Blue Quills Residential School Students

This article was published in the Summer 2017 edition of Public Involvement Alberta's newsletter, The Advocate.

If yous want proof that a lie can travel one-half style around the earth while the truth is putting its shoes on, expect no farther than residential schools in Canada.

For more than than 130 years we've been hearing the lies about these infamous institutions – that they were created to integrate Ethnic Canadians into the mainstream society, that they were intended to offer instruction to First Nations children. That narrative continues to shape how many people feel about First Nations.

After much more than than a century, the truth has a lot of catching upward to do. But now are we beginning to understand what happened, the kidnapping, the torture, the mental abuse, the destruction of families, communities and cultures.

It was with this in heed that members of the lath and senior staff at the Health Sciences Clan of Alberta (HSAA) decided to visit Blue Quills, the quondam residential school in St. Paul, and talk to people who were sent there and survived. It was an uncomfortable, only important, experience.

Blueish Quills opened as a residential schoolhouse in 1931. In 1970, afterward a sit-in by Ethnic activists that lasted 17 days and negotiations with Jean Chrétien, then Minister of Indian Diplomacy, the school was handed over to the Blue Quills Native Teaching Quango. The adjacent twelvemonth, it opened with a new purpose, aiming to have "children progress in the white human'south pedagogy, while continuing to retain their dignity and cocky-respect equally Indian people."

Today, it offers academy degrees taught in First Nations languages and preparation for jobs; it teaches the story of residential schools and engages in intergenerational healing for Indigenous communities, with a focus on language, civilization and restoring Indigenous identity; and it educates other Canadians almost residential schools.

"Some of the stories were really awful – the kinds of things that, if they occurred in a school today, we would be laying criminal charges and putting people in jail for significant periods of time," says HSAA lath member and Edmonton paramedic Kris Moskal. "They talked about having to assistance bring their siblings to the grave and things similar that. Really awful stories."

Listening to Ethnic people who had really attended Blue Quills when information technology was a residential school made the stories powerful. Hearing people recount personal experiences is much more intense than reading well-nigh information technology or hearing it 2d or third manus.

What they described was "like a concentration military camp," says Moskal. "Very, very tight cramped quarters, massive shared toilet facilities, they were all assigned a number, they weren't allowed to speak to each other by name. When they phone call it torture, I call back that's a really reasonable discussion to use to depict how they broke these people down."

Fellow HSAA board member Scott Budgell, a public-health inspector from Cerise Deer, said that before visiting Blueish Quills he thought he understood what happened at these institutions.

"My uncle, my mother'south brother, was sent to a residential schoolhouse so I thought I understood. His time at the residential school was never spoken of, so I thought I understood. My uncle, on my married woman's side of the family unit, taught at Blueish Quills residential school so I idea I understood," he says. "Until I listened to the words and heard the stories, I did non know."

He adds: "There were no choices given when the RCMP came and simply stated: 'Surrender your child or go to jail.' Children were shipped off to residential school, were separated from their families, had their pilus cut off, their wearable removed and were done down with kerosene. They were scared and they were alone. They no longer had names, they had get a number."

Children who required care and protection instead were abused, browbeaten and forced to give up their way of life.

Budgell refers to a quote from Duncan Scott Campbell, deputy superintendent full general of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932, to sum up the state's appalling attitude towards these children.

"It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating then closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages," Campbell said. "But this lone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is beingness geared towards the final solution of our Indian trouble."

Budgell says: "Nosotros knew what was happening and still we did nothing."

Canada is only now first to do something, beginning to talk about residential schools, the effects they had on those who attended, and proceed to have on Starting time Nations families and communities.

For those conversations to exist successful, they have to exist honest, says Moskal. Without truth, there tin can be no reconciliation. We have to understand what the residential-school experience did to those who endured it.

"I put myself in that context and imagine what kind of person would I be as an adult if that had been my childhood. … I struggle to think that I would fifty-fifty be functional after going through a decade or more than of that," he says.

The effects of residential schools aren't express to those who attended – they are passed on to successive generations.

"And so many of their second and now third generation out of residential schoolhouse, they're not even fully aware of what that story was because when their parents came out of the residential schools, they never spoke nigh information technology.

"This wasn't a civilized chat that yous would sit effectually and have at the dinner tabular array: 'Hey. Remember that time when we were at the residential school and you were so agape to become up and go to the bathroom, because if they ever defenseless you in the hallway y'all'd grab a beating, then yous peed your bed and they institute out you did and they rubbed your face in it so difficult they broke your nose.' "

That was one of the true stories told during the visit to Blue Quills.

1 of the areas that Blue Quills now works on is educating Indigenous people about what happened at residential schools and how information technology shaped, and continues to shape, their family dynamics – why their families seem different from the "norm" you might run into on Television set.

Much like soldiers returning from state of war with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) who don't talk most what happened to them, schoolhouse survivors are oft reluctant to talk and they share some of the same coping bug.

Canadians have a moral and ethical responsibility to prepare this, says Moskal, fifty-fifty if some people today might merits they weren't individually responsible for the schools and that it'southward all history.

The concluding Canadian residential school didn't shut until 1996. Even for the ones that closed earlier, the lingering damage to communities volition continue until information technology is addressed by us as a order. If we continue to do nothing now – almost the effect schools continue to have, virtually the massive inequality between Indigenous Canadians and others, about the lack of clean water in many First Nations communities – we're no better than previous generations who did goose egg.

The labour move tin can be a leader in this, says Moskal.

"There have ever been things that the labour movement has said, from a values position, nosotros must pursue. Information technology may initially exist unpopular, it may be uncomfortable, nosotros may take rut from all over the political spectrum … merely we were always on the right side of history," he says.

The labour movement was on the front lines of the gay-rights motility and information technology can be on First Nations bug.

"I would argue this is most certainly 1 of those times where we will be seen … to have been on the correct side of history, to be pushing publicly at the forefront equally much as we can."

For more, please read the article' I thought I understood' residential schools, but I did non know by Scott Budgell.

For more almost Blueish Quills, please read this CBC article.

To see a cursory videos on residential schools, please click hither and here.