At least one person has been fired after a racist incident occurred while students participated in an Indigenous smudging ceremony at a south Edmonton school last week.
On Friday, students and staff were conducting a smudging ceremony on the basketball court at Edith Rogers School. The school says nearby construction workers swore and yelled racial slurs while they revved their engines in an attempt to disrupt the ceremony.
The ceremony was done as a part of a commitment to truth and reconciliation, according to Edmonton Public Schools.
The dry pond project near the school is run by utility company EPCOR, which halted work at the site in order to investigate the incident.
In a statement Tuesday afternoon, EPCOR said the actions were attributed to employees of sub-contractor Wilco Contractors Northwest Inc.
The president and CEO of Wilco Contractors Northwest Inc. said he was made aware of the incident around 1 p.m. Friday and immediately deployed a supervisor to shut down work at the site.
Arthur Maat said there were about seven or eight employees on site on Friday. He said the company’s HR department spent the weekend conducting interviews, and after an internal and external review, one employee was terminated.
“It is singular in nature right now. There is some final tidying up we need to do on our investigations,” Maat told Global News on Tuesday afternoon.
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“You can imagine that the site was very active — there were people with equipment, there were people laying sod — so a lot of different involvement or in some cases, lack there of. So we didn’t feel it was fair to just blanketly fire everyone because they certainly weren’t all involved. It’s a big jobsite. They’re all moving around quite quickly. But certainly at least one was terminated and pending others.”
Maat said during the busy summer season, his company employs anywhere from 200 to 250 people, many of whom are new employees each season. He said the company is committed to implementing cultural and Indigenous awareness training for its staff.
“We are, obviously, reviewing our training to see what we could have done different. There’s always something you can do different,” he said.
“So what we are doing now is reaching out to our staff and involving our workforce. We have a very diverse workforce — visible minorities, minorities from all over the world — we’re going to be reaching out to them and having them assist us in some modifications as required in a cultural awareness program and how we deal with the diversity of the community that we work in.
“We are also going to be working directly with (Treaty Six) Grand Chief (Billy) Morin. He did put out there that he would want to meet with us and we had in fact already planned to contact them and we did that this morning directly — to the school and to Grand Chief Morin. So we’re hoping that we can have some reconciliation ceremonies with the chief and some of his team or the school. So we’re actually quite looking forward to that.”
Maat also wanted to apologize for the incident.
“I just really want to directly apologize to the students, the parents that were involved, the teachers and to the community surrounding the school and the Indigenous community that was involved in the program,” Maat said.
Wilco Contractors Northwest Inc., EPCOR and Sureway Construction Group — which is also doing work at the site — said they will jointly donate $30,000 to the Edmonton Public School Board’s amiskwaciy Academy.
“We are apologizing directly to all those who were harmed by this incident,” a statement from Wilco Contractors Northwest Inc. read.
“The hurt experienced by the students and staff is front of mind for us, and we hope the actions we are taking demonstrate to them how seriously we take this situation.”
In its statement, EPCOR said it does not condone racism or hate of any kind and thanked the students and staff who brought the incident to its attention.
“Their actions to speak up against racism are commendable,” the statement read.
“We are mindful that racism and prejudice towards Indigenous peoples continues to happen every day in our communities. It is incumbent on all of us to take action. We sincerely apologize to the students and staff who were harmed by this disrespectful act, and we again thank them for speaking up. Without their action, this conduct might have gone unaddressed. Their voices mattered.”
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