Residential school survivors helping people understand the legacy of gov't policy on First Nations
Edmonton Sun's nine part series on residential school survivor stories ...
For a century, the federal government conducted a campaign to solve what it called "the Indian question" by taking children from their families and sending them to church-run boarding schools, where they were subjected to psychological, physical and in many cases, sexual abuse.
The residential school system left a legacy of dysfunction that has devastated native communities.
In a five-part series, Sun Media's Andrew Hanon talks to former students - who describe themselves as survivors - and the people helping rebuild their shattered lives.
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Eagle signals better future - Neil Armstrong's fateful words during 1969 moon landing fulfils native prophecy
By ANDREW HANON, February 28, 2008
It was a prophecy revealed back in the 1880s, when aboriginal culture was hanging by a thread.
Entire nations such as the Beothuk in Newfoundland were already wiped out. On the Prairies, the bison were nearly gone and the people who relied on them teetered on the brink of starvation. The Metis were being hunted by a newly formed expeditionary army bent on crushing their rebellion.
The elders of the time, says Maggie Hodgson, knew their civilizations were balanced on the precipice, but they remained confident they would survive. After a dark, evil period, they would even flourish again.
"They said that when the eagle lands on the moon, we'd begin our healing," Hodgson says. "Can you imagine how crazy that must have sounded at the time? It couldn't have made much sense to anyone."
But the prophecy survived the ensuing century.
In 1969, the historic words uttered by U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 lunar mission -- "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed" -- was seen as the turning point for native people across North America.
"That's when the native healing movement began," says Hodgson. "People started reclaiming the ceremonies that had been taken from them."
In the following years, organizations like Poundmaker's Lodge Treatment Centre were established. The St. Albert-based rehab centre was the first in Canada geared specifically to helping aboriginal people overcome their addictions, in part by reintroducing ceremonies and teaching them about their traditional customs.
The objective of Poundmaker's program was to restore the sense of identity that had been taken from native people's families through residential school and other government policies.
"The ceremonies that were outlawed held our sense of identity," says Hodgson. "They provided us with a sense of belonging. If you don't have a sense of identity, of who you are and where you come from, what else do you have?"
People stripped of their collective identity are often left with little or no sense of personal responsibility, leading to massive social problems in communities.
"A lot of what we're doing now is learning to be responsible for oneself in terms of the well-being of the collective, whether that's family or commuity," Hodgson explains.
A big part of that healing process is reconciling former students with the church denominations that ran the schools.
Many students and their descendents rejected Christianity entirely, choosing instead a traditional spirituality that predates Christian missionaries in North America.
But a surprising number - which includes Hodgson, a devout Catholic - continue to embrace Christianity
"The Church did this, not God," she says.
Hodgson is a regular at Edmonton's Sacred Heart parish, a thriving inner-city Edmonton church that gears its services toward a mostly native congregation.
Hodgson says there's no conflict between Christianity and native tradition. One can pray in a sweatlodge, for example, to whichever deity or spirit they believe in.
And now, after decades of condemning traditional ceremonies, the Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and United churches that ran residential schools no longer say such practices are wrong.
Hodgson also hopes the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission will hear testimony about those who dared show the children kindness.
"The horror stories will come out," she says. "But so will the stories of warmth, of comfort and compassion."
Hodgson fondly remembers one nun who would comfort her whenever other nuns were cruel.
"Sister Rose Alma was so wonderful," she says. "I can remember getting in big trouble and going to her crying. She'd give me a big hug and say, 'You know sweetheart, I can't do anything about (the nun who mistreated you), but I love you.' And that made things bearable."
A friend told her that residential school saved his life. His parents were so severely alcoholic that they couldn't care for him. At least in residential school, he had a clean, warm bed and three square meals a day.
"That's part of the history, too," she says.
It's been a slow road forward for native communities since 1969, but momentum is building. Education levels are slowly improving, health levels are gradually getting better and there's growing interest in traditional culture and ceremonies.
But Hodgson says there's still a long road ahead. It took more than a century of racist government policy to drive native culture to the edge of oblivion and it will take several more generations to shake off the demons of the past.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, she says, is a vital step.
