Truth and Reconciliation Commission set to release report Tuesday

By Joanna Smith
Our Windosr
May 31, 2015

http://www.ourwindsor.ca/news-story/5653326-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-set-to-release-report-tuesday/

OTTAWA — The red-brick façade and towering spire of the building remain, but the feelings they evoke in Shirley Horn has changed over the nearly seven decades she has been connected to the place.

Horn, a great-grandmother from Missanabie Cree First Nation, was 7 years old when she first entered the building as a student at the Shingwauk Residential School in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.

Now, Shingwauk Hall is one of the oldest buildings on the campus of Algoma University and Horn, who had already gone back to earn a fine arts degree there in 2005, has been named its first chancellor.

“I’m 74 years old now and I’m looking at it through a different lens than when I first walked up those steps at the age of 7, that same building, and what I’m asking myself at this time of my life is: what is my responsibility in this? How am I going to make the change?” says Horn, who will be sworn in as the titular head of the post-secondary institution at a convocation ceremony June 13.

Prior to that, Horn will attend the closing events as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission prepares to release its findings Tuesday in Ottawa.

Horn was sent to St. Johns Indian Residential School, near her home in Chapleau, Ont., when she was 5 years old and then, two years later, she was transferred to Shingwauk, where she stayed for six years.

She remembers a lot of hard work — cleaning, cooking and building maintenance — and a “white” curriculum taught only half the day, so that students would receive enough education to become domestic workers once they left the school, but not enough to continue on to college.

“In hindsight now, I can see the agenda and understand it more clearly,” Horn says. “So, moving through that, coming out, trying to live one’s life in a normal way, not having any really firm grasp of how we should be parenting our children . . . We lived in an institution that never considered those kinds of life skills and how we would deal with our lives after that. And with a lot of the children, there was physical and sexual abuse that went on, which caused incredible impacts on the students and their families.”

Shingwauk Indian Residential School closed in 1970 and then she became a founding member of the Children of Shingwauk Alumni Association, which held a reunion for the first time in 1981, were students came to share their stories, photographs, laughter and tears.

That grassroots movement continued to grow over the years, developing an online archive of photographs and school records and eventually, in partnership with the National Residential Schools Survivors’ Society and Algoma University, led to the creation of the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre, which has a home on the campus.

Jonathan Dewar, director of the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre, said the university is committed to providing space to acknowledge its history and teach people about it, but also to making the promotion of healing and learning from that legacy a major, identifying characteristic of the institution.

“We are really walking the talk, in that sense,” said Dewar, adding the appointment of Horn as the first chancellor is part of that promise.

Horn says the evolving relationship between the Shingwauk survivors and the university, which has not always been easy, has much to teach other individuals and communities across Canada about building a better future.

“To me, that is a true act of reconciliation,” says Horn.