Bigstone Community Wellness
Indian Residentail School Support Program
Box 840 Wabasca, AB
T0G 2K0
Phone: (780) 891-3777
Fax: (780) 891-2015
Toll Free: 1-877-767-7060
Email: nnadap@bigstonehealth.ca

The Irish Times

Lorraine Mallinder

July 20, 2010



Canada’s past is catching up with it as the native children who were brought up in residential schools seek accountability

IT WAS snowing the day that Michael Cachagee and his two brothers left home. Their mother took the boys by horse-drawn sleigh to the Indian agent’s office. Before surrendering her children, she told them they were going to a nice place where they would have lots of fun.

“We believed her,” says Cachagee, who was four years old at the time. The boys were taken to a church-run boarding school for aboriginal children in Canada. In the years that followed that fateful day in 1943, Cachagee would be forbidden from speaking his native Cree language. He would also suffer sexual abuse at the hands of three supervisors and a priest.

Cachagee returned home at 16, a “feral child” with little more than the shirt on his back and $12 in his pocket to find his mother had a new family. He found work putting out forest fires and labouring on the railroad, but quickly fell into violence and drug abuse, his spats of self-destruction punctuated by spells in prison.

It wasn’t until he was in his 40s that he started tracing the broken path of his adult life back to the suffering he had endured in childhood. “You never realise just how much pain you carry around with you. You just learn to live with it,” he says. “When you look back, that’s when it hits you.
It’s like after a hurricane. You look around you and say: ‘Oh my God’.”

Cachagee, who is president of the National Residential School Survivors’
Society, is one of an estimated 150,000 native children who, from the late 19th century to the 1970s, were forcibly sent to institutions aimed at – as termed by government officials at the time – “killing the Indian in the child”.

The misguided drive to teach native children to think, act and speak like white people resulted in thousands of devastated lives and an as-yet undocumented number of deaths.

Today, like Ireland in the wake of the Murphy report, Canada is trying to come to terms with this dark chapter in its history. Last month, the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission launched the first of a series of national storytelling events in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to set the country on the path to healing. In parallel, it is researching unmarked burial sites on school grounds across the land in a bid to lay the ghosts of the past to rest.

The commission is clearly aiming for closure. But, in hundreds of native communities across Canada, the wounds are still red raw. Healing seems a faraway prospect on the tiny Mohawk reservation of Kanesatake (population 1,300), about 50km from Montreal. A microcosm of the dysfunctional patterns that have marked not only the lives of those who attended the schools, but also later generations, the community is afflicted by high rates of sexual abuse, psychological disorders and drug and alcohol addiction.

Until fairly recently, these problems were the community’s shameful secret.
Nobody talked about it, says local health professional Mary Hannaburg. It is only now, in admitting to the issues, that people are starting to deal with the fallout of the residential schools era. But it’s a slow and painful process.

As a crisis line operator from 2006 to 2009, Hannaburg experienced at first hand the outpouring of grief, anger and confusion that followed public revelations about the schools. Callers were often surprised at her readiness to listen. “It was as if they were asking: ‘Why are you taking the time to listen to me? Why are you doing this?’” she says. “People didn’t think they were important enough.”

In her current role as mental health specialist at the local clinic, Hannaburg bears regular witness to the psychological chaos reigning behind closed doors.

It’s not unusual to see former students who suffered a “violation of their boundaries” at the schools going on to abuse their own. In this emotionally distorted environment, where people tend to have trouble expressing their complex and conflicting feelings, large numbers have turned to alcohol and highly addictive drugs such as painkillers, crystal meth and heroin to blot out the pain. “And so the cycle goes on,” she says.

Local resident Susie Beauvais says her father closed down emotionally after watching his younger brother drown in a frozen lake. Breaking down in tears, she recounts how he scrabbled over the ice, trying to save the five-year-old boy. Like so many other children, he was buried on the school grounds in an unmarked grave. The parents were never notified. The remains were never brought home. Her father, who seldom talked about his experiences at the school, sought solace in the bottle.

Hannaburg describes the emotional numbness prevalent among so many survivors and their families as a “disconnectedness”.

