NOTES ON CHAPTER 1
My Grandmother and Others Before Me
While doing research in the Victoria, British Columbia archives, I found out that Frank Guy’s estate was sold after his death and that all money went to his family in France.
While doing research in the archives in Ottawa, I found the transcript for Mom’s trial. My blood boiled when I read about the fat, ugly man bragging to others about what he was going to do with Mom after he had gotten them drunk. All the people he told about his plans for Mom came forward to testify on Mom and Michel’s behalf. She and her husband, Michel, were acquitted of the murder.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 2
Sardis Hospital = Loneliness
Too many stories about Sardis Hospital don’t make sense. There are accusations that the hospitals used some of the Aboriginal patients as guinea pigs for experiments of one sort or another. One family in my community, the Michels, remembers two brothers and a sister taken away. One brother spent six years there from the time he was six months old until he was six years old. The other brother was five when they took him and was thirteen when he came home. The girl was at the hospital for two years. One boy from a neighbouring community spent ten years at the hospital. He was sixteen when he went home and he did not know anyone. He was so used to hospital life he couldn’t handle his community, which was going through one of its darkest periods ever. He ended up committing suicide the same summer he went home. Another girl who I got to know at Sardis and who I later went to school with at the Mission denied up and down that she had ever been at Sardis. She threatened me with physical violence when I insisted that she was with me there. I left her alone, but I still wonder why she refused to admit she was in hospital. Her family later confirmed that she had been there. My grandparents were at the hospital for eight months. The Indian nurse and the Indian agent required them to go there. Gram couldn’t understand why they had to go to hospital because they were healthy. They had to turn over their pension cheques to the people at the hospital and Gram said they received no medical treatment. Eventually, she talked her way into having them released. Gram said it was not easy to persuade the doctors to let them go even though they were not receiving treatment. Because they were status Indians, they needed permission before they could leave. Institutions of all sorts were used as a method of control over Aboriginal people.
St. Joseph’s Mission = Prison
I found a letter in the archives from the Department of Indian Affairs to the school during the period when my mom attended advising the school that getting the children to wash their sheets once a month was not enough and stressing that it should be done more often.
I also found letters about the cold weather in the winter and the difficulty in heating the buildings. One letter during the years my mom was at the Mission talked about the temperature in the dormitory being a few degrees below freezing during the night.
Letters in the archives releasing students from the schools use only numbers. The following is an example of one I found: “January 27, 1951 Mr. R.J. Meek Supt. Indian Agency Whitehorse, Y.T. The department approves the discharge of the following pupils from the Carcross Indian Residential School. No. 167 183 0154 0186 Philip Phelan Chief, Education Division.”
NOTES ON CHAPTER 4
I Get Religion But What Did It Mean?
About the restriction on Gram’s use of her language at the Mission, the suppression of the Aboriginal languages across Canada for more than one hundred years has definitely taken its toll. In my community, the only people who speak our language fluently are those who came here from other Secwepemc communities. All of our fluent speakers are dead. In some communities, there are no fluent speakers anymore. Canada says they have two official languages, English and French, and once again the original inhabitants of this land are ignored. Many Aboriginal people feel there should be at least one of the many Aboriginal languages recognized as an official language.