"I'd say that we still have a couple more generations to go," she says.
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Commission seeks truth
By ANDREW HANON,
Argentina had one to address the Dirty War of 1976-1983.
Chile had one to discover the secrets of General Augusto Pinchet's brutal fascist dictatorship from 1973-1990.
But the best known truth and reconciliation commission was South Africa's, designed to help heal the wounds of the racist Apartheid regime, in which the country's white minority used tyranny, torture and political oppression on the black majority to maintain its stranglehold on power for more than 40 years.
Now it's Canada's turn.
This year our federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission will begin gathering testimony from former students of native residential schools, which were among the key tools in a century-long government campaign to eradicate aboriginal culture and language so natives could be absorbed into mainstream society.
Nearly 150,000 children went through 90 schools across the country, which were run by the Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and United churches from the late 1800s until the 1960s, when the government began running them itself. The last of the schools was shut down in the 1980s.
Over the century that they operated, thousands of children aged five or six to about 16 were taken away from their families and subjected to horrific psychological, physical and sexual abuse, leaving a legacy of dysfunction that has been passed down to the second and third generations.
NO FIRM DATES
No firm dates have been set, but commission spokesman Kimberly Phillips said the commission is expected to launch "early this year."
The commission is part of a settlement between the government and former students, which includes compensation. Approximately 80,000 former students still alive are eligible for an average of $28,000.
The three-member commission, whose names haven't been announced yet, will spend the next five years gathering testimony from former students and studying government and church records.
The end result, says Phillips, will be a "comprehensive historical record" of the residential school system.
The government's Indian and Residential Schools Canada website says that once the commission is launched, "the prime minister will use this occasion to make a statement of apology to close this sad chapter in Canadian history."
Having an official record of the abuses that were inflicted on residential school students is critical for individuals, families and entire communities to move on from the past, says Maggie Hodgson, an aboriginal activist and former residential school student.
It's a part of our history that too few Canadians know or understand, she explains.
The residential school system was a formalized government campaign to "take the Indian out of the child," to strip them of their aboriginal identities and force into them European values, beliefs and customs, she says.
'NO INDIAN QUESTION'
As Duncan Campbell Scott, an early 20th century senior official with Indian Affairs, put it, "our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department."
While residential schools were a major component in the campaign, there were other, equally damaging programs.
For example, in the early 20th century, native ceremonies were outlawed under threat of imprisonment. For years, native people were not allowed off their reserves without written permission from the government's Indian agent.
At one point, lawyers were only allowed to speak to native people if they got the Indian agent's OK first, a cagey way of keeping grievances out of the public eye.
"There were more subtle things happening, too," Hodgson says. "Parents would refuse to teach their children their language because they knew if you had an Indian accent, you're not going to find a job."
Everywhere they turned, the message kept getting drilled into the minds of native children: you're no good, you're inferior to other people and you better try to be more like them.
After a few generations, Hodgson says, "you're kind of brainwashed."
'A LONG WAY'
Officially acknowledging what happened in residential schools and giving former students the opportunity to add their experiences to the historical record, Phillips says, "will go a long way toward healing the relationships between aboriginals and non-aboriginals."
But there's another objective, she says. In most classrooms, students learn little, if anything, about this dark chapter in Canadian history.
"People who don't have the full story will draw certain assumptions" about aboriginal people and social problems plaguing native communities, Hodgson says.
The commission's work, Phillips said, will give "average Canadians" a better understanding of aboriginal issues.
"We hope there will be broader understanding and a different relationship" between natives and non-natives, she said.
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Generational fallout
By ANDREW HANON, February 27, 2008
After spending nearly two-thirds of his life in prison, John Favel, 50, is determined not to waste another second.
"I was such an angry person," Favel says quietly without looking up from the intricate leather belt he's making for a friend.
"I'd get drinking and the rage would come out. Now I know where it came from."
Favel is finishing up a life sentence for manslaughter at the Stan Daniels Healing Centre. He spends his days at the Healing Centre doing leatherwork and other crafts.
Fifteen years ago he got into a bar fight where he beat a man so severely that the man slipped into a coma and died 17 days later.