“It’s like the love has been snuffed out. There’s an absence of joie de vivre , an inability to give a word of praise. People become closed, harsh, stoic.”

She has identified cases of dissociative identity disorder, where people develop multiple personalities as an escape route for pent-up emotions, as a “way of not going insane”.

As chief Gordon Oke, a member of Kanesatake’s band council, points out, the fallout from the residential schools era is just one of many challenges confronting the community. A quick glance at a fact file compiled by the Assembly of First Nations – the main political body representing native communities – reveals a litany of depressing statistics. Native communities post high rates of suicide, diabetes, tuberculosis and HIV/Aids.
Overcrowded living conditions and a lack of basic amenities such as clean drinking water are a fact of life in aboriginal Canada.

It seems that Canada’s first nations are doing battle with the demons of the residential schools era in third world conditions.

Mary McDonald, principal of the local elementary school, describes how the bleak prospects on reservation have engendered a pernicious sense of victimhood among residents. Part of the solution, in her opinion, lies in claiming back the identity and culture that was snatched away by the residential schools system.

McDonald, who is of mixed native Indian and Irish ancestry, has made it her mission to teach community members the Mohawk language. “If you’re really going to fix the Indian problem, you have to look at how you educate people, so they can be self-sustaining,” she says. “Understanding your language and who you are is fundamental. Once you have that basis, you can move on.”

As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission begins its work, the question of what “moving on” actually means is moot. Hannaburg believes that damaged communities need to feel a sense of justice for the healing process to begin. Deep down, however, native people suspect that nobody will be held accountable for the wrongs of the era. There is an innate sense that the decisions over how much truth will be needed for reconciliation have already been taken by the government and the churches involved (Anglican, United and Catholic).

The commission, which has been hamstrung by political disagreements over its mandate since its inception in 2008, has come in for widespread criticism over its lack of investigative powers. Under the terms of its mandate, it cannot subpoena documents or witnesses. Recently, historian John Milloy, the body’s director of research, expressed his frustration over the Catholic Church’s invocation of privacy laws to avoid handing over documents naming individual members of the clergy.

Milloy’s remit as the body’s director of research is to determine the location of unmarked burial grounds, the numbers of children who died and the causes of death. Documented cases cite tuberculosis, hypothermia and drowning as common causes. More blurry, however, are allegations of death by torture and medical experimentation.

Any claims emerging from the commission’s research will be passed on to police services, says Milloy by phone from Winnipeg. But, it is not yet clear how this will work in practice.

The search for truth has been complicated by money. With large numbers of survivors having claimed compensation payments handed out as part of the
2006 class action settlement (former students are eligible for CA$10,000 for the first year of attendance at schools, plus CA$3,000 for each subsequent year), it seems the page has already been turned. As Roland Chrisjohn, a professor of native studies at St Thomas University in New Brunswick, puts it, the public’s attitude towards demands for greater accountability is: “What do these Indians want now?”

For better or for worse, the country’s best hope of bridging the yawning gap with its native communities rests on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Cachagee, who describes himself as a “warrior, in both a physical and psychological sense”, will be fighting every step of the way to ensure the memories of the living and the dead are faithfully transcribed into the country’s history books. He relives his experiences at the Shingwauk school in Ontario on a daily basis.

“Our home was lit by candles and oil lamps. We didn’t have electricity back then. Then, I arrived at this school with bright lights everywhere. Now, when I’m in a mall, I’ll be overcome all of a sudden. I’ll have flashbacks and go back to being that little boy again.”

NATIVE CANADIANS: FACT FILE

The suicide rate among natives is more than twice the national average.
Suicide is among the leading causes of death among natives between the ages of 10 and 24, with the rate estimated to be five to six times higher than that of non-native youth.

The prevalence of diabetes among native Canadians is at least three times the national average, with high rates across all age groups.

Tuberculosis rates for populations on reservation are eight to 10 times higher than those for the Canadian population.

Aboriginal people make up only 5 per cent of the total population in Canada but represent 16 per cent of new HIV infections.

