It Bothered Me Every Day of My Life Now 70, She Is Still Scarred by the Abuse, by Hubert Bauch, Montreal Gazette, June 12, 2008

'It Bothered Me Every Day of My Life'
Now 70, She Is Still Scarred by the Abuse

By Hubert Bauch
Montreal Gazette
June 12, 2008

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/story.html?id=f1f5cd49-9522-4b21-a317-c3d3d22f6c5c

The better part of a lifetime later, Kakaionstha Deer is still haunted by the shattering experience of being packed off to an Indian residential school when she was 6 years old.

She's 70 now, but still bears the scars of the three years she spent there.

"It's bothered me every day of my life," she said yesterday as she prepared to watch the prime minister's apology at her Kahnawake home with a group of fellow residential school survivors.

Residential school survivor Kakaionstha Deer with an inukshuk - a beacon for travellers - outside her Kahnawake home: "I lived the life of a sexually abused person." Deer was 6 when the abuse started.
Photo by John Mahoney

She and her sister, who was a year older, were sent to a school for native girls in Spanish, Ont., run by the Catholic church, where she was sexually abused by one of the nuns who she said was a predatory pedophile.

She and her sister were sent to the school on the recommendation of an aunt after her parents' marriage broke up and her mother had to go to work.

"She suggested we be sent there so we could have a good education," Deer said. "She said we'd be well taken care of. She evidently didn't know anything about it."

She said after her arrival she couldn't stop crying. "I cried and cried, so did my sister. I was put in Grade 1 and my sister was supposed to be a year ahead, but I cried so much that my sister had to stay with me."

It was a time of gnawing loneliness and terrifying sexual abuse. The abuse started when she was 6, perpetrated by a nun.

"There was what we called the baby dorm, where they put the youngest, 4 to 6 years old. That's where she'd come to get us," Deer said. "When you're with a pedophile for three years, you can imagine that you're afraid to go to sleep at night."

She said she survived the abuse by dissociating herself from the brutal reality of her situation. "When physical things were happening to me, my brain shut down."

She said the nuns who ran the school ate well, but the children were kept on a near-starvation diet. "My sister had the job of looking after the chickens and she'd eat the chicken feed because she was so hungry."

In later years, Deer married and had three sons but she said the residential school experience had an emotionally crippling effect.

"I lived the life of a sexually abused person. I never knew like who I was. You put a smile on your face and you try to be happy. But I felt with my children I was distant, and I never really knew why."

She embarked on a traditional aboriginal healing program 10 years ago and said it brought her a peace of mind she never knew before. "I began to look at my own tradition and ceremonies and I came back. I called it coming home."

Deer gets angry sometimes when she sees reports on TV about residential schools and squalid conditions on reserves.

"I want to know why this happened. Was it just because we're native? And who are the people who made these policies? What kind of mind could do that?"

She said she was apprehensive about the speech, but was pleasantly surprised in the end.

Harper "was right out front with the apology about what happened and said it would never happen again. You couldn't help but get emotional. It was a historic day."

As important, she said, were the responses by the native leaders on hand.

"They all spoke about respect. That's what we want, respect."

Contact: hbauch@thegazette.canwest.com