Under the guidance of the Indigenous community, the Willowbank is constructing a cairn on its property to memorialize missing and murdered Indigenous women
Marie Louise, an Indigenous graduation coach with the Niagara Catholic District School Board, has been working with the Queenston-based school of restoration arts on the project for the past two years.
To have the ancestors’ voices heard and honoured is “very uplifting,” she said.
Willowbank is on land that was traditionally used as a camp, hunting ground and portage route by Indigenous communities.
“Our ancestors have been there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years,” Marie Louise said.
She is part Mohawk, part Scottish. She gets the Mohawk from her mother’s side of the family and the Scottish from her father’s side.
Like many Indigenous people, she has been touched by the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
She said her great-grandmother Lizzy was murdered before she was born.
Her story was often used by her mother and grandmother as a cautionary tale when she was growing up.
The inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, completed in 2019, collected stories about victims from more than 2,380 survivors, knowledge keepers and family members.
Statistics Canada reported that, in 2021, Indigenous women and girls were murdered at a rate more than four times that of non-Indigenous women.
The cairn is being built by Dean McLellan, a mason with a mastercraft certification from the Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain.
Marie Louise said she met McLellan in 2014 when he was working on the dry-laid stone lodge on the property, but it wasn’t until a couple years ago, when she bumped into him again that they decided to build a cairn.
Dry-laying is a specialized skill where stone structures are assembled without cement.
McLellan has built a couple of cairns like these before.
The first was made in Saugeen First Nation and the second was for a private client in Paris, Ont.
He said the final structure will be “about eight feet high in the shape of a teardrop.”
It will be made of limestone and sandstone, much of which was donated by Perry Hartwick of the Upper Canada Stone Company, said McLellan.
He became aware of the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women while working in Saugeen First Nation, where he met a few women whose daughters were missing.
“I can’t imagine the pain,” he said.
Before they could start laying the stones, they had to seek permission from Niagara-on-the-Lake’s municipal heritage committee.
McLellan said he isn’t sure how long it will be before he completes the cairn.
He’s building it on his own time and has to balance it with other projects, but said he thinks it should be done by October.
The foundation slab was recovered from the now-defunct St. Thomas courthouse.
John Scott, who chairs Willowbank’s board of directors, said the school has developed a “symbiotic relationship” with the indigenous community.
Willowbank set aside a portion of the property for the Indigenous community, which has unrestricted access to it, he noted.
“We’re sharing the land like we did traditionally,” Marie Louise said.
This area is called the “Love Garden.”
She said that in the spring the community uses it to grow the four sacred medicines, tobacco, cedar, sage and sweetgrass.
These make up the heart of the garden, whereas herbs and vegetables make up the inner circle and sumac comprises the outermost circle.
She was amazed one year to find a weed growing in the garden but an Indigenous woman from Six Nations told her it was actually a ceremonial plant called an Indian teacup.
“When it rains, those big leaves shaped like a cup fill up with all the water and you use that water for healing,” she said.
When it first started growing Marie Louise said wanted to pull it out but she felt “guided” to leave it alone and to this day sees it as a gift from a higher power.
