Residential school experiences helping people learn and heal at TRC gathering in Winnipeg
Strahl breaks down at hearings into residential schools
By Larry Kusch and Mary Agnes Welch, Canwest News Service June 17, 2010
WINNIPEG — Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl was overcome by emotion when it was his turn to speak Wednesday on the opening day of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission national event in Winnipeg.
Strahl, who has headed the portfolio for three years, had been sitting in a sharing circle of 20 people. Around him were the three commissioners, led by Justice Murray Sinclair, and more than a dozen residential school survivors, family members and other witnesses.
Each was asked to tell how residential schools affected their life.
After two hours, Strahl was one of the last to speak. He had heard stories of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, of missing family members, of the extreme pain that led people to alcoholism and drug addiction and the perpetuation of violence and abuse.
Clearly affected by the harrowing stories, Strahl said they were a call "to any of us that have any influence" to ensure that "the record is complete" and that "you can have some peace."
He then paused more than 20 seconds before he regained sufficient composure to continue. As he did so, a couple of residential school survivors who were part of the sharing circle patted his shoulder, offering him comfort.
Strahl said at one time he was involved in a logging business in British Columbia, at which half the people he worked with were aboriginal. But he knew little at the time about residential schools.
"It was never taught; we didn't know much about it," he said.
He said for many Canadians, including himself, he did not "personalize" the matter until Prime Minister Stephen Harper's apology to residential school survivors two years ago.
"I can't imagine it. I have four children, I have nine grandchildren. I can't imagine any of what you described," Strahl told members of the sharing circle.
"You shouldered it alone and we did not help and we were not there," he said.
"So we have our own burden to bear. Those of us who weren't in residential schools can only look on with wonder at the strength that you have, your willingness to share and realizing that reconciliation can only happen because of your candidness. And we don't deserve your ability to share those facts with us and your emotions and the impacts," he said.
The hearings are meant to create a record of residential schools and foster reconciliation.
About 150,000 aboriginal children attended residential schools over 120 years, and many were abused, barred from speaking their language or practising their culture and left with fractured families and generations of dysfunction.
"I hope someday we will look back at this day and say it was an important day in our history," Sinclair told a crowd of about 400 people during the opening ceremonies at The Forks, a plaza in downtown Winnipeg at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers.
Dozens of elders, native leaders, church officials and politicians spoke throughout the morning ceremony on a hot and blindingly sunny day.
Also Wenesday, Strahl announced the Harper government would ask parliament to repeal eight sections of the Indian Act that created the residential schools, forced all aboriginal students to attend and allowed truant officers to forceably remove children from their homes. Those sections haven't been enforced for decades, but the symbolic gesture of reconciliation won a round of applause from the crowd.
While eating a brown-bag lunch provided to survivors, Jack Beardy said it's time Canadians, especially those who believe the schools weren't so bad, hear the truth. For nine years, Beardy attended two schools in Saskatchewan, which were the worst, and two in Manitoba. There, he was frequently strapped for speaking his Cree language, the only one he knew, and fondled by staff while they pretended to bath him.
Beardy, now 65, is hoping to tell his story in public, likely in a special sharing circle with the three TRC commissioners that runs every day.
"I got brave enough, but it took a long time," said the man from Split Lake in northern Manitoba.
"A lot of people, my brothers, still can't tell their story. Too much shame."
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Speakers relive pain, humiliation - Anger, tears brim over at The Forks
By: Larry Kusch, 18/06/2010
They spoke of beatings, molestation and inedible food laced with mouse droppings.
For several hours on Thursday, in the men's sharing circle at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's national event in Winnipeg, they spoke of the pain inflicted upon them by residential schools -- and the harm the experiences did to them and to their families.
Incredibly, they were able to make the occasional joke as they spoke of unbearable suffering and pain.
A 70-year-old man named Norval, who attended a residential school at Birtle in the late 1940s and early 1950s, broke up the audience when he explained that he would stand up to speak because if he sat too long his legs would get stiff. "At my age, that's the only thing that gets stiff," he quipped as the audience roared with laughter.
