Group Holds Healing Vigil for Native Women Abuse at Facilities over Years
By Jim Day
The Guardian
October 5, 2007
http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/index.cfm?sid=68776&sc=98
Thunder Child should soon be getting a cheque from the federal government.
It likely won't be for $28,000 — the average payout expected to start arriving in coming weeks from nearly $2 billion allotted in native residential schools compensation.
About 80,000 former students can apply for common experience payments — $10,000 for the first year they attended the once-mandatory network of church-run schools, and $3,000 for each subsequent year.
Thunder Child, the native name of 60-year-old Marie Knockwood, only spent one year at the Shubenacadie Residential School in Nova Scotia. By the above formula, she would be looking at cashing a cheque for $10,000.
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| Thunder Child (Marie Knockwood), left, and her daughter, Ginger Knockwood, perform a healing song Thursday outside Province House as part of a Sisters in Spirit (SIS) vigil. SIS is a five-year initiative to raise public awareness of the impact of racialized and sexualized violence against Indigenous women. Photo by Jim Day |
She dismisses her eventual compensation, regardless of the amount, as inconsequential.
"We're not looking to get rich out of anything because natives will never be rich," she said.
For Thunder Child, the importance of a hard-fought settlement is that all the abuse she and other aboriginal students endured at residential schools has become a point of record.
Abuse did take place at these schools, both sexual and physical. That has been established as fact.
Her own short history at Shubernacadie Residential School is horrific.
She alluded to this Thursday in song to the damage delivered to her body, soul and mind.
She saved the stark details for a dumbfounded reporter following a special vigil, held outside Province House, of the Sisters in Spirit — a five-year research, education and policy initiative that is designed to increase public knowledge and understanding at a national level of the impact of racialized, sexualized and violence against indigenous women often leading to their disappearance and death.
Thunder Child recalled in frightening detail the day she "died."
Her older brother had already spent a couple of years at Shubenacadie Residential School before she headed off there. He never spoke of his torturous seven-year run at the school until well after the fact.
She would learn that her brother had been sexually abused by a priest and by older boys who were forced to abuse younger ones.
"He got it every which way," she said.
Thunder Child, who lives on the reserve in Scotchfort after a long departure from P.E.I., said her brother feared telling their parents of the abuse, but that he was adamant in his plea that his two sisters never go to Shubenacadie.
Her already-weathered face takes on added anguish as she tells of a chilling encounter with a Catholic nun. The nun, Thunder Child claims, tied her to a bathroom stall, stuck a sock in her mouth and moved in for a sexual assault.
The once innocent 10-year-old girl, she recalled, mustered all the resistance she could manage, earning her a savage beating with a plunger.
"She (the nun) said 'OK, you're asking for trouble' and she stuck it up my backside, up my rectum and at that point I 'died'," she said.
She would go on to witness aboriginal children being beaten and sexually abused at the school. She would also have an unsettling run-in with a priest.
Thunder Child said her lone year at a residential school inflicted life-long harm. To this day, she can't trust authority figures. She never married, but does have children.
"It caused a lot of damage," she said.
One daughter, Ginger Knockwood (her native name is Little Wind), helped organize Thursday's vigil that drew about 25 aboriginal people and other observers.
"I took part because I have a (healing) song to sing, I have a message to give," said Thunder Child.
"I need to bring something to my people . . . to the younger generation."
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