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The sight of it stopped people in their tracks.

They stood on the rainy sidewalks or in the shelter of an awning, looking up from their cellphone screens to get a glimpse of something they’d never seen before.

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Traffic stopped, for a moment, as a crane dangled the 55-foot sculpture above Sherbrooke St. And then, after the workers had toiled in the cold for hours, they finished the job.

Now a totem pole carved from a single piece of red cedar on Vancouver Island towers over downtown Montreal — completing a 3,800-kilometre journey nearly two years in the making. But if you ask artist Charles Joseph how long the sculpture really took, he’ll tell you it is the culmination of his life’s work.

The totem pole — called Residential School Totem Pole — tells the story of how Joseph found himself again after surviving the horrors of residential school.

“The pain that I held onto for so many years, I let it go, piece by piece, by carving it into that cedar,” said Joseph, a third-generation carver from the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation in British Columbia. “It was the only way I could tell my story and really start to heal.”