This week was the 4th anniversary of the Penelakut Tribe’s walk for the children of Canada’s residential schools. I attended the first walk in 2021. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people walked from the ferry terminal, where the kids boarded the boats that took them to the Kuper Island Residential School between the late 19th century and 1975 when the school finally closed, to the Waterwheel Park in Chemainus.
Every year the walk reminds me of the interviews Diane Harris and I did in 1992 with school survivors. Diane, my late sister-in-law and a social worker for Chemainus First Nation, was adamant that the residential school was the source of the suffering in her community. She made me (and Diane had a way of making people join her in her ventures) help her to listen and record the people’s stories. Phil Fountaine, the then Chief of the Manitoba First Nations, had only just made his residential school abuse public. There was a suffocating shroud hanging over the people’s experiences at the schools. Phil was the first person to publicly break the silence. Diane thought his was only the first step. Former Kuper Island students wanted to talk…she was sure of it. So I followed her around note book in hand. For two months in the summer of 1991 we visited more than 70 Kuper Island school survivors.
It was one of the most profoundly disturbing things I have ever done. I know. It wasn’t about me. But I was not prepared. I had no idea what I was about to hear. I had nowhere to put the words spoken by the former students. I had no space in my heart because it was so quickly broken by the very first stories we were told. I had no space in my mind because it was full of preconceived ideas about the world that up until then did not include what I was hearing about the school.
No one knew what I was about to hear. Brothers and sisters who had attended the school together did not know each other’s stories. Husbands and wives did not know each other’s stories. Parents did not know their children’s stories and children did not know their parent’s stories. Like most people, I had heard only tiny glimpses of my mother and father-in-law’s memories of the school that escaped inadvertently when they had had enough to drink to pull back a small corner of the shroud.
In the early 90s very few people knew much about stories themselves. We didn’t how to listen with integrity, how to honour the teller, how to hold or not hold the emotions, how to sleep at night after hearing life shattering information that is so, so, so much bigger than you. Diane and I listened to the stories because she was certain people needed to talk. She was right. But that’s all we knew. Now we know that what we did those years ago was just a tiny opening of what turned out to be a huge awakening.
After more than 30 years I am still constantly reminded of what Diane and I heard that summer. In hushed voices they told us stories of their confusion, fear, loneliness, embarrassment, shame, longing and hunger. Sometimes in hardly more than a whisper they said, “They told us not to tell”. The common refrain of child abusers through the ages. Still afraid someone would hear, the tellers looked over their shoulders as if a nun or a brother would creep up from behind.
They looked at me with suspicion. Why was a blond, blue eyed young woman there? “To help me record your stories,” Diane told them. They believed her and they wanted their stories heard so they tolerated me. Some graciously. Some not so graciously. One tall, heavy-set man with a scarred face and gnarled teeth leaned across the table until we were face-to-very, very, close face and said, “I hate you.” He went on to tell me why he hated everyone who looked like me. Then he said, “But you will tell my story so I will let you sit at my kitchen table.” The heavy responsibility of listening meant an even heavier responsibility to tell so the shroud could be lifted. Over the years I have come to understand my responsibility also has been to prepare the ground so others would have the space—hearts and minds open to hear.
In 2000, I finally found a voice to tell what we heard. With Rita Morris and Ann Sam I wrote No Time to Say Goodbye a kid’s book because those were the voices I had heard. It was the little people who kept speaking to me long after the interviews were over.
The stories are still alive. They come and go throughout my days casting light and shadows on pretty much everything I see and hear. In and amongst the heart-wrenching, nasty and even sometimes funny things I remember, lately one thing keeps bubbling up in my mind. Several people told us the same thing although in different ways. They said that one of the most debilitating things that happened to them, as students at Kuper, was when the brothers and nuns would walk past them and just cuff them on the head. Hard enough to hurt. But not a major injury. Not physical injury at least. Just constant demeaning, like water torture, drip, drip dripping until you mentally dissolve. One cuff after the other. Walking down the hall. Eating at the dining table. Getting into the shower. Sitting at your desk. One stiff cuff after the other. Reminding you that you are disposable. That you should be ashamed. That you are worthless. That your suffering and humiliation is their entertainment. Former students of Kuper Island said those repetitive cuffs instilled such as deep sense of disgrace, shame and indignity that they had spent every minute of their lives since trying to find their worth.
When I think about the cuffs I hear the words of Whitney Houston’s Greatest Love of All. I have sung it a hundred times, “No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity”. But they can. And they did. One cuff at a time. Many of the students said it wasn’t always the big things that hurt the most. It was the constant erosion of their sense of self, safety and certainty.
A lot has been said lately about believing the stories we hear. At the same time we are told to be wary of stories. We are all experiencing a political environment that makes trusting anything a leap of faith. The summer of 1992 I was thrown into a crisis of belief, of knowing. Disarmed, with my mind in a scramble, I was stripped of all my trusty tools—analysis, cross-checking, skepticism—all I could manage to do was listen. Unimpeded listening.
Perhaps the most important responsibility of the listener is to learn. Learn the truth about Canada, about indigenous experiences in this country and about how each one of us non-indigenous and indigenous alike can unpack our own thoughts, ideas and behaviours that negatively affect others. It’s a good day to learn about kindness, love and respect.
I have to sign off now, but there is so much more. I am thinking about how unusual the stories were that we heard. The big story of residential schools had not yet been told. The tellers were threatened by many in their communities at the time who said it was best not to tell the stories. Yet they spoke with such courage. Most of them are gone now. But they were the first to open the window and change the world.
I write my memories as a tribute to the tellers and their memories.