DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS or CELEBRATING NUANCED
- Aug 3
- 26 min read
Updated: 6 hours ago
The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.
— Elie Wiesel
Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.
— Philip K. Dick
If you’re Canadian and you haven’t yet heard about Chief Aaron Pete or his Nuanced podcast, I hope you do so soon. Not only does this young man have an interesting backstory and a great trajectory but he’s currently having some of the most interesting and important public conversations in the country — ones that so many others (other chiefs, folks with decades more experience and with the highest credentials or the shield of tenure, or just far larger platforms) seem incapable of. He’s out here, unaffraid of making mistakes or not having all the information, and actually trying to learn and inform the public as he does so. He’s busily engaging civilly with those with whom he strongly disagrees and shying away from no topic. By my assessment, in just a handful of podcasts Pete has illuminated, broached, and occasionally gotten to the bottom of so many issues that, in my experience, cannot even be brought up in a university setting or by someone in government, never mind discussed.
Tim Theilman
- Former Indigenous rights lawyer and MLA candidate for Victoria–Beacon Hill
Á'a:líya Warbus
- Filmmaker and professor at Capilano University, Director of Cultural Communications for Stó:lō Xwexwilmexw, and Conservative MLA for Chilliwack-Cultus Lake
Karen Restoule
- Director of Indigenous Affairs at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Senior Advisor at Oyster Group, and host of the Breakthrough Nation p odcast, focusing on economic reconciliation and governance
Bruce McIvor
- Founder and senior partner at First Peoples Law LLC and adjunct professor at the UBC’s Allard School of Law
Dr Frances Widdowson
- Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and Associate Professor in the Department in the Department of Economics, Justice, and Policy Studies at Mount Royal University
CULTIVATING SILENCE
I find Chief Pete’s work so impressive because I’ve tried having such conversations — even in an Indigenous Education course at UBC during the Year of Truth and Reconciliation with subject matter experts and enthusiastic learners — and, to my surprise, no conversation was possible. From there I’ve tried, and also failed, to have these conversations elsewhere in person and online over the decade since. Any discussion tends to stop or go irreparably sideways when anyone seeks any specifics or wishes to consider comparisons. I hope you’ll agree it’s pretty hard to think clearly or understand anything at all without either; or, at least, I don’t know how to. Still, activists and advocates are enthusiastic to make the most sweeping and vulgar statements, especially when there’s no evidence of such or even strong evidence to the contrary. Endlessly, they try to exterminate any context or just half the truth so they can frame as extraordinary that which was the norm. They do so comfortably, understanding that we’ve established over decades a framework that says anything but applause is maximally offensive, tantamount to a personal attack, and potentially career ending or even criminal. This is the recipe that has yielded a public discourse and now pseudo-historical record as terribly tainted and topsy-turvy as it is.
This is how we get Liberal MP Gary Merasty raising the issue of residential school death rates in the House of Commons way back in 2007 and cited in several subsequent volumes of Truth and Reconciliation documents almost a decade later. Merasty asserted at that time that “the schools were places of disease, hunger, overcrowding, and despair” and that “many children died.” Fair. But not only does he make clear what schools he's talking about, when, or what other schools looked like. And that's the whole game. He's also quoted referencing a departmental official, Duncan Campbell Scott, who claimed “fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education which they had received therein.” Referenced all over the place in a similar manner is Dr Peter Bryce, another government agent, who concluded, “Even war seldom shows as large a percentage of fatalities as does the educational system we have imposed on our Indian wards.” Of course these quotes are left out of context to suggest that, effectively, half of all Indigenous people were killed in residential schools. I’ve read and heard, stood and marched alongside people offering exactly this during a dozen Truth and Reconciliation events all over Vancouver.
