David Lone Bear Sanipass was asked to design a monument in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. The design has been ongoing for several years with many hours of research, planning, and talking with many people. We will be sharing more about the overall project and developments soon. Below find some of David’s words regarding incorporating the Lost Children into this monument.
The Lost Children
First Nations has been a very proud Nation, we have been here for many of years surviving and thriving. We have tried to keep our culture alive and passed our traditions down to our children. It has not been very easy to do with the occupation of another nation among us. We had to adapt our ways of living and have given up most of our spirituality, our customs and our culture.
Our children have been taken from our homes, and forced to learn European ways of thinking, reading, and writing. For hundreds of years this has been forced upon us, and has hurt our ways that we knew, we have tried to adapt to this way and have found it was not comprehensible to our people. We have lost our way of knowing what spirit is. This has affected our children as children were taken away and educated in the non-native way of thinking.
We have been trying to find those lost souls. We have found that we have run into walls. We have been looking for our children for many of years, a lot have not come home. We have not given up looking for them. I hear their cries in the wind, our children calling out to us to come home. In our nation it is very important that we know where all our children are and all our children to be able to come home to where they belong. We knew that we have not been told all of the story.
As my family, my family was taken away from our mother and father. My mother and father searched for us for the longest time. We are lucky they found us and we were united with them. Like I said, we are lucky to come back as a family, but most families that lost their children have never come home. There are countless numbers of families that have lost their children into that darkness. I'm hoping to bring understanding into this Monument that we still need to find all of our children.
I am putting some of the carvings of the Lost Children into this Monument they will be hard to find. It would be 27 children carved into these stones in different locations some will be obvious some will not. This is important, we need to know where they all are. In our belief they're still out there somewhere in the SHADOWS, we will leave a light on for them to see their way home.
Because of COVID this has been a lengthy process to complete on schedule the overall project and to put together how to make sense of it all. It is very important that we get this story right, this story will be in stone for all to see, and all to walk through. This works for all the families of the First Nations. There will be a number of First Nations families represented in this Monument so to get all the stories right you can see it is taking time to make sure this is right. I find it's a struggle to express the words that I need to say. English is not my first language and please apologies for my language.
This will be the only one like it in the world. People will come from all points of the world to see this. So my task is to make sure this is done with the respect of our people.
There will be a book after written about this Monument and what it means. There will be mysteries to this Monument for the world to discover in time. There are nine Mysteries put into this so people can solve of this quandary. I have been working with other sites of the world to incorporate this with other sites. And to make sure that mystery will be hard to solve but people will come and try to solve it. I think this will be the Great Mystery when we are not here and the answers are not so easy to find, but it is solvable.
This has challenged me to bring forth some of the Mysteries of the Knights Templars and our involvement with them in the past, some of the names of our people were derived and interacted with the Templars. My family and its history has involvement with the Templars.
You could say this Monument is a peace tribute to our traditions and partially of our Templars family. This has brought me to understanding we are all family of this world. Part of our understanding is getting along together. There's a lot more involved with this than putting Stones together. We are telling this story in our past so our future could have a better understanding of Who We Are and what we become. I'm looking forward to be able to work on this very soon and to lay the first key stone. To have this fantastic endeavor, hoping to work with the town of Moncton, New Brunswick and whos all involved. These are my words, David Lone Bear Sanipass