After the flag raising ceremony on September 30th, the town of Prescott is looking into more ways to honor Indigenous People.
At the town council meeting on October 4th, Mayor Brett Todd and the rest of the town council all voiced support for painting a walkway in the town orange with white feathers, to commemorate Indigenous Peoples and the victims of the residential school system. Mayor Todd proposed the walkway, saying that multiple people voiced support for it after seeing similar walkways and crosswalks in Timmins and Gananoque.
Multiple locations for the walkway, including painting part of Heritage Way or Centennial Park, were discussed at the meeting. Mayor Todd also suggested involving art students at South Grenville District High School in designing the walkway. “I did talk to Christine Sloan,” said Mayor Todd, “who’s obviously handled a lot of projects with us in the past, artistically – the murals downtown and so forth – and she did agree on the weekend, if we were interested, that the high school class could work on something, like a stencil for example, to help out with this.”
Mayor Todd says that town staff is looking into multiple options, and that painting could begin as soon as October 18th. “I’m fine if we have to do it next spring, as well, but it is only the fourth of October,” Todd says.