Here are some of their stories:
John Peter Flett of Ste. Theresa Point spoke of being beaten repeatedly by his residential school teacher in Grade 1 when he made mistakes in responding to questions that he didn't understand. "Every mistake I made I got hit," he said Thursday. He later married a woman who had spent seven years in residential schools.
Their children were to suffer from that legacy. Three sons died violent deaths, one at 17. Another was beaten by his best friend and died five months later at 29 from brain damage. A third committed suicide. "He couldn't handle, I guess, what had happened to our family," Flett said.
Joe Cooke, 74, from Cross Lake, was a study in courage as he spoke of his experiences for 11 riveting minutes, despite the effects of a stroke that left much of what he said unintelligible.
"It's hard to talk, but I still talk," he said at one point. A couple of times, he broke down, clutching one of the tent's support poles, an attendant patting his shoulder.
Norval, who attended the residential school in Birtle, said he could not tell anyone of the sexual abuse he suffered in the late 1940s and early 1950s for decades. He said when he was taken away to residential school, he thought he was going to receive an education. "I thought I was going to become something as an aboriginal person."
When he left the school, he was full of anger and hate. "I didn't know what love was... I couldn't sit down and communicate with my own mother and father because I had been away for so long."
After years of alcohol abuse, he attended Alcoholics Anonymous and later became a life-skills coach. "I wanted to make something out of my life to give back to the community," Norval said.
Tobasanakwat Kinew spoke of a residential school friend of his who suffered numerous beatings that occasionally left him hospitalized. Kinew is certain that his friend, who had vowed in hospital never to return to the boarding school, was later killed. A few days after he visited him in hospital he was informed that his friend had died of tuberculosis. Kinew was told to remove his friend's mattress and put it out in the sun. "Well I think the whole world knows that you don't die of TB in two days. This boy was killed."
Kinew also recalled being beaten with a stick until his hands were swollen on the day his father was buried. His dad had been killed in a car accident and his casket had been brought to the residential school and placed in a parlour. Kinew's sin? He stood when the students were told to kneel during an assembly.
John, from the Saskatchewan community of Southend, recalls being herded along with 30 other kids into a stinking fish cargo plane and hauled to a residential school in The Pas in 1957. There he was molested for three years and spent much of the time half-starved because of the hideous food that was served -- sometimes contaminated with mouse droppings. "If we had bologna once a month, that was our steak, and we couldn't wait for that steak to come. And we would fight for that steak," He said Thursday.
(Free Press reporter Larry Kusch is taking part in a reporter exchange this month with APTN.)
Larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca
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'Spirits still crying' of residential-school children who died unknown
By Mary Agnes Welch, Canwest News Servic June 18, 2010
WINNIPEG — The freak accident that killed Joe Harper's friend Joseph at the Cross Lake residential school was bad enough. But it still rankles Harper, 50 years on, that Joseph died in obscurity.
"There was never a funeral for him," said Harper, as he stood outside one of the tents Thursday at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's first national event, which is being held in Winnipeg this week.
"I don't even know how his parents ever found out."
Besides Joseph, who was injured and died while sliding down a hill onto a frozen lake, Harper said many Cross Lake students, including himself, suffered from chronic tuberculosis, and there were many students who never made it home.
The fate of thousands of children who died at residential schools is the biggest historical mystery the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hopes to solve.
Led by historian John Milloy of Trent University in Ontario, the commission's research boss, a team will spend the next four years making an inventory of every child who died and how they perished — whether it was tuberculosis, drowning, the 1919 flu pandemic, neglect, nefarious doings or myriad other tragedies.
Some believe that as many as 50,000 children died, a widely reported figure that some say is likely a dramatic overstatement.
Until now, though, no one has made a serious count, or tried to determine where the children now lay, whether it's in overgrown, unmarked cemeteries near former schools or nearby churchyards.
The mystery of the missing children has cropped up repeatedly during this week's event in Winnipeg, including Thursday, when one Saskatchewan survivor choked up while talking about classmates who died in anonymity.
"Their spirits are still crying," said Darwin Blind, who attended the infamous Gordon's School north of Regina, where pedophilia was rampant.
"There are all these unmarked graves, and when you dig around where the schools are, you dig up the bones."
Blind was speaking to commissioners in their statement-gathering tent.