As of May 2003, 12 per cent of native communities had to boil their drinking water and approximately one- quarter of water treatment systems on reservation pose a high risk to human health.

About 70 per cent of native students on reservation will never complete high school.

Unemployment rates for all native groups continue to be at least double the rate of the non-native population.

(Official statistics compiled by the Assembly of First Nations, sourcing Health Canada, Statistics Canada, the National Aboriginal Health Organisation and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada)


Winnipeg Free Press

July 20, 2010

Thousands of former Indian day school students have signed on to a class-action lawsuit and have hired a prominent Vancouver lawyer to represent them.

The day-school students filed the statement of claim a year ago, alleging they were sexually and physically abused just like residential school students were. Since then, 6,000 former students have joined the lawsuit.
They are seeking compensation similar to the money now being paid to residential school survivors.

The 6,000 students are hoping the courts certify the class-action case, allowing it to proceed, within a year. And, they've hired David Church, a Vancouver-based civil litigation expert, to help them.


Kivalliq News
June 30 2010
Darrell Greer

WINNIPEG/IQALUIT - It's been a busy time for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which held its first national event in Winnipeg before visiting Iqaluit this past week.

Chairperson Justice Murray Sinclair and commissioners Marie Wilson and Chief Wilton Littlechild all attended the Iqaluit stop.

The group took part in a sharing circle with residential school survivors and others whose lives were affected by residential schools, and attended Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami's annual general meeting.

The commission was established as a result of the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.

Its mandate is to inform all Canadians about what happened in the 150-year history of residential schools, and guide and inspire a process of reconciliation and renewed relationships based on mutual understanding and respect.

The Kivalliq's Peter Irniq, who resides in Ottawa, is the Inuit cultural adviser to the commissioners.

A residential school survivor, Irniq attended both the Winnipeg and Iqaluit events with the commission.

Also attending the Winnipeg event from the Kivalliq were Noel Kaludjak of Coral Harbour, Donat Milortok and David Nuluk of Repulse Bay, Peter Suwaksiork of Arviat and Martin Kreelak of Baker Lake, among others.

Irniq, who also drum danced at the Winnipeg event, said the commission has seven national events planned during the next five years.

He said he was touched by some of the testimonies made by First Nations people in Winnipeg.

"There were about 30 Inuit at the Winnipeg event, and they were kind of healers to help the survivors making testimony to the commission," said Irniq.

"The next national event is scheduled for Inuvik in June of 2011, and that will be an important gathering for both Inuit and Inuvialuit, who will make a lot of testimonies.

"Many experiences I heard in Winnipeg were very, very similar to ours.

"I heard one story of a person who jumped through a window and went back home, and that reminded me of 1958-59 when one of our people left Sir Joseph Bernier Federal Day School Turquetil Hall in Chesterfield Inlet and tried to walk back to his community."


Irniq said a lot of people talked about being sexually, physically and mentally abused.

He said those were the same topics talked about in the Kivalliq when the residential school journey began in 1989-1990.

"We had a chance to talk with many of the Metis and First Nations survivors, some of whom I've known for a long time because I also attended Akaitcho Hall in Yellowknife in 1963-64.

"It gave us an opportunity to trade stories of what happened to us and, basically, they were all very similar stories.

"For me, the national event in Winnipeg was a very uplifting experience.

"We had a lot of people come into our Inuit tent, and I talked to them about our experiences, as well as the loss of our culture, language, spirituality and, most of all, the loss of parenting skills."

Irniq said residential school is something that requires a lifetime of healing.

He said the Nunavut government should include the residential school experience and the apologies that followed in the territory's high school curriculum.

"The Government of Nunavut should want high school students to learn about Inuit residential school experiences.

"It would give them an opportunity to learn why Inuit were taken forcibly from their parents, and sent to residential school by the church and the Canadian government.

"Our parents may have suffered more than those of us taken away, because it was a permanent disconnection from them the day we were taken away to residential school, which was very foreign to us to begin with.

"The whole idea of residential school was to assimilate Inuit into thinking as a European."

Irniq said Nunavut high school students should learn about the conditions at residential school, including the abuse and not being allowed to speak Inuktitut in class.

