Residential schools’ intergenerational legacy
Geraldine King may not be a residential school survivor, but her life has been impacted nonetheless, writes TERESA SMITH.
Geraldine King, 33, has spent her life thinking about residential schools and how they’ve affected her family.
The Carleton University student says she is an “intergenerational survivor,” because, while she wasn’t a student herself, her grandmother and likely her grandfather lived with memories of abuse and loss of culture. Their experiences, says King, changed the way they treated their children and resulted in a cycle of abuse and alcoholism in her family.
On Thursday, King stood shoulder-to-shoulder with about 100 people in Ottawa and thousands more in 12 cities across the country to demand that Prime Minister Stephen Harper “honour the apology” he made in 2008 on behalf of all Canadians for the horrors experienced by more than 150,000 aboriginal people at residential schools.
They want the immediate release of all documents pertaining to the residential school era to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
The government has so far downplayed the number of documents it has and called others requested by the TRC “irrelevant.” For his part, Murray Sinclair, the Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, estimates there are millions of documents still outstanding.
King, who is Ojibway, said seeing her grandmother’s name written on a list of students at St. Joseph’s School in Fort William near Thunder Bay helped to make the truth “palpable.”
“It answered a lot of questions,” said King, who works for Carleton’s Centre for Aboriginal Culture and Education.
But many indigenous people in Canada are still looking for answers.
King suspects her grandfather attended one of the schools but there is no paper trail to prove it. “There are grandchildren, and children and great grandchildren who want to know what happened (to their family members). Were they there? Were they not there? Where did they go?”
The protest was sparked after revelations this week that government bureaucrats conducted nutritional experiments on 1,300 residential school students between 1942 and 1952, depriving them of important vitamins and leaving them malnourished. The experiments were detailed in a research paper by University of Guelph food historian Ian Mosby.
A spokeswoman for Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Minister Bernard Valcourt called the experiments “abhorrent examples of the dark pages of the residential schools legacy.” In an emailed statement, Andrea Richter said the federal government has already sent 900 documents related to the experiments to the TRC, however King is not convinced.
“Every day we find out about something new,” she said. “If people didn’t speak out about that, who knows if they would have ever been released.”
Nearly all indigenous people living in Canada today are inter-generational survivors. King says many people are still dealing with the schools’ legacy, whether it be suicide, alcoholism, abuse, drug use or incarceration and homelessness.
“This is shared Canadian history but we’re the ones who claim the burden of it,” said King. “We also need buyin from Canadians.”
Ben Powless, 27, also attended the Ottawa rally on Thursday. He said a series of events being held at Ottawa’s Gallery 101 over the coming months is aimed at increasing awareness about what he called “Canada’s real history.”
The discussions and public forums, called Niigaan in Conversation, are designed as informal safe places to talk about hard issues.
They are an attempt, on an individual rather than government level, to come to some mutual understanding.
“We want to bring together aboriginal and non-aboriginal people to have conversations that we haven’t been able to have as a country up to now,” said Powless, who stressed that everyone is welcome.
“Don’t bring shame and guilt,” he said. “Bring a willingness to listen.”
The next Niigaan event is at Gallery 101 on July 31 at 6 p.m.