The Times is Now... A Virtual Conversation on the U.S. Truth and Healing Commission...

 

Webinar on the U.S. Truth & Healing Commission Bill on 9.27.23

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) hosted a virtual conversation on the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act (S. 1723). 

NABS is joined by U.S. Congresswoman Sharice Davids (Ho-Chunk) and a guest panel featuring Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee), Dallas Goldtooth (Lower Sioux Dakota Nation), Mato Wahuyi (Oglala Lakota), and Georgeanne Growingthunder (Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes). 

Learn how you can advocate for the U.S. Truth and Healing Commission Bill. 

 Learn More: https://boardingschoolhealing.org/truthcommission/

 Explore our Advocacy Toolkit: https://sites.google.com/nabshc.org/nabs-truth-and-healing-toolkit/home

Why a Truth and Healing Commission

We have a right to know the truth of what happened in Indian boarding schools in the United States.

Over the course of a century, hundreds of thousands of our children were taken or coerced away from our families and Tribes and forced to attend government-sanctioned Indian boarding schools.  These schools were tools of assimilation and cultural genocide, resulting in the loss of language and culture and the permanent separation of children from their families.  To date, there has never been an accounting of:

• the number of children forced to attend these schools;
• the number of children who were abused, died, or went missing while at these schools; and
• the long-term impacts on the children and the families of children forced to attend Indian boarding schools.

We have a limited amount of time to hear directly from survivors and record their stories.  A Congressional Commission is needed to locate and analyze the records from the 523 known Indian boarding schools that operated in the U.S.  A Commission would also bring together boarding school survivors with a broad cross-section of tribal representatives and experts in education, health, and children and families to fully express and understand the impacts of this federal policy of Indian child removal.

 

The real battle was in the mind: Cyclist crosses Canada

 60s Scoop |  Michael John Lo | Aug 14, 2023

He was determined to change his life, so he rode a bike from Moncton to Nanaimo

After 20 years living in Eastern Canada, Chris Aubichon is returning to Vancouver Island to finish his education, which he stopped pursuing at the age of 12. “This is part two of my life."

Chris Aubichon’s two elder daughters and sister Jenn were waiting to welcome him at Bowen Park. From left, Nevaeh, Chris, Selenia, and Jenn. VIA JENN AUBICHON

Listen to this article

Chris Aubichon has spent the past three months cycling across the country in a bid to raise awareness of post-foster-care life and men’s mental health — and to begin a second chapter of his own life. 

The 44-year-old father of three reached the finish line at Bowen Park in Nanaimo on Friday evening, where he was greeted by a cheering group of supporters. 

After 20 years living in Eastern Canada, he’s returning to finish his education, which he stopped pursuing at the age of 12. 

“This is part two of my life,” he said. 

Aubichon, born in Prince George and raised in Nanaimo, is of mixed Indigenous and Metís heritage; he was a ward of the court from the age of six to 18. 

His mother, who is of Tla’amin descent, was raised by a white Catholic family and was part of the Sixties Scoop. 

“She had her own demons,” he said, adding that her mother was born in a residential school. 

His grandmother died of a drug overdose in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside after leaving residential school, he said. 

Aubichon said he has overcome his substance abuse and addiction issues, stemming from his upbringing, which involved experiences of sexual abuse in group homes. 

But his mental health remains a persistent challenge, one that has cost him jobs, relationships, and housing. 

“It doesn’t matter how badly you want to get up and go to work. You’re not getting up,” he said. 

It’s part of the reason why he chose to bike back to Nanaimo. 

“If I jumped on a plane and flew across the country, I’m going to be the same man that got there that left, and that man isn’t going to find success,” he said. 

But someone who’s able to bike across most of Canada? 

“The man that can do that can surely be successful at school,” he said. 

On May 11, Aubichon found a mountain bike that could hold his 320-pound frame, loaded it up with camping gear and started pedalling. 

He didn’t even inform his family until he was halfway to Fredericton. 

His sister Jenn, initially skeptical of the whole ordeal, had only one request: that he document his journey, both the highs and the lows. 