What can be found in Truth and Reconciliation documents and other trusted sources, though much less prominent than the decontextualized or perfectly baseless statements, are some of the facts. That:
Over ~160 years (or ~110, depending on how you wish to count), more than 150,000 children attended residential schools across Canada. (That's out of a population of roughly 1-1.5 million; so perhaps 10-15% of Indigenous people ever attended residential school — not everyone or most people, as typically framed, or even many but instead a small minority)
At the system’s peak, in the 1930s, it is estimated roughly 30% of school-aged Indigenous children attended and, though stays varied widely, the average attendance was roughly five years. (Canadians at this time averaged 3-7 years of school attendance and few had even one year of secondary education)
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission uncovered 3,201 fatalities (so about 2% not “half”)
The overwhelming majority of those deaths, 2,434 of them (or 76%), occurred prior to the 1940s with the highest rates of death between 1885-1910. (There are no statistics from this time on the outcomes of non-Native students in boarding schools in remote communities or anything of the like and even today there are no comprehensive statistics kept to track fatalities related to public school attendance)
Almost all those deaths were due to disease and, by a very large margin, the most common illness was tuberculosis. (Tuberculosis was also the leading cause of death for all of North America and Europe at this time because there was no understanding of the disease or, thus, how it spread, how to prevent it, or how treat it)
Most of these fatalities came before the universal uptake of the germ theory of disease, a standard treatment protocol or cure for most illnesses, prior to the development of any antibiotics, modern vaccines, or modern medical practices, or the construction of a modern hospital in most of the regions with residential schools
Tuberculosis mortality in residential schools fell from around 900 per 100k students in 1907 to under 100 per 100k by 1921, after hygiene and ventilation improvements were implemented across all 80 schools in the country due to the criticism of Dr Bryce. That meant residential schools had a fraction of the TB infection and fatality rates found on reserves at this same time
Prior to the Second World War there was no national building code, no national fire safety standard or provincial fire code regulations, no food safety or water chlorination standard, no swimming and water safety programs, and practically everything we take for granted today around health and safety was yet to be
Also lost from most discussions or accounting is that these earlier quotes about mortality concerns were coming from authorities within the system, not students or parents, not whistleblowers or outside investigators, and that as soon as medicine and treatment standards existed for TB, for example, or building standards for another, fatality numbers plummeted even as attendee numbers increased. Left out too often as well is that there were many documented abuses and with that also many investigations, arrests, and convictions. And all that took place generations ago now and is well documented.
But, be sure, none of the above is interesting or seen as relevant by virtually anyone. Obviously. Talking about what we know is as offensive as a thing can be. And, as such, if you hear from those who most like to bring up these topics, or even just read them the news (or if you attend any school at any level) you could easily get the impression that murder was the leading cause of death and by way of deliberate starvation or strangulation all executed by Hitlerian nuns, or something. That's just not arguable in polite or merely public conversation. Even privately, in my experience, you cannot have a conversation about any of this, even if all you do is cite the Truth and Reconciliation documents themselves. It’s effectively impossible to get anywhere or try and elevate the discussion beyond what some people, it seems, wish had taken place.
THROWN FOR A LOOP
Just try, for instance, so little as seeking more information from anyone making the strongest public statements about children’s remains being found on the grounds of the former residential school in Kamloops. Or even anything associated. Actually, just try seeking more information from someone even teaching the subject, presenting on it, or leading a rally. That proclamation wasn’t just asserted to be true, entirely without evidence or, as it now seems, any good reason to suspect it was true. That would have been bad in itself. However, because so many are so keen to live in such a world, they neither needed nor wanted any evidence. And then from this groundless footing they took the additional leap to assert that bodies were not just found in unmarked graves but that these were both previously unidentified children and also that they had, thus, obviously, been mistreated or even killed, through action or inaction, by those connected with this school — and all of this, naturally then, orchestrated by a cabal of genocidaires behind the scenes [insert whomever you think the real enemy is]. First the press ran with it and then quickly following suit were many public institutions, professional societies, and of course all levels of government (all the way up to the Prime Minister who imposed the lowering of flags for six whole months). The BC Assembly of First Nations needed to make a formal statement. They insisted not merely that “215 unmarked mass graves of children were located” but that “the confirmation of this mass unmarked burial site points to state-sanctioned genocide…” And then this set of confected confabulations was immediately being taught and atoned for at every level in our schools, too.
In reality, not only was there no record of any parent or family reporting even one Kamloops student missing but, yes, of course, no remains were located or exhumed and not even so little as any forensic digging or testing took place on site, even in the five years since this wild proclamation, despite a federal fund of more than $285 million intended to be used just for this sort of thing and this one community receiving more than $10 million to do exactly this. Similar circumstances unfolded in New Westminster back in 2016 but there, within weeks, soil cores were taken and digging happened. Those revealed that this same ground penetrating radar had signaled construction materials, old pipes, metal fragments, buried tree stumps, and boulders — but no burial features or and evidence of human remains. So this is quite the situation we find ourselves in. It looks to me as obtuse and unethical as any moral panic ever documented. And, worst of all, at this point none of it could possibly be set right by finding evidence of burial sites or human remains.
