Building truth and reconciliation in BC this week - some media coverage showing understanding
To Break Residential Schools' Dark Legacy, Understand Why
Know the roots of Canada's incarceration of native children and see why effects linger.
By Kevin James Ward, Yesterday, TheTyee.ca
A class in penmanship at the Red Deer Indian School, Red Deer, Alta. 1914-19. Source: United Church of Canada archives.
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Hey Teach, What's Reconciliation? - Skip class, rewrite curriculum, build a world-class research centre. How Lower Mainland schools will mark the TRC hearings.
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For Residential School Kids, a Legacy of Sex Abuse - Native leaders hope Truth and Reconciliation hearings will break the cycle of violence.
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Reconciliation Week Envisions 'New Way Forward' - Events around Truth and Reconciliation Commission aim to foster healing, hope for a better future.
Many Canadians know that from the later part of the 19th century through much of the 20th, the federal government and various Christian denominations used residential schools as part of a broader effort to subjugate native peoples and colonize their lands. Less known, however, is the reason for choosing this particular institution as part of facilitating the colonial process.
Research shows that prior to their arrival in North America, comparable institutions had been used in Europe for quite some time. But a deeper look into their design and purpose reveals why they essentially became Canada's prime colonial instrument of choice.
James G. Gibb, in The Archaeology of Institutional Life, writes, "Institutions permeate our lives, and their actions -- and inaction -- ramify for generations." This compels us to understand the influence of institutions on our lives, as well as their historical impact. In so doing, we must understand first the conceptual origins of the institution in question. Understanding the Indian residential school means inquiring into its root.
In A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System -- 1879 to 1986, historian John S. Milloy says early proponents of Indian residential schools believed they would be the "most efficacious educational instrument" to assimilate Indians into civilization, as well as being a "valuable tool of social control." However, he says it is "not clear exactly what had brought the idea" to the government's attention, nor could he locate a "single root from which the Canadian residential school system can be seen to have grown."
He does however remark that by the 1840s, institutions of this kind existed in Europe and that the British Empire and the United States used them for non-native and native children alike.
Why is it important to trace back through this history? I can tell you why it's important to me. In 1992, my siblings and I held our mother's funeral in her home community of Fort Chipewyan, in northern Alberta.
On arriving, the village's kindly elders and others, along with a Catholic priest and nun, organized a service in their modest A-frame church. We learned the church was the same one our mother attended as a child, located near the former site of the residential school she spent 10 years in, from 1940 to 1950.
Prior to the service, I took in the various paintings and murals on the walls. All were familiar Christian motifs, except one. Atop all the others, above the pulpit, was a large image of a lone eye. I was dumbfounded and disturbed as I imagined my mother as a child sitting where I was, with this unnerving image and its explicit message of surveillance impressed upon her.
In the days that followed, I was compelled to examine my own understanding of God, which included the belief that the divine Himself scrutinized and scored all of my thoughts and actions. Consequently, I decided I needed to know more about this image; especially its use in a colonial context.
As the years passed, I sought out and was fortunate enough to locate the following threads of insight, which I wove into a story that clarifies for me the root, function and consequence of Canada's Indian residential school system.
More importantly, during this time I came to understand why my mother reflexively sent me to Sunday school when I was quite young, which is where the bad seed of a watchful God took hold of my mind. Subsequently through non-Bible studies, so to speak, I eventually exorcised this indefensible belief by seeing it for what it was and has always been throughout time: indoctrination.
'Strike the soul rather than the body'
In Michel Foucault's deconstructive account of the origin of the prison, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, he reveals that in late 18th-century France, the Crown's use of public executions involving dismemberment were becoming increasingly intolerable to social reformers. Not because protesters opposed executions, but rather, in step with the prevailing ideals of the Enlightenment, they stood to establish the "legal limit: the legitimate frontier of the [sovereign's] power to punish."
When executions were scheduled, they sought to keep the condemned person's body intact for reasons of humanity and respect. This was when the "birth of reform" as a broad penal movement found footing in Europe.
