Shoe Memorial After Rain by Hunter Madsen

Shoe Memorial After Rain

  
     

This memorial on the steps of a Vancouver museum commemorated 215 long forgotten indigenous children, whose remains, still unidentified, were found on the grounds of a decommissioned "Indian school" run by the Catholic Church since the 19th Century in British Columbia;  one among the many institutions established to raise children who had been torn from their homes and cultures for forced acculturation. 
  
Nobody can say exactly how these kids died; no doubt, most of them expiring from some combination of loneliness, sickness, and abuse.  And from broken hearts too sad to bear imagining.

  

TITLE - "Shoe Memorial After Rain"
WHERE - Vancouver, British Columbia (2021)