As for the labour we did while at the Mission, while doing research at the archives, I ran across some letters from businessmen in Williams Lake in the 1930s who wanted the government to do something about the free labour that the Mission had in the children. The businessmen did not complain about the use of child labour or the treatment of the children. They complained that they had to pay their workers and couldn’t compete with the Mission, which sold harnesses, tack, vegetables, and other goods that the kids produced.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 7
Pain, Bullying, But Also Pleasure
Funerals are a way of life for Aboriginal people. I have been to hundreds of funerals. Many funerals I have been to are not because I know the person who has died but I might know his or her daughter, granddaughter, niece. We go to comfort and support each other, and I did not realize how supportive we were of each other until I attended a funeral at Sugar Cane led by a visiting priest, someone who worked only with the church in Williams Lake. His congregation would have been mostly White. When it was time for the eulogy, the priest decided to say a few words because one had not been prepared. The person who had died was a street person in Williams Lake, yet the priest commented that this person would be greatly missed because so many people had attended his funeral. I looked around and realized that because this priest was used to just a few people at non-Aboriginal funerals, he probably thought that the crowd of about one hundred was a huge funeral. In fact, it was a small funeral, and I was feeling bad for the family because there were not many people there. I have seen many Aboriginal funerals where five hundred or more attended. Aboriginal people have a common understanding of pain and suffering, and we understand why there are so many tragic deaths. Our communities are always there to try to pick up the pieces as best we can for those who are left to mourn. Funerals are a time to support the family, but they are also a time to reconnect with others from neighbouring communities and tribes. All differences are put aside and everyone comes together as one.
Home Sweet Home
The report of the Commission of Inquiry concerning the Adequacy of Compensation Paid to Donald Marshall, Jr., is a good reference point for the programming we got at residential school. Marshall was a Mi’kmaq Indian who spent eleven years in jail for a crime he did not commit. The types of losses that a person suffers as a result of wrongful imprisonment were identified in a paper by Professor H. Archibald Kaiser. Anyone who attended residential school can easily identify with the same losses: loss of liberty; loss of reputation; humiliation and disgrace; pain and suffering; loss of enjoyment of life; loss of potential normal experiences; other foregone developmental experiences, such as education or social learning in the normal workplace; loss of civil rights; loss of social intercourse with friends, neighbours, and family; physical assaults while in prison by fellow inmates and staff; subjection to prison discipline, including extraordinary punishments imposed legally; accepting and adjusting to prison life, knowing it was all unjustly imposed; adverse effects on the claimant’s future, specifically the prospects of marriage, social status, physical and mental health and social relations generally. Professor Kaiser continues with an apt commentary:
Surely few people need to be told that imprisonment in general has very serious social and psychological effects on the inmate. For the wrongfully convicted person, this harm is heightened, as it is hardly possible for the sane innocent person to accept not only the inevitability but the injustice of that which is imposed upon him. For the person who has been subjected to a lengthy term of imprisonment, we approach the worst-case scenario. The notion of permanent social disability due to a state wrong begins to crystallize. The longer this distorting experience of prison goes on, the less likely a person can ever be whole again. Especially for the individual imprisoned as a youth, the chances of eventual happy integration into the community must be very slim.
The report goes on to say that evidence reveals that prisoners live without privacy, subject to rules that govern their every hour – a life without freedom, without hope, and without dignity. Another comment by Professor Kaiser was that “there is no dollar figure which can replace lost years, lost opportunities or compensate for the injury sustained by the victim.” Now you take all of that and put children, some as young as four and five years old, in the same conditions and one can easily see why the schools were so devastating to our communities.
Indian agents, priests, Indian nurses, and the RCMP had control over every aspect of our lives. In the 1950s, Doreen (Bates) Sellars and her sister, Lena Bowe, who were both married to non-status Indians, went to visit their mom, Annie Sellars, on the Soda Creek reserve. Having non-status husbands made Doreen and Lena non-status as well. Everyone saw that their skin hadn’t become lighter, and they did not otherwise appear different but, by virtue of the Indian Act, they were no longer “Indian.” The Department of Indian Affairs made it law that only “Indians” were allowed on Indian reserves. Even though they were born and raised at Soda Creek, Doreen and Lena were breaking the law by visiting their mom. They were trespassing.