According to Foucault, underpinning the reformists was the added belief that, in the absence of execution, punishment should involve incarceration. They thought this would allow for corrupted thoughts and habits to be re-shaped and aligned with "normalized" social behaviours. In time, this saw the corrigible groomed to fill the lowest stations of the nascent industrial economy.
As society transformed from peasantry to industrialism, new kinds of crimes emerged that demanded censure and the wrongdoer's correction. The consequences of this shift fueled the reform movement, which began to spread throughout European society with special attention given to reshaping and disciplining the under-classes, especially the vulnerable young, based on the principle that punishment "should strike the soul rather than the body."
Furthermore, Foucault says, the "general recipe for the exercise of power over men" was to impress upon minds "as a surface of inscription for power, with semiology as its tool; the submission of bodies through the control of ideas." In short, the prison would be where the "universal pedagogy of work" would be impressed upon "those who had proved resistance to it."
Europe's earliest prison schools
According to Foucault, Mettray, a French 19th-century penal colony for boys, signified the "completion of the carceral system... the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which are concentrated all the coercive technologies of behaviour. In it were to be found 'cloister, prison, school, regiment.'" Pre-dating Mettray, though, was Rasphuis of Amsterdam, which opened in 1596.
Rasphuis also incarcerated young malefactors, on whom a number of reforming techniques were used -- "a whole complex of methods 'to draw towards good' and 'to turn away from evil' held the prisoners in its grip from day to day," writes Foucault. It became the model institution for others like it. The maxim over its gate read, "Wild beasts must be tamed by men."
Even so, Foucault says what set Mettray apart was the "essential element of its programme," which ensured future cadres faced the same apprenticeships and coercions as the inmates themselves did. In other words, "they were 'subjected as pupils to the disciplines that, later, as instructors, they would themselves impose'. They were taught the art of power relations."
The prison, says Foucault, became these "new castles of the new civil order" -- "a machine to alter minds" -- that had "transformed the punitive procedure into a penitentiary technique." As importantly, he contends, it would be a phenomenon that would over time finds its way into the "entire social body."
Foucault also shines a light on Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher, jurist and social reformer, as well as designer of a penitentiary model that epitomizes the length and desire to which power will go in order to discipline both the incarcerated and the broader social body.
Bentham's Panopticon, conceived in 1785, foresaw cells ringing a central observation tower, with prisoners exposed in open chambers to perpetual observation, without the prisoners ever actually seeing the observer in the tower. The main effect of this, says Foucault, was to "induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic function of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action... in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers."
In other words: create in the inmate a self-conscious, self-correcting, and self-regulating mind and therefore body.
Incidentally, Foucault says the Panopticon model should also be understood as a way of defining power relations in the everyday world of people. It serves to "reform prisoners... to treat patients, to instruct school children, to confine the insane, to supervise workers [and] to put beggars and idlers to work."
The Panoptical residential school
In 1879, an influential report on Indian industrial schools in the United States, the Davin Report, came to the Canadian government's attention. In it, the report's author recommended Indian children be "kept constantly within the circle of civilized conditions," that is, confined to industrial boarding schools (which later became known as residential schools). This aligned with Foucault's observation that "discipline sometimes requires enclosure; the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony."
Canada established Indian residential schools as federal policy in the 1880s. By the 1920s, parents were legally compelled by threat of imprisonment to turn over their children to be incarcerated in these institutions, which by then totalled more than 100 across the country.
Similar to the initial aim of the prison, as described by Foucault, the Indian residential school's standard curriculum, as initially envisioned by the federal government, included practical training to "remove prejudice against labour." Reform also included having hair traditionally worn long radically shortened and European-styled clothing imposed. In all, says Milloy, the Indian child's every "action, thought, speech and dress" was under the press of total reform during his or her time at a residential school, which included stripping away mother tongues and replacing them with English or French.