Aubichon agreed, even though he thought that no one would care. But his journey would be followed by ­thousands on social media, and even catch the eye of government ministers. 

The initial days were the hardest, a constant fight against severe cramps, back spasms, and shoulder pains resulting from a life of smoking, drinking and neglect, he said. 

“Physically, I was only making it 15 or 20 kilometres a day,” he said. “I could pedal for maybe 15 seconds and I would have to stop, and my legs would cramp up.” 

But the real battle was in the mind, he said. 

Aubichon has bipolar disorder, depression, and chemically-induced anxiety disorder, which has cost him jobs, relationships, and housing. 

“There were days where I’m just riding down the roads and just literally crying,” he said. 

But bit by bit, the gears felt lighter on his feet, and every day he would ride further until he was travelling 120 kilometres per day. 

That’s not to say there weren’t other challenges. 

Wildfires in Northern Ontario dogged his steps. Vicious headwinds and sweltering weather accompanied much of his journey through Western Canada. 

The Rockies were brutal, and he was forced to detour from the Coquihalla due to yet another wildfire, near Merritt. 

Twice, he was thrown off his bike in northern Ontario by the buffeting winds of camping vehicles passing him with only 12 inches of clearance. 

On the western outskirts of Winnipeg, his bike was stolen outside of a Tim Hortons. 

But an emotional dispatch on social media went viral and people donated money to replace his gear and supplies. 

There were many such instances of kindness on his journey, he said, adding that an older man in North Bay, Ont. slipped him $50 without knowing that Aubichon was starving that day and couldn’t afford to eat. 

People have invited him into homes, waited on the sides of a highway for hours just to encourage him on his journey, he said. 

“I’m still a big man, but I’m in great shape,” he said, adding that he’s probably lost 50 pounds since he started. “I have a clarity that I’ve never had in my life, and mentally I feel stronger than I ever have.” 

Aubichon now wants to help others through a bike support group and advocate for better supports for youth aging out of care, who are overrepresented in homeless populations. 

Many people living in tents right now are former wards of the state, sent out to fend for themselves at an early age, he said. 

“A lot of what they're dealing with is not their fault.” 

SOURCE

We Need To Think in Terms of Healing All People

August 19, 2021 / farinaking

By Marsha Small (Northern Cheyenne)

As the public now decries the unmarked graves of Indigenous children of residential and boarding schools, many Native families are thinking, “We know. Finally, they’re paying attention!” After all the work that many Native communities and intellectuals/activists have been doing, people are noticing and condemning, unlike any time before, the terror and nightmare that Native families have been living with for generations. Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland, a boarding school descendant, recently announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Truth Initiative, which offers hope to affected communities, but also raises questions about the methods and approaches of this inquiry. Stories are surging on the outcry and accusations about boarding schools, sometimes without listening to the Native survivors, families, and communities that have already been speaking out and seeking truth, healing, and reconciliation in their own ways. For many that have experienced the horrors of boarding school first-hand, and to their children, these conversations trigger trauma. 

Farina King and Marsha Small are two Native American scholars and descendants of boarding school survivors who are dedicated to serving their peoples by amplifying the voices of those who attended Indian boarding schools. 

In her work, King addresses how Diné identity has changed among boarding school students through the twentieth century, and she addresses the physical affronts, illness, abuse, and punishment, and as well as survivor skills and creativity that students used to overcome their challenges at boarding schools. 

Marsha Small, or O tata’veenova’e (Northern Cheyenne/Tsististah), has used geo-referencing systems such as ground penetrating radar (GPR) and geospatial information systems (GIS) to locate unknown and unmarked burial sites of the Chemawa Indian School Cemetery. 

Listen to Farina King and Sarah Newcomb talk with Marsha Small for the Native Circles podcast.

We are part of a growing collaboration who address the intergenerational impacts of what historian David Wallace Adams defined as “education for extinction,” or schooling set to eradicate Indigenous sovereignty and being in the empire of the United States. We call for the Indigenizing of truth seeking and telling on the histories of boarding schools. Healing derives from self-determination and community-based approaches that center on living Indigenous communities and boarding school survivors and their families. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) has spearheaded this movement for truth and healing in the United States (https://boardingschoolhealing.org/). 

