George was serious and direct, as we talked. Despite the fact that she walks with a limp due to an injured leg, she seemed younger than her years. Preparing to be photographed, she looked striking in a black dress, her salt and pepper-coloured hair touching her shoulders. She told me she's a pipe carrier, a sun dancer and a spirit dancer. When asked to describe the significance of these roles, she looked me in the eye and said, “Holy.”
I asked Amy George if she would be participating in British Columbia Truth and Reconciliation Week herself, and she said that Kinder Morgan is a corporate sponsor of the event and that corrupts the entire effort and she won't have anything to do with it.
"It's bullshit," she said. She said she wholeheartedly supports the residential school survivors, but that she doesn't understand why Kinder Morgan is supporting the reconciliation effort, even as it's destroying First Nations' land and livelihood through its oil sands pipelines.
It's the hardest month of the year for George. September is always depressing. It brings back bad memories rooted in experiences from years long ago, from the formative years of childhood.
“It’s the change in the air and the smell and the coolness. And, in my body, I’m remembering the fear I had as a child and the hurt and the pain of leaving my mom," George said and reiterated that she wouldn't be participating in next week's events, not only because of Kinder Morgan, but but also because of the horror she experienced.
"How can you reconcile that level of cruelty?" she asked.
I asked George if it would ever be possible for her to forgive the Canadian government.
But she said that it wouldn't be. "The government said we’re sorry for what happened to you. They didn’t say we’re sorry we built these schools so you would die. Every apology they make, I say, 'that’s bullshit.'
"I wonder why I’m still here," she mused. Other residential school survivors have committed suicide, had their lives ruined by alcoholism or drugs. "They're just totally lost people," she said. "Some of the elders on the reserve can’t even mention that they were in residential school. I used to be the same. I had my whole childhood blocked out it was like a gray area, my whole childhood."
Then she went into counselling. Her counsellor said, "We’re going to take a peek at your residential school issue, because if you try to look at it all at once it could do you more harm than good. So, we’re going to just glance.
"I said to her, 'Why the hell am I telling you? How could you ever understand what I went through?' And she said, 'I’m a second generation Holocaust survivor and I know exactly how you feel.' And then we both cried.
George said she will never forget that moment.
"We just looked at each other and couldn’t believe it. She said you have all the same characteristics as a Holocaust survivor."
But George said it's not really the same. "That genocide ended, but it's still ongoing here. It didn't end," she said. "The objective of the government of Canada has always been to kill my people."
Last week, it was announced that a delegation of federal ministers would be traveling to British Columbia to try and win First Nation opponents over on pipeline proposals. I told her I thought it was interesting timing for the ministers to come during Truth and Reconciliation Week and I asked what she thought of this.
George said, "It tells me that the people in charge of the administration of Canada cannot be trusted. "They’re putting money ahead of the people, of all living things. When I was very little, my dad said to me, 'If you take fish out of water, you take a life. If you chop down a tree, you take a life, so you be appreciative and use every bit of deer or fish you take. And be appreciative of that life.
"We’ve always only taken what we’ve needed," she said, "and that was with respect for all living things. The people who are in power in Canada have lost all touch with what it’s like to be a human being. A human being has respect for all living things." She said that to her, people at Kinder Morgan are liars and murderers if they condone what is being done to kill plants, trees, animals and people who depend on having a clean environment.
"It’s not if there’s a dump, but when there’s a dump out here," she said, turning her gaze to Indian Arm. "Then we’re going to be breathing poison, the plants are all going to die, the fish are all going to die and we’re going to all die. They don’t clean up after there's an oil spill, it’s up to the people. They move on to the next place. They should just get over their addiction to oil."
What about her, I asked. Would she be prepared to stop using oil and oil-based products?
"There’s other energies available," she said.
A punishing education at Indian Residential School
Like all the other children on the reserve, Amy George was forced to leave her parents when she was six-years-old. She was sent to live at St. Paul’s Indian Residential School, which was run by the Sisters of the Child Jesus nuns and the Order of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate.