The effect of this, he says, was to reset "the child's cultural clock from the 'savage' seasonal round of hunting and gathering to the hourly and daily precision required by an industrial order." To where, he adds, the "temporal orchestration of life heard in the sounds of water breaking through spring ice and leaves rustling in freshening fall breezes was to be replaced by ticking clocks and ringing bells -- the influence of the wigwam replaced by that of the factory... Equally essential was the influence of the Christian faith."
In Who is Breaking the First Commandment?: Oblate Teachings and Cree Responses in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, by George Fulford with Louis Bird, the latter recounts his experience in the early 1940s at the St. Anne's residential school in northern Ontario.
Bird describes how the priest used an illustrated book of the Bible to instruct the children. This method was highly successful, he says, such that he could recall the images even 60 years afterward. According to him, the pictures impressed the children "more than words." For instance, on the image of Moses with the commandments, he says, "That picture scared us to death when we were young."
He explains before the appearance of missionaries, his people sought out high places for vision quests, and because they only had small hills and the mountain in the picture was much higher and surrounded by clouds and lightening, the effect of seeing this was "powerful medicine." The priests, he says, knew their pictures would have this kind of effect. "The missionaries know how the mind of the native people work. They know this is going to work. And it did work. It's still in effect."
This pedagogical approach recalls Foucault's remark regarding the "general recipe" on controlling bodies by controlling ideas. A priest who had taught during Bird's time seemingly confirms this: "That process of teaching with images, so successful in teaching civilized children, is doubly so for our Indians. They must see to understand."
Then there was the object of the instructional method itself. The image of Moses that so impressed the young Bird also included the inscription: "God inspired fear in Moses and his people so that they would observe his laws." The aim here was clear: Instill in the Cree children the fear of a judgmental and punishing God and impose a life-long obedience to the Church.
Of course, putting the fear of God into persons, principally children, is a common Christian objective. For instance, in Parental Use of the Threat "God Will Punish": Replication and Extension, authors Hart M. Nelsen and Alice Kroliczak discuss how Christianity generally holds up God as an "all-seeing God" or an all-knowing entity where "escape from the punisher is impossible."
Here the spectre of the panoptical Indian residential school arises, operated as they were by various Christian churches and funded by the federal government. And another of Foucault's striking observations comes to mind, where he notes that at Mettray, the French 19th-century penal colony for boys, "the entire parapenal institution... culminates in the cell, on the walls of which are written in black letters: 'God sees you.'"
A dark legacy
Through this story and others, I have come to understand better the plight of native peoples generally and, in some cases, those native individuals and communities I either have known or worked for in my life.
One particularly good summary of this understanding comes unsurprisingly from Foucault, who argues prisons "cannot fail to produce delinquents. It does so by the very type of existence that it imposes on its inmates... it is supposed to apply the law, and to teach respect for it; but all its functioning operates in the form of an abuse of power. The arbitrary power of administration: The feeling of injustice that a prisoner has is one of the causes that may make his character untamable. When he sees himself exposed in this way to suffering, which the law has neither ordered nor envisaged, he becomes habitually angry against everything around him; he sees every agent of authority as an executioner; he no longer thinks that he was guilty; he accuses justice itself."
This insight allowed me to see how this type of distrust likely played out in the lives of native parents who spent too many terrible years in an Indian residential school, specifically in regards to entrusting their children to government schools, residential or otherwise.
No doubt a serious reluctance pervaded their thinking. And no doubt this reluctance, resistance even, played out in the lives of their children as one would expect: poor learning and other adverse outcomes that in time would create more troublesome consequences. This observation is borne out by far too many bleak historic and contemporary socioeconomic statistics profiling native Canadians.
Of course, in addition to this mistrust, other effects followed generations of Indian residential school survivors: racism, sexism, classism, ignorance and general discrimination lead to perpetual ill-treatment. Equally obvious, as we now know, was the existence of serious forms of internalized and lateral abuse resulting from survivors' experiences of mental, emotional, spiritual, cultural, physical and sexual abuse in those institutions.
