Did I try to run away? Do I forgive the abusers? Children ask why I couldn’t go home to sleep and what I got to eat. Why did my parents leave me there? Did I tell someone about the abuses I endured? Adults ask why they didn’t already know about this. People often ask what happened to me in those schools. I was one of those children, incarcerated in Indian Residential Schools for 12 years, taken in just days after my seventh birthday. Canada’s policy targeted children to ensure continuous destruction from one generation to the next. Implementation of the policy, primarily carried out by churches acting for the Canadian government, aimed to destroy our cultural and linguistic heritage, legal and religious freedoms, governmental and societal structures, and the very identities of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples. The Indian Residential Schools policy and era were not intended to support or educate our people, but to get us out of the way of settler development and access to the wealth of Canada’s natural resources.
Although I have told my story to more than 300 audiences across Canada and the United States-and responded to a wide range of questions-no one had ever asked me that, and I wasn’t sure I knew the answer.įor more than 100 years, First Nations and Inuit children were removed from their homes and communities to be locked up in residential schools, operated across Canada as a matter of federal policy decided in the Parliament of Canada.
“Will you ever be happy?” A grade 5 student asked me that question following a presentation of my Indian Residential School experiences in her classroom.
0 kommentar(er)