He said Nunavut schools aren't the only ones that could benefit from adding the residential school experience to their curriculum.

"Students at the high school level in southern Canada should also be learning about the residential schools.

"After all, Inuit were being sent to schools using Canadian taxpayers'
money in the 1950s and 1960s.

"It's important to add this to the curriculum while my generation of Inuit who were sent to residential schools are still around, because we don't have a lot of time left.

"I'm 63 years old, and I certainly don't expect to be here another 63 years."



Names read out to free ‘the spirits,’ says Littlechild

Elise Stolte

June 30, 2010

Edmonton Journal



RED DEER — On the banks of the Red Deer River, the names of the children were called out, one by one.

Benjamin Boyd, Samson Cree Nation.

John Moonias, Louis Bull First Nation.

And the list continued, naming the more than 300 children who attended the Red Deer Industrial School from 1893 to 1919. All of them are dead now; some died at the school itself, and are buried in a long-neglected graveyard that was only recently rediscovered.

Wednesday’s event was the first official ceremony to recognize those who died in a residential school.

Wilton Littlechild, one of the commissioners on the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission, called it a “freeing the spirits” ceremony. Many children were sent away to residential schools and never came home, he said.

“Children who went to boarding school tried to run away, died trying to run away, and never came home,” he said.

But this ceremony will free those spirits to pass on to the other world, “whether you call it heaven or happy hunting grounds,” he said.

“They finish their journey because of what you’re doing,” he said, thanking the several hundred people who came to the ceremony at Fort Normandeau, just outside of Red Deer.

Many of them were former residential school students themselves.

Larry J. Crane, from Tsuu T’ina First Nation, said it was important “not to forget but to forgive, to feel.” He attended residential school in Brandon, Man., from 1967 to 1969. “This is for everybody because (residential
schools) affected all of us, even to this day. It still affects us,” he said, pointing to the loss of parenting skills and the high number of aboriginal children in foster care and aboriginal adults in prison.




NunatsiaqOnline
June 28, 2010

Chris Windeyer



We’ll hear from Inuit residential school students, commissioner says

“We know that we have a significant obligation to the Inuit”



The Truth and Reconciliation Commission looking into abuse at residential schools will make sure a distinct Inuit story is told, the commission’s chair pledged June 24.

Speaking to the annual meeting of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami in Iqaluit, Justice Murray Sinclair said the TRC will give every one of Canada’s
150,000 residential school survivors the chance to contribute to the commission’s record.

“We know that we have a significant obligation to the Inuit and to ensure that Inuit stories are told,” Sinclair said.

The TRC’s visit comes on the heels of its first “national event” in Winnipeg, where survivors of residential schools shared experiences with one another.

A similar, though informal, event was held June 24 at Iqaluit’s Anglican parish hall.

The Winnipeg gathering was the first of seven to be held across the country over the next five years. The only national event to be held North of 60 will happen in Inuvik next June.

But commissioners were adamant that Nunavut communities will get a chance to host their own events.

Holding the national event in Inuvik “absolutely does not mean we’re not going to do anything else in North,” commissioner Marie Wilson said.

“We know perfectly well that one event in the North is not going to do it.”

Sinclair also said the commission is going to try to offer travel assistance for people who want to travel to Inuvik.

However, the scheduled but controversial end of funding from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation means it’s not clear how much money the commission will have to bring people in.

Sinclair said the commission is working on a travel fund, which already has a $35,000 from churches.

ITK president Mary Simon and other ITK delegates said TRC events need to start happening in the North as soon as possible, because too many elders have already died waiting for a chance to tell their stories to the commission.

“People have died waiting for this to happen,” she said.

The commission also addressed ongoing complaints about claims for common experience payments being denied.

Sinclair said that while the TRC has no authority over compensation payments, he’s concerned that about 25 per cent of claims from northerners are being rejected.

“That’s something that may end up back in front of the judges who are administering the settlement agreement,” he said.

Sinclair, along with fellow commissioners Wilson and Wilton Littlechild, came to Iqaluit at the invitation of ITK. They also introduced members of the Inuit subcommission, including co-chair Robbie Watt and cultural advisor Peter Irniq.