As early as 1928, the Meriam Report uncovered many of the harms of Indian boarding schools, such that the federal government increasingly redirected their attention towards public schools for Native children. However, some boarding schools have remained open into the twenty-first century, though they have changed many of their most nefarious policies, many even embracing the teaching of Native American cultures and languages. Yet, struggles over educational sovereignty ensues as Native youth fight to protect their right to life and water at home. 

The One Mind Youth Movement are Cheyenne River Sioux young leaders who are fighting to sustain Indigenous “outreach, community, and education” (https://www.omym.org/). Some Indigenous youth are fighting to wear ancestral regalia at their graduations such as Christian Titman of the Pit River Tribe who sued his school district in California for not allowing him to wear an eagle feather in his graduation cap in 2015.

The Navajo Nation is an example of one tribal nation that is attempting to reaffirm their authority over the education in public schools on their reservation. 

Boarding school histories trigger guilt, both in those involved, as well as those looking on. Many now ask, what more could we have done to save the lives of these children? 

King once asked her Diné father why he never taught her Diné bizaad, Navajo language, and he told her, “You never asked.” But she knows other Diné parents who no longer talk to their children in Navajo, and they openly admit that they thought that their language would hurt their prospects in the future. The schools drilled in them that Indigenous languages and cultures were impediments and vestiges of a losing and dying people. They believed that the trajectory of their children excluded Indigenous values, including sovereignty and peoplehood for which many of their ancestors sacrificed their lives. A relentless ailment that burdens the survivors of boarding schools and their posterity is the paradox that we will either forever belong to a race of victims, or we can reject our Indigeneity and side with “the winning team.” History is often framed as a game of winners and losers, but there are never winners in such histories of violence and rupture.

Indian boarding school truth-seekers must seek healing and recognize our Indigenous ancestors made the most of a difficult situation. They survived with the hope that their descendants would someday thrive. Uncovering buried truths will reopen the wounds that never fully healed, and the healing will be painful. This is not a process that can be rushed, or ripped apart, and it must involve those who are affected by the legacies of Indian boarding schools. Each grave uncovered represents a missing child, a stolen ancestor, and a family that never came to be.  -Farina King, Ph.D.

 

PODCAST!

HERE

 

What the U.S.A. can learn from our northern neighbor's #TRC reconciliation efforts

 Healing a bitter past: the Canadian model

. 

By Douglas Harper | July 23, 2021 | Star Tribune

JONATHAN HAYWARD, Canadian Press via AP file.

A memorial is seen outside the Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, on June 13.

Recent reports have prompted me to recall the Truth and Reconciliation Commission meetings I attended with a Canadian friend in Edmonton, Alberta, in March 2014. The commission's purpose was to bring light to the dark history of Canadian residential schools, which were modeled after similar schools for Native children in the United States.

Perhaps the fear that we in America will discover similar unmarked graves of Native children who died in the boarding schools we forced them to attend will lead us to seek the truth and attempt reconciliation, as our Canadian neighbors have done.

What would a truth and reconciliation commission achieve? What did it achieve in Canada? Why would we venture on such a path?

On a practical and immediate level, the meetings held across Canada awakened people. It awakened me, the outsider looking in, feeling shame and remorse.

The meetings gave voice to those harmed by the residential schools. One account remains vivid:

A First Nations man described how he lived with his tightly knit extended family of nomadic hunters and harvesters. One day when he was eight or nine a boat came upriver to where they were camped; Indian agents came ashore and an argument ensued. He was wrenched away from his parents, who were screaming in disbelief, and forced onto the boat. As the boat pulled away the last thing he saw was his parents waving their arms. It was the last time he saw them.