Weirdly, if you find folks complaining about this online it tends to be about the money (rather than seemingly all authorities and public entities losing their minds). I have no problem with a blank cheque to discover if there are human remains on this or any other site, who those people are if found, and what happened. I would want that for any school, anywhere. And it seems obvious to me that the aim should be to document what took place, notify families and communities, to put those people to rest, and to track down responsible parties, if any. It also seems clear that the issue is both of national importance at this point and requires taxpayer dollars and as such the process must be a public one. It must be transparent as any academic research and also needs to be done in a timely manner like any legal matter promising to have significant impacts on individuals or society, as this surely does. To me, that seems as obvious as can be. I admit I don’t really understand any other perspective. I also don’t understand any perspective that says this whole matter hasn’t turned into a national disgrace, manufactured by all the misreportings, overreactions, and meddlings of all the usual suspects on all sides, who never care about facts or evidence and who’ve decided to weaponize and seek to gain from this… alas.
NOW THAT YOU'VE BEEN DRAGGED INTO THIS...
Even after asserting that there was a century of unpardonable horrors visited upon many who attended residential schools generally — so denying nothing — I would be shocked if you could have a conversation or even get more information about this topic in any public way. I, for example, was recently watching a conversation about all this unfold online when someone insisted, unquestioned, that there are countless missing children down throughout time and that the deaths were obviously part of a race-based extermination attempt. I wondered, wrongly of course, if there were unmarked graves of children from this same period in a nearly identical setting, only with far more fatalities, with actual remains found, but under circumstances that would preclude race as a factor, if that would go any way to shedding further light, broadening the discussion, or changing the narrative, exposing other causes or correlations?
That wasn’t hypothetical. I’d just heard about the discovery of a mass, unmarked grave holding almost 800 young children and babies on the former grounds of a Catholic church-run home for women and children in Tuam, County Galway, in the west of Ireland — a place the survivors called “prison” and consider themselves lucky to have escaped. Too, all these deaths occurred not in a previous century or over the period of a hundred years, as in Kamloops, but all in just forty years and within living memory, between 1925 and 1960.
But, as anticipated, this cannot be brought up. There are certainly no relevant parallels and nothing interesting to be found there. This surely doesn’t point to a far broader, systemic problem within the church and any such suggestion would just be more racist denialism (and also a certain bigotry toward Catholics.)
So, what do we actually know about Kamloops? Well, pretty good records were kept for the children attending the residential school there, which was the largest in the whole national system. So, for example, given that there were 300 students at the school between 1935 and 1945, around its peak, if this was the general Kamloops population in regular public school we would expect to see around 10 deaths over the same ten years. And then we can ask what was the number of deaths of Indigenous students during this period? And we have an answer: 11. Okay, but do we know who these children were and how they died? Yes, we do. As recorded by the attending physicians and those who conducted autopsies at the local hospital, the school principal, as well as the Department of Indian Affairs:
Agnes died of strep. (Antibiotics were not developed for another decade)
Florence died from “sleeping sickness.” (Of which there was a global pandemic the entire decade prior)
Leslie, Mary, and Kathleen died from complications due to measles. (There would be no vaccine for another 30 years)
Clarina, Theophile, and Arcelle got meningitis
Annie got tuberculosis
Pearl drowned while swimming at a nearby lake
Josephine died from eating toxic wild berries
And if you look you’ll find that all across the country, even nearly a century ago and in the grips of what is said to be a genocidal machine at the height of its evildoing, it was the norm for the RCMP, the local coroner, the Ministry of Justice, and the Ministry or Indian Affairs all to investigate any fatality, and leave a paper trail of their doing so, all for an single accidental death at what was then a remote school amidst a small and sparse population — and for a child who we’re told was not merely uncared for but, we are taught, all of these parties were actually seeking to kill.
