Residential school survivor turns life story into art
Residential school survivor Charles Joseph turned his life story into a work of art. It will stand outside the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
The sight of it stopped people in their tracks.
They stood on the rainy sidewalks or in the shelter of an awning, looking up from their cellphone screens to get a glimpse of something they’d never seen before.
Traffic stopped, for a moment, as a crane dangled the 55-foot sculpture above Sherbrooke St. And then, after the workers had toiled in the cold for hours, they finished the job.
Now a totem pole carved from a single piece of red pine on Vancouver Island towers over downtown Montreal — completing a 3,800-kilometre journey nearly two years in the making. But if you ask artist Charles Joseph how long the sculpture really took, he’ll tell you it is the culmination of his life’s work.
The totem pole — called Healing Reconciliation — tells the story of how Joseph found himself again after surviving the horrors of residential school.
“The pain that I held onto for so many years, I let it go, piece by piece, by carving it into that pine,” said Joseph, a third-generation carver from the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation in British Columbia.
“It was the only way I could tell my story and really start to heal.”
Joseph’s piece will stand outside the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for the next six months as part of the city’s 375th anniversary celebrations.
The totem pole — an art form specific to nations in Western Canada — has little to do with Montreal’s history.
And it’s no small irony that indigenous people lived in and around the island thousands of years before it was colonized by French settlers (rendering the celebrations somewhat meaningless to them).
But Joseph’s experience of abuse and self-loathing in residential school is one that thousands in Quebec can relate to. About 6,000 survivors of Canada’s residential school system live in the province.
For decades, children from Innu, Cree and Mohawk territories, among others, were taken from their homes, and placed into church-run schools where they were beaten, molested and forced to stop speaking their native language.
“For me, Montreal’s birthday is Montreal’s birthday, it’s not ours. But if you’re going to celebrate it, I want our story to be a part of that,” Joseph said.
“I want people to know what we went through, but also that we’re alive and we’re still fighting.”
Strictly as a piece of art, the pole is mesmerizing: it weaves Kwakwaka’wakw symbols like the spirit bear, raven, whale and sea serpent with Christian iconography. Joseph — a short, sinewy 58-year-old with a muscular pair of hands — chiselled away at the pine in his mother’s backyard.
Making the pole was a way for Joseph to unburden himself of the memories that still haunt him. He was six years old when the federal agents took him to St. Michael’s Indian Residential School on an island in northern B.C. “When I got to the school — it was this red brick building — I could feel it right away, the misery,” he said.
“They threw me on the ground, cut off my hair, tore off my clothes and put me in the residential school uniform. I remember thinking, in my own language, ‘Why are they so mean to me? What did I do?’
“I was whipped and strapped for the first two weeks because I didn’t know what to write on the blackboard,” he said. “I took a lot of beatings, I was put into closets and starved and worse.”
He called St. Michael’s “Alcatraz, but for kids,” owing to the fact escape was nearly impossible. Joseph and some boys he had befriended built a raft one year and tried to sail it back to the mainland. The current pushed them back onto the island and into the unforgiving arms of the priests.
When it became clear he could not get away, Joseph focused his resistance inward. He says he secretly held on to his indigenous language by speaking it in his mind so the teachers wouldn’t catch him. Despite his rebellious spirit, the experience scarred him.
“For years, there were nightmares after nightmares,” he said.
“Those thoughts never go away, so I became an alcoholic, trying to stop that thinking. Alcohol didn’t do it, so I turned to drugs. That didn’t do it. It got worse, the smell of the person that was touching me (as a child), it came back and it triggered me. I still tremble sometimes.”
He found sobriety 26 years ago, when he threw himself into carving.
“I started to embrace my culture and realize that it’s OK to be who I am,” Joseph said.
“It changed my life. It’s been tough to hang onto this pain. It never really goes away. I put it into the art, but I’ll probably never be whole again.”
Today, Joseph’s oldest son is an artist, and he says he’s passing the Kwakwaka’wakw traditions to his grandchildren.
It’s unlikely passersby will look at Joseph’s work and understand the depth of experience that went into creating it. On Wednesday, the city will hold a ceremony for the totem, including dancing, singing and a giving of thanks to hereditary Mohawk chiefs. In a city without many symbols of the country’s indigenous roots, Joseph’s work will serve as a reminder of an unpleasant chapter in Canadian history. But he says he mainly just hopes it makes people stop, smile and think.
“If there can be some understanding, just a few moments of understanding, then that’s great,” Joseph said. “We’re a part of this land and we’re survivors and we have a history and a culture that’s worth celebrating.”
The pole will be taken down next fall and shipped to Toronto — where a private collector will display it in his museum.