Eriel Deranger’s reflection on our 215: It could have been us
Trigger warning *sexual abuse, rape, suicide, violence, child abuse, mass graves, death*
Over the past few days I have waxed and waned between anger, outrage, sadness, numbness and fatigue. Today I am just tired. When the news of the findings of a mass grave of 215 children outside a residential school in Kamloops broke I wasn’t surprised, and at first I was numb to it. Feelings of “of course there is a mass grave outside of the school, that’s what happened, children went and didn’t return.” This numbness is a product of many of the things I was exposed to as a child, as a young adult and as an adult. Things that are considered “normal” to many Indigenous people with family members who are survivors of these atrocities.
I am the first generation on my paternal side to not be forced into a residential school. The. First. Generation. Let that sink in for a moment. Many of my relatives just slightly older than me went. This means some of my cousins were subject to the tortuous treatment that went on in these schools. I narrowly escaped this fate. Yet, throughout my childhood I was plagued with the fear that someone would come take me and my siblings away if we didn’t behave enough, if my parents didn’t provide enough, or simply because I was just an “Indian” and that’s just what happened to little Indian kids.
“Don’t be too loud, or they will come and take you away.”
“Don’t misbehave, or they will come take you away.”
“Don’t look or act too poor, or they will come take you away.”
“Don’t be too Indian, or they will come take you away.”
The blood memory of this trauma coursed through my veins with the same veracity as my connection to the land and my understanding of who I am as a Dene woman. We are of the land and they will come to try and take you from all that you are. I still carry these fears when I walk through stores or take my children to the doctor or at parent teacher conferences. It’s palpable and so unfair.
As I write this I am two blocks away from a school yard during lunch hour. I can hear the children laughing, screaming and playing without fear, without the worry of such a thing to happen. That was not my reality or the reality of many of the Indigenous peoples of so-called Canada only a generation ago. Growing up, I was afraid of being Indigenous because I saw what it had meant to my father and his siblings and many of my cousins. I saw it in the sadness in the eyes of my setsuné (grandmother) and setsiyuné (grandfather). I wasn’t ashamed, I was afraid. The teachings of my father and his siblings and of the many Indigenous elders and leaders that I was exposed to growing up ensured that I wasn’t ashamed of my identity, but the fear, that fear of being taken away, hurt, and possibly never returning lingered.
My father didn’t speak Dene to us. He spent 5 years in a TB hospital as a young child and that was followed by 4 years in the Holy Angels Residential School in Fort Chipewyan before he decided he didn’t want to go back and followed his father out into the bush. I didn’t ever hear much about his time in the TB hospital or residential school. He told me they cut his hair and beat him if he spoke Dene and that was about it. He also spoke of how he became accustomed to eating toast with jam and drinking coffee for breakfast, something that I would share with my father as I aged. Much of what I learned of the treatment of Indigenous peoples in residential school came from seeing the pain in my relatives - those addicted to drugs and alcohol, to those that inflicted sexual, mental and physical abuse onto those they loved. My mother always told me that they were damaged because of what happened to them while they were in residential schools. I would only become more aware of the power of trauma and intergenerational trauma as I got older.
For a time I worked for the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, now known as the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN), as a Treaty Land Entitlement and Specific Land Claims Researcher. Many of the staff at the FSIN were survivors of residential school, or like me, the first generation to not attend. My job was to conduct archival and oral history research regarding breaches of Treaty rights and shortfalls of land allocations of the numbered Treaties in so-called Canada.
I conducted what is called paylist analysis for many First Nations in Saskatchewan. This entails following a sort of census of Indigenous nations from the signing of Treaty until the mid 1900’s. Studying the population trends of nations became one of the things that catalyzed my desire to understand more about the true history of this country. So many children were taken to residential school and never returned without closure to parents, so many people were starved to death while the church and state officials sat comfortably in their homes atop stolen land, and so many policies to try and erase us from memory on the land and in our own minds. Many times I would interview community members about what happened to this family or that, to confirm drastic changes in the paylist or census lists. It was during this time that I was exposed to some of the most horrific stories from people just a generation older than me of their experiences of colonization and the residential school systems. Not just stories of their personal lived experiences in these institutions but their experiences of abuse and neglect afterwards, and of the pains they carried and subjected to their own children too. I remember crying often because I felt so incapable of doing anything more than listening and I ached to do more.