Noticing this, then, we are left to wonder why none of these details, the causes and circumstances around these children’s deaths, are easily found on the national Truth and Reconciliation website? Why is all of the above excluded on prominent lists and thereby left to appear like these kids are unaccounted for and likely both murdered and/or missing? Why only record that deaths took place — and thereby leave it to the public to infer (with the terrible information they’ve been given, the outlandish stories so credulously repeated in the press and in all our schools) that each one of those kids was, perhaps, beaten to death by a rageful nun or left to succumb to some illness by being denied a curative that would’ve been given to any non-Native child? That’s actually how I came upon the above list. Someone I was communicating with about this insisted there were vast numbers of missing and murdered children and that residential schools were, in effect, the Canadian equivalent of Germany’s killing camps. I explained that I'd heard and read quite a lot about this matter and never came across anything but rumours, that it is always someone else who has the information. I asked for any evidence of any of this. She said the information was everywhere and quickly sent me this link. Even getting that much was astonishing. It was a link to a list of deaths from the Kamloops residential school: https://nctr.ca/residential-schools/british-columbia/kamloops-st-louis
Trouble is, this list is nothing like what it is presented as. It’s not a list of 200+ names and it doesn’t contain the names of anyone that appears to have been killed or gone missing, as far as I know. It’s a list of 62 children, from 1890 to 1978, who died while enrolled in the school, mostly under circumstances that are well-documented. But, curiously, to figure that out I had to spend hours scouring through old and largely unsearchable Indian Affairs documents just to dig up the above 11 death records, which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has in its possession.
So how does that make this look: the information my interlocutor thought she had, the framing of the offerings of TRC website, and all the conversations and coursework inspired by and riffing off this and similar reports and presentations? Well, it looks to me like there’s a tremendous fraud being perpetrated. And how else could it look? No less than four levels of government and seemingly everyone else, from the BC Law Society, to the UBC Faculty of Education, to the CBC and the rest of the dominant media are all enthusiastically lying (or being almost impossibly careless, rather carefully so, about what they're talking about.) Are they not? And isn't everyone in government and education doing their part to get the word out in just the same way, too? Seems so. Maybe just to me.
So, how then do you point out such obvious lies? How do you elevate the concern to the level demanded by the dis- and misinformation pandemic we're in? How do you operate in a space where the radical position is suggesting we don't whip up hysteria, refrain from scapegoating or victim blaming, and only condemn people for crimes they actually committed? Well, in response to my finding of this public record I was told that if my interlocutor's wasn’t a list of murdered or missing children that, indeed and as ever, such lists most definitely exist, even if they aren’t on the website or available to the public.
I was then told that we needed none of that. The evidence was as blatant as can be for a neglect so severe that it went far beyond meagre murder to the clearest of genocidal intent and wholesale extermination. Just as the Assembly of First Nations demanded. The evidence was everywhere. All I had to do was look at the deplorable conditions at the Kamloops residential school. She didn't have specifics but was sure we could just look at the unsanitary conditions and poor fire safety at the school. She'd heard or read this someplace, and everyone just knew to be true.
Well, anyone silly enough can go looking for records, even on the Truth and Reconciliation website. You can search through documents and find statements such as “None of the major fire-safety improvements called for by a March 1971 inspection of the Kamloops, British Columbia, school had been carried out by May 1972.” Though it could take an hour of research, you might find alongside that documentation of a new fire suppression system installed in ‘63 and that a brand new fire alarm system and emergency lighting arrived in ‘73. Though the situation is framed in modern documents as a "very high risk" and "dire," was it so? And is it the clearest sign of evil? However you feel when you read the above, I think any sane person would ask if any other public schools in the province of British Columbia had health and safety concerns or needed upgrades and if those took any time to fully remedy. But, whatever you do, don’t point out that critical fire, structural, and seismic issues were first uncovered at the main high school in the provincial capital, with 800 kids in attendance, and not 1904 or 1974 but in 2004, with findings of the highest possible seismic risk as well as mechanical and electrical safety deficiencies deemed “severe” (by current standards not 19th century or 1970s ones) requiring either total demolition or complete overhaul — and that the ministry didn’t approve the work until 2019 and completion only came in 2024. That’s irrelevant and stupid even to bring up, apparently. It only highlights your racism and bigotry and wayward thinking, apparently.