No doubt, the presence of overwhelming and unresolved grief factors in, too. So would the absence of parenting skills which vanished in the process of denuding homes and communities of children.
Intrinsic individual resilience, or more specifically its lack -- such as various addictions -- also played a role in poor outcomes overall. Still, one cannot discount the big picture's underlying influence on survivors' choices, vices or habits or worse -- dying too soon or causing grievous harm to themselves or others.
In any case, there is another, pertinent reason for this dismal record: the newcomer's initial rejection of native people, both as cultural groups and individually, that ultimately resulted in native people's subjugation through Indian residential schools and other oppressive means, such as reserves.
More recently, though, this rejection persists in government denials of native land and cultural rights. This denial fuels the broader intergenerational impacts of colonialism, which when combined with native people's anomie indicates that no thriving future lies immediately ahead for them.
My vision of truth and reconciliation
I have hope that the dark legacy of a people imprisoned for simply being who they were can be broken and replaced by something this country can be proud of, something that today's outgoing native and non-native generation can embrace as a new and exceedingly honourable legacy worthy of their best deeds.
This would be a bequest that rests on at least two ideals: The first of which is having our country's youth taught a common truth about the Indian residential school system as well as the intergenerational impacts of these institutions and of colonialism itself.
The second is bridging the contemporary relationship between native and non-native Canadians and having this reflected in dramatically improved outcomes for today's and tomorrow's native youth, resulting in their cultural survival and prosperity, whether in their own lands or in this country's urban communities.
To me, this is what a lasting truth and reconciliation between us would look like.
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A different day of learning
Day-long event highlights the legacy of the residential school experience
THE TIMES - SEPTEMBER 19, 2013
Regular classes were replaced with something quite different at the University of the Fraser Valley on Wednesday. The university transformed its curriculum for that day, so that students, along with the rest of the campus community, could gather together for the Indian Residential School Day of Learning.
The day-long collection of learning events, on-going displays, and interactive activities was held in conjunction with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) national event in Vancouver, which runs Sept. 18 to 21.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has a federally assigned mandate to learn the truth about what happened in the Indian residential schools and to inform all Canadians about it.
The Commission's website notes that the TRC hopes to guide and inspire First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples and Canadians in a process of truth and healing leading toward reconciliation and renewed relationships based on mutual understanding and respect. A slogan that explains the motivation behind the TRC states that the process is "for the child taken; for the parent left behind."
UFV gave all students and employees the chance to learn more about this aspect of Canadian history and how it still impacts Canadian society, by taking part in events scheduled for several UFV locations on Wednesday. The decision to transform the curriculum for this one-day event was approved by the UFV Senate at its June meeting.
"We believe that it is our responsibility as a university to participate and show leadership in the process of examining, discussing, reflecting upon, and healing the wound in our national fabric caused by the legacy of the residential school system," said UFV provost and VP academic and Eric Davis
Events at UFV included a keynote address titled Schooled for Inequality by Dr. Jean Barman, a historian with specialties in the history of education and B.C. history; a presentation from UFV alumnus Dallas Yellowfly and 3 Crow Productions about the experiences of local residential school survivors; displays about Coqualeetza, St. Mary's and other residential schools; areas where participants could express themselves through art and writing; and a slideshow of photos related to the residential school experiences. Film screenings, presentations, and readings ran throughout the day at various UFV locations in Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Mission, and Hope.
The residential school experience had a profound effect on indigenous people in Canada. The governmentfunded, church-run residential schools were set up to eliminate parental involvement in the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual development of Aboriginal children. The system was active from the 1870s through the end of the 20th century. Generations of aboriginal children were compelled to attend the 130 residential schools across the country, two of which - Coqualeetza and St. Mary's - were located in the Fraser Valley.
More than 150,000 children were placed in these schools over the more than 100 years that they existed; 80,000 are thought to be still living today. Much information has come out over the past few decades about the mental, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse that took place within these schools. Even children who did not experience direct abuse were affected by being wrenched from their family and home community at a young age. And those who returned to the community as adults did not know how to function as a traditional member of their society.