Despite miserable weather, the tent was crowded all day Thursday until organizers shut down all outdoor activities in the late afternoon due to rain and high winds.
Tuberculosis, which still plagues many remote aboriginal reserves, was a common killer at residential schools. A TB outbreak at the Cecilia Jeffrey school in Kenora, Ont., in 1925 killed seven students and, 20 years later, the disease still infected a quarter of them.
Fires were also common. At Harper's school in Cross Lake, a fire in 1930 killed a teacher and a dozen students.
This summer, Milloy and his army of researchers will start combing through thousands of documents stored in government archives and in about 40 different church collections. They'll be looking for any hint about a child who died.
"People write things in the margins of letters," he said. "There are diaries where children are mentioned. . . . We'll look at it all."
As a matter of policy, the government tossed many residential school records every five years, so there are frustrating gaps in the documentation.
That's why researchers will also scour the memories of survivors, including the 1,000 that will give official statements to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission event this week.
Statement-takers will explicitly probe whether a survivor knew of a child who died at their school.
A team of historians and archeologists will also do site surveys of any graveyard they hear about, which could lead to better commemoration of each cemetery.
One thing the commission won't do is dig up bones to do DNA testing — it's up to elders and each community to determine what to do with the remains.
"If you finally know where your child is, and you can go put flowers on the grave, literally or figuratively, it gives you some sense of closure," said Milloy.
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Churches, members coping with burden of guilt
By: Lindor Reynolds 18/06/2010
When he was a young priest in the '60s, Rev. Bob Webster was offered the chance to volunteer at a residential school.
"I thought it would be like a camp," the Anglican minister says today. "I thought the kids would play games and sports and have a good academic program. I heard they'd go home once a month and their parents could visit them whenever they wanted."
He shakes his head sombrely.
"I had no idea, no conception of what was going on there."
He didn't take the volunteer position and is forever grateful.
I am an Anglican. Webster was once my parish priest.
He may not have been involved in the residential schools directly but he, like so many other clergy, carries a burden of shame and guilt. It's a guilt shared to a lesser or greater degree by many Christians.
If you look at a map produced by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission you'll see residential schools dotting every province and territory. Most Christian faiths -- Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Mennonite, non-denominational, Presbyterian and United -- are represented.
The schools, scattered like a broken string of black pearls, reveal a sordid history that cannot be erased.
What First Nations people and Christian believers (sometimes they're one and the same) need is a greater understanding of the impact residential schools had on all of us.
Webster has chosen to wear his black shirt and priest's collar to the interfaith tent at The Forks. A large cross hangs around his neck. He debated wearing street clothes, he says, but realized he'd be hiding who he truly is.
"I had to be prepared to hear hard words," he says quietly.
"If they need to say something to a church member they can say it directly."
In 1993, former Anglican primate Michael Peers issued an apology on behalf of our church.
"I have felt shame and humiliation as I have heard of suffering inflicted by my people, and as I think of the part our church played in that suffering," he wrote.
For many of us in the pews, it was an acknowledgement of something only rumoured or talked about in whispers. We knew, in the vague way most Canadians knew, but had not allowed ourselves to understand the depth of the cultural genocide. We looked away rather than looking inward. The institution in which we had literal faith betrayed generations of children under the guise of saving them.
"I don't feel personal guilt," says Webster. "I feel a corporate guilt. The church is the church is the church. We bear the burden of the sins of our forefathers."
The impact, he surmises, is the same as that felt by some Germans for the Nazi atrocities during the Second World War. They weren't there. They didn't commit the acts. But the Holocaust happened in their country (and others) while people stood by silently.
There have been plenty of prayers at The Forks this week, sacred fires lit and a calling on God and the Creator for healing. Christians have stood shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, with First Nations people. The reconciliation is a fragile process and one fraught with deep pain and broken promises.
The tenderness and respect shown by the participants allows us to rejoice in the power and resilience of the spirit.
The five-year mandate of the TRC won't be long enough to complete healing. That will take the number of generations equal to, or greater than, the decades residential schools harmed innocents in the name of God.
