Both my parents attended residential school in the 40s and 50s. Dad went to St Anne’s in Fort Albany and mom went south near Sudbury. Mom’s experience was bad but not too terrible. Dad’s was one of pure terror and torture and he never really admitted to anything until the last five years of his life in his 70s. The family asked him for detailed information to fill out forms to write a description of his experiences but it was so terrible for him that we were barely able to write a page of stuff. He was so angry, ashamed, sad and upset about it all … we could only talk about it for so long before we had to stop. He got a settlement package and he could have asked for more because the stories that were shared by others that he went to school with were absolutely terrible … but he didn’t want to … he said it was in the past, nothing can be done about it and he just wanted to forget it all. He said that the settlement was for his grandkids and that they could at least have that.
The most terrible thing about all this is in knowing my parents experience, knowing how terrorized they were and yet there are still people out there who absolutely don’t believe it … or dismiss it as the past and should be forgotten about. Dad did want to forget partly because he said that he didn’t quite believe anyone would do anything about it all … he was surprised when he received any kind of settlement.
It’s terrible that this happened to my parents … it continues to be terrible for my family because many people still disbelieve what happened to them.
My heart goes out to you, your parents and all other residential school survivors. No child, no parent, no people should have had to endure such trauma.
I hope, one day families who still suffer from this generational trauma can break through the horror of their and their ancestor’s experience and are able to stop their suffering and thrive instead.
The suffering and stigma lasts a lifetime … it did with my parents and it will with me. But the suffering is lessened with every generation.
What many people don’t understand is that this is a generational thing for me, my family and for you and your family.
My parents experienced it, they passed some of that suffering to me and I will pass a little bit of that suffering to the generation after me and they in turn a little less to the generation after.
The same with you … you heard the story, you’ll share it with those around you and you will all live with it and understand it … then the generation after will learn again and understand it and accept it.
Then in a hundred years everyone will know it, remember it but be less affected by it and life can go on.
There is no easy fix to this … it will take life times. But the more people there are like you, the sooner we may lessen that suffering.
I’m “involved” here, with a small “i”. I’ve tried to avoid becoming “Involved” with a capital “I” by doing press interviews and such. My business is a geophysical equipment rental business, which included many of the GPR systems that are being used to survey suspected grave sites. I have no doubt that the things reported to have happened at residential schools are largely true. However, as a geophysicist, it has been drilled into me repeatedly “no anomaly is anything until it sees daylight”.
In the mining industry, for example, you get geophysical anomalies all the time, but they are meaningless until a drill core is taken. Sometimes your interesting geophysical anomaly is just a blob of granite. “Show me the core” is a common refrain.
In the medical imaging industry, you have the same thing. A blob on an x-ray/MRI/ultrasound/whatever is just a blob until a sample is taken (biopsy or similar).
The GPR anomalies are being reported as “body-candidates” or similar couched language by the archeological professionals doing the survey. But it’s still just a blob until exhumed. Unfortunately, this runs into a truly sticky situation: if they are bodies, disturbing them is sometimes sacrilege. But you can’t confirm it is a body definitively without disturbing it.
This is a weird place to be wedged as a scientist. For any other target, we can verify. In the meantime, more GPR surveys are ordered – it’s non-invasive and provides blobs on a map. So it’s good for my business for now, and I try to remain merely “involved”.
Reports like the above talk about denialism. So I worry about raising my voice lest it provide fuel for those that take any shred of doubt as proof. It’s so hard to be a centrist these days.