When he arrived at the school they cut off his hair and burned his traditional clothes, and fed him food he found repulsive. He could not speak English and no one could speak his language. He slept in a large room among strangers. He was physically punished for doing things wrong he didn't even understand. He had no idea why he was there and why such terrible things were happening to him. Eventually, as he learned English, he was taught that his beloved grandparents from whom "he had never heard a bad word" worked for the devil. Yet he missed his family more than he could express.

He described sexual abuse, corporal punishment and bullying. When he left the school as a teenager he fit nowhere. He had lost his native culture and language, which he had learned to be ashamed of. But he didn't fit into white society, which for him was racist. Like many he fell victim to alcohol and drugs.

His story was one of many.

The second purpose of the meeting was apology. A representative from the Catholic Church, which had administered most of the schools, read a letter that began: "We, the Bishops of Alberta and the Northwest Territories, apologize to those who experienced sexual and physical abuse in residential schools under Catholic Administration … also we apologize for participating in governmental policies that separated children from their parents and that suppressed their cultures."

Representatives of the provincial and national governments addressed the audience: "We apologize. Nothing we can say can make this past go away. We may have thought we were doing good, but we were doing something terribly wrong. Hopefully by saying this we can begin a process of healing."

Later, Frank Oberle, Minister of Aboriginal Relations wrote: "Residential schools will always be among the great wrongs of Canadian history. An example of the profound harm that we are capable of when inequality, paternalism and racism prevail over our sense of common humanity."

The third purpose was concrete change. The most important may have been mandating that the unvarnished history of the residential schools become part of the K-12 curriculum across Canada. The commission also produced four lengthy documents that contained the results from their research and public hearings, free and easily available on the web. The overview is found in "Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada," easily searchable.

These reports remind us what humane societies do: they study their missteps, even evils such as slavery and cultural genocide. They admit to wrongdoings and invite those who were harmed to speak. The most powerful speak humbly and ask for forgiveness. Finally, humane and honest societies rewrite their history when new knowledge and new awareness comes to the surface. They do it in the open, in a dialogue where all are invited to speak.

I'd be thrilled if some of the Americans riled up about "critical race theory" would read these Canadian documents and think about what it really means to face up to our past, make amends and move forward.

Douglas Harper, of Forest Lake, is professor emeritus of sociology, Duquesne University.

**

Residential schools: How the U.S. and Canada share a troubling history

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland says she wept when she heard news from Canada about what are believed to be unmarked burial sites of children's remains near a former residential school.

The news made Haaland think of her own Pueblo ancestors such as her grandmother, who as a girl was taken from her family, put on a train and placed in the American version of a residential school for five years.

After crying, Haaland took action. The New Mexico politician now leads the federal department that ran U.S. assimilation schools — she's the first Indigenous person to do so. And she's launched an investigation into their legacy.

In a memo last month to the Department of the Interior, she said the news from Canada should prompt a reflection on what Americans refer to as native boarding schools. She requested a report by next year on the schools, their cemeteries and on the possibility of finding unidentified remains.

It's only fitting that movements to assess the legacy of assimilation schools in both Canada and the U.S. should occur simultaneously. That's because they've been intertwined from the start. That point was made several years ago in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission report.

An architect of Canada's residential schools policy, in an 1879 paper, looked at boarding schools just established in the U.S. and urged Canada to create similar ones. On the basis of that paper from Nicholas Davin, Canada's federal government opened three such schools, starting in 1883 in the future province of Saskatchewan.

Both countries borrowed ideas from reformatories being constructed in Europe for children of the urban poor, said the Truth and Reconciliation report.

Haaland's great-grandfather was taken to the institution that most influenced Canada's program: the now-defunct Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. The founder of that school, army officer Richard Pratt, infamously voiced the philosophy behind his program: "Kill the Indian [in him] … and save the man," meaning Indigenous Peoples should be assimilated, not exterminated.  

Read more on this story here.

**

Final funding for Woodland Cultural Centre from Canada and Ontario Government helps complete Phase 3 of the restoration project.

