Residential school survivors make trip to Victoria

Keith Chief Moon, of Kainai First Nation, is from a large family of 12 who took care of one another. Then came the race to convert his parents and send the children off to residential school.

Mom was swayed to the Catholics and dad to the Anglicans. The result was a chaotic and tension-filled life in residential school.

“The abuse kicked in in Catholic school, because we were not supposed to be there,” he said of the religious divide. That abuse ran the gamut of sexual, physical, emotional and spiritual harm.

Chief Moon was speaking to one of the more intimate gatherings for statement taking at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s first-ever regional event, which was held in Victoria, B.C., April 13 and 14.

He sat in a circle with six others with about 40 people in the room. He said the treatment of the students was “very close to being animals.” The nurturing and gentleness he experienced at home was replaced by ridicule, “putting people down.”

When things failed to work out for him at the Catholic school, he was sent to the Anglicans. At the age of six he was beaten by one of the supervisors and dragged by his hair down a flight of steps. He said he was also constantly lied to at the school.

He remembers a friend at the school whose mother had died. He started to cry at the news and was told to stop because “your mother’s no good. She left you.”

The language by policy was to be eradicated, but on his father’s advice he chose to remember his Blackfoot language.

“Only when I started following my own belief system did I start to become the person I was meant to be,” he said.
The TRC event was held at the historic Empress Hotel and conference centre. Huge halls were packed with hundreds of people, often standing room only, as residential school survivors shared their experiences.
Perry Omeasoo of Hobbema, who works with the vulnerable in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, spoke in one of these large halls. He talked about the severed relationship with his mother, the direct result of being taken from her to attend residential school. He said he felt abandoned by her, but she was irreparably hurt by the removal of her children as well. He sees his mother from time to time, but there is no relationship.

Omeasoo said he has a good life. “I like what I have become.” He said the Common Experience Payment he received through the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement was a small price for government to pay for damaging this relationship.

“I would rather have my mother,” he said.

Chief Moon too was unimpressed with the settlement agreement, because of the bureaucracy that has grown around it.

“They are still lying to us,” he said of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology in 2008 for the residential school system.

He said it would be difficult to reconcile this past without some effort on the part of government. It has “to play a part too,” said Chief Moon. “They have to walk their talk before we can reconcile.”

Reconciliation remains an elusive component of the TRC agenda, but according to Assembly of First Nations National Chief Shawn Atleo, who attended the event, reconciliation was happening, even witnessing it in his own family.

TRC Chair Justice Murray Sinclair spoke about the forced removal of children to attend residential school. He told people to put aside the stories of abuse for the time being and contemplate instead whether it is ever right for government to remove children from one race of people in a country to put them into institutions so that their language and identity can be taken away, so that they would never be allowed to learn their true history or form the relationships with their families; to assimilate the children into a different culture and language system.
“Is that ever right? The answer has to be ‘no’,” Sinclair said.

The town-hall style plenary sessions held each afternoon at the regional event were attended by many hundreds of non-Natives, mostly from church organizations. Their comments, however, suggested many are still trying to understand the extent of the trauma experienced in the residential school system.

“Why did this happen?” asked one man, who attended the two-day event. He made comparisons to Anglo-Canada’s treatment of the French where their language and culture was recognized and valued. “I am ashamed of the white race for the way they treated the Aboriginal people.”

Said another man, “I apologize for the attitude, and the indifference.”