When a child dies a universe perishes.
When a young life is taken, thousands of lines of lives break, and those who are still alive, those who loved that child, can never fully heal. But the healing doesn't start if parents don't even know what happened to their child.
The scale of the news about the remains of 215 children found on Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc on the site of the former Kamloops, B.C., Indian Residential School, is crushing. The darkest pages of Canadian history are brought to light. Many people come together in sorrow. The discovery brought up collective pain and the long-standing trauma of Indigenous communities across the country and continent.
Flags at the city hall in Estevan and all other federal buildings across Canada were flying at half-mast. More than 50 pairs of small shoes have been brought to Estevan City Hall to never be taken back in memory of those and other lost Indigenous children, who've never returned to their families. The same was happening in many other communities.
While all these gestures are to honour those children, they are not enough to heal the gaping wound created by the federal residential school program.
When I hear someone saying "all that" is a long-gone history, I feel almost physical pain. The last citadel of this violent oppressive system inflicted upon Indigenous peoples – the Gordon Indian Residential School, located in Punnichy, closed in 1996. That's only 25 years ago. It's not history – it's present. We all know people who made it out, or who had relatives, friends or community members in that system. And it's blind and foolish to think that this page is turned over.
According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), between 1831 and 1996, more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were taken away from their families and placed in residential schools, often far away from home, in an effort to assimilate them into Canadian society of European descent.
Subject to physical and sexual abuse and malnutrition, forced to convert to Christianity, not allowed to speak native languages and often violently punished for breaking those rules, at least one in every 50 children died in that system. The death rate in residential schools was comparable to the number of Canadian prisoners of war that died in Nazi camps during the Second World War.
In 2015, the TRC called the residential school program a "cultural genocide," but when I hear stories of survivors and testimonies about the living conditions in those schools, which were supposed to be homes for children, I feel that it wasn't just cultural.
Disease, and tuberculosis, in particular, was the main killer, fortified by lack of even the most rudimentary medical care. Other research has found that in some schools students were a part of long-term unethical nutrition experiments, in which many were starved and denied adequate nutrition.
Accidents, which happened often due to the absence of basic safety standards, took a lot of lives as well. A devastating number of children froze or drowned when trying to escape schools and return home. No one was in a hurry to look for runaways, and it was usually too late when they were found.
That is a dark and shameful page in Canadian history. Those lives are lost and should never be forgotten. And the wounds are nowhere close to being healed.Â
With all that said, being a person of a different background, what I appreciate about Canada is the ability to recognize the committed historic crimes and try to find ways to first, reconcile, and second, ensure to never repeat them again. As far as I know, not too many countries in the world have the guts to not only face the past but also to own it. Here, I can see the potential in people and in the government to make the right choices to help the trauma heal.
So what can we all as private people or as groups or communities do in response to this news? Recognize the truth and acknowledge it. Do something that fits to remember the lives that were taken.
There are many survivors who made it out of the residential school system. Hear their stories, learn in ways acceptable to them, treat them with respect and acknowledge their strength.
What can be done at the government level? Past can't be rewritten, but in the present, the right choices need to be made. I believe, the only way to potential healing is knowledge. The research of undocumented deaths and burials in residential schools all across Canada needs to be funded. Be it federal money, provincial or local, we need to learn the truth, find it, talk about it, mourn and create space for gradual healing.
