Residential School Stories to Be Preserved at National Research Centre, Edmonton Event Told

By Brent Wittmeier
Edmonton Journal
March 28, 2014

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/Truth+Reconciliation+Commission+compile+estimate+many+students+died+residential+schools/9674196/story.html

Elder Reg Crowshoe gives the prayer in Hall A to begin the day’s activities at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission event at the Shaw Conference Centre on Friday, Mar. 28, 2014.

Each story is told in its own way, filled with anger, resignation and resilience. Some are poetry. Others are just a few words long.

Survivor stories may be central for most Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, but at a Friday afternoon session in a room downstairs at the Shaw Conference Centre, the discussion was about what will happen when it’s all over.

The commission is slated to conclude its work next June when it issues a final report reflecting six years of work and a $60-million mandate, extended one year due to difficulties in getting government documents. The commission is one to emerge from a $5-billion settlement between the federal government, Canadian churches and aboriginals in 2007.

Stories and documents collected by the commission will be housed digitally at a National Research Centre (NRC) at the University of Manitoba, which will initially open at the Chancellor’s Hall until a new riverside memorial building can be built. A director was appointed in February.

Stories being heard at commission events will be checked to ensure they don’t “name names,” a condition of the settlement agreement, then made available through a growing list of regional centres. Other documents will remain solely accessible at the centre. At this point, many of the details are still being worked out.

“I think there’s a danger in this just becoming an archive, a library,” said Wab Kinew, an aboriginal broadcaster and musician who is director of indigenous inclusion at the University of Winnipeg, one of the partner institutions.

“We have to make sure that the NRC is engaging with people wherever they’re at. It has to be compelling for children. It has to walk the line between telling the truth and not completely alienating those who aren’t descendants of survivors.”

Doris Young, a residential school survivor who works with the University College of the North, talked about the importance of maintaining the link with survivors.

“It is my hope it will always be there, that human touch,” said Young, a member of the commission’s Indian Residential School Survivor Committee. “This is not just a research centre, this is a very special place for Canadians to come and see their history.”

Before Edmonton, the commission had collected approximately 12,000 statements and 4.5 million government and church documents, said Murray Sinclair, commission chair.

The commission is also trying to find out how many students died at residential schools as part of a missing children project, asking vital statistics offices throughout the country for their estimates of deaths.

For now, the collection of stories continues. At the Shaw Conference Centre, there’s a room behind a curtain for private statements. Others tell their stories before hundreds of listeners at a main hall.

At a church area in one of several halls, Amy Arcand sat at a round table, flipping through a binder of photos from the Roman Catholic-run Ermineskin Indian Residential School. She found her 14-year-old self in a row of girls in matching shirts and ties from 1961-62, Arcand was a member of the Rangers, which she describes as an advanced form of Girl Scouts. Arcand remembers tying knots, marching.

In a sharing circle a floor below, Alfred Beaver talked about being pulled from his Wabasca home to attend residential school between 1950 and 1961. Because of bone deformities that left his arms and legs “like macaroni,” he was bullied and nicknamed “frog.”

Beaver told listeners about losing a handkerchief, then being accused by a nun of using it as toilet paper. He was sent into the outhouse to retrieve it, where he was forced to crawl through the waste to try to find a cloth he knew wasn’t there.

“I think that was the first time I experienced a tinge of anger, of hate,” said Beaver, who later spent time in prison and working in a sawmill. In the 1970s, he tracked down a priest who abused him, putting a knife to his throat.

“I’m not a little boy any more,” he told him. Perennially shy, Beaver talked about learning to dance in later life, taking rumba and tango lessons at Canada Place.

Contact: bwittmeier@edmontonjournal.com