You can look further for details about unsanitary conditions, too. You might recall the aforementioned general report by Dr Bryce in 1907, about all kids in residential schools living in close quarters and with insufficient ventilation. What tends to be absent where such things are spelled out is the reality that, in response, over the next fifteen years residential schools all over the country, around 80 of them, were upgraded to the point that those schools were found to have ½ to ⅙ the disease and disease mortality than on reserve, where these kids came from and we are told in the counterfactuals of today that they would have been better off. Still, you might notice that there remained problems with quarantining sick kids in the 1930s and '40s, prior to antibiotics and vaccine; and you might also note that it is not clear nurses, doctors, hospitals, long-term care homes, or any part of the whole damn public health system, here or anywhere in the 21st century, has demonstrated they know how to respond to an outbreak of well-studied disease or how prevent people from spreading illnesses with common transmission patterns, and that the worst performing are the vulnerable under their care. And what could be clearer?
Aside from acknowledging that reserves were less safe than schools and that, of course, reserves were their own problem you might also find in your document searches that this particular school came about at the “request from members of the Kamloops Band for a school to be established amongst them.” And you might find that it was chosen to be an residential school because the population was so small and so disbursed that anything else would have imposed an unreasonable burden on attendees or just been impossible. Even to get to Kamloops many travelled by horse and sometimes for days. You might also note that Kamloops was an industrial school and kids were not chained to desks inside tiny classrooms or dorms or otherwise isolated, as in the popular imagination. Instead, they had every kind of outdoor activity, rather unlike the schools most of us went to. Aside from their regular prayers and chores common to most boarding-type religious-based schools, all of them were outside all the time, caring for chickens and pigs, milking the cows and churning butter, tending to the orchard, and growing potatoes and carrots, and the like, as well as having a variety of playing fields and places to swim and spending time running around in the hills or fishing at the river.
And if you look a little deeper you might also find publications related to the 1993 Royal Commission held at the Kamloops Residential School. You might learn that the Commission heard and published days of testimony from 18 local First Nation Chiefs and community members who attended this school. Across 700 hundred pages of testimony you will not find the words: sick, illness, fatal, or kill. “Killed” is stated one time when a speaker notes how, prior to residential schools, there were “very hot wars of Natives people being killed and being subject to real incredible punishments.” “Suicide” appears twice as does “death” in the transcripts; but these instances do not relate in any way to anything that took place at residential schools. “Murder” appears once, not divulging something that happened at school or talking about the past but noting the present, that “We are disproportionately represented in the jails, in those who are in conflict as victims of violence, rape and murder.” “Missing” appears one time with someone talking about the federal government missing an opportunity with Friendship Centres. “Lost” also shows up a dozen times with reference to members of the community having “lost a lot of their language, history and culture” as well as lost skills or there being a lot of people who “have lost hope.” Others note lost land, of course. There are zero references to lost people, children, students, or pupils. Bury, burial, grave, cemetery, and dig do not appear either. “Digs” shows up once with someone noting that archaeological digs establish the community’s presence on throughout the region going back countless eons.
From there you might discover the 2000 publication of a book titled Behind Closed Doors: Stories from the Kamloops Indian Residential School, about the experience of 32 former students who attended from the 1920s to the 1970s. (But you are unlikely to find the original, only a revised version from 2006.) In it you might read, in their own words, that they chose when they wished to attend and when to leave school and that some started at age five and others at twelve, some lasted only a year and others ten. You might also learn that some insist they were forced by parents or officials to go while others insist they volunteered to go to school because they wanted to be around other kids. You might read that in some families all the kids went and in others only one. You might read that while some arrived alone and without anyone from their community there, either, while others had a whole pile of siblings and cousins and friends in attendance. You might read that children and their family members were free to come and go all year, each weekend, or throughout the week, and that they commonly did so. And you might also read that their own family members or folks from the community worked at the school or that they would join the kids on outings or picnics on the weekends, bringing treats along with them. You might read some reporting going home for two months over the summer and two weeks at Christmas, others telling of being sent home for half the year for being unable to adjust to school life, and even others reporting they remained at the school the whole time they attended. And you might read that it tortured kids, and still burdens them today, to not know why they couldn’t go home over the holidays; and yet in other cases you might learn that students did not want to go home, and for good reason.
