Caroline Zentner
lethbridge herald
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Some survivors of Indian residential schools tried for years to forget their experiences but the focus of a workshop now underway in the city is to find ways to remember.
Organized by the Blood Tribe Department of Health, the Kaamotaani, Samipaitapiyiisini (Survival, long life) workshop brings together survivors of St. Paul's and St. Mary's residential schools, Blood Tribe community leaders and Marie Wilson, a commissioner with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
"Canada has a responsibility to remember," Wilson said during her keynote address Tuesday. "Those schools were in place for 150 years until 1996. We have to learn the truths of that. The government has acknowledged that it was wrong-headed policy and there were harms but we're a long ways away from figuring out now that we know that, what do we do with that? There is not one answer."
Workshop participants will develop ways to commemorate survivors such as through a time capsule, monument, signage, history book and cultural and healing events.
Gus Chief Moon was one of four survivors scheduled to share their experiences. He said he spent eight years in St. Paul's residential school and was only eight years old when he was taken away from his family.
"I couldn't sleep for three, four days. Being there I looked outside wishing my parents would come and get me. But they couldn't. If my dad came and picked me up (and said) 'This is my child, you're infringing on my rights' he'll be sent to jail. So my dad told me 'You just have to go there, it'll do you some good.'"
Chief Moon didn't speak any English but students were punished if they were caught speaking Blackfoot. He recalled having to scrub stairways at the school for a week for speaking Blackfoot. He said students had to stand in the corner for hours at a time without being allowed to use the bathroom for some small wrongdoing.
"The supervisor didn't give a hoot. They didn't think we were human," he said.
He said he started drinking at an early age trying to drown his hurts but he eventually turned his life around and became a minister.
"I had my hurts in my days of residential school. I never learned anything there. The only thing I learned is how to fight," he said.
The residential school settlement set aside $20 million, currently held by the federal government, for commemoration purposes.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up as part of the agreement is tasked with discovering what happened at Indian residential schools and how it happened. The commission has conducted research, secured documents from the government and the churches involved in running the schools and gathered more than 2,000 statements from survivors and their children.
"We need also to hear, so that we are being not only honest with the country but honest with ourselves, about what has this created as a legacy," Wilson said. "Some of the legacy is positive; some people got education and went on to have careers. A lot of the legacy is not positive, it is painful and it is negative, shall we say. It is the social welfare system and the jails and the prisons and the addictions centres and all of those places where people have ended up because of inability to function in a healthy way."
To help ensure that no one forgets, all records gathered by the TRC will be housed in a national research centre to make it accessible.
"Just as we cannot deny the Holocaust we cannot deny this travesty that happened in Canada that damaged so many people," she said.