Native and Non-Native Voices on the Residential School Issue and Historical Revisionism: Writing Between the Times
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Native and Non-Native Voices on the Residential School Issue and Historical Revisionism: Writing Between the Times
Wayne A. Holst
University of Calgary
Calgary (Alberta)
HISTORIOGRAPHY TO THE PRESENT
3. Native Voice
[...] the residential school experience touched not just individuals but whole communities. As the stories unfold, it becomes clear that it was not a case of isolated individuals sustaining losses and then returning to a healthy social context, but of almost everyone sustaining virtually identical losses - and having only an unhealthy, strategically disrupted social context to return to. It was that wholesale disruption that spawned the degree of family and community breakdown that now plagues so many aboriginal communities [...] [we need to be taken] emotionally and intellectually, back to the period when it all began (Rupert Ross, in Deiter, 1999, p. v).
Because so many generations attended residential schools they have affected all First Nations individuals. For example, even though I was raised in the city, all my family members, including my parents, my grandparents, uncle, and aunts on both sides of the family attended these schools. Most of my friends also attended the schools, including my husband and cousins. As well, all of the people whom my parents associated with during my formative years were residential school survivors. To say that the school experience did not directly affect my life would be a denial (Deiter, 1999, p. 23).
Celia Haig-Brown's book Resistance and Renewal (HaigBrown, 1988) appearing just over a decade ago provided the first known published interviews with former students of a Canadian residential school conducted by Natives. The book included frank testimonials of sexual, physical and emotional abuse suffered by students at the Oblate-run Kamloops, British Columbia Indian Residential Schoo!. Non-Natives, at first reading of this book, found it unduly harsh. Some wondered if it were contrived for effect.
Yet, the stories offered here sounded to Native people who read them very much like those that were coming out of many Canadian residential schools. The appearance of thisbook was a breakthrough event for survivors because it validated their experience. For the first time, Native people were telling outsiders stories of what they had gone through themselves. Unfortunately, the book did not garner the public attention it deserved. Canadian society was not yet ready to accept the truth of these stories (Deiter, 1999).
In a similar manner, Vicki English-Currie, a member of the Peigan First Nation, published a personal testimony of her initial experience in a Southern Alberta residential school entitled "The Need For Re-Evaluation in Native Education." English-Currie writes:
[...] This overnight transformation in my life was a total shock and an interruption [...] This was an enormous setback and the beginning of a lifetime of cultural tragedy [... ] [My life became] overshadowed by the stress, anger, fear and hostility that was accumulating
[…]
[…] the first day at school [...] a nun took me to a room and pushed me inside with my bag and closed the door..This was one of the very first times I experienced violence [... ]
[...] I was almost paralysed by fear, and no one seemed to notice (English-Currie, 1990, p. 51-52).
In 1994, the Assembly of First Nations published a report entitled Breaking the Silence: An Interpretive Study of Residential School Impact and Healing as Illustrated by the Stories of First Nations Individuals. Because this was produced by an official national Native organisation, it had the effect of sanctioning the right of other survivors to begin claiming and telling their own stories. In British Columbia this led to the first filing of suits by former students against alleged abusers in church schools. The subsequent conviction of a Catholic bishop for assault in a Canadian Court of Appeal signalled a dramatic turning point for Native people. The justice system could work for them even as it had often worked against them. For many, this was a new discovery. Since that first claim, literally hundreds of others have been filed against churches across the nation.
The appearance of Native voice in residential school historiography marks an important point of transition in writing about the schools. For the first time since these institutions appeared in Western and Northern Canada more than a century ago Native people are themselves publishing stories of their experience for general Canadian audiences. Constance Deiter, a Saskatchewan Cree, with degrees in anthropology and law, believes that giving voice to Native school experience will serve several purposes. In the first place, it provides an alternate reading to what even sympathetic non-Native writers have offered. As a case in point, she expresses some concern over James Miller's interpretation of some of his research findings (Deiter, 1999).
In Shingwauk's Vision Miller (1996) displayed a photograph of the Lebret Indian Industrial School with teepees and carts set up outside the schoolyard. Miller interprets this as evidence that school administrators allowed parents to visit. Deiter says that her grandfather, Fred, told her a different story about the appearance of the teepees. The teepees were camped outside the school grounds for months. To be sure, they housed the parents and grandparents of the children living at the school. But he understood that those parents were there on a semi-permanent basis in hopes of catching a glimpse of their children. The set-up of the camp implies that the Native inhabitants intended to stay for lengthy periods. "I commend Professor Miller for the massive research for the book," she says, "but the real stories about residential schools can only be told by the Indian people themselves" (Deiter, 1999, p. 8). Her point may be challenged but it is significant that her position is now so confidently expressed.
A second benefit of current Native publication of the pain that many experienced, directly or indirectly, is that it is an initial but necessary step in the healing process. For years, that pain was repressed or acted out negatively within a confined Native constituency. It revealed itself pathologically through addictions and violence. There is now new hope for overcoming chronic Native pathology. While Deiter's book provides little evidence of the healing currently taking place within Native communities that matter is introduced in another recent publication by Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey.
"I believe that now is our time [...] We are starting to be looked at now and I believe that we can really make a difference because we are finally standing up" (Fournier and Crey, 1997, p. 205). These words by Randy Napoose, a Cree from Hobbema, Alberta, reflect healthy pride as well as signs of new hope for cultural revitalisation and spiritual healing on the part of growing numbers of First Nations people across Canada today. Stolen From Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and Restoration of Aboriginal Communities was written by Canadians of Native ancestry. It is largely a first person testimony to tragic yet ultimately constructive struggles on the part of very human but valiant Native people who are seeking to rise above circumstances which were largely beyond their control. Tragic, because while some would be helpers in the schools and then in social service agencies were outright scoundrels, many of those involved from church and society were motivated by good yet misguided intentions. Constructive, because more and more First Nations are honestly facing the truth of their past and are determined to build a different life for their children.
Again and again this determination appears. "We're doing this for our children's future." What was once "stolen from our embrace" must again be restored. The authors pull no punches in their candid assessment of who caused much of the devastation wrecked upon Native peoples since their first encounters with the Newcomers. Pre contact societies, though not idyllic, had usually developed time honoured patterns of education for their young and effective procedures for the handling of social dysfunction in their communities. The authors claim that the sexually abusive, addictive devastation and political cronyism which is now so common in many Native communities is due largely to government policies such as the imposition of residential schools and social service agencies (Fournier and Crey, 1997).
Cultural revitalisation is occurring. In the spirit of the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (Canada, 1996) many of Canada's First Nations want to reclaim responsibility for educating and caring for their own children. A new generation of leaders, tarnished but wizened by their history, is calling upon people of good will from church and society at large to provide the resources they lack to complete the task of rebuilding.
Strong anger is directed at church persons who abused their positions of power and trust. Descriptions of the terrible pain, often suffered by children at the hands of non-Natives as well as persons from their own families, is heartrending. Before the First Nations can truly govern themselves they must heal themselves from a deadly mix of perversions and addictions. Four of the seven chapters of this book focus on taking responsibility for one's own victimisation and on assuming new hope for today and tomorrow.
The claiming of Native voice leads to the taking of Native responsibility. Central to this healing is a return to the teachings of the traditional elders. These teachings imply more than restorative health. They call for a return to meaning, balance and purpose in life (Ross, 1996).
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