"She was really beautiful, really extremely beautiful," George said, recalling the pain of being separated from her mother. "She could be so comical sometimes.
"Whatever she would say to me especially in a group of people, they’d be laughing. She was really kind and she loved loved loved us. And she was wise. "My brother told me years later that every time they brought us back to residential school, she’d cry all the way home. And she said to my brother that it was just like she could look down the beach and still see all the brown bodies just running and having so much fun, 'and now it’s more quiet than the grave now, so quiet, no more kids.' "
Although St. Paul's was also in North Vancouver, the authorities forbade parents to visit their children and George said that she could recall a mother coming to pick up her child at the end of the year only to learn for the first time that he had died months before.
Established in 1881, the school housed children as young as four years old and as old as seventeen.
The teachers were all nuns.
“The sisters spoke among themselves and with the priest in French when the children were to be excluded from knowing what was being spoken about. The children were never allowed to speak or use their own languages and were punished for doing so as they were often mistaken for ‘making fun’ of the Sisters," text on the Vancouver Foundation's website on Indian Residential school explains of St. Paul's.
All of the ‘chores’, the cleaning, cooking and laundry were done by the students under supervision of the Sisters. The regimen of discipline was extremely harsh:
Pinched ears, arms and raps across the knuckles with a metal edged ruler for immediate reproach on whispering, not answering fast enough or correctly, at ‘day-dreaming’, or being too tired. Punishments included being made to kneel beside your bed or desk or anywhere you happened to be, for 10 min or an hour at a perceived infraction.
Children were often ‘made an example of’ or shamed by being made to wear a ‘dunce cap’ in class or having to ‘stand in the corner’ facing a wall in a classroom or hallway or dormitory if your work or chores or school work wasn’t ‘good enough’. Getting the ‘strap’, a long hard woven leather belt was common for major infractions like trying to run away from the school, or direct defiance or disobedience.
Students were given numbers and the number was often used instead of their names.
“I was Number 50,” George said.
I asked George if she suffered sexual abuse at the school. She gave me a piercing look. I waited for her answer. Tears collected in her eyes.
"Yes," she said.
"I wonder what kind of major sin I could have committed as a six-year-old to be so severely punished day in and day out.
“The Canadian government built those schools. They said those small pox blankets didn’t work, the alcoholism didn’t work. They said, ‘we’ll build these schools. We’ll take their children away. We’ll kill their language. Then their spirits. And they will die.’ That was the whole reason they built these schools. There was murder in them," George said.
“At the end, I didn’t know who I was supposed to be. They fed me a daily diet of ‘dumb Indians’ ‘thick-headed Indians’ ‘stinking Indians.’ They’d say, ‘you stink to high heaven.’ They never gave any instructions about moon time. It was harsh, harsh, harsh. There was no love in those schools. They said hell is where there is no God and no love and that’s exactly where I was.”
Once she left school, she immediately started drinking to dull the pain and to try and forget. For many years she continued drinking.
She said she left the residential school at age 15, then was transferred to another school called Notre Dame, where she was the only native student. There, too, she was treated "horribly", she says. Like many residential school survivors, George turned to drinking to forget her past trauma. But when her husband died, she became determined to stop.
"My husband died in 1986 and every time I would pick up a drink or a beer, in my drunken brain, I kept expecting to see him walk in and it was such a big horrible pain. I said 'I can’t do this anymore.' I kept expecting him to walk in. And he wasn't here anymore.
"He was in the worse school, Port Alberni's school was the worst in BC. All the abuses were rampant there. Sexual abuse. There was a treatment center on an island and the children would try to swim home and drown...
"This year when I got severely depressed I went into the sweat and I cried for two rounds steady. I couldn’t stop I couldn’t stop crying. When I came out, I felt a hundred percent lighter. I gave it to the rocks, I gave it to my ancestors, I gave it to the creator. I said, 'I’m too small and weak, help me.' I asked all my grandmothers and grandfathers, 'help me out, I’m suffering.'