If you were raised in a faith you can understand the betrayal that comes when a priest (or an entire church) sins. The abuse of children, residential schools and other sexual improprieties cleave parishes and dioceses. Part of our faith and public statement is the belief it will strengthen us. When churches do harm, when they act like a funhouse mirror to the sanctity of our belief, we are failed.
I do feel guilt, both as a Christian and as a Canadian whose society has long felt free to marginalize its First Nations people.
May God, and they, forgive us.
lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca
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Pilot recalls flying terrified kids to residential school
By Larry Kusch, Canwest News Service June 18, 2010
WINNIPEG — The sad memories are still vivid for Lynn Bishop 40 years later — a remote northwestern Ontario lake, two distressed aboriginal children and their grim, heartbroken parents.
Bishop, now a retired Winnipeg businessman but then a university student working as a commercial pilot in the summer, was told to fly to a specific spot on the shoreline to pick up children for return to Kenora, Ont.
"I was told that at a point on the shoreline there would be two small children to bring back to the base where they would attend the nearby residential school," Bishop, then 27, recounted in a sharing circle at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's first national event, which is being held this week in Winnipeg.
When he landed his six-seat Cessna float plane at the appointed spot, he was struck by the fact that there was "no dwelling of any kind, no structure, no tent and, unless I missed it, no boat."
There wasn't even a dock.
"When I got out, I could sense immediately that there was a high sense of discomfort and stress within this group," Bishop told the sharing circle, which included residential-school survivors and Justice Murray Sinclair, chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
"The father was very sombre-faced and grim. The little boy, who I would guess was eight years old, was expressionless but you could tell (was) tense."
"The mother, who it was apparent had been crying . . . was in a very high state of anxiety. The little girl, who I would guess to be six years old — no more than six — was trembling and sobbing and clutching her mother's garment with a death grip."
Bishop, who went on to manage Winnipeg's airport and serve as an executive with the Cargojet airline, said the children's father told him that the young girl was about to be separated from her mother for the first time. It was late August and the children were not scheduled to see their parents until the following June.
"We took off and I recall thinking . . . I would do a pass and bank (the plane) so that the kids could wave at the parents. . . . That was a mistake because all it did was heighten the sense of separation and the tenseness. And we now had two very upset (children) — the little girl, I would think, in clinical terms you could call traumatized, at that point," Bishop said.
He said the children both "wailed and sobbed" all the way back to Kenora, a trip that lasted well over an hour.
However, the final indignity was still to come, he said with a sigh.
When they landed in Kenora, there was nobody to welcome the children — only a taxi parked on the dock waiting to take them to the residential school.
"I can recall clearly carrying the two small suitcases . . . to the car.
The children climbed into the back seat and the taxi drove up a hill, turned right and was out of sight.
The heartless treatment the frightened children received angered and disgusted Bishop, inspiring him to come forward to share his story four decades later.
"No chaperon, no welcome, no adult, no words of welcome and I remember thinking, 'How cold and uncaring can this get?' "
Bishop said the events of that day "had a very disturbing effect" upon him, but over time the memory receded — until he began to read about the horrors and abuse that took place in so many residential schools in Canada.
He told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission the more he read, the more "significant that day became" and the more he wondered about whatever became of those two children.
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Healing comes full circle
John Woods, Winnipeg — June 17, 2010
This truth and reconciliation commission consists of two people, a hospital room and some tear-jerking country twang.
They have overcome 2,000 kilometres of geography and 150 years of troubled history to join, hand to latex glove, mother to adopted son.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” says the lean man in the bed to the grey-haired woman in the gloves. “Come here and sit closer.” A few kilometres away, thousands of people have gathered along the shores of the Red and Assiniboine rivers as part of the official Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a $60-million government effort to atone for 150 years mandating aboriginal residential schools.
But the true grunt-work of forgiving the awful truths of those institutions is taking place here in Winnipeg's largest hospital, fourth floor, room 41, mind the ceremonial sweet-grass on the way in. The man in the bed is Edward Gamblin, a 62-year-old Cree country singer who experienced all that residential schools are now infamous for: isolation from family, violent punishments, abusive priests. The 75-year-old woman in the gloves is Florence Kaefer, his grade three residential school teacher. She’s been tending his hospital bed for a week. Their private path towards friendship personifies everything the commission and the nation are aspiring towards.