You might also learn that students would sneak away just to play in the mountains whenever they felt the urge or would run into town and go for pie and ice cream and that they did this all the time. You might read that they chewed and smoked tobacco or that they got really into poetry, theatre, and drama. You might read that they did beading, leather work, and made ceramics, learned how to knit, sew, and darn, learned Native drumming and dancing, had bake sales and car washes or that they would go hunting. You might read that they celebrated Halloween and Valentine’s day and got extra treats, like little bags of candy and nuts and maybe an apple. You might read that they had regular movies, dances, and concerts, played in the band or sang in the choir, that they and swam in the lake and in the school’s pool, learned gymnastics or boxing, played on the schools’ baseball and soccer fields or down at the playground by the river, went skating and on sleigh rides, and participated in parades and festivals. Or you might read of kids travelling all over the region and province for different events and competitions, or even that they crossed the country by bus and by plane on a year-end trip, seeing Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec, or even went on a trip to Mexico where they had roses thrown at them for their dance performances.
You might read that all they did was go to church and pray or that, with a note from their parents, they never had to go to daily mass or to church on Sundays. You might read about all the fruit and cookies and candies and sugar they would get or that they would run down to the sweet shop down on the corner and buy candy; or you might read that they never had anything sweet. You might read about how they loved all the milk and butter and even making the butter or how the butter was always rancid and horrible and how, even now, they can’t drink milk because of all the sour dairy at boarding school. You might read about how they ate little more than lumpy gruel or elsewhere that breakfast was eggs, hashbrowns, and toast, and a selection of bacon, ham, or sausages and that there was jello and berry pudding and rice pudding and custard. You might read that they were never allowed to speak their language or that, of course, they always did, all night long and any time they were alone. You might also read that they personally received and saw no physical punishments from staff but that they got beatings from their own family members and communities and other students, gangs from other communities; or you might read from some who were constantly getting the strap and seeing or hearing others on the receiving end, too. You might read about one boy never learning to read despite his years in school or of another who would go on to get a graduate degree from UBC...
In this way, Kamloops Residential School seems exactly as you would expect: like everyone, even those in the same cohort, had a very different experience. What you will find in all of these personal stories is all the same sorts of things you would get in any report from any kid in almost any school from this period. And when paired with the more than 1,000 photos, letters, and other documents from the school found on the Truth and Reconciliation website, this now notorious residential school seems only more normal. You'd certainly be forgiven if you browse all these records and come away feeling this school was not quite Treblinka or Auschwitz-Birkenau. In fact, you'd be forgiven for thinking it looked and sounded nicer than that school you attended. I don't know about you but, side from the residence side of things, none of the stories in this book deviate radically from anything I or my parents or grandparents retold about their time in school. That makes what is absent rather glaring.
I think the following is a good sample of the spectrum of stories in this recollection from dozens of residential school survivors:
“I think the Indian school had a good impact on me. I just wished they’d have stayed open. I think it would have helped a lot of Native kids that are being troubled … I think if they’d kept the residential schools open, we’d maybe have been able to help start reviving our culture … I think it could have really helped in the long run.”
“My experience at the residential school was good. There’s one thing I’ll tell you, it was really good to be able to go to school and to learn how to read and write. And the other thing, the best of all, I was happy to learn about God. … Yeah, I have good memories of all those years that I went to residential school. Those years I never saw what some of the kids talked about. And my sisters, they never went through anything. We talk about our days in school and stuff like that, yeah everything was good.”
“To me it wasn’t all that bad, but maybe I had fun. Like there were other people with different experiences. They’d never talk about it and I didn’t pry. Everything wasn’t all that right. There was probably things going on around me that I didn’t realize. I just sat back and said, ‘Whoa, did that happen, really?’ I was curious I guess, I wasn’t shocked, not really. I don’t think I thought they were just BSing around or joking around. I never thought any of it was true but like I said people, different people, went through different experiences than I did, maybe worse, maybe better, I’m not sure.”
“...I blocked it out, in the back of my mind and forgot about it, the horror stories I heard from other people. I can’t remember who they were. But I heard stories or rumours about people, like being molested, being beaten and stuff like that even when they were little kids and teenagers.”
“I’ve witnessed in my time, all my friends that went here have died violently. They’re all gone now and whether that’s drinking, or suicide, or drugs, or whatever the case may be, it could have been because of this school. They could have been abused sexually. I can’t say I’ve been abused sexually, there has been attempts, but I fought it off.”