“Our government stands shoulder to shoulder with Indigenous partners as we support community-directed work to identify and commemorate Indigenous Residential School sites across the province. Today’s investment in the Woodland Cultural Centre is critical to the important work being done by Six Nations of the Grand River to build a national resource to support public education and centre for healing for the community.”  – The Honourable Greg Rickford, Ontario’s Minister of Indigenous Affairs

 “It was a good day to know that the site of the former Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School will receive the funding necessary to restore the building and will house the history and stories of the “Mushhole” school children.  Having the site designated as a National Heritage Site is significant to this history as well.” – Roberta Hill, Mohawk Institute Residential School Survivor  

Download PDF Press Release Here

Learn more about the Save the Evidence Campaign

**

READ: US churches reckon with traumatic legacy of Native American schools

“Boarding schools — along with the entire structure of our churches and government and policing and military — combine to create a particular world. White Christians are safe in that world.” — @gindaanis 

 

 

How little done on Truth and Reconciliation #TRC

 Two TRC Calls to Action Are a Litmus Test for Governments. They’re Failing

An abandoned Kamloops graveyard of children remind us of how little has been done even to begin the work on truth and reconciliation.

Tom McMahon 3 Jun 2021 | TheTyee.ca

Tom McMahon is former general counsel of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, former executive secretary of the Manitoba Aboriginal Justice Inquiry and former senior counsel at Elections Canada.

Shoes placed near Parliament Hill in recognition of the discovery of children’s remains at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Why are there still no public monuments honouring these children, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called for? Photo by Adrian Wyld, the Canadian Press.

As we all struggle with the news of 215 Indigenous children found in a Kamloops graveyard, many are demanding that the Canadian government finally implement the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action. I was general legal counsel to the TRC and previously executive secretary to the Manitoba Aboriginal Justice Inquiry, both under the direction of Murray Sinclair and the other commissioners.

I've never told anyone

Stories of life in Indian boarding schools

Dan Gunderson | Moorhead, Minn. MPR NEWS

A young girl prays at her bedside at a boarding school. A new book by an Ojibwe author tells the stories life for American Indian children in boarding schools designed to purge their language and culture.

Courtesy of North Dakota State University Press | Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions

Denise Lajimodiere's interest in the Indian boarding school experience began with the stories of her parents.
"Mama was made to kneel on a broomstick for not speaking English, locked in closets for not speaking English,” she said. “They would pee their pants and then the nuns would take them out [of the closet] and beat them for peeing their pants.”
Lajimodiere is Ojibwe, and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota. She was an educator for 44 years, working as an elementary school teacher and principal before ending her career recently as as an associate professor of educational leadership at North Dakota State University in Fargo.
Her parents were separated from their families and sent to federal government-run boarding schools as children. Thousands of Native children met the same fate during the boarding school era, which scholars estimate lasted from the late 1800s to well into the middle of the 20th century.

Denise Lajimodiere's grandfather Benjamin an his sister Martha, circa 1898.

Denise Lajimodiere for MPR News

The children were sent to the schools to be purged of their Native cultures, languages and spiritual practices — forced to learn English, and often abused.
The experiences of those children, now with children and grandchildren of their own, have left a deep scar on many in the generations that came after them.
“Papa was beaten with a belt. He saw one of his fellow students die from a beating at the school,” she said.
Her parents rarely talked about their boarding school experience. She only was able to coax stories from her father in the last years of his life.
“Papa said, 'I just couldn't learn that language,'“ she said, “so they put lye soap in his mouth and the kids would get blisters."
Lajimodiere believed her parents’ boarding school abuse was a reason for the family dysfunction she grew up with, so she began a decade-long quest to understand it, interviewing people who went through the experience.
"It's a journey I had to go on to forgive my dad for the way we were raised, for his temper, his verbal abuse and for the beatings,” she said. “So, it was a long journey to understand why my father was the way he was."
What she found was a trove of stories closely guarded for decades by those who lived them. She tells those stories in their own words in her new book, “Stringing Rosaries.” She collected the stories using strict academic research protocols, but the listening was intensely personal.