It started in 1957 in a small Norway House classroom, 450 kilometres north of Winnipeg.
“Her class was a place of refuge for us children,” says Mr. Gamblin, wearing a Native Pride cap. “She was a good teacher.”
Others were not. Ms. Kaefer remembers hearing children crying for their families at night when she supervised the overcrowded dorm. She had no way of knowing that supervisors were physically and sexually abusing the children.
“I wasn’t aware of what was really going on,” says Ms. Kaefer, who was just 19 when she jumped at the chance to teach in the remote community. “I was there to teach.”
She left after two years to teach at the now-infamous Port Alberni residential school in B.C., falling out of touch with her old students from Manitoba.
Once proud of her teaching resume, she stopped telling people she worked at residential schools by 1990, when revelations of sexual abuse at the institutions began hitting headlines.
“I was embarrassed,” she says. “At the same time I was hurt that I was tarred with the same brush as those who abused.”
But a late-blooming relationship with her old grade three student would change that shame to pride.
In 2006, she was travelling through Manitoba when she came across a CD of Edward Gamblin’s country tunes. “I wonder if that’s the boy I knew,” she remembers thinking.
Later in the trip, she saw another Gamblin CD for sale, Cree Road. She bought it and read the liner notes while sitting on a hotel room in The Pas. “They said that when Edward was a child, he was sexually, physically, mentally and culturally abused at school in Norway House,” she says. “I broke down in tears that hotel room and just cried and cried.”
One tune in particular, Survivor’s Song, drew more tears. “They took away my innocence and poured holy water on me,” it goes. “They took my soul and placed it at the foot of their cross ... Eleven long years still haunting me.”
She decided to confront Mr. Gamblin. She found his number, dialled it nervously, said hello and stated her name.
“I remember you,” Mr. Gamblin replied. “You were my teacher.”
After a long conversation, he invited her into his healing circle to smoke a peace pipe and work towards some sort of understanding of the past.
She travelled from her home in Courtenay, B.C. to meet him. “I hugged him,” she says, “and told him how very sorry I was about what happened to him in school.”
She has visited him several times since, even adopting him as a traditional son. They write letters often, addressed “Dear Son” and “Dear Mom.”
Her latest trip east came for bleaker reasons. He was in this Winnipeg hospital with a heart conditions when his wife died. Ms. Kaefer rushed to his side, knowing that much of his family would return home for the funeral.
“I cherish her company, otherwise I would be very alone right now,” he says, holding her gloved hand tightly. “This here is reconciliation on a one-to-one basis. That’s the only way healing can work.”
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Residential schools: stories to tell and re-tell
June 16, 2010
Truth and reconciliation are things we think that only faraway, war-torn countries need. Not so. The Indian residential-school system in Canada – a system carried out by churches with the imprimatur of governments – resulted in widespread abuse and loss of aboriginal culture, a national shame that still, today, demands truth and reconciliation. A four-day national event at The Forks in Manitoba provides an entry point for all Canadians into that process.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, a product of the settlement agreement between the federal government and Canada’s aboriginal peoples, is co-ordinating the event and six others like it across the country. Its mandate extends to creating a historical record, collecting statements from anyone affected by the residential-school experience, and promoting education about it for future generations.
The residential-school system removed children from their homes and families. The results included horrendous instances of sexual and physical abuse. Almost every student was shaped by emotional cruelty and loss of dignity. Eddy Jules, a student who arrived at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in 1969, remembers that “the first thing they did to us when we walked in the door is they cut our hair” – an assault on a child whose long hair is intrinsic to his First Nations identity.
Truth is needed because some facts still need to be collected. The commission’s chair, Mr. Justice Murray Sinclair, wants to get to the bottom of stories about children who went missing from the schools. Stories of student-on-student abuse also need to be told.
Reconciliation is needed because in many ways, residential schools aren’t just part of the story of the aboriginal-colonial relationship; they are the story. Nearly every aspect of the relationship – the making, and occasional breaking, of treaties; attempts to suppress aboriginal culture; the institutionalization of aboriginals – is either reflected in, or was propelled through residential schools.
