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	Canadians Need to Hear Stories of Residential Schools By Janet Bagnall Times Colonist May 13, 2008 http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/comment/story.html?id=5a971f9d-0989-40c6-97a6-0f25145687d0 Robert Joseph was six years old when he was taken from his home more than 60 years ago and sent to a residential school in Alert Bay. After 10 years at the school, he told the Vancouver Sun, he "staggered out of St. Mike's already a full-blown alcoholic." Alex Janvier was eight when missionaries at Alberta's Le Goff reserve put him and several other reserve children into the back of a cattle truck and drove them 150 kilometres to a residential school near St. Paul, Alta. Janvier spent 1943 to 1953 at Blue Quills Residential Indian School. "It was a rigid, rigid regimentation," he told the Ottawa Citizen. "Discipline was extremely harsh." Diana Billy, 50, was a teenager in the 1970s when she was taken from the Waiwakum Indian reserve north of Vancouver and sent to a Catholic residential school where, Billy told the New Statesman, she was abused for several months before she ran away. She counted herself among the luckier ones. Her father had been in the residential school system in the 1940s, but never spoke of it. Her cousin, she said, never recovered from the sexual abuse he suffered at a residential school. An alcoholic, he ultimately killed himself. Today, Billy is among an estimated 80,000 living victims of the residential school system who will be compensated as part of the $2-billion settlement agreement between the federal government, churches and aboriginal communities for the abuse residents suffered. Janvier is among an unknown, but possibly substantial, number of native children to have benefited in some measure from his stay in a residential school. A Parisian priest took over the school when Janvier was 12 and encouraged his artistic talent. For his contribution to the arts, Janvier has been awarded the Order of Canada and a Governor General's Award in visual and media arts. These are the stories, bad and not-as-bad alike, that Joseph, hereditary chief of the Gwawaenuk First Nation and special adviser at West Vancouver's Indian Residential School Survivors Society, wants all Canadians to hear when the Canadian version of a truth-and-reconciliation commission is constituted June 1. The $60-million commission has a five-year mandate, but will report to Canadians within two years about the experiences of aboriginal children in the residential schools specifically created to break their ties to their families, language and culture. About 150,000 children were taken from their communities and forced to attend schools where they were kept in substandard conditions and often abused. The commission has the legal power to examine all church and government files concerning the schools, including records of the deaths of thousands of aboriginal children from tuberculosis. The highly contagious illness was reported to have swept through some schools when sick children were left in crowded dormitories. The commission is also expected to investigate persistent although unproven allegations of unreported deaths. Testimony before the truth- and-reconciliation commission will allow all Canadians to learn, Joseph said, why aboriginal people have become so "stereotyped -- that we're lazy or losers or drunkards or whatever." These stereotypes "have resulted from a very destructive, oppressive colonization of aboriginal people," Joseph said. "And I think if we learn that together, there's lots of room for creating understanding between all of us." Phil Fontaine, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, has also argued that the commission is necessary so that "there will be no more secrets." Fontaine took one of the first steps toward dismantling the secrecy around sexual abuse at the schools in 1990 when he told of his own "embarrassment and shame" as a victim of sexual abuse: "In my Grade 3 class ... if there were 20 boys, every single one of them ... would have experienced what I experienced." Critics of the truth-and-reconciliation process suggest that nothing of value will come of the exercise, that we are not like South Africa, trying to overcome institutionalized human-rights abuse. But to each country its own version of the process: If we learn about our shared history, including this dark chapter, and reaffirm our commitment to human rights, it will have been worth every cent of that $60 million.
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