Back in the 1970s, he was convicted of two counts of manslaughter for the fatal shooting of his brother and cousin in a drunken brawl.
Since he was 18, Favel has spent fewer than five years outside the walls of the prison system. He's spent so much time behind bars that he doesn't even know some of his siblings.
Favel hopes to get paroled later this year and this time he is determined to contribute to society.
"This is what I'm devoting myself to now," he says, surveying the small hobby room deep in the bowels of the centre.
On the wall hangs a native ceremonial shield that Favel and his friend made as a gift for the organizers of the Valentine's Day march to honour missing women.
Favel says he takes full responsibility for his crimes, but the only way he can turn his life around is to understand the roots of his rage, which go back beyond his own childhood.
He didn't go to native residential school, but his parents and grandparents did.
The second oldest of 12 children, Favel grew up in a home that was defined by anger, violence and alcoholism.
"As a child, I didn't have a bike, I didn't have toys," he says. "I grew up extremely poor and ashamed of who I was. All I ever saw was violence and drinking. I felt disgraced all the time, but I stayed quiet and kept all the anger and shame inside me."
His father, he says, was a kind, gentle man ... when he was sober.
"But when he drank, he became angry. He yelled at us, hit us," Favel says. "I don't blame him, though. I see now that he was only parenting us the way he was parented at residential school. He was doing the best he could with what he had."
Favel's grandparents grew up at a time the federal government had declared an all-out war against native culture.
In the early part of the 20th century, anyone caught conducting native ceremonies like the sundance could be imprisoned. Native children were sent to residential schools, forced to adopt Christianity and forbidden to speak aboriginal languages.
"They had their culture taken from them," he says of his grandparents. "When someone tells you that your language, your ceremonies are evil and you must take theirs, you're lost. They were taught to be ashamed of who they were, and my grandparents really struggled with that."
He pauses, looks at his hands, and says, "It all just came down, down, down the line. I never went to boarding school, but I still suffered from it."
Favel, who now has four grandchildren, is determined to break the cycle. He embraces the spirituality and customs that were taken from his grandparents, and has remained clean and sober for several years.
"Today, I'm able to feel and talk openly. I'm able to cry."
Another inmate, who asked not to be named out of respect for the family of the man he killed, remembers a nun smashing him over the head with a classroom pointer for speaking Cree, which she called "the Devil's tongue." He was five years old at the time and had just started attending residential school.
"Almost all of my memories of that time are violent," he says. "I remember the shame. At five or six years old I would cry and say that I didn't want to be an Indian."
Once, he got hurt at school and the priest comforting him offered an ice cream cone. The boy said yes and the priest exposed his penis.
When the boy said that didn't seem right, the priest replied, "If you don't want to remember, just forget."
The inmate adds: "I grew up learning new ways to forget. When I got older, alcohol and drugs helped me to forget."
He was so high on drugs at the time that he has no recollection of the murder he committed.
"There's no doubt that I did it," the inmate says. "And I take full responsibility for my actions."
His eyes fill with tears. "I don't have the right to ask my victim's family for forgiveness, but I do have the right to say I'm sorry."
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Healing a people, a nation - National day of reconciliation a longtime grassroots effort
By ANDREW HANON, February 26, 2008
They waited a century for an apology. Last week, it finally came.
On Feb. 12, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd rose in parliament and offered a formal, unequivocal apology to his nation's 450,000 Aborigines for 70 years of "profound grief, suffering and loss" caused by policies aimed at forcing them to abandon their culture and be assimilated.
"As prime minister of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am sorry," Rudd said.
"For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants, and for their families left behind, we say, sorry."
Most indigenous leaders in Australia welcomed the apology, saying it heralded a new era of reconciliation in the nation.
Canada's natives are still waiting to hear those same words from Ottawa.
In 1998, then Liberal Indian Affairs Minister Jane Stewart expressed "profound regret" for Canada's "paternalism and disrespect" toward native people, but an unambiguous admission of wrongdoing and an apology from a prime minister has never followed.
