanor returned to Potlotek to take care of her aging mother.

Colleagues, there are many heroes among us, people who have the ability to traverse life’s adversities and hardships, to shift their life path from surviving to thriving.

We all need people like Eleanor. They are all living examples of reconciliation through resilience. Reconciliation does not mean that Indigenous people want to be pitied. What Indigenous people need is the wisdom, compassion and understanding that enabled you to flip the switch from surviving to thriving in your own lives.

Eleanor’s story reminds us to view life as a privilege. Yesterday morning I was reminded of this privilege. I was told that my sister Joan had transitioned into the spirit world earlier that morning. In memory of Joan, I would like to quote Chief Crowfoot, who was on his deathbed at the time. He said:

In a few more moments I will be gone. It is from nowhere we come and it is to nowhere we go. What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Rest in peace, Joan. Wela’lioq. Thank you.