In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology on behalf of the Government of Canada to the survivors of residential schools, stating: "This policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country."
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Aboriginals face Canada's 'dark past' at hearings
By David P. Ball, 24 hours Vancouver
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission begins four days of hearings in Vancouver Wednesday into residential school abuses.
Hundreds gathered around False Creek Tuesday to witness a flotilla of ocean-going canoes paddled by aboriginal youth and non-aboriginal supporters.
It was part of a week of reconciliation for Canada's residential schools, in which roughly 150,000 students were placed in church-run schools, many abused sexually and physically.
Watching the boats arrive, Irene Stevens recalled the day authorities arrived at her home to take her to Lejac Indian Residential School at Fraser Lake, B.C.
"They had a gun in their hands," Stevens told 24 hours. "They told my dad that if none of us children went to the residential school, they were going to take (social support funding) away from him.
"We come from a family of 12, but now we've dwindled down to five - lots of drugs and alcohol in our lives now. In a way, it's kind of hard for me to be here. But I'd really like to try to get all this behind me."
Fellow Lejac student Edward Dennis said the school left him with little but "hatred and animosity" towards Canada. He recalled three students who died trying to escape from the school's abuses one winter.
"They were running away," he said. "One of them turned around at Piper's Glen. He could hear the other three fall through the ice."
He said manual labour taught aboriginal students "how to serve the white people - then you were a good Indian.
"I've prayed to the creator to get me out of that," he said. "I don't want to hate any more."
Another survivor told 24 hours his memories of residential school were of "beatings and starvation." Recently, widespread nutritional and scientific experiments on unwitting children were revealed.
"All they taught us was how to work," said John Dennis. "We did all the work on a farm - looking after the cows, horses and chickens.
"They got the money, but we got nothing. We hardly ever ate chicken or eggs. We got garbage. Lots of times I had to steal food, especially when I worked in the garden."
For the leader of the B.C. First Nations Summit, himself a school survivor, the legacy was disconnection and brokenness.
"It's created a whole foundation of dysfunction, which was the government's intention to begin with," Grand Chief Ed John said. "It was the government's policy, as the prime minister acknowledged, to 'kill the Indian in the child.' That's what these Indian residential schools were for.
"They went after our families, our communities where we lived, our languages, our cultures, our songs and teachings - to disrupt them (and) Christianize and civilize us ... Events like this help our people move forward, to acknowledge the past with other Canadians ... and for them to understand and collectively try to reconcile that dark past."
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Event brings residential school stories to light
Truth and Reconciliation Week allows abuse survivors to share their experiences with Canadians
BY KIM PEMBERTON, VANCOUVER SUN SEPTEMBER 18, 2013
Sheila Thompson wears a hat given to her by her mother at the Reconciliation canoe event in False Creek Tuesday. Photograph by: Jenni Barens , Special to the Sun
Stepping out of a traditional native canoe on the edge of False Creek, Sheila Thompson took off her bell-shaped, cedar bark hat to sweep back her hair, but quickly placed it back on again.
It was a subtle movement, but significant.
Her canoe was in a large flotilla gathered for a ceremony to celebrate the opening of Truth and Reconciliation Week in Vancouver, part of a national healing process for survivors of Indian residential schools.
The hat means everything to Thompson because it was given to her by her mother, Doreen Bonneau - a residential school survivor - just a few weeks ago.
"For me that hat is special," said Bonneau, who was interviewed by telephone from her home in Hope because she was too ill to attend Tuesday's welcome ceremony.
"I had it made for my daughter. I'm very proud of her. She's learning a lot of our cultural ways."
Although Thompson is too young to have attended an Indian residential school herself, she too has been affected by that dark period of Canada's history. Because her mother suffered such emotional harm during her childhood she wasn't able to care for her daughter and, at the age of three months, Thompson was sent to live with her father's family on Vancouver Island.
