Hidden history comes to light

Posted On March 13, 2013

For over 100 years Canada’s Indian, Metis and Inuit children were taken from their families and sent to institutional settings called residential schools, sometimes forcibly, sometimes under threat of incarceration if parents did not cooperate and always with the deception that what was being done was in the best interests of the children.
 
What happened to those children is Canada’s great shame. Children were told their cultures were worthless, and they were forced to deny their heritage. They were abused and punished for speaking their language, they were prevented from observing their ceremonies, their names were changed. In many cases they never saw their families again.
 
The Canadian government had developed a policy called “Aggressive Assimilation” to be taught at these church run, government funded residential schools.
They were federally run under the Department of Indian Affairs. Attendance was mandatory. Agents were employed by the government to ensure that all native children attended the residential schools.
 
In all, about 150,000 Aboriginal, Inuit, and Metis children were forcibly removed from their communities and placed in the system.
 
The students lived in substandard conditions and endured physical and emotional abuse. They were in the schools 10 months a year, away from their parents and communities.
When they returned home, they often felt they no longer belonged. They had lost many of the skills they needed to help their families, and they became ashamed of their native heritage.
The skills taught to them at the schools, supposedly to help them assimilate into white culture, were so substandard that they also could not function effectively in an urban culture.
 
The last residential school closed in 1996, but for the survivors the scars, pain and memories still linger and take their toll.
 
The entire residential school tragedy has come to be known as the Canadian Holocaust.
 
A number of residents at Tobique First Nation are residential school survivors, who are still dealing with the trauma and emotional scarring from the experience.
 
Wayne Nicholas is one such survivor, who gives voice to his experiences through poetry and healing ceremonies.
 
I had a wonderful conversation with Wayne last week. I had just met him, but his humour and wisdom was immediately apparent.
We discussed a number of the issues that are challenging us all today, and demanding that we wake up in time to save our planet and ourselves.
 
He cracked a wise joke about so-called “Indian Time’….he pointed out to me, quite reasonably, that certainly Indians respect time….when it’s time to respect it!

Stephanie Kelley
 
 

Warrior

The tears of my youth have stopped flowing from absorbing the injustice, inflicted by Godly persons of cruel and wicked devils, who have extracted me from the womb of my community, cutting off my mother tongue, forcible compliance to their way of life and killing my spirit, my people, my community and my nation.
 
Severely depressed, I painfully walk with permanent scars that are deeply saturated within my soul and I can no longer speak from my heart as I continue my life’s journey looking, hoping and searching for the end of the trail, beaten, broken, burdened and buried in despair.
 
Helpless and unable to cope with the weight of atrocities gushing from the subtle but deadly waves of genocide that will not subside from all levels of governments along with the courts of the dominion that are manipulating, diminishing and imposing changes that disrupts the well being of our communities.
 
My physical, mental, emotional and spiritual being are extremely out of balance where healing can only come from within and I must rise above the injuries of yesterday otherwise I will be the vessel of tomorrow’s generations that may lead to the fatality of a people.
 
I am a warrior gravely wounded from the incarceration of an Indian Residential School and the genocides, but it is time that my resilience will abrogate the usurping of my people’s rights, liberties and freedoms upon the lands and resources we own, enjoy, use and occupy.
 
I must heal myself by picking up the multiple years of baggage and heal every single wound that has pierced my body and soul so that I can live without shame, poverty, abuse and anger. Then and only then will the healing drums give strength, pride and dignity among the hearts and minds of all Warriors.
 
Canada Day Poem of Wayne Nicholas July 1st, 2010