"I Lost My Innocence:" Commission Hears of Childhoods Lost in Residential Schools

By Michael Wright
Calgary Herald
November 4, 2013

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/calgary/tells+Reconciliation+Committee+mother+made+feel+ashamed+language/9122592/story.html

Truth and Reconciliation Commission Chair Justice Murray Sinclair

Victoria Crowchild knew she needed help when she found herself yelling at her young son because his clothes were dirty.

The wounds she carried from her days in an Indian residential school overwhelmed her in adulthood and finally drove to her to get help.

Crowchild recounted her days at several residential schools to the Calgary hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Monday.

"The whole thing unwound in my face," she said of the abuse she directed at her son.

"I was calling him all the names the teacher had call me. I was doing exactly what . . . that teacher had done to me. And then I realized what I'd become. Because I knew I had to stop I couldn't do this to my son."

Crowchild was forced to attend several residential schools. She was removed from the first, she said, because she cried too much.

The second school was worse.

"I remember going into a dorm," she said.

"In the middle of the night I remember somebody putting their hands on me and that went on for a while. I screamed. They put their hand over my mouth and they told me if I ever said anything to anybody they would say I was lying. I didn't say anything all I could do was cry. I felt so alone."

Background: Abuse at the schools: 'I felt so dirty'

Crowchild said she spent five years in counselling as an adult to try and come to terms with her suffering.

"I went there I lost my innocence. I lost my dignity, I lost my pride, I lost who I was and what I was.

"I was told that I was stupid, dumb, lazy, ugly. That I was a savage."

One teacher who was especially abusive in the classroom gave her the will to speak publicly to the committee, she said.

"If she makes me quit what I have to tell you then she's won, that teacher."

Background: "Now you are no longer an Indian"

Darryl Brass told the commission he was unable to bear the beatings and humiliation of a residential school in Saskatchewan, so he and a friend ran away.

When he was found and returned by the RCMP, Brass said a priest took him to a remote building on the school grounds, where he was left alone.

Soon after, another man came in, he said, and asked him why he had run away.

Brass took long pauses as he described what happened next to the committee.

"He wanted me to take my clothes off. I hated it. I didn't want my clothes to be removed. And then he proceeded to punch me around, he punched me in the back of the head and in the ribs so hard I fell down.

"Then I was thrown on a mattress and my underwear was pulled off. I was raped. I never hated it in life so much. I've never hated anyone as much as that."

With a swollen head form the beating, Brass said he struggled to fall asleep that night, struck by a sensation of flipping backwards when he did.

"I could hear a real loud buzzing in my head. lt still happens once in a while to this day. It takes me back to that place."

Brass struggled with alcoholism as a young man and was jailed many times. Usually for violence.

He was sober now, and said he was proud his eight children all had jobs and were law-abiding.

"I think if it wasn't for tears I'd be dead. It was tears that brought me healing."