Student No. 48
Stolen childhood leads to ‘healing journey’
KITCHENER — His mother dropped him off at school when he was five. He didn’t see her for 11 years.
Geronimo Henry, 79, took his sad childhood into Margaret Avenue Public School Friday to help 300 students understand what was taken from children sent to residential schools.
He arrived there young and crying. He left hard and angry, student No. 48, which he later tattooed on his hand so he would never forget. He became a drunk, distanced from society and from his parents, who could have visited him at the school but did not.
“I just went wild,” he said. “I couldn’t adjust to the outside world.”
After hearing his story, the first question a student asked was: are you over it yet?
“I’m still on my healing journey,” he said.
For more than a century, residential schools separated more than 150,000 aboriginal children from their families and culture. The idea was to teach them and to assimilate them. The last school closed in 1996.
In 2008, Canada apologized for the “sad chapter in our history.” Margaret Avenue Public School plans to hang the apology in its hallway. Students wore orange shirts Friday to commemorate the impact of the schools.
Henry is from the Six Nations reserve southeast of Brantford. He accepted $40,000 as his share of a court-approved settlement for students of residential schools. The money hasn’t healed the scars.
His mother sent him to a Mohawk residential school in Brantford in 1942.
She had few options after his father left home. Henry arrived with his brother and two sisters, all older than him.
His siblings got out earlier. He stayed until 1953.
The first day, the school cut his long hair. The other boys just wanted to see him fight, to test his strength.
The school put him to work on its farm, with time also in classrooms. He was fed the same mushy oatmeal for breakfast every day. Like other children there, he was often hungry.
He remembers scavenging for food scraps at a nearby dump, looking for discarded bread or candies or dented cans. If the garbage was covered in filmy flour, the kids would wipe it off, learning later that it was rat poison.
A picture snapped in the school dormitory shows him staring into the lens, a boy wearing a bandana, trying to look like a cowboy, trying hard to fit in.
“Having his hair cut off, not being able to speak his language, and not being able to celebrate his culture, that’s all really hard,” said Keanna Davidson, 13.
Katelyn Dickson, 13, was shocked to hear that students went by numbers, not names. It pains Sophia Campbell, 13, to hear that young Henry spent years without his family.
“They pretty much had no childhood whatsoever,” said Avalon Bridger, 12.
The Brantford school closed in 1970. Today it’s part of a museum showcasing aboriginal art.
After he left the school, Henry was angry with his parents. It was only after each died that he was able to visit their graves, perform a tobacco ceremony, reflect on his anger, and ask their forgiveness.
A student asked: do you know why your mother never visited you?
He got drunk enough once to ask. She sent him to his father, who also put him off. He still doesn’t know why.