Haunting Canada Shot Wins World Press Photo

A haunting image of red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside, with a rainbow in the background, commemorating children who died at a residential school created to assimilate Indigenous children in Canada won the prestigious World Press Photo award Thursday. 

The image was one of a series of the “Kamloops Residential School” shot by Canadian photographer Amber Bracken for The New York Times. 

“It is a kind of image that sears itself into your memory. It inspires a kind of sensory reaction”, Global jury chair Rena Effendi said in a statement. 

“I could almost hear the quietness in this photograph, a quiet moment of global reckoning for the history of colonization, not only in Canada but around the world”. 

Last May, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation announced the discovery of 215 gravesites near Kamloops, British Columbia. It was Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school and the discovery of the graves was the first of numerous, similar grim sites across the country. 

“So we started to have, I suppose, a personification of some of the children that went to these schools that didn’t come home”, Bracken said in comments released by contest organizers. “There are also these little crosses by the highway. And I knew right away that I wanted to photograph the line of these crosses with these little children’s clothes hanging on them to commemorate and honour those kids and to make them visible in a way that they hadn’t been for a long time”. 

You may also check out my post on the said subject titled “Mass Graves of Indigenous Children in Canada” published May 30, 2021 @ http://helpvictor.blogspot.com/2021/05/discovery-of-mass-graves-of-indigenous.html