I AM A VICTIM of Canada’s residential school system. I never attended a residential school, so I cannot say that I survived one. However, my parents and my extended family members did. The pain they endured became my pain, too.
At the time I was born, my family still followed the seasonal nomadic ways of traditional Ojibway people. In the rolling territories surrounding the Winnipeg River in northwestern Ontario, they fished, hunted and trapped. My first home was a canvas army tent hung from a spruce bough frame. Some of the first sounds I heard were the calls of the loon, the snap and crackle of a fire and the low, rolling undulations of Ojibway talk. My mother, my siblings and I lived communally with my matriarchal grandparents and some aunts, uncles and cousins.
But there was a spectre in our midst.
Having attended residential school, the members of my family returned to the land bearing heavy psychological, emotional and spiritual burdens. Despite my mother’s staunch declarations in later life that she had learned good things there—she’d found Jesus and the gospel, learned how to keep a house—she was wounded in ways she could not voice. Each of the adults had suffered in an institution that tried to scrape the Indian out of their insides, and they came back to the bush raw, sore and aching. Their pain blinded them to the incredible healing powers within traditional Indian ways. And once they discovered that alcohol could numb their deep hurt and isolation, we ceased to be a family.
From within their trauma, the adults around me struck out vengefully, like frightened children. When I was a toddler, my left arm and shoulder were smashed. Left untreated, my arm hung backwards in its joint. Over time, it atrophied and withered. My siblings and I endured great tides of violence and abuse. We were beaten, nearly drowned and terrorized. We took to hiding in the bush and waiting until the shouting and cursing of the drunken adults had died away. Those long nights were cold and very frightening. In the dim light of dawn, the eldest of us would sneak back into camp to get food and blankets.
In the winter of 1958, when I was almost three, the adults left my two brothers, my sister and me alone in the bush camp across the bay from the tiny railroad town of Minaki. The wind was blowing bitterly, and our firewood ran out at the same time as our food. When it became apparent that we would freeze to death without wood, my older sister and brother hauled my younger brother and me across the frozen bay on a sled piled with furs. We huddled at the railroad depot, cold, hungry and crying. A passing Ontario provincial policeman found us and took us to the Children’s Aid Society. I would not see my mother or my extended family again for twenty-one years.
I lived in two different foster homes until I was adopted at age nine. I left my adoptive home at age sixteen. For years after that, I lived on the street or in prison. I became a drug user and an alcoholic. I was haunted by fears and bad memories. Although I was too young to remember what had happened, I carried the residual trauma of my toddler years. I grew up ashamed and angry that there was no one to tell me who I was or where I had come from.
As a writer and a journalist, I have spoken to hundreds of residential school survivors. Their stories have told me a great deal about how my own family had suffered. At first, I ascribed all of my pain to the residential schools, and I hated those I held responsible. I blamed the churches that had run those schools for my alcoholism, my loneliness, my fears and my failures. In my mind, I envisaged a world where I could have grown up as a fully functioning Ojibway, and that glittered in comparison to the pain-wracked life I had lived. But finally, I’d had enough of the anger. I was tired of being drunk and full of blame. I was tired of fighting against something that could not be confronted. My life was slipping away on me, and I did not want to grow old still clinging to my fury.
After considering my situation, I decided that I would visit a church. I had had religion forced on me in my adopted home, and churches had run the residential schools that shredded the spirit of my family. If I were to lose my anger, I reasoned, I would need to face the root of it. I determined that I would take myself to a church, sit there and listen to the service. I chose a United church, because they had been the first group to issue an apology for their role in the residential school debacle. The United Church was the first to publicly declare responsibility for the hurt that had crippled generations and to make a tangible motion towards reconciliation. That put it in a more favourable light with me.
No one spoke to me as I took my seat in a pew near the back that first Sunday morning. There were no other Native people present, and when the service began I heard everything through the tough screen of rage. Then I noticed an old woman beside me sitting with her eyes closed. She looked calm and peaceful, and there was a glow to her features that I coveted. So I closed my eyes, too, tilted my head back and listened. What I heard then was the unassuming voice of the minister telling a story about helping a poor, drug-addicted woman on the street despite his own fear and doubt. What I heard was the voice of compassion.
I went back the next week. Again I listened to the minister with my eyes closed. This time he talked about some lessons he had learned while waiting in the grocery line and being stuck in freeway traffic. I was surprised. Here was a man responsible for directing the lives of his congregation, and he was talking about his own spiritual shortcomings. There was no self-aggrandizement, no implied superiority.
I went back to that church many times in the weeks that followed. The messages I got were about our search as humans for a sense of comfort and belonging. I don’t know exactly when my rage and resentment disappeared. I only know there came a time when I could see that all of the messages were about healing, about love and kindness and trust and an abiding faith in a God, a Creator. There was nothing to be angry about in any of that.
After I came home to my people, I sought out teachers and healers and ceremonies. I committed myself to learning the spiritual principles that had allowed Native peoples to sustain themselves through incredible changes. I adopted many of those teachings in my daily life, and every ceremony I attended taught me more about the essence of our spiritual lives. I realized that what I had heard from that minister was no different from the root message in our own teachings.
It’s been years now since I sat in that church, but I have not receded into the dark sea of rage or old hurts. There are genuine reasons to be angry. The damage caused by the residential schools to both the survivors and those like me who were victimized a generation or more later is real, and sometimes overwhelming. But healing can happen if you want it badly enough. Every spiritually enhancing experience demands a sacrifice of us. For me, the price of admission was a willingness to let that solid block of anger dissolve.
As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission makes its tour of the country, I hope it hears some stories from people who have fought through their resentment and hatred to gain a sense of peace. We need to hear stories of healing, not just relentless retellings of pain. Despite the horrors, it is possible to move forward and leave hurt behind. Our neighbours in this country need to hear about our capacity for forgiveness and for self-examination. That is how reconciliation will happen.
It’s a big word, reconciliation. It requires truth and true humility, on both sides. As Aboriginal people, we have an incredible capacity for survival and endurance, as well as for forgiveness. In reconciling with ourselves, we find the ability to create harmony with others. That is where it has to start— in the fertile soil of our own hearts, minds and spirits.