Voices from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s closing ceremony

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada held a closing event in Ottawa (Algonquin Territory) between May 31 and June 3, beginning with a five-kilometre healing walk across the bridge from Gatineau, Quebec. On June 2, the Commission released the findings resulting from its six years of hearings from survivors, and made 94 recommendations. The Nation was present throughout the event. We spoke to those who had come from Eeyou Istchee and neighbouring communities about their feelings on the closing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Their statements are presented in their own words.

Speakers:

Joseph Esau (Waskaganish): residential school survivor

Grand Chief Dr. Matthew Coon Come (Nemaska): residential school survivor

Ian Diamond (Waskaganish): son of residential school survivors

Gertrude Christine Johnstone (Moose Factory): residential school survivor

Jeannie Pelletier (Chisasibi): residential school survivor and daughter of residential school survivor

Brian Wadden (Chisasibi): residential school survivor

Joseph Boyden (Moose Factory/New Orleans): honorary witness, author of Governor General’s Award-winning novel The Orenda, as well as Through Black Spruce and Three Day Road (both of which deal with the Indian residential school system)

Joseph Esau

I came here to see what’s going on. We wanted to hear other people’s stories. Definitely, people have a hard time talking about it. They don’t want to hear anything about it, or have anything to do with this. But I think this helps with healing. It helps you find new friends, people who are going through the same thing, so you know you’re not alone. I’ve seen some people I know and people I went to school with, and I saw some pictures that brought me back to where I was in residential school. Those were kind of mixed emotions.

Grand Chief Coon Come

The majority of [Crees who attended the event] have participated in some of the National Gatherings the TRC held. They felt comfortable doing it outside their community. That’s understandable. There’s a feeling here of camaraderie, because you went to school with these people – you’re meeting up, catching up with old friends. I think that’s important in the way you share stories.

Ian Diamond

My dad [Grand Chief Dr. Billy Diamond] was associated with some of the other conferences, but specifically I came down here to be with my mom, because even though she was married to Billy, she’s done a whole lot of this stuff for a while. They were doing workshops in Moose Factory when they had something similar to this, and she was one of the grief counsellors in Moose Fort.

Walking into the building here, it was amazing: I was hearing multiple languages, and they were all Native. It was this joyful pride, initially. There were so many from the various religious denominations, and the government, that tried to systematically wipe out those languages. I found the noise of it all was something unique. They tried to extinguish all these languages, yet it became this one loud voice.

Gertrude Christine Johnstone

I’m from Moose Factory. I went to Bishop Horden Hall in 1942. I was only five years old then – my sister and I went together. Well, they came and got us. We didn’t go. Six years I was there. I’m a widow. I have four kids. I’ve lived back in Moose Factory since 1957. My sister was a survivor as well, and so were my husband and his brother. This means a lot to me. It’s important to know what really happened to the people who lie in the grave.

Jeannie Pelletier

In college at John Abbott, I took a course called Indian and Inuit Views. I thought it’d be easy credits! But it was actually very hard. For an essay on residential schools, I asked my grandmother, but she didn’t want to talk. It was hard to do that assignment because nobody wanted to talk to you at that time. One person in my community heard about this event. I was telling her it would be positive, that they’d have counsellors, and people will be able to talk about it. She said, “That belongs at the bottom of the sea. That’s not something people should talk about.” So I didn’t ever push her to go. I just said, “Oh, okay.”

Grand Chief Coon Come

We will have people who’ll be reluctant to talk about it, and we must respect that. While the children were taken away, the parents were left behind. I can’t imagine what they went through. My mother told me the story of when we were taken. When the plane landed, I was in the bush, playing. I was a kid about five or six years old. The next thing you know, our parents were calling us, giving us brown bags, and telling us we had to get on this plane. We said, “Why?” We didn’t understand why we should get on a plane. My mother said the first thing you could hear that evening was dogs howling. Then, because we all lived in tents back then, you could hear one tent after another crying. So you can’t imagine what the parents went through. I can imagine, then, why some of the parents and grandparents won’t talk about it.

Ian Diamond

Everybody has their own timeline. I’m sure there are some people who’d say they’ve moved on, but really didn’t deal with it. Then there are some that are in that area of forgiving – even right down to forgiving the government. But I guess it comes down to an individual’s speed.

Jeannie Pelletier

We didn’t know what residential school was, before all this. I thought it was other people. I was shocked to learn that out of the three schools in our community, we actually went to one of them [Sainte-Thérèse-de-l’Enfant-Jésus in Fort George]. [My husband Brian] actually stayed there, but I was a day-school student, just before the move [from Fort George to Chisasibi]. My mom told me I entered when I was four years old. She didn’t want me to go – she had a hard time to let me. It was a day school, and I didn’t sleep there, but they were nuns. And there were things that were done there that I realized later should not be done. It’s only when they did the hearings that I realized that we saw those things too.

Ian Diamond

But for me, I never once went to residential school, because that particular generation, for the [Eeyouch] Cree anyway, when they had to sign the James Bay Agreement, that was one of the things they wanted to be sure – that they’d never again give anyone the right to send our kids away.

Gertrude Christine Johnstone

What happened to that truth, there? There are people who lost their lives, or lost a part of their lives, and the truth has to come out one way or the other. We were just like slaves. We worked. Half a day of school, half a day of work. If we didn’t finish we had to go back and do what we had to do. They would punish us for nothing at all. If we spoke Cree we’d get a strap for it – my grandfather and grandmother never did anything like that to punish us. It was much worse.

Jeannie Pelletier

The nuns were very strict. They controlled the bathrooms very much – they didn’t let you go to the bathroom. It was like any school, where the kids who got in trouble got put in the front row. I remember seeing the puddles under their desks.

