First Nations Will Listen, but Expectations Low
By Suzanne Fournier
The Province
June 10, 2008
http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/story.html?id=8dac7117-c065-402c-a5cc-dc03dd39f40a
B.C. aboriginal leaders say Prime Minister Stephen Harper's apology tomorrow to residential-school survivors is too little, too late.
"A lot of our people are suffering and dying because of the residential schools," said Willie Blackwater, one of the pioneers in a 2005 lawsuit against the federal government and the United Church for the horrific sexual and physical abuse he and others suffered at the Alberni Indian Residential School.
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| Counsellor and former residential-school student Lorraine Hance will be at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre tomorrow to help other former students gathered there deal with their emotions as the apology is read in the House of Commons in Ottawa.
Photograph by : Wayne Leidenfrost, The Province Photo by Wayne Leidenfrost |
"You can't just give people an apology after all this time and say all is forgiven, because it's not."
Blackwater, whose Gitxsan name is Sii' Haast, is to fly to Ottawa today at Harper's invitation to hear the federal government's apology.
Blackwater was raped and beaten by Arthur Plint, who served eight years in prison for numerous sexual offences against Indian boys and was paroled in 2003 at the age of 85.
Blackwater settled his case out of court and got $19,000 in a "common experience payment," part of a $1.9-billion payout offered by Ottawa in 2005.
Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl said Harper's apology, to be heard in Ottawa by about 100 survivors and native leaders in the House of Commons, will be "fairly lengthy" and "very thorough."
Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, said "there was no consultation with aboriginal people about this apology, or the proper ceremonial way it should be delivered."
Native Women's Society of Canada president Beverley Jacobs, who is to meet Harper before and after the apology, said "the apology is totally politically expedient for this government, but we will listen to see if Harper recognizes aboriginal women, who as keepers of language and culture, were severely harmed by the schools."
Lorraine Hance, a counsellor at Healing Our Spirit Society who works with 150 residential-school survivors, will be at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre as Harper's apology is read at noon Vancouver time, to help former students deal with their emotions.
Hance said her clients have been denied federal compensation but suffer from "the shame, the cultural genocide, and the physical and sexual abuse that went on in those schools."
"I know some people say they had a positive experience there, but I think it is outweighed by the suffering," she said.
Hance, whose mother and nine of 11 siblings were sent to St. George's school in Lytton, says she "still has marks all over my body."
"I was sent to St. George's when I was six, but I couldn't understand English so I was beaten with the buckle end of a big thick razor strap," said Hance. "I spent 12 years there and I was sexually abused by the priest and the matron, who dragged me down concrete stairs by my hair and flushed my head in the toilet."
Hance said she received only $10,000 under the common-experience payout.
The $1.9 billion was set aside for residential-school survivors after provincial and federal governments fought the victims and the churches in a decade of expensive lawsuits that the survivors slowly began to win.
Blackwater said many former residential school students "have gotten more money than they've ever had, and depending on where they are in their healing, they are just coping."
"They're drinking it up and drugging it up, and we are left as usual to help our own people. What's missing from this apology is human compassion."
Contact: sfournier@png.canwest.com
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