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.

“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.

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