Jim Prentice, the Tories' former Indian affairs minister, said an apology for residential schools was unnecessary because "the underlying objective had been to try and provide an education for aboriginal children."
But that's not enough to stop a small Edmonton-based group from organizing the National Day of Healing and Reconciliation every May 26 for the past 10 years.
"Unfortunately, it's not officially recognized by the government ... yet," says campaign manager Lisa Hinks.
It was the brainchild of British Columbia therapist Edward Colley, who in the 1990s worked with dozens of native patients who were scarred by abuse in the native residential school system.
"He knew they needed some kind of apology and reconciliation," Hinks explained, "and he felt it had to carry the same kind of weight as the apology the government gave to Japanese Canadians" who were put in prison camps and had their property seized during the Second World War.
The cause was taken up by Maggie Hodgson, an Edmonton-based native activist who at one point worked for the Assembly of First Nations.
"As she worked on it, Maggie came to the conclusion that reconciliation isn't just an aboriginal issue, it's a Canadian issue, period," Hinks says in her office at Native Counselling Services of Alberta's downtown Edmonton headquarters.
Throughout Canada's history, several groups have been targets of discriminatory government policy. Ukrainians were herded into internment camps in the First World War. Chinese immigrants were charged a head tax.
On the first national reconciliation day, only a handful of communities and organizations took part. But by 2007, the number had grown to 225 across the country.
Most of the participants are connected with native residential schools, Hinks says, and the United Church, one of four denominations that operated them, is a huge supporter of the campaign.
But it's not about laying guilt trips for past injustices, she says. The day's activities are designed to promote forgiveness, understanding and moving forward.
Hodgson says she's in no rush to convince the government to formally declare National Day of Healing and Reconciliation.
"I don't think these things need to be top-down."
If enough everyday people mark the day, the government will eventually see the light and make it official.
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Nothing but a number - Ed Marten lost his name, his family, his language and his identity to Holy Angels
By ANDREW HANON, February 26, 2008
Ed Marten shows artwork depicting his days in residential school. Here, he shows the day he was dropped off at the school. In the foreground a nun is prying him off the chainlink fence while his weeping mother walks away.
Ed Marten hates it when people mispronounce the name of his native band.
"It's Mik-sew Cree First Nation, not Miki-sew," he says. "I know that's how they spell it, but it's wrong. I lost my identity once. I don't want to lose it again."
Marten, 55, has lived his entire life in Fort Chipewyan, tucked in the northeast corner of Alberta, an hour's flight north of Fort McMurray. His band, one of two in the area, was named after his great grandfather.
But for nine years, Marten was known mostly as Number 56, the designation given to him by the administration at the Holy Angels Indian Residential School, which for 70 years overlooked the community from the hills above Lake Athabasca.
"My dad was a trapper, so his work was seasonal. He didn't have any trade, so in the off-season we lived on assistance and whatever he got hunting," Marten recalls.
"But then the Indian agent came to my parents and said, 'you're Treaty Catholic, so your kids are going to the school. If you don't send them, we're cutting off your assistance.' "
The school served a large, isolated part of the province, and its pupils came from communities like Fort Smith, Janvier and Fort McKay.
But for kids like Marten, being sent to a boarding school in their hometown was a special kind of torture. The world they knew and loved - but were strictly forbidden to return to - was just beyond the chain-link fence.
"It was like a chained-up dog left to starve, but with meat sitting there just beyond his reach," Marten says.
He remembers his mother dropping him off on his first day of school.
"I can still see my mom walking away, bent over and crying, as I clung to the fence screaming at her to come back. A nun had to pry me off and take me inside," Marten says.
He remembers getting into trouble whenever he saw his mother or father walking into town and tried to call out to them.
Parents were allowed to visit their children once a week for 30 minutes. All visits were supervised by a staff member.
"I think they wanted to make sure we weren't telling our parents what was going on," he says.
The children were strictly forbidden to ever speak Cree, and Marten's mother could barely speak English.
"She'd speak to me in Cree and I'd have to answer in English or I'd get in big trouble after my parents left," he says. "(The nuns) would always call me by name when my parents were there, but as soon as they were gone, start calling me Number 56 again."
