Movie on aboriginal children sent to resdidential schools. In Canada’s relatively short and placid history, few episodes are as troubling and atrocious as the Canadian government’s Residential School System.
Between the 1840s and the not-so-distant year of 1996, these institutions, funded by the government and run by the church, stole Aboriginal children from their families, shipped them to schools thousands of kilometers away, abused them physically, mentally and sexually and knowingly contaminated them with tuberculosis, all while deliberately obliterating their sense of self, heritage and culture.
The abuses went far. Survivors of St. Anne’s school, in Fort Albany, Ontario, reported having been tortured on an electric chair for the amusement of visiting dignitaries. Boys there were forced to masturbate while showering together in plastic skirts. The aim of these schools? Nuxalk Residential School Survivors. There are many Residential School Survivors in the Nuxalk Nation.
Here are just two of their stories. The Coast Mountain News thanks Lorraine Tallio and Leonard Pootlass for sharing their experiences. The words reprinted here are their own. For Residential School Kids, a Legacy of Sex Abuse. Native leaders hope Truth and Reconciliation hearings will break the cycle of violence.
The residential school in Port Alberni, one of the most notorious, operated for more than half a century from 1920 to 1973. Jerry Adams hears "Just get over it," a lot. He hears it from some young aboriginal kids who say they're sick of talking about their grandparents' residential school experiences. He hears it from some non-native people, dismissive of the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which is coming to the PNE Coliseum in Vancouver Sept. 18 to 21 to record the stories of residential school survivors and their descendants. Just get over the past. "We're trying to," he says, laughing, in his office on East Broadway, on the main floor of a no-frills three-story apartment building decorated with aboriginal art and smelling of freshly-baked buns. When victims become the criminals - In B.C., about five per cent of the population is aboriginal. Disturbing pattern of sex abuse. Residential school survivors share their stories.
Margaret Commodore remembers the beatings.
Whenever students did something wrong, or staff said they did something wrong, the strap was brought out. Reconciliation a monetary and emotional battle for residential school survivor. Mavis Jeffries would do anything to get to Vancouver, but it won’t be easy.
Coming to Vancouver means coming to terms with a lifetime of sadness for the residential school survivor. She’s been combing Facebook looking for a ride and learning to surf the net on a cellphone to try and find a way to get to here by Wednesday so she can walk with her people at the Truth and Reconciliation gathering, share her story and hear others. She’s even been selling bannock by the side of the highway in Gitsegukla, near Hazelton, to scrape together the money for a bus ticket.
For Jeffries, who survives by hunting, fishing and picking blueberries, and who clothes her family on $5-a-bag clothing from a thrift store, a trip to Vancouver is an extravagence beyond her wildest dreams. For residential school survivors. I live in fear of the dark because of the residential school.
Sainty Morris was play-wrestling with his best friend when they got caught. The residential school priests forced the two boys to beat each other bloody. Another time, Morris helped a younger student hide a puppy. When they were caught — again— the priests made them drown the puppy in a sack. And no matter how minor the infraction, the priests locked Morris in a dark room without food or water for as long as 15 hours. Former residential school teacher opens up. Sometimes, in this business, a story sticks with you long after it’s gone to air.
In 2008, when Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission into Indian Residential Schools (TRC) was first getting started, I did a remarkable interview while guest hosting The Current on CBC Radio. It’s not often we hear from former teachers of Indian residential schools, so I was naturally intrigued by my guest Florence Kaefer, who taught at just such a school in Norway House, Manitoba, in the 1950s. But something else made the interview truly memorable. Florence, on the line from Vancouver Island, was joined by one of her former students, Edward Gamblin, calling in from northern Manitoba.
Residential school survivors share their stories at Truth. The young girl, whose mother had died in childbirth, was being cared for by her aunt and uncle.
“But I came into the wrong hands when I was six,” Flanders told attendees at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission this week. As TRC commissioners Marie Wilson and Chief Wilton Littlechild listened, Flanders described the sense of sheer isolation and loneliness that she felt as a boarding student at St. Residential School Survivors' Stories.