Brian Wadden

With the priests, if you did something wrong – even just speaking your language – they’d make you hold out your hand, and they’d hit you with a pole. And if you tried to pull your hand away, they’d make another priest hold your hand while they hit you.

Joseph Boyden

The TRC made me an honorary witness, which is a huge honour. What that means for me is that this closing ceremony is not the end of the conversation, but the beginning of many new conversations, and I will do my best to help make those conversations happen. Reconciliation means continuing to tell these stories – not to lay blame, but to make sure that future generations know this part of history. As an honorary witness I see it as my responsibility to encourage that sharing of stories and experiences.

Grand Chief Coon Come

I think the younger people are beginning to understand what their parents went through when they were taken to residential schools. Certainly there was a lot of shame. As people come out, it becomes acceptable. I remember the first time that people were talking; the parents and the grandparents were the ones who said, “Don’t talk about it.” It wasn’t because they didn’t want to hear it – I think it was because they weren’t ready for it.

I think a lot of people in the communities didn’t want to tell their stories to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission because if they did that, that would mean first they would have to tell their families what they experienced. They would have to tell their children and their parents, their grandparents, their aunts and uncles. This could be very painful. But reconciliation begins in families.

There are different levels of healing. There’s the national level, which we try to provide through the Cree Health Board and Social Services, and then there’s the family level and the community level. Of course, there’s also the level of the Nation itself. Part of what we know of the residential schools system was removing the children from the families, which meant removing them from the land. If you remove them from the land that means the government was in essence saying that there was nobody living on the land. So we have to deal with Nation-building, which is a matter of reclaiming our lives, reclaiming our institutions.

Joseph Boyden

[Prior to contact,] these were very complex and developed societies with their own sets of problems, and the arrival of European colonizers just threw gas on the fire. First the Dutch, then the French, and later the English believed these societies were simplistic and savage. They saw [Indigenous] cultures as practising black magic – and the residential schools system grew out of that ideology. Unfortunately, it’s an ideology that still exists today in some places. Three Day Road dealt explicitly with residential schools, and Through Black Spruce was about the lasting effects of that system, but The Orenda was about the ideology that founded those schools and allowed them to exist.

Grand Chief Coon Come

Residential schools caused the loss of language, and that was important – because the ones who went to residential schools could only speak the day-to-day Cree. They could not understand their parents when their parents spoke what I’d call “bush Cree.” The students were taken out of their homes and sent away, and no culture was taught to them. So when the parents wanted to teach their kids when they came back, the residential school survivors couldn’t understand what their parents were saying. Therefore, they couldn’t pass that culture to them.

And of course when you’re taken away from the land, and removed from your community, they’re touching the economic base. The government’s intention was to make sure nobody lived out on the land. Now the students who’d been taken away felt that they had no connection to the land. There was a diminishment of that connection, and a diminishment of connection to the family. Certainly there was a loss of parenting skills – Indian residential school survivors have quite a challenge in trying to raise their kids, because they were always in a boarding home in their childhoods.

Gertrude Christine Johnstone

Healing is a nice word, but you have to do it yourself. Look at me – I’ve been suffering all my life, and after I got married, when my children were first born, I didn’t know if I should speak English or Cree to them. Would they have to go through what I went through in my young days? That was the question I asked myself. I answered by mothering to them in English, so they didn’t have to suffer. Today, the children need to know. I told my children. My daughter’s here, guiding me. She can’t even speak Cree! I have to translate it for her. She’s a nurse and she can’t even talk to her own people.

Jeannie Pelletier

My mom’s name was Lillian Spencer. She just passed about a month ago. She didn’t talk about residential school until toward the end of her life, and then she began to open up more. That’s when I found out what had really happened to her. I always knew there was something, but I never pushed it. I waited for her to open up to me. She told me she had a dream that she went back to the time when she was five years old, when their beds were in a row. Somebody had visited her in her bed, one of the people from the church, who were supposed to take care of her. In her dream she began screaming at this person and called him a child molester. She said after she confronted him in the dream, “I felt the anger leave me.” I noticed that. She was more at peace in the end. Her face was different. Everything was different about her.

Ian Diamond

There are some proactive communities – I’d like to think my community is associated with that. We’ve had a wellness centre for close to 25 years now. They’ve been dealing with alcohol and drug treatment, and a lot of that stems from generational problems with those issues. Specifically, not dealing with those issues. The coping mechanisms they used were alcohol and drugs. A lot of the community members in Waskaganish either have used the churches or they’ve used the wellness centre to deal with the emotions from abuse they all went through.

This healing has to go on in some form or another, either tribal initiatives, or community initiatives. But people still have to continue trying to deal with this. I don’t know if the words “truth” and “reconciliation” are in the vocabulary. But at the individual community levels, they just want healing above all. And that’s what my community members are trying to do.

Gertrude Christine Johnstone

I know some people who still live with it, but slowly I got over it myself. Slowly. You don’t just forget about it. The others are talking about it, and I just listen, I don’t say anything. I just tell them to say a prayer to get healed. That’s what I did. I went in the bush by myself one day and I talked to Gitchi Manitou. I felt better after that. The land is there for you.

Jeannie Pelletier

Going through my mother’s belongings, I found things she kept for me – the papers she received, and the compensation she received. Two years ago she came to the Montreal Truth and Reconciliation event, and after that she went to a court session – she received the highest amount awarded. She asked me not to tell anyone she had received that money. We found out later that she had put it in a trust for my brother and me. She didn’t use the money herself. She could have, but I don’t know why she didn’t. She decided to leave that money for us. I don’t even know what we’ll do with it, my brother and I.

Joseph Esau

I’ve done some healing. I’ve started that journey. Here, it starts conversations for other people. That’s where their journey starts. Then they start to participate in healing circles, talking about how to let that pain go and start out on another new journey.