His mom and dad frequently brought candy, dried meat and other treats, but usually the nuns would confiscate it.
"Sometimes they'd let me have a bit and then they'd take the rest of it and pass it out to other kids," he says. "I was OK with that. It seemed like a good thing to do. But most of the time they'd just take it and I'd never see it again."
Bedtime was strictly governed. All the boys in his dormitory had to sleep on their sides, facing the same direction, hands clasped like they were praying in front of their faces. Regular patrols went through the dorms to make sure they maintained the position even after they fell asleep.
"If our hands went under the sheets, we'd get hit because they were worried we'd be playing with ourselves."
He was sexually abused by a maintenance worker who was a member of a monastic order.
"I thought he was really nice," Marten says. "He always had a little candy or cookies or other stuff, and he'd give it out, especially to the kids whose parents lived far away and couldn't visit very often. Then one day, after giving me something, he said, 'now you have to pay me back.' I was only nine years old."
He left school at 16.
"I rebelled against everything they tried to teach us in there. I chain smoked, I drank, I was a womanizer."
He had a daughter and realized he was as harsh and strict with her as the nuns were with him.
"I remember looking at her clothes and before I could even think, saying 'cover yourself up. Those are the Devil's ways.' "
For years he abused alcohol and was plagued by anger and depression. Eventually, he sought help and was referred to group therapy, where the counsellor urged everyone to write down their experiences.
"I didn't want to do that, so I walked out," he says. "I didn't go back for two years."
The psychiatrist tried another approach. Noting that Marten was always doodling, she suggested that he try expressing his experiences through art.
"It was hard," he says. "Drawing those sketches was a very tough, emotional experience."
The first, a depiction of the day his mother dropped him off, took three months.
But since then he has produced a series of sketches that he uses in presentations to other residential school survivors. The simple line drawings detail his life in residential school and the effect it's had on him.
Interestingly, while he has rejected his parents' Catholicism, he remains a devout Christian, attending instead an evangelical Protestant church in the community.
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Sinister social engineering - ARCHITECT OF SYSTEM BELIEVED ADDRESS 'THE MOST COMPLICATED INDIAN PROBLEM'
By ANDREW HANON - Mon, February 25, 2008
Duncan Campbell Scott was one of the most respected men of his time.
A senior government official in Ottawa, he was also one of the Confederation Poets, a collection of writers who were to Canadian poetry what the Group of Seven was to the visual arts. He was also an accomplished pianist and fellow of the Royal Canadian Society. He died in 1947.
But even with all these achievements, in 2007, Scott was named one of the worst Canadians ever by the historical journal The Beaver for his role as one of the architects of the native residential school system, a system that led to massive-scale abuse of children, ripped families apart and saddled Canadian taxpayers with billions of dollars in compensation payments.
Scott was one of the highest-ranking bureaucrats in the Department of Indian Affairs in the early part of the 20th century.
He argued in 1911 that taking children away from their families to be raised in church-run boarding schools was "by far the most important of the many subdivisions of the most complicated Indian problem."
In fact, he warned, unless they were assimilated into mainstream society, natives "would produce an undesirable and often dangerous element in society."
"The Indian problem" was considered a thorn in the side of Canadian politicians since before Confederation.
A report prepared for Prime Minister John A. Macdonald's government said the best way to "civilize" native children was to take them away from their homes and families and put them in boarding schools.
This was because "the influence of the wigwam was stronger than that of the (day) school," and that native children should be "kept constantly within the circle of civilized conditions."
Federal Indian Affairs Minister Frank Oliver, a prominent Edmontonian, said in 1908 that only education could "elevate the Indian from his condition of savagery" and "make him a self-supporting member of the state and eventually a citizen in good standing."
One Indian Affairs official said in the 1890s that the objective of residential schools was to "obliterate" the children's connection to their heritage and culture.
But in the 1990s, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People called it social engineering at its most sinister.
"Put simply, the residential school system was an attempt by successive governments to determine the fate of Aboriginal people in Canada by appropriating and reshaping their future in the form of thousands of children, who were removed from their homes and placed in the care of strangers," the report says.
