We had a nation ceremony a few months ago here in Vancouver at the Joe Mathias Centre. The reason we chose to do it outside of our nation and do it in Vancouver was that there are many children in the urban areas and many families. A number of our 17 communities participated. The children were from all over. We had the whole Joe Mathias Centre filled with families and children. Each community blanketed and welcomed home their children. Some had a lot, some had a few.
There's much more work. The families called for us to do that each year so that we could recognize the children who are in care and the ones we're still working on bringing home.
About a month later, our community of Neskonlith welcomed home 20 children, which was a high number. Our family support worker Gena Edwards and our councillor Fay Ginther worked for a long time in reunifying those children with the community and the families. It was really emotional to a lot of the families.
I recognize that there's still a lot of healing to the children and a lot of healing to those families that participated. Our families also asked that we continue to do that work.
We had a baby who was being removed in Toronto, for example, and thankfully, they notified us. They almost took the baby and put the baby in the system. We had to ask almost door to door in our community whose relative this baby was. We found out it was because of the sixties scoop when the grandfather was removed. He didn't have a connection with the community, so nobody knew this baby, but it was because of the gap and the void that the sixties scoop caused. We were able to bring the baby home. He was one of the 20 children we brought home and we're working on reconnecting him with his family. His sister is still, unfortunately, in Toronto. She's not from our community, but the grandmother did express interest in having that child placed with us, so that the brother and sister can be together.
Those are the kinds of stories each one of those children and their families could have shared, the horrendous experience they had and the work it's going to take for healing and the work it's going to take for reunifying them with their family, their culture and their language.