Her father was Caucasian, and Thompson's ties to her native culture were severed.
"I just remember, growing up, there was something missing - just something deep inside you know isn't there. I know this is what it is," she said, touching the hat.
"This is where I belong. My culture is deep within me."
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission begins its sixth national event, and first in British Columbia, Wednesday, allowing survivors an opportunity to share their stories. The commission's goal is to also educate Canadians about the injustices that about 150,000 aboriginal children endured after they were removed from their homes and placed in church-run schools from the 1870s until the mid-20th century.
Bonneau still remembers the day she was pulled from her mother's arms at their home on the Chawathil First Nation reserve and sent along with her six siblings to St. Mary's residential school in Mission, in a truck normally used to transport cows. She was four years old.
Once at the boarding school the children were not allowed to speak their language, look a white person in the eye or have contact with their parents, she said. Bonneau wouldn't see her parents again for seven years, and it would be 12 years before she got out of the school for good.
"I ran away about 14 times. I was so frightened, abused and beaten."
Bonneau, now 70, said it took her years before she told her family about the abuse.
"It took me years to survive but now I am a strong woman. Going to court (which Bonneau did in 2000 against the perpetrators) doesn't take the pain away. It doesn't heal you. You'll always have those bad dreams."
Still, she is hoping she can join her daughter and grandchildren and participate in Sunday's Walk for Reconciliation and A New Way Forward in Vancouver.
The events being held by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission "mark a turning point" for all Canadians, said Shawn Atleo, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations. He urged British Columbians to participate in this week's events and join with them on Sunday's walk.
"This is the start of a massive resurgence of our culture. The residential school era was a time when education was used as a tool to try to assimilate; now education can be a tool to reconnect," Atleo said Tuesday.
On Thursday, the commission is welcoming about 5,000 students from across the province to participate in educational activities dealing with residential schools.
Across Canada, only the Northwest Territories and Nunavut have made it mandatory for schools to teach schoolchildren about Indian residential schools. Atleo said he would like to see the provinces also make teaching this history mandatory in schools.
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Residential school survivors share their stories in Vancouver
By Nick WellsMetro - September 18, 2013
Nick Walls/MetroTrace Joe, left, listens as her mother Margaret Commodore, recounts living in a residential school as a child at Pacific Coliseum Wednesday.
Margaret Commodore remembers the beatings.
Whenever students did something wrong, or staff said they did something wrong, the strap was brought out.
"You learned to show them that they weren't hurting you," the residential school survivor from Chilliwack said on Wednesday.
Related:
- Protesters in Saskatoon take aim at Ottawa over nutrition experiments on aboriginals
- Youth learn about residential school impact
- Film tells residential schools survivors' stories
Commodore, 80, was attending the first of four days of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission event held at the PNE in Vancouver.
Commodore attended Coqualeetza Institute, a residential school in Chilliwack, for one year in 1939 before moving to the residential school in Port Alberni in 1940.
She spent seven years on the Island and remembers the beatings and the abuse, both physical and sexual, that went on behind closed doors.
Commodore, along with several others, reported the sexual abuse to a staff member but nothing was done.
She said it wasn't until she was older and working in the Yukon that she was able to realize the impact the experience had on her and her family.
To help overcome the grief and anger, Commodore went to the Tsow-Tun Le Lum healing centre on Vancouver Island.
She was able to talk to counsellors and share the experience of what happened to her.
Family members admit that they knew little of Commodore's experience while growing up.
"She's just so strong. She's going through her healing process but she doesn't know how awesome she is," said Trace Joe, one of Commodore's three daughters.
Despite the trauma, Commodore raised three children while putting herself through nursing school and eventually became a provincial politician from 1982 to 1996.
Commodore praised the healing centre in helping her.
"There's a program at Tsow-Tun Le Lum called "Moving beyond the traumas of our past", and that's exactly what we're looking to do. We have to move on," she said.