Old Antoine Peeps, the chief at the time, who had a personal grudge against that family, informed the Indian agent that Doreen and Lena were on the reserve. The Indian agent came and kicked Doreen and Lena off. My auntie Annie sent a message to her son, Percy Sellars, at Lyons Ranch where he worked. Percy went and got his sisters and then went to the Indian agent and told him that he was taking Doreen and Lena to his place on the Deep Creek reserve. Percy also told the Indian agent that he had better not try to kick his sisters off the reserve from his place. He told the agent that his sisters were born and raised in the community and had every right to be there. Doreen and Lena were not bothered after that. The discriminatory provisions of the Indian Act stayed in place until 1985, when amendments brought the act into line with provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
My uncles and brothers found it easier to hide from the authority figures rather than confront them. A cop car coming meant trouble coming. I hated those times. There was always a feeling of being intruded upon when someone would say, “Cops” or “Priest” or “The Nurse” or “The Indian Agent.” Zoom! Like magic, everyone pulled a disappearing act. Up the stairs or out the back door they went. They would hide until they were sure the coast was clear. I learned at a very young age that it was “them against us.” Canadian society with their courts, the politicians with their legislation, and society in general all upheld these racist laws and policies against Aboriginal people.
The Catholic church wanted complete control of our lives from the time we were born to the time we died. Our parents went to church and did other things the Catholic church dictated because of the fear instilled in them since childhood which was used to control their adult lives. If anyone died without being baptized, they were not allowed to be buried in the graveyard where the rest of our community members were buried. Ellen Michel was one of my grandmother’s closest friends. They were so close that Ellen, my grandmother, and Gram’s sister, Annie, called each other sisters. They weren’t blood related at all, but they chose to think of themselves as sisters. A few years before Ellen died, in 1990, she was over visiting Gram. She was talking about her baby that had to be buried in their field at Deep Creek all by itself. There was a small fence around the grave but, over the years, it has deteriorated. Ellen and her husband, Louie, didn’t have enough time to baptize the baby before it died. The priest assigned to our community would not allow the baby to be buried in our graveyard because the baby died shortly after birth and had not yet been baptized! So, according to Catholic “law” this innocent little baby was not “pure” enough to be buried with the ones who had been baptized. It was banished from our community graveyard by the priest. Sixty years later, Ellen was still deeply hurt by it. Her granddaughter, Barb Dixon, said Ellen worried about the baby and talked about it a lot. According to the priest, in order for anyone to go to heaven they first had to be baptized. This little baby wasn’t baptized, and Ellen worried about where its spirit ended up. I assume she feared the worst based on the teachings of the Church. How could these priests be so cold-hearted as to condemn a little soul like that as an outcast from our community and not allow the mother the comfort of thinking her relatives who had already passed on into the spirit world would look after her little one? The hypocrisy of the Catholic church never ceases to amaze me. On one hand, they preach that we are all “God’s children,” and on the other hand they condemn an innocent little baby who never had a chance to commit any sin except dying before it was baptized.
Sometimes I still get such an intense hatred for the people and policies that so negatively affected my family and fellow “Indians.” I try not to think about it too much because I know that it will eat away at me inside. I don’t want to go back to living my life with such anger most of the time. It is important to remember these things, but I can’t let the anger rule my life.
When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, I was at Soda Creek in my mom and Lawrence’s house when a female relative came in. She had blood smeared on her throat and a cut under one eye, not a big one but enough to make it bleed. She was pretty shook up. She had been hitchhiking home from town and a White guy driving a hydro service truck picked her up. They got to the airport turnoff, eight miles north of Williams Lake, and he said he just had to go up there for a few minutes to fix something and then he would run her home. She believed him. He took her on a deserted road, got out, and came around to her side of the truck. He threw her out of the truck and was going to rape her. After throwing her down on the ground he saw she had her menstrual period. He swore at her and then took his knife out. He held it to her face and gave her a knick on the face just below her eye and the other on her throat. He said that if she ever told anyone, he would find her and cut out her eye and slit her throat open. He left her there on the ground, got in his truck, and drove away. She fixed herself up and walked down to the highway. She would not hitchhike again. She began to walk the fifteen or so miles home. People from our community who were coming from town eventually picked her up.
