It's hard not to cringe when you first hear of the experiences First Nations people had with Indian Residential Schools. When Hubie Joe told me his story, I had the same feeling in the pit of my stomach I got from watching pictures of my Grade 5 teacher's trips through the Nazi concentration camps.
How, I wondered then and now, could one person be so cruel to another? How could one race think itself so superior to another? What could justify the destruction of a people and a culture?
When I first had those thoughts, I was an eleven-year-old student, innocently thinking that Canada could never be a party to anything so heinous.
Boy, was I wrong. For while I was having those thoughts, kids my age, older and younger, were experiencing a special kind of made-in-Canada hell. Although no one rounded up Native kids in cattle cars and led them to crematoriums, in some cases the reality was just about as bad.
Little children were beaten to within an inch of their lives just for speaking their own language. And that's not one of those rumours one hears and can never substantiate but the eye-witness statement of a registered nurse who worked at St. Mary's Hospital from the 1950s on.
Along with Aboriginal people throughout Canada, students at St. Augustine's School in Sechelt were forced by law to attend the institution. If they didn't, they were rounded by the principal of the school and the Indian agent and held against their will. For ten months or more of the year, the children were segregated by their sex and age and not allowed to have any contact with their own brothers and sisters. The food the kids were fed was in many cases little better than slop, and for growing bodies there was never enough.
As the saying goes, it takes a whole village to raise a child, but in Canada, over and over for all too many years, it took only one individual to destroy a child. It's time for Canada to right the sorriest episode of its history. The people who attended the residential schools should be compensated now. While money will never replace a stolen culture or rectify the abuse endured, it might make it possible for some of those still suffering to get the help they need to recover.