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Truth and Reconciliation event opens wounds, exposes truths
ANDREA WOO - VANCOUVER - The Globe and Mail - Sep. 18 2013
More than 60 years later, Amy George still vividly remembers the snap of the long, black strap hitting her little hands, the pain, and the resulting welts that would render her incapable of gripping a pen, or the chains of a swing set.
But the abuse she endured at St. Paul's Indian Residential School in North Vancouver went far beyond the physical: For nine years, starting when she was six, she was taught by nuns to hate herself from the inside out, she says, to be ashamed of who she was.
"I was taught the worst thing in the world was to be an Indian," Ms. George told a crowd of thousands on the opening day of the national Truth and Reconciliation event in Vancouver on Wednesday. "[They would say,] 'You're so hard to teach because you're so dumb.' And that stayed with me for the rest of my life."
This week's four-day event, put on by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, is the sixth of seven mandated under the Residential Schools Settlement Agreement between former residential school students, first nations groups and the government of Canada.
The commission, established in 2007 as an independent body to inform all Canadians about what happened in more than 120 years of residential schools in Canada, is expected to deliver a full report by 2014.
Each of the national events has been designated a theme under the first nations' seven sacred teachings; it was fitting for Ms. George, now a frank, 72-year-old Tsleil-Waututh elder, to speak at the one fashioned in the theme of honesty.
In an interview afterward, Ms. George said it is her hope that reopening these wounds and sharing such stories will help the public better understand the struggles of the first nations.
"A lot of our people suffer from addictions," said Ms. George, who herself has struggled with drugs and alcohol. "The general population has no idea. They just say we're a bunch of lazy, good for nothing people. We are a people coming out of oppression and genocide. Those schools were built so that we would die."
In a particularly candid moment, Ms. George revealed she suffered sexual abuse at the residential school since her first year there.
"The nun said to me, when I'd be playing and running around with all the kids, she'd come right close to my ear: 'You are a dirty, filthy, little girl,' " she said, tears welling in her eyes. "So I blamed myself, for my life, for being a dirty girl. I was only six."
Other speakers at Wednesday's opening ceremony included Shawn Atleo, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Canada, who told the crowd the path to reconciliation will be paved with the telling of truth.
"Our healing journey requires that we fully understand this history, the government policies and the actions that resulted, and that everyone understands that what happened to us was not our fault," he said. "From this understanding, we are breaking the cycle of historical abuse and violence."
Premier Christy Clark told the audience the B.C. government "deeply regrets the harm that was done to aboriginal children and their families and the lasting impact Indian residential schools have had on them.
"Whatever our ancestry, no matter when we or our ancestors came to this land, all Canadians share with aboriginal people a common sorrow at the cruelty and abuse that took place under the guise of education."
Thursday's events include sharing panels, a town hall on reconciliation, two film screenings and a free concert in the evening.
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Residential school legacy a 'horrible cycle of abuse'
BY ELAINE O'CONNOR, THE PROVINCE SEPTEMBER 18, 2013
Dallas Yellowfly, whose father was sent to a residential school at age six, poses with a mask he created to tell the story of a mythical woman who steals children.
Photograph by: Ron Perron Photography , The Province
As a child, Vancouver Aboriginal educator Dallas Yellowfly recalls hearing the story of a wild woman who lurks in the forest ready to snatch children. It's a traditional First Nations story used to discourage children from wandering. Sadly, it's more than allegorical.
In a very real way, it came to pass, when an estimated 150,000 First Nations children were ripped from families, sent to residential schools, stripped of their language and culture and often abused.
"The story of the wild woman is the segue into the real story of the Indian agents who would take children to residential schools," Yellowfly said.
On Wednesday, the public school cultural facilitator will reenact that story at the University of the Fraser Valley's Indian Residential Schools Day of Learning. His presentation includes a theatre piece, Qualena, plus testimony from two survivors of St. Mary's residential school in Mission, Cyril Pierre and Joe Ginger, who detail the abuse they endured and what they've had to go through for compensation.
