TAKE THIS MENTAL TEST TO BETTER UNDERSTAND RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS
Imagine if strangers tore your children from your arms and whisked them away
Here's a disturbing mental exercise for you, but one you should take nonetheless.
Think about the wealthiest neighbourhood in your city. In Calgary it's Mount Royal, in Vancouver it's Shaughnessy and in Toronto it's Forest Hill.
Place yourself in one of the mansions there. Now imagine the following scenario: One day, armed government officials come into the neighbourhood and forcibly remove every child without warning, including yours. No time for goodbyes or sage final words of advice from parent to child. No last minute “I love yous.”
Try as you might — despite all of the resources at your disposal — you can't find where your children have been taken. Your neighbours know as little as you do. You're told this is the law. It's for the best. Your children will be well educated.
You don't have to be a psychologist or psychiatrist to figure out what might happen to you and the other adults in those posh communities. Depression very quickly will take root as the will to live plummets. Family breakdown ensues. You start to self medicate with alcohol or drugs or both. Or maybe you just stop getting out of bed. Self-harm and suicides spike.
That's just for the adults.
Then put yourself into the shoes of the children. One day you're out with your father and grandpa on their trapping line, the next you're grabbed by strange men, thrown into a boat and taken far from home. One moment you're picking berries with your mom, the next you're hauled away by RCMP officers.
You are young and you don't understand what's going on. You cry for your mother and father. You're slapped and told to shut up. The place you're taken to cuts your long hair off. You're stripped naked, “deloused,” your clothes and any other possessions you have are taken away and burned. None of the adults in this faraway location speak your language. Indeed, many of the children who come from numerous other communities don't speak your language, either.
When you do see people you know who speak your language you're beaten for trying to communicate with them. When you start to understand the only language allowed to be spoken, you're told that your language isn't important and your culture is evil.
Like many congregate settings, when one person gets sick, everyone gets sick. Some of your young friends die from the flu, measles or tuberculosis. In some cases you're tasked with carrying your friend's body to a hole dug in the ground. Their body is covered with dirt, a few prayers are said over the mound but no grave marker is placed there.
You may be beaten. You may be sexually abused. There is some kindness and love, but it's doled out in minuscule amounts.
The food is not very nutritious. In some instances, you aren't given enough. It's part of a federal government experiment to see what will happen to children if you are underfed and denied nutrition.
You are just six years old when you arrive at the residential school. By the time you see your family again you're 16. Your parents are unrecognizable when you are dropped back “home.” If your parents and grandparents are still alive, they seem much older than the vague memory you have of them. There is no spark left in their eyes. They're lethargic and depressed. They drink now. They tell you how much they missed you, how sad they have been since you were stolen away by the government, how desperately they tried to find you. But you don't understand them because you no longer speak their language. You are strangers with the same blood.
You don't feel like you belong. You move to the big city. Nobody gives you a job. You find others who lived through what you lived through. Someone passes you a bottle. You find comfort there and, in this new community of people who suffered just like you, you find a sense of belonging.
Your girlfriend gets pregnant, but she doesn't know how to parent because she never had parents since she, too, was stolen away from hers. Your children are taken away and you fall into a deep depression … and the cycle continues.
The above is the response I have sent to some readers who have wondered why residential schools are considered so bad. “After all,” wrote one reader, “the upper crust of British society still sends their children off to boarding schools, many of them with bad food and harsh conditions. Not long ago, corporal punishment was common. Those children rose to the top of their society.”
True. But those privileged children were not beaten for speaking their language (they were taught it) and they got to go home for the holidays. Also, those school leaders knew and know they can only go so far before they'll lose their students and the support of their parents.
“Many children in Canada, not just Indigenous children, died at a young age, 100 years ago,” argued another reader. “In 1920, 239 children out of every 1,000 Canadian children didn't live to their fifth birthday.” True again. But the death rate for Indigenous children at residential schools was as much as 20 times as high as in the general population at various times.
Intergenerational trauma is real. The social dysfunction caused by the federal government's residential school policy runs deep and is long lasting, but Indigenous people are breaking that cycle.
On Wednesday, Alberta's Indigenous Affairs Minister
Rick Wilson said that after the discovery of the remains of the 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., Canadians woke up to what residential school survivors and elders have been telling us for years, “that many children did not find their way home. In these disquieting days we're learning why truth must precede reconciliation,” said Wilson.
Even though residential schools were a federal responsibility, the Alberta government did the right thing and is contributing $8 million toward helping Indigenous communities find unmarked graves with the Alberta Residential Schools Community Research Grant.
“We have a moral obligation,” said Premier Jason Kenney, “to honour those children whose lives were lost.”
We honour them by not just finding their graves, but by imagining what would have happened even to our most privileged communities if the same thing had happened to them.