“They had the swings and everything but they never used to have a fence there, so kids would go down to the river and you always heard of somebody getting swept away. Then I remember they put a fence up. I remember kids would drown and their attitude was just ‘Oh well.’ I don’t remember hearing of anyone dying in the school, just in the river. The kids would always tell each other not to go down by the river.”
“As I listened to this lady talk about the residential school and her recollections, it really made me feel for my sisters. That they were being beat on also and going without food and getting abused physically and mentally. Myself I wasn’t physically abused. I shouldn’t say that because I was strapped and I was slapped and also got beat on for using my own language. I was about seven, eight years old at the time when all this happened to me. Oh there was a lot of strapping, like kids that either stole or lied or talked out of line. Some of them ran away, came back and they were beat on, their hair taken or shaved off, and I remember they would take their clothes off them and put a wet towel on their backside and they were strapped. A lot of times if they were a bedwetter they would take the sheet and put it over them and they had to stand in a corner like that.”
Most of the stories in this book contain some combination of the above details among other observations about the school itself or the daily routine, the food or the chores, relations between the kids or between the kids and staff, their past and present relationship with Catholicism or spirituality, home life and life after leaving school.
There is one wild telling that does stand out, however. It's from a former student who recalls being at the school from 1964 to 1972. He talks about constantly being strapped, about getting “500 straps on each hand”, for no reason other than trying to be a good student, and of every student who didn’t get top marks getting “250 straps on each hand.” And he shares how on the tenth day of strappings, for no reason, the principal punched and kicked and threw him around his office and, in fighting back, the student fractured the principal’s neck “or something like that.” But he also recalls receiving no punishment as a result. He then explains how he loved playing hockey, that he was the school’s team captain, that the other team had all the pads and gear and they had nothing but still “slaughtered them ten-to-one”, with him making “five goals and three assists in the first ten minutes of the game” and receiving the MVP plaque. From there he tells of “a few suicides.” He talks in some detail about four hangings and a drowning that happened at different times but, as with the above mention of kids dying in the river, he does not tell us who the kids were or where they were from, and cannot recall their names, anything about the circumstances, what happened to them or the impact on the students, school, or community. But he does talk about having been the person who discovered two of them and of getting “150 straps on each hand” for having done so. He then goes on to report stumbling upon an oblate brother molesting a whole group of boys in the projector room. He says that he grabbed a mop and “broke the mop handle over his forehead, split his forehead open.” He says, “there was a pay phone by the door, I ordered a student who was in the projector room to phone his parents.” And he explains that, “One nun confronted me and said, ‘No one is to move and no one is to say nothing,’” but also that, “in about an hour or so their parents came and they were outraged at what had happened.” We’re then told “There was four involved, but they died or committed suicide, and that oblate I think he was charged in Williams Lake.”
I don't know what to make of that last story. The punishments are far more severe than other tellings and though there are some specifics about people dying, who they were, where they came from, or what happened to them is weirdly absent. And despite these deaths there's no mention of anyone being killed or rumours of such nor of any missing children. No mention is made of burials, graves, or anyone digging up human remains on the school grounds either, despite all the kids engaged in farming and yard work and the whole area, all around, being visible from the school and its dormitories, day and night and all year round. And no mention of anything of the sort, not even one child, is made over any of the other 225 pages. Maybe only to me it is exceedingly difficult to imagine a school full of nuns and priests, with an attached chapel they visited daily, had no interest at all in talking with their charges about life and death, sin and virtue, heaven and hell, or engaging the whole community in Catholic rites. That is not to suggest in any way that no killings or burials took place, only to notice that even with time (40 or 80 years later) and distance and with an eagerness to acknowledge what took place, for many formal and informal opportunities to share these stories and set the record straight, for countless people seeking those stories out, for generations of healing circles and truth tellings and reconcilings... those stories, of all stories, are not being told. Or, at least, the public is not hearing them, even now after another 25 years and a national reckoning.
All I know is that the more I learn about all of this the worse all of it looks, and not in the way I ever would have imagined. But there is some hope that if people like Chief Aaron Pete and others of good will can keep having difficult conversations we may be able to actually, someday, learn something about what did or did not take place.