The other co-chair of the Inuit subcommission, former CBC North reporter Jennifer Hunt-Poitras, couldn’t attend.

Sinclair promised the commissioners will return to Nunavut for more events.




Edmonton Journal
June 29, 2010

Elise Stolte



Forgotten aboriginal children will be honoured

Neglected graveyard near Red Deer recovered years after closure



EDMONTON — Church officials and aboriginal community leaders are planning the first large-scale combined ceremony in Canada to honour children buried in a neglected residential school graveyard.

Wednesday morning's ceremony, with a feast for up to 1,000 people, comes almost two weeks after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's first national event in Winnipeg, and it deals with one of the most contentious parts of the residential school story -- the children who never returned home.

Archeological evidence and school records suggest between 27 and 65 people, including five staff members, were buried on a small strip of land on the banks of a creek about a 10-minute walk from the former Red Deer Industrial School, just west of the city of Red Deer.

The school building has since been destroyed, and the cemetery itself disappeared from property records for years. But a private landowner preserved the site, along with four wooden headboards. In 2005, the local Sunnybrook United Church decided to try to heal relationships with local bands by researching what happened and honouring the dead.

"This is the first project, and I might even dare say it's the first project of recovering a (residential school) cemetery with any church,"
said Cecile Fausak, liaison minister for residential schools with the United Church of Canada. "We're learning lots through the process and being looked at to advise other groups that might come together to do something similar."

One smaller ceremony was held in Fort Providence, N.W.T., earlier this year.

Red Deer's ceremony takes place Wednesday at 11 a.m. near the burial site.
Organizers chose June 30 because it was the last day of school, when the children would traditionally have been released.

The Red Deer Industrial School was built by the federal government and operated by the Methodist Church from 1893 until it closed in 1919.

Children were supposed to split their time evenly between school and working in the fields, although former students later said work often took most of the time.

Especially during the early years, conditions were miserable at many schools. In the close confines of the live-in facilities, tuberculosis and other epidemics were common.

Red Deer Industrial was no exception, according to a 1993 University of Calgary study. Federal records show one-third of the 62 students admitted between 1893 and 1895 died at the school or within a decade of leaving it.

In a 1907 report, the federal chief medical officer said the school had the "worst mortality rate in the industrial schools examined across Canada."

On Wednesday, members of local Cree bands, whose parents and grandparents studied at the school, will read off the names of 325 former students and sing an honour song.

The United Church, federal government and provincial governments are also sponsoring a traditional feast for the children, with a total budget of $32,000. Members of the Nakoda people from near Calgary are scheduled to hold a pipe ceremony at the burial site to honour their children, and Metis children will also be honoured in song.

Albert Lightning, a member of the Ermineskin First Nation near Hobbema, told his children their uncle was buried in that forgotten cemetery. He was
12 when he was called in from the field, arriving just in time to see the body of his six-year-old brother David being put in a grave. Then Albert was sent back to work.

"He didn't even know his brother was sick until they threw him in the hole," said Albert's son Rick, now a grandfather himself and chairman of the committee planning Wednesday's ceremony. Albert died 19 years ago at the age of 104.

"He was really bitter about (his brother's death)," Rick Lightning said.
"Because David was so young, we didn't know anything about him. My father never spoke much about him."

But his father would have liked Wednesday's ceremony, Rick said. Years ago, his father snuck onto the cemetery property, a grove of poplar trees on the edge of a small creek, and prayed for his brother.

Official records list David Lightning as buried in the city's cemetery, not the small residential cemetery. But the records are so old and fragmented, "we don't know who was buried there," Rick Lightning said. "We're doing it for all of the children, not just one individual child."

The Cree believe they have a duty to pay respect to those who have died, but sometimes parents on the reserves didn't know their children had died until months or years later, said Lightning.

The feast will finally help rest these spirits, he said. "We all need to belong, whether we are alive or we've passed on.

"(The children buried here) actually existed, they were human beings and they existed, and the families that come will be able to honour these children."