Hundreds of people attended the fourth annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation event at Brantford’s Mohawk Park on Saturday, September 27, 2025.
Hosted by Brantford Native Housing (BNH), the event featured a variety of activities including singing, dancing, and drumming, as well as opportunities to learn about various community services, and to support small businesses.
To kick off the event, Shane Bomberry, vice-president of the BNH Board of Directors, first welcomed everyone to the celebration.
“Today, we gather not only to celebrate culture, language, song and dance, but also to reflect on the truth of our shared history. Truth and Reconciliation is about remembering, honouring and healing. It is about acknowledging the pain and the trauma caused by residential schools, systemic racism and generations of displacement. It is about working together to ensure those injustices are never repeated,” he said. “But today is also about resilience. It is about the strength of our elders who carried language and teachings through the hardest times. It’s about the courage of our survivors who shared their truth to Canada, so that Canada could finally begin to listen, and it’s about hope and resilience in our young people who are reclaiming tradition, learning songs, speaking our languages and leading us forward. …Reconciliation is not just for a word – it’s a responsibility, and each of us has a role to play in that by showing up, by listening and celebrating.”
Afterward, Elder Kathy Smoke offered the crowd a traditional Haudenosaunee opening, followed by Chris Myke and Jordan Jamieson performing an Anishinaabe ancestor song. A short while later, Blayze Longboat delivered a Thanksgiving Address, also known as The Words That Come Before All Else, to offer greetings and gratitude for the natural world before leading into the day’s social dances.
As the event got underway, visitors spent a majority of the afternoon mingling with friends and family, singing and dancing alongside various groups, or visiting the 11 community partners and 16 vendor booths set up throughout the park.
From beaded jewellery to book pouches, art work, dream catchers and more, there were plenty of ways to support the local craft and art vendors on site.
Visitors throughout the day also had the opportunity to contribute to a large community dream catcher, which was put together by Jaxon Pamenter, BNH’s summer student and Culture Support Worker, and his aunt Loralei Jamieson.
The two explained that the dream catcher was made of willow branches, sinew and a piece of deer rawhide, on which Jamieson painted an image of two young Indigenous children dancing in their regalia.
“I think it’s really important that when we look at the painting and see everything that’s included in it, we remember everything that it’s teaching us,” said Pamenter. “For example, we see the men’s traditional dance, which tells us our stories from the past, as well as the jingle dance, which is very healing. Loralei even included seven figures around the big drum in the back there, which represent those Anishinaabe Seven Grandfather Teachings.”
“The dancers are also moving in a clockwise motion, which is the direction that the Haudenosaunee move in when they’re doing social dances and such. And those puddle spots following them? Those are meant to show how our steps resonate with the earth,” added Jamieson. “Another few details I added in were the flowers; the yellow represents the dandelions while the white represents the strawberry flowers. And in the back there, I added in several white pines because they’re all medicines that we use.”
Throughout the event, visitors were invited to add one of four ribbons colours of their choosing: the red, representing mental health and wellbeing; the white for spiritual wellbeing; the yellow for emotional wellbeing and the black for physical wellbeing.
“The colours are really important because they’re a reflection of our medicine wheel; a representation of our spiritual, physical, emotional and mental wellbeing,” said Jamieson. “That’s really how we try to balance ourselves, not only as Indigenous people, but as all people and I think it was just really nice to have the community come together and work with those colours.”
With Brantford’s close proximity to Six Nations of the Grand River and the city having a large urban Indigenous population, Alma Arguello, Executive Director of BNH, explained why it was so important to honour Truth and Reconciliation.
“One of the biggest parts of the day is the truth and acknowledging the history of Brantford. It’s a heavy history, yes, but we have to know the truth of what happened at the Mohawk Institute. We have to know the truth about the bylaws and how they discriminated against Indigenous communities and their people,” she said. “The other part of it is reconciliation, right? It’s being able to sing the songs, to dance, to be in community, to be able to have wares that people can buy, and to have allies come forward. It’s not about empty or performative actions, it’s about actually doing something and reclaiming the culture.”
Arguello said that overall, she and her team were thrilled to have been able to, once again, host the event.
“This is an event that means a lot to the community and so we’re so excited to be here again. We always put a lot of thought and effort into this event and so it’s just nice to see people getting up and interacting with each other,” she said. “I love seeing everyone be together and all the little girls in their jingle dresses and the little boys walking around with their gasdó:wehs too, it’s also just so beautiful. And that’s what this event is all about, right? Having the community come together and celebrating, that’s the whole point.”
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
