Content warning: This story includes descriptions of violence, including sexual violence, against children and self-harm.
National Day for Truth and Reconciliation was marked across Canada on Sept. 30 to remember the survivors of Canada’s residential school system, and the children who never made it home.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) concluded that residential schools were “a systematic, government- sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples.” The TRC characterized this intent as “cultural genocide.”
Vancouver Island University (VIU) marked the day with an Every Child Matters Orange Shirt Day ceremony at Malaspina Theatre where two survivors of residential schools shared their stories alongside Indigenous staff, faculty and witnesses from the university’s senior administration
Uncle Randy Fred, Elder at Vancouver Island University
Uncle Randy Fred is an Elder at Vancouver Island University who attended the Alberni Indian Residential School for nine years as a child. He is a member of the c̓išaaʔatḥ (Tseshaht First Nation).
Fred can still remember when an RCMP boat visited his family in Dodger Cove, where his father was working as a fisherman, and spoke to his mother.
“I was hiding behind her and one of them asked her ‘How old is that boy there?’ And she said ‘five.’ It was the RCMP and he told her, ‘We're coming back here in September and if that boy is here, I'm sorry to tell you, but we'll have to haul you off to jail.’”
He told the audience about the day he was taken to the school by his father, who was himself a residential school survivor.
“I just thought we were going to say goodbye to my older brothers and sisters, but my dad picked me up, carried me up to his front stairs and handed me off to this guy, and he brought me inside to the principal's office, and I was crying the whole time. I had no idea that I was going to be left there.”
Fred said his father had also suffered abuse at the residential school as a child.
“My dad, when he first went to the Alberni Indian Residential School, they stuck a needle right through his tongue twice when he was caught speaking our language.”
After former dormitory supervisor Arthur Henry Plint was convicted of sexual abuse of children and sentenced to 11 years in prison in 1995, where he died in 2003, Fred was one of 22 former students who sued the United Church and Government of Canada for the abuse they suffered at the school.
The Blackwater v. Plint lawsuit was filed in 1996 and went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada who ruled in 2005 that the church and government were both responsible for failing to protect students under their care.
“I was involved in the Blackwater case where we sued the United Church and government of Canada for abuses imposed on us by the staff and the stories that came out of court were so horrific, many of them unbelievable” he said. “The Blackwater case was a precedent setting case and it really set the stage for where we are today. I tell people that it was an important milestone on the road leading to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”
Fred is now working on producing a documentary video about the court case.
But success in the courts does not mitigate the damage done to the people who suffered in residential schools. The effects of the trauma remain many years later. Fred says that of the people he started school with, most have died from violent deaths, drug and alcohol.
“One of the real impacts of the school is the alcoholism, the drug addictions. In my case it was like suicide,” he said. “I always had a death wish. I attempted suicide twice. When I drank to the point of blacking out, for me, it was like death. It was like this little escape. Many people I know who were sexually abused attempted suicide and many of my family members actually committed suicide.”
Today Fred says survivors and their communities are working on healing and living positive lives.
“We're digging ourselves out of all that negativity, learning to live like healthy people and learning to be happy,” he told the audience at VIU. “When I started here a couple of years ago I made a decision that I want to be a happy elder, I want to spread that happiness.”
Fred says that events marking National Day for Truth and Reconciliation are important places to tell the truth about the legacy of Canada’s residential school system.
“It's unfortunate that I have to share such a horrific story, but it's reality,“ he said. “It's important for all of you to really understand where First Nations people are coming from. Colonization failed to destroy us, all the attempts that were made to destroy us failed, and we're still here.”
Fran Tait, Malaspina College’s first Indigenous academics advisor
Fran Tait is a former academics advisor at Malaspina College and a survivor of the Alberni Indian Residential School. She is a Tsimshian from Lax Kw’alaams First Nation.
Her voice shaking, she told the audience at VIU about her life.
“I had a younger sister, she was murdered. My father died of TB, and my mother was murdered. So we became orphans.”
Tait was five when she and her two brothers were taken to the Alberni Indian Residential School where they were separated for the first time in their lives.
She suffered physical and sexual abuse for years. “From the age of five to twelve is when all the sexual abuse happened,” she said. “The physical abuse happened. The beatings that you can’t even imagine.”
When Tait and her brothers returned to their home community, they had been away so long that they didn’t remember their extended family.
“My family did not know me. My family did not know my name. I didn't know them. They were strangers to me.”
Tait said she didn’t find safety in her community.
“Everybody gathered at my aunt and uncle's house, and the party began, and that night I was raped by four uncles,” she told the silent auditorium. “So my community was no safer than residential school.”
Tait told the students about how young girls at the school were targeted for sexual abuse by a male staff member.
“The thing that also bothers me is that Saturday night was movie night and movie night was his favorite time to take the girls out of the auditorium to his bedroom and he raped them, me included,” she said. “Then Sunday morning, he would stand up in the pulpit and preach about sin.”
Tait says she turned to alcohol after her experiences at the school but quit drinking 27 years ago when her daughter told her that she wouldn’t be allowed to see her grandchildren if she kept drinking.
Tait started working at Malaspina College, the precursor to Vancouver Island University, in 1974 as the college’s sole First Nations academic advisor.
“I wasn't welcome at Malaspina,” she said, recalling what other staff told her. “‘There was no need for a special position. Those Indian kids, they do their own thing.’ That was the mentality of the day. I had to deal with white male faculty who saw my existence as worth nothing. So that was who and what I had to fight.”
Dale Hunt, educational advisor for aboriginal students at VIU
Dale Hunt is an educational advisor for services for aboriginal students at VIU and a member of the Kwakiutl First Nation. He spoke about growing up as the child of residential school survivors who were heavy users of alcohol.
“I say that I survived the survivors, that's huge to be able to say you survived the survivors, but I can say barely,” he said.
Now that intergenerational trauma affects him as he raises his own son
“My mom was always perfect, you had to be perfect, and if you weren't perfect, you were punished,” he said. “So those are some of the things that I have to walk with in life. So I wanted to be the best goddamn father I could ever be and I strive every single day to do that. But I struggle as a father. I want to be perfect, but I don't have to be perfect anymore.”
Lillian Morton, director of Indigenous education at VIU
Lillian Morton is the director of Indigenous education at VIU and is Coast Salish (Penelakut and Stz’uminus).
She talked about working at home preparing to teach a class about residential schools when her young daughter walked in and started asking her questions about the video she was reviewing.
“My five year old daughter comes trumping down the stairs as they're talking about putting kids in cattle trucks and driving them away. ‘Mama, what is this?’ Well, I guess if we're old enough to take kids, when they're five, we're old enough to tell them that they're not going to get taken anymore,” she told the audience, recalling what her daughter asked her that night.
“‘Mom, are they going to be able to do that? Can someone come and take me away? Is this going to happen?’”
Morton told her daughter, “Baby they can't do that anymore. They're not going to come and take you away from me,” she told her daughter. “Then I realized that that's actually not true. It's true in different ways.”
Morton told a story about how her kids didn’t want to wear matching socks and she was afraid that someone would see that and call child services.
Morton said she tries to stay positive and all of the events for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on Vancouver Island are heartening.
“I get to stand in front of all of you and be so proud that we're all here together. There's so many gatherings all over and we are going to learn and figure this all out.”
Listen to CHLY's recording of Randy Fred and Fran Tait’s stories below: