Woman describes impact of residential schools
Labrador woman shares devastating impact residential schools had on her family
Just hours before learning of the discovery of the murder of 215 children by the Catholic church and their actors, my mother gifted my Inuk/ Dene son a bag of oranges, an orange onesie, and a pair of orange sneakers I had picked out.
Watching my son play with his cousins in the sunshine with his orange sneakers is a gift. I can’t help but cry at the thought of my boy in that cold, cold ground. Never knowing where he is and what that absence would do to me and those closest to me isn’t a feeling I ever want to explore.
I see, feel and relish in the pure, unfiltered joy he brings to me and my family. I haven’t seen my mother’s eyes light up with joy instead of light refracting off a swell of tears in a long time. I truly believe she is an angakkuk (shaman) with incredible power.
I was in Grade 8 when
I first heard of residential schools in a classroom setting. A segment that consisted of a few sentences was allocated to residential schools, hidden amongst a wealth of information on the Hudson’s Bay Company and Sir Wilfred Grenfell’s missions.
Dr. Grenfell had a major hand in filling the residential school. On a small, postagestamp-sized parcel of traditional Mushuau Innu First Nation territory — in socalled Happy Valley-goose Bay, Labrador — Grenfell Health is still carrying out his work. It’s located just 33 kilometres from Yale School in North West River, Labrador.
My Grade 8 teacher, Mr. Singh, wasn’t exactly the most qualified to speak on the subject. Looking back, though, I realize he instilled in me some interesting facts about migration.
I remember noting, in my eighth grade vernacular, the resemblance between Inuit and Asians (not realizing the vast diversity of Asian identities and cultures at that age). He shared a little about migration and that Inuit indeed have Asian roots that span thousands of years.
It was the first time I felt engaged in the material and some form of acceptance in the educational system. Now, I feel sad for that girl, who was excited and eager to share that my mother, aunts, uncles and grandparents went to residential schools.
I didn’t hear my mother speak at length or in-depth about her experiences until later. It took longer to witness her shed the immense shame, guilt, self-loathing and pain that Melville School, like many residential schools across Turtle Island, programmed her to feel.
Like social media’s behaviour modification techniques that use shame, guilt, harassment and other overwhelming emotional responses to sell products, residential schools worked very similarly to further their economic and colonial goals.
GENERATIONS OF ABUSE
Recently retired senator Lynn Beyak said in 2017, “Teachers and administrators at the residential schools were ‘well-intentioned’ and that the staff ‘didn’t mean to hurt anybody.’”
The documented deaths of children in these institutions say otherwise.
“Documented” is the keyword.
In 1907, Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce, the chief medical health officer of the thendepartment of Indian Affairs, alerted the Canadian government of the fact that 50 per cent of Indigenous children were dying from tuberculosis and other communicable diseases due to the overcrowded and dilapidated conditions of their living quarters. He was swiftly removed from his job and the Canadian government ceased the documentation of such truth.
Keeping with the agenda that fit with Dr. Grenfell’s body of work of medical experimentation on and the attempted re-programming of human children, this provided Canada with a whole new medical venture.
Unsurprisingly, tuberculosis sanitoriums were overflowing with Indigenous people. My anansiak (grandmother), Fredericka Terriak, was subjected to surgical experimentation at one of these Canadian institutions.
My observant anansiak and atatsiak (grandfather) saved their money to buy their children nice clothes so they appeared assimilated. This, they hoped, would help ensure they weren’t subjected to the same degree of abuse they were as students. They recognized what the European tyrants were expecting of them and our people — an entire people who knew the stars, the land, the sea and true civility long before their first contact with Europeans. So, they played along to save their children. Wouldn’t you?
Even with her new threads from Sears and Eatons, my mother was sexually, emotionally and mentally abused. She says it was her safe place because, in contrast to the magnified abuse she endured in the community, it was.
The residential school alumni in the community had learned many lessons in abuse. They then brought their new lessons home with them. As generations passed, the churches believed they were taming the “savages.”
She continued to endure abuse and was labelled the woman who called rape. She navigated her career with experiences we would be shocked to hear even in the Me Too and Time’s Up era. She went to the board of one of her employers and they told her she liked it. These men are celebrated in the community.
NOTHING HAS CHANGED
Here we are in 2021, with the same vigorous colonization program that has been going on for generations.
We have mostly Indigenous families and communities grieving the 215 children who were buried in unmarked graves at a British Columbian residential school site.
We have settlers starting patrol groups in Labrador to harass and sic the police on houseless Indigenous folks who are either residential school survivors or the direct descendants of residential school survivors.
We have an inequitable, often racist health-care industry that is treating the disease caused by forced poverty and confinement to highly contaminated areas.
The diesel fuel that has leaked into Upper Lake Melville combined with the methylmercury poisoning of food sources and other chemicals from the Five Wing Goose Bay base’s heyday have real-life impacts on health and the way of life of not just Indigenous people, but all life in the area.
We have lateral violence that was woven in by residential schools and other Canadian systems by way of internalized racism, colourism and blood quantum.
Yet, we are told by the settler state to view murder and genocide as just another dark stain in Canadian history books. We must refuse to choke down that narrative and accept flags at half-mast as a form of adequate justice when Indigenous peoples and all life have been and are being written off as disposable. The Newfoundland and Labrador provincial government and Canadian government must search all residential school sites and where their staff lived.
My family suffered a devastating loss when my pregnant sister, Loretta Saunders, was murdered in 2014. She was writing her honours thesis on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls when she disappeared without a word. Thirteen gruelling days later, she was found in a hockey bag on the Trans-canada Highway near Salisbury, N.B.
Our family’s individual and collective trauma bubbled up and boiled over, burning us and those closest to us. It was the most difficult experience that shattered my trust in those who loved me.
We are lucky because she had fair skin and blue eyes. Loretta knew she was lucky to be white-passing. I have acknowledged that we are the lucky ones during public speaking engagements. I know families who are still searching for years — sometimes decades — with no support from the media or law enforcement because of the colour of their skin and other prejudices that are ingrained into everyday Canadian life.
Residential schools have inflicted disgusting, horrific abuses on infants, toddlers, children and adolescents. This has had devastating effects on Indigenous families and communities. The research is there that proves that trauma actually affects our DNA and can be passed onto future generations. Epigenetic studies have shown that trauma can leave a chemical stain on one’s DNA and alter the biology of offspring.
FIGHTING FALSE NARRATIVES
The truth about Canada’s genocidal and militant invasion was buried even in the classrooms of my day, so I try to be patient and educate. It’s additionally taxing when it seems that the settler nation of Canada is comfortable (when not violently defensive) in the name of complacency and maintaining the status quo. However, it is on shaky and cursed ground they stand.
Things cannot continue as they have. The denial of racism, colonization and the destruction of the land and water is taking lives.
It wasn’t until the world told me I must be ashamed of who I am and where I come from that I felt ashamed.
I tried to mimic what I saw on social media and television to be “cool.” They can have their “cool” back because I have fanned the fire in my belly long enough and am ready to engulf false narratives, oppressive systems and racist settler ideals in flames.
My child will be raised to protect and fight for his people and all who are vulnerable, regardless of identity.
I have hope for the future because we are still here. Our existence truly is the resistance that our ancestors prepared us for.