Even though it would have been easy for her to identify the hydro man, reporting it to the police was not an option. We knew it would be a useless exercise, and more trouble would follow if we reported it. Judging from past experiences when White men raped Native women, she would probably have been made to look like a whore in court, and the guy would probably have been acquitted. That was common knowledge in the Aboriginal community. The White man would have denied it, and that would have been the end of it. That was the way it was and, some would argue, still is. When I was eighteen, I was living at Soda Creek. I was home alone. A cop came to the door and was looking for a lady who was living with one of our men. Apparently, there had been a death in her family and the RCMP had been asked to find her. There were few phones in the Aboriginal communities at the time, so if the RCMP were looking for someone, they had to make a trip out to Soda Creek. I told the cop that Cynthia and Tom lived out at Fish Lake. There was a training centre set up out there at the time. While he was talking to me he was looking past me into my house. Finally, he asked me if I was alone. I said yes. I thought he might think Cynthia was with me. He asked if he could come in. Alarm bells went off immediately. I said no. He then asked me if I could go with him out to Fish Lake. I again told him no. He said he didn’t know where Fish Lake was and could I show him? I knew damn well he knew where Fish Lake was. It had a reputation for trouble, and the RCMP were constantly being called there. He kept trying to convince me to go with him. Even though he was an officer of the “law,” and I should have had no reason to fear him, my Aboriginal experiences immediately put up huge red flags not to get in that car with him. I knew the laws for his people and the laws for my people were not the same. Once I realized what he was trying to do, I stepped out of the house so that we would be in full view of the other community members. He finally left. I heard later that an RCMP officer had sexually assaulted an Aboriginal girl from a neighbouring community after he lured her into his car. It was about the same time as my encounter with the RCMP officer. The girl reported it, but they refused to believe her. Nothing happened after that.
At Soda Creek, all the houses were built in a circle, and a road went around the reserve. During the spring and summer months we had at least one car a week and sometimes several cars a week filled with White people driving around the reserve. They would, of course, have their windows rolled up and their doors locked as they slowly drove around the reserve. They were not ashamed to gawk. We all hated their uninvited intrusion into our little neck of the woods. It was easy to identify the gawkers because they usually drove cars that Aboriginal people at the time would not be able to afford. At first, I would just go in the house when I saw an unfamiliar car coming around the reserve. Later on, I got so sick of it and would just glare at them. Once I got an unloaded gun, stood on my porch, and held the gun by my side so they could see it. I was looking right at them. The car went zooming out of the reserve. I expected the cops to come out after a complaint was laid, but they never did.
One Day I Realized I Had Survived
Many Aboriginal girls lost their babies through forced adoption, and many were later forced to give up their children to foster care. The “Sixties Scoop” refers to the adoption of Aboriginal children in Canada when children were literally scooped from their homes and communities. Government authorities and social workers acted under the continued racist assumption that Aboriginal people were inferior and unfit to raise their own children. Even though this practice went on well past the 1960s and into the 1970s, the highest numbers of adoptions took place in the 1960s. In many ways, it is still happening today.
Unfortunately, far too many Aboriginal youth do not make it. According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, “Suicide and self-injury were the leading causes of death for Aboriginal youths. In 2000, suicide accounted for 22 percent of all deaths among Aboriginal youth (aged 10 to 19 years) and 16 percent of all deaths among Aboriginal people aged 20 to 44 years.” It also says that, “Suicide rates of Registered Indian youths (aged 15 to 24) are eight times higher than the national rate for females and five times higher than the national rate for males.”
