Residential school survivors share their stories. 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. How their children react. Growing up, Carey Newman didn’t hear much about his father’s time at residential schools, just a story about being expelled for stealing holy wine and drinking it under an apple tree.
“My dad’s not a talker,” said Mr. Newman, 38, during an often emotional interview at his Victoria home and studio. “So he made a conscious decision not to tell us things about what happened to him. Many more Indian residential school stories to be heard. ‘It is a story of our people in Canada, of what happened here’ Shirley Horn , 72, Missanabie Cree OTTAWA—“My name is Charles Cline.”
So begins the testimony of a teenage Cree boy who lost six toes — three on each foot — and injured his right hand due to frost bite because he ran away one winter night after being whipped with a rubber strap by a staff member at the Norway House Indian Residential School in northern Manitoba. It was 1907. Given he was such a dirty, dishonest, incorrigible boy, according to the school principal, it was not the first time he had received corporal punishment during his eight years at the boarding school. “There was never any reason to whip me. An investigation into the incident, completed more than half a year after Cline’s feet were frozen — one of his wounds had still not healed properly — concluded that whipping was too severe a punishment for bedwetting and perhaps it would have been more in accordance with Christian values to treat the problem with medicine. THEIR story. There were tears and anger, but also hope and even some laughter as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard from residential-school survivors Wednesday in a central Alberta community wracked by the drug trade and deadly gang violence.
The hearings in Hobbema were held at the site of the former Ermineskin residential school, which opened in 1894 and by 1980 was the largest Indian school in Canada. Former student Flora Northwest told the commission of a happy childhood ruined by religious officials, who took her from her parents when she was just a little girl. “I had a beautiful childhood where I used to wake up to the sound of the drum with my grandfather,” she said. Residential schools. Residential schools. Residential schools. Canadian Indian residential school system.
There has long been significant historiographical and popular controversy about the conditions experienced by students in the residential schools.
While day schools for First Nations, Metis and Inuit children always far outnumbered residential schools, a new consensus emerged in the early 21st century that the latter schools did significant harm to Aboriginal children who attended them by removing them from their families, depriving them of their ancestral languages, sterilization, and exposing many of them to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of staff and other students, and enfranchising them forcibly.
History[edit] Residential schools apology. 3 thousand deaths. Colin Perkel, The Canadian Press Published Monday, February 18, 2013 10:43AM EST Last Updated Tuesday, February 19, 2013 7:18AM EST TORONTO -- At least 3,000 children, including four under the age of 10 found huddled together in frozen embrace, are now known to have died during attendance at Canada's Indian residential schools, according to new unpublished research.
While deaths have long been documented as part of the disgraced residential school system, the findings are the result of the first systematic search of government, school and other records. "These are actual confirmed numbers," Alex Maass, research manager with the Missing Children Project, told The Canadian Press from Vancouver. "All of them have primary documentation that indicates that there's been a death, when it occurred, what the circumstances were. " The number could rise further as more documents -- especially from government archives -- come to light. The largest single killer, by far, was disease.