There is an urgency in telling the stories. Most of the schools closed by the 1970s, so almost all of the perpetrators are gone. Many former students – the commission estimates 80,000 – remain, but their numbers are dwindling. The legacy remains, in the generations of people whose parents and grandparents failed at parenthood because they knew only institutionalization in their own childhood.
Reconciliation may be harder than truth, and not just for aboriginals; it will take a creative engagement by the commission to convince new Canadians that this is part of their story, and to remind all Canadians that the residential schools story merits telling and retelling in 2010 and beyond.
There are legitimate differences of opinion in Canada about questions of aboriginal policy, but the need for truth and reconciliation cuts across these lines. In 1994, a young aboriginal student told the CBC that traditional First Nations education consisted of “the three L’s”: looking, listening and learning. That education was denied to too many aboriginal people. The commission allows Canadians to look, listen and learn, if they have the courage.
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Religious leaders share their side of residential school stories - Church representatives worry about how they will be received, but aim to atone for history of vice
Patrick White, Winnipeg — Jun. 16, 2010
Mardi Tindal, the leader of the United Church of Canada, was finishing a quick sandwich and squinting from the glare off the Red River, when an aboriginal woman at the next picnic table started recounting her residential-school experience.
Like most of these stories, it involved loss of family, loss of dignity and, eventually, loss of self-worth.
“It just tears me up to hear that,” said Ms. Tindal, whose church administered 13 residential schools across Canada. “May I pray for you?”
The woman consented. Some do not.
The dozens of church representatives who have flocked to The Forks in Winnipeg for the first large event put on by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have a curious role here: to simultaneously promote a message of virtue and atone for a history of vice. The commission has invited them to tell their side of the residential school story – the sinner’s tale – and they’re doing so with great trepidation.
“I treat it like going into confessional,” said Rev. Deacon Conrad Plante. “We are very tense going in and we hope to come out with a degree of comfort.”
The tension lay just beneath the surface on Wednesday during the kickoff of the four-day event. One denomination advised its clergy to doff their clerical garb. During opening speeches, two women scoffed and noisily exited a tent when a clergy member stood to speak.
Few feel that conflict more profoundly than Rev. Stan McKay. A Cree man from Fisher River, Man., he attended residential school 480 kilometres from home – “five years of incarceration,” he calls it – and later returned to a residential school as a teacher.
“I know now that children were being abused while I was there,” said Mr. McKay, a former moderator of the United Church. “Becoming aware of those issues, it’s difficult to know where to stand on some issues. … For years, people have come up to me and asked how, as a survivor, I can still be affiliated with the church. Well, I see myself on the periphery of the church these days.”
As much as church members want to hear stories of former students, they are also eager to tell their own stories.
Church tables in the commission’s “learning tent” garnered a large, young crowd all day as people pored over photos and documents from church archives, searching for depictions of the places they know only from the sad stories of relatives.
“Hopefully, through this, those who were hurt will also hear our truth,” said Archbishop Albert LeGatt of Saint-Boniface, Man. “On the whole, those who worked in the schools wished to do good. But they were caught. They were part of a system that was profoundly unjust, that took children from families. There was abuse, physical and sexual. We don’t deny that. But part of our truth is the story of many good people caught up in a destructive system.”
One Catholic priest told the story of a friend who worked tirelessly to clothe and feed his residential school students because the federal government did not provide enough money.
“In the summer he would roam Winnipeg begging factories for clothing donations,” said Brother Thomas Novak. “And now he is heartbroken because he is blamed. He knows they didn’t do the job they would have loved to do, and we’re hoping he can tell more of his story.”
Throughout the fledgling course of the commission – a body that will record residential school stories for five years and hold dozens of statement-taking events across the country – critics have grumbled that it will do nothing to indict abusers, essentially pardoning their sins. Not surprisingly, the churches see it differently.
“I don’t think this exonerates at all,” said Archbishop Fred Hiltz of the Anglican Church of Canada, leaning against a brick wall in the shadow of cranes erecting the Canadian Museum for Human Rights next to The Forks. “This moves us beyond litigation, beyond court proceedings to actually hearing the truth. Everyone has realized that cash doesn’t restore souls, that it doesn’t provide genuine healing. Someone listening to their stories – that has a much greater potential.”