Residential school survivor calls for action
“How many children from Labrador never got home? How many were lost and forgotten, never heard from again? How many didn’t make it?”
That’s what residential school survivor Toby Obed said was running through his mind after hearing about the discovery of the bodies of 215 Indigenous children in unmarked graves at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.
Obed is joining voices across the country in calling for the federal government to search all former residential school sites following the recent discovery in Kamloops, which he believes is just the tip of the iceberg.
“All I could think was if there were 215 at that school, one school, how many others are there across the country?” he said. “Probably thousands. As a survivor, we always heard rumours, but this confirms it. All the schools need to be searched.”
There were 130 residential schools in operation across Canada and it’s estimated over 150,000 Indigenous children attended. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has identified 3,200 student deaths so far and has said there could be thousands more that went undocumented.
One of the things about it that resonated with him the most when he heard the news, Obed said, was that children as young as three were found in the grave, the same age he was when he was taken from his parents in Hopedale and shipped to North West River.
“I’m one of the fortunate, one of the lucky. I made it home. There were so many who didn’t,” he said. “Those 215 children, they never had that opportunity, they didn’t have that chance. We’ll never know what they went through.”
Obed said it’s important for people to remember residential schools are part of recent Canadian history, and some were still in operation not that long ago. He attended the Yale residential school in North West River the 1970s. The last residential school in Canada didn’t close until 1996.
“For people to say, ‘It was 100 years ago, let it go,’ I can’t. I live with it, I experienced it, I go though it every day. This isn’t a long time ago.”
Dozens of people gathered at the town hall in Happy Valley-goose Bay on Monday afternoon to remember the lives of the children lost and leave keepsakes — 215 teddy bears — in their memory. One of the organizers of the event, Jodie Ashini, told Saltwire Network it was good to see the support in Happy Valleygoose Bay and across the country since the news broke about the finding in Kamloops.
Ashini, a council member of the Sheshatshiu Innu First Nation, said when she first heard the news it struck her heart, and she could relate to it.
“I lost my own child, she was seven, and I was lucky, if you could call it lucky, to be able to bury her and get closure from that. I just think of those mothers, never knowing. I can’t imagine not knowing what happened to your child.”
Her father was the victim of physical abuse when he was sent away to school, Ashini said, and she feels it had an impact on him for his entire life. He had told her that he was lucky because he wasn’t sexually abused, but did know it was going on.
“He bottled it all up. He didn’t even tell my mother, and they were together for 25 years,” she said. “It was a traumatic experience for him that he never forgot.”
Ashini said it has united Indigenous people across the country in their shared tragedy, and she hopes people will remember those 215 children.
“It shouldn’t have had to come to this, something so shocking, to get people to see what happened,” she said. “I just hope now this doesn’t fade, that people remember it, remember what happened.”