THUNDER BAY – Students at Claude E. Garton Public School have learned to walk in the shoes of Indigenous people living in remote communities who don’t have access to clean drinking water.
Inspired by a student at the school, youngsters at the Current River school marched seven times around the building, up and down stairs and through the hallways, each walking about two kilometres, matching the distance those living on some reserved have to walk to a well for safe water.
Students also carried buckets filled with objects meant to simulate the weight of the water that has to be carried back home, another two-kilometre trek.
Lee Roberts, a 10-year-old at Claude E. Garton, said she and her classmates were stunned to learn so many people don’t have access to clean drinking water.
“We think that we need to take action and try to help them,” Lee said.
“We also think that everybody should be treated equally and it’s not fair that we get clean water and not everybody else does,” said nine-year-old Madison Sundell.
“We think everybody should have clean water,” said Jake Vandahl, an eight-year-old student.
All three students said they can’t imagine life without easy access to all the water they need.
“I think it would be very difficult because you have to wake up very early and you have to walk to a well that’s two kilometres away every morning. We have water from a faucet and we just turn it on and we have a drink or we can bathe,” Jake said.
It’d be pretty frightening to have to live that way, Madison added.
“Sometimes it would be a little stressful, I’d think.”
Brittney Smith, who teaches a Grade 3/4 French immersion class at Claude E. Garton, said her students had finished a section on early Ontario settlement, including a segment on Indigenous traditions and culture.
Their new unit is living and working in Ontario, which helped open the students’ eyes to the fact many Indigenous people still live in remote communities today – it’s not just a thing of the past.
When they realized many reserves lack the basic necessities of life, and that boil-water advisories exist in dozens of First Nations communities – some lasting a quarter of a century or more – they quickly started asking what they could do to help bring even more awareness to the problem.
“It started a whole new discussion on what life can be like on some reserves, that some are fly-in communities or ice-road access. So students got really, really curious and asked what is their life like and … how is their life different than ours,” Smith said.
“Through that discussion the topic of water came and they just became so passionate and so upset about it and they said, ‘Well, what can we do? Let’s figure this out.”
They watched a video with Autumn Pelletier, a clean water advocate whose great aunt, Josephine Mandamin walked the entirety of the Great Lakes to raise awareness of water rights.
“The students asked if they could do something like that and that sparked our Spirit Week and our two fundraisers.”
Families and friends of participating students collected pledges, the money raised going toward school activities and equipment.
