TRUTH OR SPIN FROM WYNNE?
Grits play politics with fact checks
Re: ‘Nothing good’ about residential schools, says Anglican Church, March 21.
I commend Archbishop Fred Hiltz of the Anglican Church in Canada for his moral leadership in forthrightly denouncing the misguided statements of Sen. Lynn Beyak attempting to justify and sanitize the effects of the residential school system on thousands of First Nations’ children.
When I was a child growing up in a typical middle-class home in Regina, one of the many summer activities offered by the local YWCA was a Saturday bus trip to the Gordon “Indian School” in the nearby town of Punnichy, Sask.
The intent of this outing, I can only surmise, was to provide both groups of children the opportunity to find out more about each other.
For us, these children were objects of curiosity: Why did they not live at home with their parents as we did?
Would they be wearing buckskin, feathers and moccasins? Speak English? I recall no education provided ahead of the trip.
What I do recall — even at age nine — was an overwhelming feeling that something was quite wrong; that the whole atmosphere of the excursion was forced, staged, manipulated to make it seem as if all was perfectly fine and proper, and that the children there were happy to sing, dance and play games with us.
But there was a sense about the place that immediately left me with the opposite impression. Sadly, Gordon Indian School did not close until 1996; it was the last of these notorious institutions to close its doors.
What I learned over time about what went on at Gordon, and the other schools like it, solidified my opinion that these establishments were as close as Canada could ever come to the replication of the Nazi concentration camps — the only clear difference being the lack of gas ovens. Heather Dufault, Ottawa