Many of the stories I heard are too unbearable to share but there is one that I will never forget, shared to me by one of my aunties that’s passed on. She attended a residential school in southern Saskatchewan. We’ll call her D. She talked of how she fared much better than most of her peers with only minor incidents of physical and mental abuse. She shared stories of being stripped down in front of her entire class, head shaved and whipped for speaking Cree, her native tongue. All the while she laughed saying “ I didn’t care, I still spoke Cree whenever I could.”
Her best friend didn’t fare so “easy”. She caught the eye of the priest who would demand visits into the night. She became pregnant and the nuns cursed her and tried to beat the child out of her telling her that both she and the baby were an abomination delivered by Satan himself. This violent attempt to miscarry the baby didn’t work and the young woman delivered a healthy baby. However, as D told me, this young woman was forced to bury her child alive right after it was born. This young woman later took her own life. D reminded me that this wasn’t the first time, or the last, that young women bore children of the rape by priests, and were then forced to kill their children by live burial. These babies litter the grounds of residential school along with the children that were starved, beaten and murdered for being too Indigenous.
I remember the “apology” given by Harper in 2010. I was in Winnipeg for an Indigenous rights consultation meeting with a bunch of other Indigenous youth and elders and some foundations. It also coincided with the gathering of Indigenous peoples for other meetings in the same hotel we were in. Hundreds of Indigenous peoples packed the main ballroom of the hotel with drummers from Cree and Dene communities and stories from many survivors were shared. I remember looking around the room and being struck by the sheer sadness and how inadequate an apology felt in that moment. I cried. I cried with a deep sadness and sorrow that was matched by others in the room. These cries came from the release that we were still here unlike so many others.
This is not something that happened a long time ago, and we simply cannot just get over it. The apology just shed light onto something that was just a dark secret that we were told to never speak of, in the same way that my dad never spoke of his experiences or his language.
My own experiences of the intergenerational impacts of the trauma of residential schools are watching many of my kin struggle with unresolved trauma. This manifests itself in substance abuse, mental health issues, suicides, and some becoming perpetrators of violence, both sexual and physical, on others. I am, along with my sisters, a survivor of sexual abuse at the hands of a non-relative residential school survivor. My step father, a TB hospital and residential school survivor as well, died of a stroke because he feared the medical and educational institutions so much that he refused hospitalization and life saving surgery. My own biological father struggles with mental health issues, substance abuse and homelessness. I feel like the words of apology and “wear an orange shirt” day do little for all those children robbed from their parents, all those babies born in those schools, and all those that survived and the pain they carried and the effects it has on their ability to be in this world.
Our communities deserve reparations beyond the residential school monetary payouts that do nothing for the intergenerational trauma passed onto others. We need land reparations for those impacted by residential schools. So we can heal on the land, and begin to repair the deep wounds of disconnection from our human and non-human kin. It needs to be affirmed that we are people of the land, and that our language, our culture and our identities are connected to these places our parents and grandparents were ripped from. We need Land Back.
Those 215 children that never made it home, piled together like nothing more than a burden, are a reminder that I just narrowly escaped this potential reality. I am more than a number and all of those children and the countless others that have yet to be found are more than numbers. They are sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. They have names, like me, like my children, like yours. Please don’t let this be just a headline for a week or two, we are more than a catchy headline and story. Let these children and all the other unfound children be identified and returned to their homes and families.
May this lead us to the path for truth, justice and reparations. It’s time to heed to urgent cries from our communities to investigate every residential school grounds, and address the legacy of mistreatment and harm at the hands of the colonial governments. This can start with ensuring that all our communities be granted clean water and adequate housing and health care, and the respect of our Free, Prior and Informed Consent and the power to determine our own fates and our right say no to projects, plans and policies that affect our people and lands. We need to be talking about land reparations and ensure that not just our babies are returned but our lands be returned to our communities for healing, for justice and to begin to repair that last 500 years of subjugation, dispossession and genocide.
#LandBack #ResidentialSchoolReparations #WeAreMourning #BringThemHome #ThereWillBeMore