The report goes on to say that "marching out of those schools, the children, effectively resocialized, imbued with the values of European culture, would be the vanguard of a magnificent metamorphosis: the 'savage' was to be made 'civilized.' "
But residential schools were just one component in the campaign to eliminate native identity.
According to the Indian and Northern Affairs Canada website, cultural practices and ceremonies such as sundances on the Prairies and potlatches on the West Coast were outlawed in the 1880s, but officials did little to enforce the bans.
That all changed around 1920, when Scott also led a "virtual crusade" against the ceremonies. Many people caught practising them were jailed. In one case, a 90-year-old elder was sentenced to two months' hard labour.
In the 1920s, the government tried to keep natives from spending too much time in pool halls by threatening jail time for proprietors who let them spend time in their establishments.
And for years, natives were allowed to leave their home reserves only if they had written permission from the local Indian agent.
The website said one of the reasons behind the pass system was "to discourage parents from visiting their children in off-reserve residential schools."
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Demons from St. Albert's Indian Residential School - 'Someone was always being hit for something'
By ANDREW HANON - Mon, February 25, 2008
For years, Joe Courtoreille refused to go into St. Albert.
"I just couldn't come through on that road," he says. "Too many bad memories. I'd always have to go around."
Just thinking about the nine years he spent "imprisoned" at St. Albert's Indian Residential School used to anger Courtoreille.
"It was awful," he says, "just like jail."
He checks himself, then adds: "No. Jail is more better."
Courtoreille says the children were virtual slaves in the service of the Catholic Church and sexual playthings for the school's staff.
Once, as a young teenager, he was forced by a nun to masturbate her with a bottle.
When he was nine, a priest ordered Courtoreille into his private room and made the boy perform sexual acts on him. If he refused, the priest warned, he'd beat him.
Almost every night for two or three more years, the priest would select one of the boys around Courtoreille's age. Each night he'd pray it wasn't his turn.
"That's the way it was," the 77-year-old says, sipping coffee and smoking a cigarette in his apartment in an Edmonton seniors' home.
"The priests would abuse the younger boys and nuns would abuse the older ones."
There were two native residential schools in St. Albert. The Edmonton Indian Residential School, run by the Presbyterian and later the United Church, was on the northeast corner of the community.
Courtoreille attended the Catholic-run St. Albert's Indian Residential School on a massive acreage now occupied by the Sturgeon hospital on Highway 2. It was only open from the late 1930s to about 1950.
He was eight when the local Indian agent showed up at the Alexander reserve 50 km northwest of Edmonton, to take his brother and two sisters to the school.
"He told my grandparents (who raised them) that if they didn't let us go, they could be charged, so they had no choice."
Once at the school, all boys and girls were segregated and forbidden to speak to each other.
"I wasn't allowed to talk to my sisters, even if we were in the same class," Courtoreille recalls. "We'd have to pass notes."
Every day began at 5 a.m. with a church service. After that they spent half the day working on the farm, which Courtoreille says he later learned supplied area Catholic hospitals with food.
"I figure we made a lot of money for the priests," he says. "In the springtime, the boys 13 and older worked pretty much all day on the farm."
Courtoreille remembers being taught to make the sign of the cross before milking each cow.
"I figure that's where the saying 'holy cow' comes from," he says, laughing.
Afternoons were spent in the classroom, where a teacher worked at the front and a nun stood vigil in the back, using a stick to hit anyone who didn't pay attention to their lessons.
Bedtime for the younger kids was 7 p.m. Once they were tucked in, he says, no one was allowed to get up, for any reason.
Kids who wet their beds would have their faces rubbed in the wet sheets, like disobedient puppies, followed by a strapping.
"Someone was always being hit for something," he recalls. "All of us kids, we'd try so hard to be perfect, but we were just kids. You can't do everything right all the time."
He shows a scar on his scalp, a souvenir from the time he refused a nun's order to clean the outside of the second-floor windows by crawling out on the ledge.
"I was scared," he says. "I didn't want to fall. She said I had to, or else. She got so mad she hit me with a stick."
His grandparents would visit on weekends and the children got to go home for two months in the summer, but they never told anyone about what was really going on.
