The Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission was in Edmonton Saturday to collect statements, both privately and during public sharing circles, at Boyle Street Community Services, at 10116 105 Ave. It’s the first time the court-ordered national commission has held such an event at an inner-city agency.
“This is a missing story in our work,” said Willie Littlechild, one of three commissioners.
“We’ve been to over 500 communities across Canada over the last three and a half years, listening to stories about the residential school experience,” said Littlechild, a lawyer and former MP originally from Hobbema.
“It’s been very difficult to hear from the street, for example, homeless people, and their story is critically important. We were ordered by the court to try to find out the truth about residential schools ... and they make the story complete. So it’s important for us to come to the community as opposed to asking them to come to us.”
The commission was established as part of a residential schools settlement that included compensation and an apology in 2008 from Prime Minister Stephen Harper to former residential school students.
About a dozen men and women participating in a morning sharing circle at Boyle Street Community Services sat on folding chairs around a video camera that recorded their statements.
In the centre of the room was a small bundle, two pouches of tobacco wrapped in layers of coloured broadcloth and tied with blue ribbon. Cultural adviser Gary Moostoos will later take that bundle to a sweat lodge, pray over it and offer it up in a sacred fire.
The tissues collected during the sharing circle will also be burned in a ceremony meant honour the cleansing and healing power of those tears, said Brenda Reynolds, who facilitated the sharing circle and works with the Indian Residential Schools resolution health support program.
More than 130 residential schools operated with government support in Canada. More than 150,000 students passed through those schools. Aboriginal children were removed from their homes and placed in the church-run schools where they were isolated from their culture and language and, in some cases, physically and sexually abused.
Alberta had about 24 residential schools, the most in Canada.
Survivors told stories Saturday of lasting anger that got them in fights as adults or in trouble with the law. Some dulled their painful memories with substance abuse — alcohol, heroin, sniffing gas.
Myles, who did not want his last name published, sobbed as he described the sexual violation and mental and physical cruelty that started when he was a five-year-old boy and lasted until he was 12. The fear and suffering he endured for most of his childhood at a residential school in Wabasca still haunts him daily, Myles said.
“They say it’s going to end. Believe me, it’s never going to end,” said Myles, 58.
“People tell me that’s in the past. We’re the ones that feel the pain. We’re the ones that feel the hurt. We’re the ones that have been destroyed, our thoughts and our minds.”
He described being slapped, choked, grabbed by the hair or ears, stripped of his clothes and being sexually abused. He learned to keep quiet, shut off his emotions. Some students committed suicide, he said.
“My spirit was getting weaker. My body was getting heavier, so heavy, like I was carrying a big tree that I was going to carry for the rest of my life,” Myles told the group.
The smell off coffee still sparks flashbacks of frightening mornings waking up at the school, he said.
“Now, today, it haunts me every day. When I try to sleep, I hear footsteps.”
Myles said his children urged him to attend Saturday’s event and “tell it all, Daddy,” so he did.
“I’ve got to keep going and work on myself,” Myles said, exhaling heavily.
Original Article
Source: edmontonjournal.com
Author: Andrea Sands
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