Building new relationship between Aboriginal residential schools survivors and the Canadian public
Healing native wounds
By ANDREW HANON - January 5, 2008
If you stand in the parking lot of the new leisure centre in St. Albert, you can look north and see a historic red barn, standing like a lonely sentinel on a rise in the field.
It's a serenely bucolic image, one that is enjoyed every day by the owners of the million-dollar McMansions that have recently erupted from the earth just a few hundred metres to the southwest.
What they likely don't know is the barn's shameful and evil place in history, a site where hundreds of aboriginal children were tormented and abused in a church and government-sponsored campaign to eradicate native culture and assimilate them into mainstream society.
The barn and three rustic houses nearby are all that remain of the Edmonton Indian Residential School, which was run by the Presbyterian and later United Church from the 1920s until the early 1960s, when the federal government took over the institution until it was finally closed in 1968.
For nearly half a century, children from across northern Alberta and northern B.C. were taken from their families and brought there to learn farming and religion.
The main school building, which had sat empty since the mid-1970s, was burned to the ground in 2000 when a couple of drunks broke in.
The fire turned out to be a cathartic event for the school's former students. Many, who for their entire adult lives had never spoken of what they went through, began looking up old classmates.
It was time, they agreed. After a generation of shame, anger and mistrust, it was finally time to face the demons of the past.
Every summer from 2001 to 2004, former students held gatherings at the site, which in a sublime example of poetic justice had become home to the Nechi Institute, a native organization devoted to improving the health of aboriginal communities and Poundmaker's Lodge, a native-based addictions rehab centre.
The gatherings included native ceremonies, sweat lodges and talking circles presided over by elders and trained councillors. It was here that they finally began to reveal what went on at the school.
Many disclosed sexual abuse at the hands of some of the school's staff. They talked of harsh discipline, of cruel corporal punishment or of being locked for up for days in the dark of the barn's basement for such sins as sneaking out after curfew.
They spoke of constant, nagging hunger, despite the fact that the school's 350-acre farm was considered by government officials to be a model of productivity.
Perhaps most chilling of all, the men recalled being paid to dig unmarked graves for deceased patients of the nearby Charles Camsell hospital, which served in part as a tuberculosis sanatorium for natives. The school property, it seemed, had become a convenient dumping ground for unclaimed native corpses and the boys, mostly 10 to 12 years old, were handy gravediggers.
The former students spoke of shattered relationships with their parents and an inability to have healthy, stable interaction with their own children and grandchildren.
Their stories are not that different from those of the more than 150,000 native children across Canada who went through the residential school system.
It's a sickening, shameful chapter of Canadian history, a wound that festers in all Canadians, not just native people. And until it is fully acknowledged, there can be no healing.
That is what the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission will do this year - making a historical record that we can all learn from. The financial compensation that residential school survivors are receiving is for them. This commission is for all of us.
Perhaps finally, when the full truth comes out, the walls of mistrust between native people and the rest of Canada will start to come down.
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E-mail Andrew Hanon at andrew.hanon@sunmedia.ca