"We were scared," he says.
"We didn't talk about it for a long, long time."
To this day, the memories of residential school come back to haunt him.
"Sometimes it really bothers me," he says. "I used to figure alcohol would cure that feeling. It did for a while, but then things just got worse. I used to be so angry, and sometimes I didn't even know why."
He reached a turning point in 1968, when he drank moonshine and went permanently blind.
Realizing that he was killing himself, Courtoreille quit drinking and started trying to deal with the demons that haunted him.
"For years we wouldn't talk about what went on in there, now it's good that our people are more open about it," he says.
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Legacy visits generations removed - Kids were taught their culture and beliefs were evil, and rigid obedience replaced family love
By ANDREW HANON, Sun, February 24, 2008
Native elders call it "blood memory" and it's poisoned individuals, families and entire communities.
They say that the legacy of abuse from Canada's Indian residential school system penetrates right into its victims' bloodstreams and has been passed down from generation to generation.
Now, grandchildren two generations removed from the government campaign to eliminate aboriginal culture are still feeling the effects.
The system, where children were taken from their homes and sent to church-run boarding schools, was in place for a century across Canada and was at its peak from the 1920s to the 1950s.
More than 90 schools operated in all provinces, with the highest concentration, 28, in Alberta. In all, more than 150,000 children aged five to 16 attended.
Former students describe themselves as "survivors" of residential schools because of the psychological, physical and sexual abuse so many of them suffered at the hands of the people charged with educating them.
"The stories you hear are horrific," says Marlene Peters, who works with survivors and their families.
One man told her of how, when he was eight or nine years old, he lost a school-issued handkerchief. When his teachers figured he must have dropped it down a 13-hole latrine, they made him crawl inside the trench and search through the human waste to find it.
When he failed to locate the piece of cloth, they made him stand at the back of his classroom for several hours, covered in feces.
His classmates teased him mercilessly for the rest of his days at the school. He grew up to become a tortured, bitter, angry man who spent time in jail for manslaughter.
"People don't realize the impact these events have," said Peters, who works at the Nechi Institute, which promotes health in native communities. (Interestingly, the institute shares space with Poundmaker's Lodge, a native-based rehab centre, on the site of the Edmonton Indian Residential School on the northern edge of St. Albert.)
Even if a child wasn't horrifically abused like the boy forced to slither through human waste, the system, by its very nature, was abusive, she says.
"Children were taught that their culture and beliefs were evil and that if their parents weren't Christian, they were going to hell," Peters explains. "One of the major objectives was to get children away from their parents."
The children grew up in an institution, where order, obedience and discipline were driven into them, without any nurturing, affection or love. In essence, many were raised like convicts.
"It was a very rigid environment, like being in the military," she says. Rules were strictly - often brutally - enforced, and the adults in charge were usually unbending, severe disciplinarians.
"Then you see the intergenerational impact," Peters says. "It's common to see adults who grew up in residential school withholding affection from their kids - rigid, strict and unable to express love."
Now the cycle of dysfunction is continuing to the third generation, with the children of residential school survivors raising kids of their own.
This cycle, says Leona Carter, is one of the key causes of the epidemic of substance abuse and addiction in native communities.
Carter, former executive director of Poundmaker's Lodge, says residential school was one of the most common threads among aboriginal clientele at the treatment centre.
"Our philosophy was that most addiction is just a band-aid over much deeper problems that are rooted in childhood issues," says Carter, who is now the City of Edmonton's aboriginal relations director.
Residential school was designed to strip children of their native culture and assimilate them into mainstream Canada. It ended up just taking away their identities, while racism and government policies kept them from being accepted into society.
Outcast and unable to understand their shame and rage, residential school survivors turned to drugs and alcohol.
"That was what our program was designed to address," Carter. Residential school survivors - and many of their children - "are lost. They don't have that strong base that a sense of belonging and community can give. A lot of our treatment program was helping them reclaim their culture and dignity."
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Tortured by memories - A former resident dug graves as a youngster - a one-handed boy haunts him still
By ANDREW HANON - Sun, February 24, 2008
It's a memory that has haunted Jackie Williams for half a century.
