‘TREATED LIKE ANIMALS’
A member of the Atikamekw sharing circle is consoled during the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Montreal on Tuesday. Painful testimony fuelled by anger and sorrow dominated the day. Jesse Feith has details.
Before leaving for Montreal to speak about her siblings, Françoise Ruperthouse asked her 84-yearold mother what she should say or what kind of message she would like her to send.
“She told me to show my fist to the government,” Ruperthouse said Tuesday, raising her right fist in the air while speaking before the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
“She said, ‘Show your fist to the government that took away my two children.’ ”
Two of Ruperthouse’s siblings, Tony and Emily, disappeared under uncertain circumstances in the late 1950s. Both had been airlifted to a hospital in Amos from Pikogan, in the Abitibi region, about a year apart.
The family lost track of them from there.
Tony, 2 or 3 at the time, was sent to Amos when his mother thought he was showing signs of bronchitis. From there he was transferred to a hospital in Baie-Saint-Paul, roughly 900 kilometres away, without the family ever knowing.
The family was told he died soon after — “there was no body, no death certificate, nothing,” Ruperthouse said — but were later informed, through medical records, that he spent more than five years in the hospital before being buried in a communal grave at age 7.
Emily, a busy child known to run around in the woods, was sent to a hospital after a bad reaction to a bee sting. When officials couldn’t tell the family where she was, they feared she had suffered the same fate as her brother.
Ruperthouse’s father pleaded with her to go looking for Emily, but she didn’t even know where to start. Enlisting help from the Centre d’amitié autochtone de Québec, she learned Emily was still alive some 30 years later.
Then, after decades of silence, the Baie-Saint-Paul hospital contacted the local health centre in Pikogan to alert the family: Emily was there, sick and possibly dying.
She now had severe disabilities, the family was told, was in a coma and wouldn’t recognize them.
“They kept her for more than 30 years and never contacted my parents, and now that she was sick, they could reach us to tell us?” Ruperthouse asked. “My parents were treated like animals. But they had love and feelings and emotions.”
When family members rushed to the hospital, the difference between the woman they found and the Emily they remembered felt surreal. They took turns moistening her mouth with a sponge. When she woke up, Ruperthouse said, the first thing she said was: “Mama.”
Emily had been placed under public curatorship, but the family was eventually able to bring her home. She died in 2010.
“We still don’t know what happened,” an angry Ruperthouse testified through tears. “What did they do to my brother and sister? What happened in that hospital?”
Ruperthouse said the family has been told the hospital wasn’t able to reach them and assumed the children were orphans.
But she insisted this was a “pack of lies,” noting the government had no problem finding the family’s other children for residential schools.
And when the family obtained Tony’s medical records in recent years, both his parents’ names were on them. Emily’s records remain elusive.
“They knew where to find us,” Ruperthouse said. “It’s not true they didn’t know.”
The inquiry, launched in September 2016, is holding hearings all week in Montreal.
Later Tuesday, Denise PictouMaloney, a Mi’kmaq woman from Nova Scotia, testified about the murder of her mother, Indigenous rights activist Annie Mae Pictou Aquash.
In 1976, a rancher mending his fences found Aquash’s body in South Dakota. She was beaten and shot in the head by fellow members of the American Indian Movement. Two men, Arlo Looking Cloud and John Graham, were convicted in the 2000s.
At the time of her mother’s death, Pictou-Maloney said her family was given no information about what happened and never offered any support. Living with few resources in Nova Scotia, they couldn’t afford a lawyer to look intoit.
“For many years our family sat in limbo, not really knowing what happened, but just having to accept it, like a lot of our families have to,” Pictou-Maloney said. “It’s just part of being Indigenous. This stuff happens and you swallow it, choke it down, and go on.”
Tuesday’s hearings ended with several women joining a sharing circle to discuss how they lost infant family members of their own to Quebec’s health-care system, all telling stories similar to Ruperthouse’s.
They spoke of babies — Maxime, Pierrette, Alice and others — brought to hospitals and never returned. They recalled being kept in the dark and then informed of their deaths, without bodies, death certificates or reasons. One spoke of a child-sized coffin being delivered, sealed and screwed shut, the family ordered not to open it.
When it all became too much for one speaker, whose sister disappeared in the 1950s, she collapsed in sobs and long, sharp cries. Commissioners and health support workers hurried to console her. Staff slowly broke out in song and inched toward her, forming a circle. The entire room stood in support.
What did they do to my brother and sister? What happened in that hospital?