By Rachel Braeuer and Ljudmila Petrovic
Photo by Rachel Braeuer
Feb. 27 marked the end of Residential School Education Week at SFU, which consisted of a three-part speaker series featuring Commissioner for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Marie Wilson; SFU’s Chair of the First Nations Studies Department, Dr. Eldon Yellowhorn; and Dr. John Milloy, professor of Canadian and Indigenous History at Trent University. All events were free and open to the public, hosted at the Convocation Mall theatre and the Wosk Centre for Dialogue downtown.
Each event began with the acknowledgment of territory and a song played on a traditional flute played by Dr. Vicki Kelly, an associate professor at SFU. The song both mourned and honoured the survivors and their healing journeys.
Residential schools operated in Canada for 150 years and saw approximately 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children removed from their homes and forced into attendance. It is estimated that 80,000 of these attendees are still alive today.
“[The] events are aimed at raising society’s general appreciation of what went on in residential schools, why they continue to impact Aboriginal people and what could be done to help mitigate that impact,” said William Lindsay, the director of the Office for Aboriginal Peoples (OAP) at SFU.
In 2008, 12 years after the last residential school closed its doors, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) was established with the goal of learning the truth of what happened in the schools and inform all Canadians of this. The TRC made use of documents from the schools themselves, and testimonies from those who survived the residential school experience — whether they attended the schools first-hand or simply felt the lasting impacts left on Indigenous communities.
Speakers elucidated unique aspects of the impact of residential schools and the effectiveness and shortcomings of the TRC. One of the talks concluded with a panel of residential school and intergenerational abuse survivors who offered stories of their experiences, healing journeys and collective community efforts to repair the traditional social infrastructures the institutions of colonialism broke down.
Frank Wallace, one of the panel members and a representative of the Indian Residential Schools Survivors Society (IRSSS) talked about his recovery from addiction that stemmed from being abused sexually and physically in a residential school.
“We’re here trying to get our lives in order, so that we can carry on out of the dark days of our past, to move on, to help others, to start learning how to leave all of that stuff in the past . . . it’s not easy,” he managed to say with a cracking voice. “But I’m here.”
Adeline Brown, a Haida elder, spoke of feeling lonely and isolated from her family while she attended a residential school in Edmonton. Dr. Milloy stated that many children were sent to residential schools by families experiencing institutionalized poverty. In the process, they forgot their language and culture, and were thus unprepared for reintegration in their traditional communities when finished school. They often felt a conflict between their Aboriginal culture and the culture they had been taught.
These common experiences have travelled down as intergenerational trauma — most often presenting themselves as family abuse, substance problems and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). But bearing witness to these traumas in first-person accounts is not an attempt by a community to dwell, but rather to move forward.
“This is not [a place] where we’re going to have to remain. My story is just that: a story,” said Angela White, IRSSS workshop coordinator, whose parents attended residential school. “We’re not letting that story define who we are to this day.”
And yet Milloy stated that “we are further away from reconciliation than we have ever been in this country.” He pointed to Bill C-45 as the “persistence of hypocrisy, a distance between the rhetoric of care and the reality of policy.” Milloy noted that although Canada’s residential school apology addressed and apologized for horrors past, it did not acknowledge its results, look into the future, nor outline principles for a national healing process. “It’s been a progress into the past,” he surmised.
The global context of the history of Canada’s treatment of its first peoples was a component of many of the speeches, but came to a head during one question period. Attendee Michael Marker, an associate professor at UBC, spoke to the differences between the US’s residential schooling system and Canada’s. “The sexual abuse is on this side of the border, and not on the other,” he insisted, shaking in anger. “There can be no reconciliation, only restitution.”
Nevertheless, Lindsay remains optimistic about. “I think the will is there to learn about residential schools by teachers and young ones, and it’s going to be part of that healing process . . . hope sessions like the ones we’ve had over this past week can be a road to healing in this process.”
