Chilling Lessons

It is a long four days in May in Williams Lake, British Columbia. Survivors of St. Joseph’s Mission Indian Residential School have come together jointly for a commemoration project and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools. Shawn Atleo, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, is present for the unveiling of a memorial to those who survived “the Mission” and the many who did not. Walking where the schoolyard once was means walking on unmarked graves. Children simply disappeared.

Somehow on day three, Atleo looks both refreshed and exhausted on the plane to Vancouver, where he will transfer to Winnipeg and attend Elijah Harper’s funeral. The death of Harper (another residential school survivor) at age 64 from complications from diabetes mirrors First Nations communities everywhere, sadly accompanying the many tales of death told at the Williams Lake commemoration and in Bev Sellars’s They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School—which was her assigned identity and what she had to answer to for seven years at the Mission. She was one who survived, and knew, even before pen met page, she would tell the stories of that evil place from 1961 to 1967 when numbers replaced human beings.

Those who survived the schools often barely reach the age where they could be considered elders and then die, as Harper did, well before the national average age of 80.7. Bodies and spirits so badly beaten and brutalized in childhood are forever vulnerable. I ask Atleo how he is able to continue as he leaves one memorial to the dead for another. He is visibly moved by what he just attended, but resolute.

“When we say no to something as Elijah Harper did about the Constitution,” he answers, “we also need to say yes to something else. Yes to reconciliation—yes to the process that is going to recognize what truth and reconciliation seek to do, and move this country forth to truly reconcile the past. Part of that is the implementation of treaties, the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the true understanding of the Royal Proclamation. All of this needs to be done in the spirit of truth and reconciliation.”

Yet so many Canadians do not know what the treaties represent, or that Canada finally signed the UN declaration but has not acted on it, or that the Royal Proclamation should be playing a role today in land claims and other disputes. And where are the non-Native people at the truth and reconciliation hearings? How will they hear these ugly yet powerful stories? How will they reconcile a past they have yet to even recognize?

Sellars’s well-written, comprehensive and haunting book is an excellent place to begin, and I hope it becomes mandatory for high school classes. It is written with intelligence, in a clear, concise manner so students who care at all about Canada will be moved. Sellars takes us to a time before she is born, when a French immigrant impregnated “an Aboriginal woman named Mary, but abandoned her and would not acknowledge the baby as his.” That baby was John Baptiste, Sellars’s great-grandfather. Sarah Baptiste would be his daughter and Sellars’s “Gram”—the woman who raised her, loved her deeply, taught her life- saving traditions, but had no power when her granddaughter was taken away from her. Baptiste spoke the Dakelh (Carrier) language, but would only allow English to be used in her cabin as she wanted to protect her children and grandchildren against the punishments meted out if they spoke it at residential school.

Loss of language was one of the ways the Oblates committed cultural genocide at the Mission, where Sellars says emotional, physical and sexual abuse of children was the norm. They were fed (and force fed) rotten food that completely lacked in nutritional value. She writes, “Junie had made the mistake of scraping her food directly off the plate into the garbage can. A nun saw her and made her dig the food out of the garbage and eat it. Of course, the food was now mixed with other garbage. Junie sat there crying and gagging, trying to get the food down.”

The children were always hungry and so, when allowed to go for walks in the surrounding hills, would forage for the foods they knew so well from family traditions—alec (kinnikinnick berries), seg wouh (rosehips), white berries, soap berries and wild onions, to name a few foods packed with nutrition. But they had to be careful. If nuns or priests caught them they were strapped for eating “poison.”

In order to survive, children learned to never challenge authority, always to obey and even to question what came naturally to them. When Sellars learned to tell time she was punished; a nun did not believe she should have the right to know what time it was. When they knew something was wrong—like the brutal beating of children while all others were forced to watch—they could do nothing, even when those children were siblings or cousins. Not surprisingly, when Sellars and a friend went to the Williams Lake Stampede as twelve-year-olds in the summer, neither of them or the many other First Nations or non-Native people there came to the aid of a First Nations girl named Margaret when white men in a pick-up truck tried to kidnap her. She screamed for help while fighting them off. Luckily she was able to break away and run just as two more men were getting out of the vehicle.

Sellars argues that the soul-destroying “lessons” of residential school robbed First Nations people of the ability to make life-saving decisions of their own. Constantly being told they were wrong—even when they were right—gave them a deeply entrenched feeling of worthlessness. It follows, then, that after watching generations of white people who had come to “save” them savagely beating their friends and family members, they would sense that trying to rescue Margaret would somehow harm them all. That the pavilion First Nations people were relegated to during the stampede was called “Squaw Hall” speaks volumes in this land known for the Highway of Tears.

Such chilling stories are told with conviction and a matter-of-factness by Sellars. She would go on, after bearing three children who, she says, changed everything in a life-affirming way, to earn a degree in history and political science, to get a law degree and to become chief of Soda Creek First Nation, in interior B.C. As chief she challenged the RCMP, who she says were responsible for many of the beatings First Nations people endured. Residential school taught them it did not matter if they had committed no crime—those in authority were allowed to do whatever they wanted. Her book comes out just months after Human Rights Watch issued the report “Those Who Take Us Away: Abusive Policing and Failures in Protection of Indigenous Women and Girls in Northern British Columbia, Canada.” Indeed, the shadows cast by residential schools and the colonial legacies they left are long. Let none of us ignore them and let all of us be part of the truth telling and reconciling.