Since the early 1950s, the one-handed boy has come to him in his dreams, driving Williams to extended bouts of insomnia.
For years he tried to make the boy go away with alcohol, but drinking only made things worse.
He never spoke of the boy to his family, but Williams's guilt and simmering resentment was still obvious to everyone around him.
They would just chalk up his moodiness and drinking to his years in a native residential school, like a war veteran tortured by memories of combat.
"We never went to the police about him," Williams, 67, said from his home in Hazelton, B.C. "The other fellows kept telling me we should have, but I'd tell them nobody would believe us and then we'd be put in jail."
Williams only met the one-handed boy once, in a field north of St. Albert where the Edmonton Indian Residential School stood for more than 50 years. He never learned the boy's name, never heard what happened to him after that horrifying night.
All that remains of the school, which operated from 1924 to 1968, is the barn and three houses that served as quarters for the senior staff.
Williams and his brother Roy were pupils there in the late 1940s and 1950s after being forcibly taken from their home by police in northern B.C. and put on a train to Edmonton.
He didn't see his home again for nearly a decade.
As a nine-year-old boy, Williams watched his widowed father trying to stop the Mounties from taking his sons.
"The police officer said, 'Look here, you stupid old bastard. You move and we'll put you in jail,' " Williams recalls.
Williams, a rebellious, smart-alecky kid who often spoke out before thinking, remembers being beaten by school staff for his impertinence and being locked in the barn's lightless, dingy basement for disobedience.
"They were so strict," he recalls. "Some of those bastards liked hurting us."
But it's the night he met the one-handed boy that is seared deepest into his soul.
According to several former students, young male students were paid to dig graves in the surrounding fields. The school, run by the United Church of Canada, operated a massive farm to teach agricultural skills. A few miles south, the federal government operated a tuberculosis sanitorium for natives in the now-closed Charles Camsell hospital.
Witnesses interviewed by Sun Media said from time to time, the hospital would send deceased patients' bodies to the school, where the boys were paid anywhere from $2 to $10 to dig unmarked graves.
"They'd just be boxes," Williams recalls. "No preacher, no service. Just bury them and be done with it."
They had no idea why, but later guessed that they were either unclaimed or their families couldn't afford to ship the bodies home. None of the witnesses knew of any students being buried there.
One hot day when Williams was about 11, he and three classmates were ordered to dig a grave for a small coffin.
"It was hot, so we kinda cheated," he remembers. They quickly dug a shallow grave only a few inches deeper than the coffin, covered it over and went to collect their money.
That night in the dormitory, they boys began to whisper to one another. Even though they'd dug several graves, they had never seen a dead body.
One of them convinced the others to sneak out to the field and dig this one up. After all, he reasoned, it's only a few inches down. It'll only take a few minutes. As they were scraping off the thin layer of topsoil, the boys heard an eerie scratching sound from inside the coffin.
Terrified, they pried off the lid and discovered to their horror that a child inside, a boy about five or six years old, was still alive.
"One hand was just a stump, like he'd chewed it off," Williams said. "He started moaning, and we took off to the principal's house and woke him up. We were sent back to bed, ordered not to tell anyone and he said he'd take care of it."
That was the last time any adult ever spoke to Williams about the horrifying incident.
To this day, whenever a stranger comes to his door, he reflexively looks to see if they're missing their left hand. "I just keep hoping I'll meet that kid again and that things turned out all right for him," he says. "It's always on my mind."
In 2000, the school burned down, prompting its former students - who were from across northern B.C. and northern Alberta - to come back to the site.
For the next four years, they held reunions in St. Albert. It was at these gatherings that many men, then in their 50s and 60s, talked of the unmarked graves for the first time.
Williams remembers wandering into the field and trying to find the spot where the one-handed boy had been buried. He participated in ceremonies to release the spirits of the dead.
As for his three friends, all of whom were from the Hazelton area, one drank himself to death, one committed suicide and the third died of natural causes at an early age.
"I'm the only one left," Williams says. "I have to make sure people know what happened. I can't let what happened be forgotten."