This image provided by World Press Photo which won the World Press Photo Of The Year award by Amber Bracken for The New York Times, titled Kamloops Residential School, shows Red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside commemorate children who died at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, an institution created to assimilate Indigenous children, following the detection of as many as 215 unmarked graves, Kamloops, British Columbia, 19 June 2021. (Amber Bracken for The New York Times/World Press Photo via AP)
Tomorrow we enter Holy Week and for me the solemn crescendo is Good Friday with a worship service which invites us to ponder the mystery of the crucifixion of Jesus, the Christ. Crucifixion was a common form of capital punishment in the Roman Empire because the prolonged torture of the victims and the display of their bodies would presumably act as intimidation and a deterrent to others. Death on a cross is still used in some countries.
The photo above was taken by Edmonton photojournalist Amber Bracken and it recently won the prestigious World Press Photo award. An Associated Press article offers:
"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."
This award came a week after Indigenous representatives from across Canada met with Pope Francis, culminating in an apology for the horrors of Roman Catholic Residential Schools.
It's important not to over-analyse visual images with words, to instead receive the power provided through our sense of sight. Still, we can note that the deaths of innocent Indigenous children and the callous disposal of their bodies by those who claimed to be disciples of Christ is a violation of covenant or promise which is expressed in scripture in the Genesis story of the rainbow.
I will also mention that Amber Bracken was arrested by the RCMP, unlawfully, and eventually without charges last November, at the site of a Wetsueten First Nation blockade on their own land. Even though the officers knew she was a journalist for The Narwhal magazine they took her into custody as a form of intimidation. The photo below was her last before being arrested.
A militarized police officer aims his gun into a tiny house full of unarmed individuals on Friday, Nov. 19, 2021. Photo: Amber Bracken / The Narwhal
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