My brother Ray died in the Williams Lake hospital one night in 1977. He was only thirty-two years old. Ray had always complained about his heart. He would say, “I think I’m having a heart attack.” We would laugh because he seemed so healthy, and we would tease him and tell him he was just hungover. Native people rarely went to the doctor those days unless it was to see Dr. Lee, the only Chinese doctor in town. Gram did not seek the services of a doctor until she was eighty-eight years old. She had such tremendous pain in her knee, she finally agreed to seek help. All her experiences with doctors had been negative. She was still bitter when she told me of her daughter Janet who died when she was only twelve years old. Janet suffered with severe headaches and the Indian medicines did not help, so Gram, in desperation, went to see a doctor in Williams Lake. Gram said she was so upset when the doctor told Gram that the only thing the matter with Janet was that Gram gave her too much coffee. Gram did not allow her kids to drink coffee. She took Janet home, but the headaches got so bad Gram had to take her to the hospital. Janet ended up dying during the night. The next day, Gram went back to the hospital and they told her that her daughter was dead because of a brain tumour. The girl in the bed next to Janet told Gram that no one did anything for Janet. Apparently, they had not even given her Aspirin for her headaches. Gram always felt guilty and angry for leaving Janet in the hospital. She said that if Janet were home, at least she would have attended to her and tried to make her comfortable. She hated that Janet died in pain and with no one around to comfort her. Gram also had a son who had a hunchback. Gram treated him at home but he died at the age of twenty-two years. Mom later asked the community nurses what the hunchback would have been caused by, and they told her tuberculosis.
Following in that tradition, Ray did not go see a doctor and ended up dying of a massive heart attack. It was my job to go and tell Gram and my uncle Johnny about Ray’s death. Ray died in December, and it was so cold, forty degrees below zero, that they could not finish burying him. The dirt that should have been returned to the grave had frozen solid, and the workers could not loosen it to bury Ray. They managed to put half the dirt into the grave before they got too cold to continue. This was the only time I have seen a coffin sit by a grave until the next day.
There was an independent inquiry into Ray’s death. Apparently someone, probably someone who worked in the hospital, felt that there was negligence in his treatment. We only found out about the inquiry because it was on the Kamloops TV news. I was surprised to hear about the inquiry, but the only thing I thought was that Ray would have been “tickled pink” to hear his name on the TV news. He once was in an advertisement for the Williams Lake Stampede, and he thought that was the greatest thing in the world. At a previous stampede parade there was a mechanical bull on wheels. Ray, who had been drinking, went over and asked the guy if he could ride the mechanical bull. Ray fancied himself a bull rider, but I don’t think he did very well in rodeos. He wore a cowboy hat and, when he got on the mechanical bull, someone videotaped him. They used the video as an advertisement for the stampede. Every time the advertisement came on TV, he would beam with pride.
So, from the TV news we found out that there might have been some negligent medical treatment when Ray died. No one felt the need to inform his family of what, who, or why there was an inquiry. We were not informed of when or where it would be, and so no one attended. No one contacted us with the results of the inquiry. Of course, our programming taught us not to ask questions. Just accept.
About fifteen years later, my mom was talking about Ray’s death. She asked me to try to find out what had happened in the hospital and why Ray had died. I found out who to write to and asked for the results of that inquiry. I got a very short letter that said the inquiry found no one at the hospital at fault. There was no explanation and no insight into why an inquiry had taken place. I left it at that for the same reason we did not ask about it in the first place.
Final Thoughts
In 2004, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation released a number of reports on the effects of colonization and the residential schools. The Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing booklet indicates that Medieval Europe had similar experiences and responses, such as rampant alcoholism, social instability, cultural and moral breakdown, spiritual rejection, as well as profound mental and emotional withdrawal from the trauma of hundreds of years of bubonic plagues and the social disruption that followed. The booklet goes on to say that comparison with European experiences during and after the plagues helps to illustrate that, once traumatic events stop for a sufficient length of time – research says it takes forty years – before socio-cultural reconstruction and healing will begin.
The booklet goes on to say that Aboriginal people still don’t have the forty years needed to recover. For the past five hundred years, entire Aboriginal communities have been continuously traumatized by the millions and millions of deaths from diseases brought by non-Aboriginals, expulsion from their homelands, loss of economic, and self-sufficiency, removal of children from their homes, assimilation tactics, and incarceration in prisons and residential schools. The trauma of colonialism is still happening today. Although not as ubiquitous as it was before, it is still there. All the social problems in Aboriginal communities are not because we are “Indians.” The problem is a human problem and a result of hundreds of years of trauma.