Woman’s ‘spirit was taken away’ at residential school, panel told
HOBBEMA— Flora Northwest refers to her memories from residential school as tangles in front of her: the nights when the priest arrived calling her “my child, my child” before cornering her in his cloying embrace.
The days filled only with work, so much so that Northwest now considers herself, with a hint of humour, a great cleaner.
The nuns with their French accents mimicking her Cree accent, then beating her and the other children until they spoke English and gave up their traditions.
“That was the beginning of the unknown and the wilds coming there,” said Northwest, 68, speaking face-to-face with Marie Wilson, commissioner for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission travelling across Canada and into Hobbema Wednesday and Thursday to hear stories from former students of residential schools. The commission was established in 2007 as part of a residential schools settlement that included compensation and a 2008 apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper to former residential school students.
Northwest told of a beautiful early childhood where she woke up to the sound of her grandfather’s drumming, and falling asleep to his stories and songs.
“There was a lot of harmony,” she said, “until a day when I was taken.” From age six to 16, she attended the Ermineskin Indian Residential School.
“How I survived is beyond me because I did not speak a word of English,” Northwest said, sharing her story with a gym full of several hundred fellow students, health workers, volunteers and other witnesses. “Your spirit was taken away. ... I hated what happened. I hated myself.”
She said it took years of recovery to give up her seven-year alcohol addiction, to learn not to be the Mother Superior who yelled at her four children in fury. Never did she talk about her experience, until the Ermineskin residential school came under study in the early 1990s. Northwest began studying social work in 1991, unaware that every time she crossed the school threshold, she was walking over the threshold of her painful childhood.
“There was always something about the school I didn’t like, something hidden,” she said. Then she learned the building’s history. “That’s when the gates of hell opened up and it was horrible. Everything came back: the voices came back, the ridicules came back, the lonely nights came back, the smells came back.”
Forgiveness hasn’t yet come back, but Northwest’s journey continues.
“I don’t cry as much as I did as I get stronger,” said Northwest, now a student counsellor at the Hobbema outreach school called Amiskwaciy. She boasts six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren and is the head of a family with two generations of young people graduating from high school.
“We were victims then; we became survivors,” she said.
Commissioner Wilson said such lasting injury needs to be named. The commission records every submission to inform future generations.
“It is a reminder to us all that there are certain things that can be changed and must be changed by the individual. There are certain things that must be changed at the community level and there are things that must be changed at a broader society level,” she said. But society has been slow in that area, she added. Many MLAs haven’t been present during submissions. The prime minister hasn’t attended any, Wilson said.
“The societal level has a lot to do to catch up. What you hope for in a day like this is something will shift. And people will be marked in a way they never have.”