Many of the former boarding school residents she interviewed prefaced their stories by telling Lajimodiere, “'I've never told anybody my story. I've never told my kids. I've never told my grandkids. I had to think about these stories all my life about what happened to me. I don't want my kids to have to think about it or know about it,’” she said.

Denise Lajimodiere, author of “Stringing Rosaries.”

Amber Mattson | Courtesy of Dreamcatcher Photography

For most people, Lajimodiere promised anonymity before they would share with her the stories.
She recalls one elderly woman who refused to even let family know she was being interviewed for the book.
"She became very quiet, even though it was a huge house, and no one was in the house,” recalled Lajimodiere. “She started whispering about being sexually abused and she said, 'I don't know why I'm telling you. I have not told anybody.' Almost every survivor in the book experienced sexual abuse, or they witnessed it."
Lajimodiere found that, while the stories people told her were often infused with painful and traumatic memories, that pain was not universal. Some people recalled their time at a boarding school fondly. But Lajimodiere says even those people — who said they preferred the school experience to alcoholism, abuse or hunger they experienced at home — shared stories of abuse in the boarding schools.
As she traveled the country doing research on boarding schools and collecting stories, Lajimodiere said she would often find herself sitting in her car, sobbing, after an interview.
She realizes now that she was experiencing the collective intergenerational trauma of losing language, culture and identity. Her parents both spoke their native languages, Ojibwe and Cree, before they went to boarding school.
"My father never spoke Cree again; that was completely beaten out of him,” said Lajimodiere. “So, now, at my age, I'm trying to relearn Ojibwe. Ojibwe is the language of our ceremonies — and our ceremonies have come back very strong."
Lajimodiere thinks connecting with traditional ceremony and culture is helping Native Americans across the country recover from the generational impact of the boarding school era.
She asked people she interviewed what it would take to heal from the trauma they experienced.
“Some of the people in the book say an apology would be a recognition of what the government did to us. Others have said, 'Boarding schools destroyed my childhood; I'll never get that back, so an apology would mean nothing,’" she said.
“Many of them said [what would be healing would be] a return to tribal spirituality and to the languages, our traditions and our ceremonies," she said.
Lajimodiere felt compelled to share the stories because many who attended boarding schools in the first half of the 1900s are now elderly and dying.
She's clear that she doesn't want the stories to elicit pity. She wants understanding.
“I want the world to know that part of why we are the way we are,” she said, “with high alcoholism, high diabetes and a lot of other health issues, one of the overarching reasons is the boarding school era.”

More:

• 'The Wolf at Twilight' Novel explores the legacy of Indian boarding schools
• 'Older than America 'Film crew revisits Indian boarding schools
• • 'Pure love on the dance floor' Celebrating the jingle dress tradition
  • Minnesota sounds and voices Ojibwe women singers learn from their ancestors' voices
   

The Thick Dark Fog

"The Thick Dark Fog" Official Trailer from randy vasquez on Vimeo.

Read more here: http://www.thickdarkfog.com/?page_id=120

Thick Dark Fog" Official Trailer
http://vimeo.com/user9741689/trailer

Award winning documentary - The Thick Dark Fog.

Walter Littlemoon attended a federal Indian boarding school in South Dakota sixty years ago. The mission of many of these schools in 1950, was still to “kill the Indian and save the man.” The children were not allowed to be Indians – to speak their language or express their culture or native identity in any way at the risk of being severely beaten, humiliated or abused. What effects did these actions cause?

Many Indians, like Walter, lived with this unresolved trauma into adulthood, acting it out through alcoholism and domestic violence. At age 58, Walter decided to write and publish his memoirs as a way to explain his past abusive behaviors to his estranged children. But dealing with the memories of his boarding school days nearly put an end to it.

“The Thick Dark Fog” tells the story of how Walter confronted the “thick dark fog” of his past so that he could renew himself and his community.

