Bearing witness

I received a note from my sister Janie Wesley this past week that included an historic document. Her message asked me to look at the image of a typewritten telegram or letter that was sent October 17, 1945. It detailed the admission list of children to be sent to the Albany Indian Residential School, including the name of my father, Marius Kataquapit, one of his brothers, and another uncle on my mother’s side.

Janie pointed out that this letter was dated just a week before our father’s fifth birthday. The other children on the list would have been about the same age.

In 1945, my father’s family was living a traditional life on the land surrounded by their extended relations. They were fluent in the Cree language and had very little to do with European ways of living or communicating. Life revolved around surviving on the land following traditional practices, activities and ways of living that were thousands of years old.

I have often wondered how my father’s father, James Kataquapit, looked at the European people in his life. His livelihood centred on the fur trade and how best to negotiate and gather income from English and French traders who bought the animal furs he had painstakingly gathered, prepared and transported over long distances. His meagre earnings would then be handed back to the same traders in return for a little food and goods he needed to keep his family alive. European settlers dominated even his spiritual life with Christian religion while suppressing our traditional spirituality.

In his 20s, he left to fight in the Great War for a “Kitchi-Okimaw” (a great leader or a king). He was gone for almost two years during the First World War, serving in the Canadian Forestry Corp in England. He witnessed the development created by the “Mishtikooshoo” (the white man) in the south. He boarded a steel-hulled ship that took him over the great ocean and probably wondered if he would ever return. He visited lands on the other side of the world and saw the devastating effects of war, death and destruction.

He was content to be paid for his efforts but was happy to return home after the war. When he arrived in Canada and traveled north, he was simply dropped off at a wilderness rail stop near Hearst, Ontario. On his own, he followed a tributary of the Albany River north to James Bay and back to his family in Attawapiskat. After he arrived home, he learned that some of the young men he left with didn’t return.

His homecoming left him in the same situation as when he left. The same European traders and church leaders managed his earnings. During his absence, his income from the war had evaporated with the excuse that it was used to provide for his parents and family. After going overseas for a war he didn’t understand and serving the country of Canada for two years, he went back to living with nothing and surviving on the land with his own skill and abilities.

Later, middle-aged with children, the Canadian government forced him to surrender his young sons under the guise of education. Anyone who refused saw their children forcibly removed by authorities. The family was told the boys would be gone for the winter and return in the spring, but both James and his wife Janie feared that their boys might never come home. This turned their world upside down and made them very sad and anxious. The boys did return but they were changed forever.

My father Marius had very little to say about his memories of his time in residential school. He confided that it was a painful time as he was thrust into a foreign world, filled with strangers who followed strange customs and spoke a foreign language. He felt that he was punished for being an Aboriginal person and that the separation from his parents at such a young age scarred him for life.

I was deeply moved by the document that my sister Janie forwarded to me. She received it from a family friend, Roseanne Sutherland, who works for Chiefs of Ontario and is researching the residential school era in the James Bay area. It is a sober reminder of the government policy of abducting all children from Aboriginal communities in an effort to assimilate our people. Thankfully it did not work, but this document bears witness to a crime that broke and bent our communities for generations.