"No matter where I went, I cried just as hard. We’re a people who are told everything about ourselves was wrong and there wasn’t one thing that white society said ‘this is valuable we'll take this from your society’. It was like everything we had was useless and now look at the world the way it is. Are we the last of the human beings that understand this tree is a living entity, that this insect going by is a living entity, that everything has a right to grow? Our earth, she can’t breath anymore and she’s not going to be able to provide food, because we’re overpopulated.
"All my life in residential school was were called dumb Indians. Even as a child I thought how can we be dumb when you don’t even know that tree is a living entity. And they pull everything out of the ocean, they pull sharks out and chop their heads off and throw them back to the water..."
Chief Dan George's pain
Her father, Chief Dan George, was only 5 when he was sent to St. Joseph's, which is now where St. Thomas Aquinas stands. Before going to school, his name was Geswanouth Slahoot, but at school he got the name 'George.'
"He had never worn shoes and he couldn’t speak English and he was so terrified. I remember him saying when he was five as soon as you’d get into the schools if you had brothers and sisters they’d separate you immediately.
"He’d be running to where his older brother was and say 'I will sleep with Henry.' And they’d bring him back to his own bed. And he’d run from school through a trail into the bushes home. If you didn’t put your kids in residential schools, they’d put your parents in jail. At one of the residential schools, they’d stick a needle in their tongue and they had to wear it, if they spoke their own language. My father was forced to learn English.
"He would never mention it, but I can’t ever remember him putting his arm around me or sitting me on his lap or hugging me. He grew up with no love so he didn’t know how to give it. Towards the end of his life he’d kiss our cheek if I just sat beside him. If I was having a bad day I just sat beside him and that made me feel better..."
Last June, at the 2013 Healing Walk in Fort McMurray, Amy George had stopped at a tailing pond near the Syncrude facility with a small group of chiefs and elders, and she wept for a long time. As cannons boomed to scare away wildlife, George stood facing the polluted body of water and I could only imagine what she was thinking and feeling. Her grief was so moving it literally stopped the march and the demonstrators stood respectfully listening.
I asked her and she explained. "In the Eastern direction are the yellow people and in the South are ourselves, the red people, and in the West where I prayed are the black people. In the North are the white people. They were getting someone to pray in each of the directions. I was asked to pray in the West and I have heard horror stories of people having ear infections, eye infections, throat infections, stomach infections, and dying of cancer from breathing that poison day in and day out downstream of the tar sands.
"And when they asked me to pray in that direction, I sort of asked, 'Creator, are we not your grandchildren, too? Why do we suffer? Why do our populations keep diminishing and others thrive? Are we not your grandchildren, too? I’m praying for all those who’ve died, I’m praying for their families, the ones who suffer because of these tar sands and breathing in poison day in and day out 24/7."
She went on, saying "I wonder if that was the right thing to question my Great Creator. I believe he is the maker of all things and in that moment I felt angry towards him. I saw despair, grief, hopelessness in people living near the tar sands. I could see it in the eyes of the people who have family members, who have died or are dying. It was all contained in that moment. It was sorrow for all living things.
"Someone asked me during the walk, about the people living in Fort Chipewyan, why don’t they move? Why do they stay there? I knew the answer to that question. My people have been here for 30,000 years. I remember when I told my father, 'Dad, they said they’re going to relocate the Indians and make this the biggest sea port in the world.' He said, 'that’s the only time I’d ever take up my gun if they try to move me. I’d sooner die than be relocated. I got so frightened that my dad was willing to stay here and die. Now, at my age I understand. I would fight till the end. I wouldn’t move. Why did my ancestors fight with their lives for this land, and suffer all they suffered, if we just move?"
When she returned to British Columbia, George said she felt ecstatic to be home. "It felt so good in my heart to come here and see all this green and the little birds on the trees. And then I had a nightmare that from the band office on the top of the hill, it was all grey, and everything -- all the greenery, all the people -- were dead. The trees were all gone and it just looked like the tar sands."
Original Article
Source: vancouverobserver.com
Author: Linda Solomon
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