For more information visit: thickdarkfog.com

Henry Roe Cloud - first Indian graduate of Yale

New Documentary on Henry Roe Cloud (First Indian to Graduate from Yale) Matthew L.M. Fletcher | July 5, 2011| URL: http://wp.me/p7zky-4Ta

Reynaldo Morales, the documentary maker, sent this link to the excellent documentary on Henry Roe Cloud, the first American Indian to graduate from Yale in Connecticut and also a co-author of the Meriam Report. Henry was a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation. Ned Blackhawk at Yale helped to make Henry the face of American Indian alumni at Yale.
Click here for documentary

This is a hero of mine. Henry is Thunder Clan, a true leader. Please watch this movie....Trace

Survivor of Boarding School (and a true hero) passes

Residential school survivor overcame ordeal
By Mark Lemstra, Special to The StarPheonix
March 3, 2011

On Tuesday night, Doreen, a close friend of mine, passed away.
She was a survivor of residential schools. Doreen's story is remarkable not only for the trauma to which she was exposed as a child, but for the way she chose to respond to such adversity.
Instead of quitting, she rose to obtain a university degree in social work and spent her time counselling other victims of residential schools.
Residential schools were first conceptualized in 1820 by the Sir Peregrine Maitland, lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, to gain "influence over children." The Department of Indian Affairs rationalized that the government needs to "kill the Indian in order to save the man," and that to do so, "It is to the young we must look for the complete change of condition."
The Gavin Report of 1879 recommended forcibly removing children from their parents, placing them in custody of the government and church, and maintaining separation from parents for as long as possible -"the better for success."
The other justification was to maintain order. After the Northwest Rebellion of 1885, Superintendent James McRae from Indian Affairs concluded: "It is unlikely that any tribe would give trouble of a serious nature to a government whose members had children completely under government control."
To keep parents away from their children, the secretary general of Indian Affairs, Edgar Dewdney, in 1891 authorized "the employment of the police to keep the visitors off the precincts."
The goal was to take Indian children from their parents "at earliest age possible," which was deemed to be six years of age. Removal from the parents for 10 years was needed to ensure that "all the Indian there is in the race should be dead."
Duncan Campbell Scott, superintendent of Indian education, declared before Parliament in 1920: "I want to get rid of the Indian problem. 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."
The first major problem was chronic underfunding of residential schools. It took $185.55 per student per year to provide basic services. Regrettably, only $115 per student was allocated. Thus the underfunded schools were poorly built and maintained, and over-crowded, resulting in a crisis of sanitation and health.
It also forced the children to work extreme amounts of physical labour in order to pay their own way. The Indian Affairs Department labelled the residential schools "a disgrace to anybody."
Dr. P.H. Bryce, chief medical health officer for the department, wrote in 1922: "Fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education they had received therein." Bryce concluded that these schools were a "criminal disregard" and " a national crime" of the responsibility placed on the government and its thirdparty provider.
In fact, the legal opinion from S.H. Blake to cabinet minister Frank Oliver was that: "The appalling number of deaths among the younger children appeals loudly to the guardians of our Indians. In doing nothing to obviate the preventable causes of death, brings the department within unpleasant nearness to the charge of manslaughter."
For example, the death rate from tuberculosis in residential schools was 86.1 per 1,000 children, compared to 0.09 deaths per 1,000 children in Canadian cities.
To save costs from the high death rates, Indian children were buried two per grave.
The second major problem was physical and sexual abuse committed against the children. Children were often strapped, whipped, chained to beds and locked in cold, dark rooms. Reviews conducted by Indian Affairs of the abuse concluded that "beating was the norm, more or less, in every boarding school in the country."
Approximately 80 per cent of the children were routinely physically abused and 50 per cent sexually assaulted. The last school closed in 1986.
Doreen was kind enough to share her personal stories and wisdom with me for about half an hour at a time, almost daily, for two years. She gave me an education I could never receive by reading books.
As well, she often attended my university classes to share her stories with graduate students. When she got to the part about how she was prepared by the nun, and what she was forced to do with the priest, there was never a dry eye in the room.
Perhaps most surprisingly my friend believed in forgiveness. Instead of hating the government or the church, she believed it was the work of individual failings.
Doreen also believed in the spiritual world. I have no doubt that she is there now. I will never forget her.
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