Yellowfly knows firsthand how that trauma persists today.
His father, an Albertan of Blackfoot heritage, was sent to residential school at age six. The experience scarred him and he turned to substance abuse and crime.
Yellowfly's mother, a criminology student, met his father while he was in prison. They married and had Dallas, but his father hit him as an infant so his mother severed ties. Yellowfly healed his wounds by learning about his culture and teaching the legacies of residential schools.
"It's creating this horrible cycle of abuse," said the UFV graduate. "There are generations of broken families disconnected from their culture and traditions and ashamed of who they are."
UFV's program runs at the Abbotsford, Chilliwack and Mission and Hope campuses, and is free and open to the public.
UFV Indigenous Studies professor Wenona Victor said in a statement the university had a responsibility to engage.
"There is a misconception out there that this is only First Nations history. It is part of Canadian history," Victor said.
More than 130 residential schools operated in Canada from 1875 to 1996. Two were in the Fraser Valley: Coqualeetza in Chilliwack and St. Mary's in Mission.
The UFV event coincides with the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the Pacific National Exhibition Sept. 18-21. That four-day event is an opportunity for survivors to share experiences.
For a schedule of UFV events visit: UFV.ca/day-of-learning.
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Paddling Together
Eddie Gardner (standing, at left), UFV elder-in-residence, speaks during the Indian Residential School Day of Learning event at the Gathering Place at the Chilliwack campus on Wednesday.JENNA HAUCK/ PROGRESSBy Jenna Hauck - Chilliwack Progress - September 18, 2013
Eddie Gardner (standing, at left), UFV elder-in-residence, speaks during the Indian Residential School Day of Learning event in the Gathering Place at the Chilliwack campus on Wednesday. The replica of a 12-person canoe (seen here) was part of the day's 'Paddling Together' theme. Twelve people circled the canoe - four were residential school survivors - in a ceremony which "showed a meaningful way to represent healing, understanding, facing the truth, and creating harmonic relationships," said Gardner.
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Walking to build strength
By Martina Perry - The Northern View - September 18, 2013 7:00 AM
Remembering the past can help strengthen the future.
The Aboriginal Education Department of the Prince Rupert School District is organizing a "Walk to Build Strength" in recognition of Residential School Truth and Reconciliation week in Vancouver from Sept. 18 to 21. The event is aiming to acknowledge the past while celebrating the strength of survivors and creating understanding.
Debbie Leighton-Stephens, district principal of Aboriginal Education, said the effects of residential schools are still impacting aboriginal people today.
"We want to be honest about the truths of the history ... and how it has impacted us. Not to dwell on it, but acknowledge [residential schools] did happen and it's affecting our communities and families," said Leighton-Stephens, who is organizing the event along with Marilyn Bryant and Reagan Sawka from the Aboriginal Education Department.
Leighton-Stephens said the event is an opportunity to renew relationships on a shared understanding of the effects of residential schools.
"That acknowledgement piece is very important. It's not an aboriginal peoples issue, it's our nation, province and community's issue," she said.
Organizers encourage non-aboriginal Rupertites to partake in the event. Leighton-Stephens said having non-aboriginals learn about residential schools is an important part of healing for survivors.
"A lot of people out there don't understand, and don't get it. When they don't have that understanding, some people move to judgement," she said.
The walk will begin at Mariners Park at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 21, with participants walking to the Fishermen's Hall on Fraser Street. Following the walk, there will be an event at the hall that will include traditional dancers, and speakers who will share their experiences and their journey to healing.
"This day is to come together to show unity, build strength, acknowledge and move ahead with the healing and learning," Leighton-Stephens said.
Prior to the walk, a group will be going into four Prince Rupert schools to speak to students about residential schools, and how they are still affecting aboriginals today.
Prince Rupert events were planned with input from residential school survivors, who Leighton-Stephens said have lived through the shattering experience and worked on their healing journey.