"My family was taken from me, my language, my culture." The speaker waits for her audience to take in what she has said, repeats the phrase. "Family, language, culture."
In a windowless basement room in a modest Sarnia hotel, fifteen women lean forward on their metal chairs, pens poised to take notes.
We are attending a three-day retreat, organized by and for Ontario women school teachers. The focus is anti-racism and cultural appropriation. All day Friday and Saturday we have listened to speakers give voice to their stories. We have been prodded and challenged to rethink our assumptions about history, equity, power and charity. We've joked about being an underground movement, but the joke carries with it our determination to use what is being offered to improve teaching and learning in our classrooms.
Our speaker is wearing the uniform of our collective: slacks, knit top, jacket. One hand holds the side of the lectern. She is speaking without notes. Her voice is quiet, firm, the voice of a patient grade three teacher.
The story begins with her childhood in an Ojibway village, north of Lake Superior. We hear about exploring bush trails, berry picking, fishing. "I was happy," she says. "When I was seven, my life changed.”
A priest drove her to a residential school. She was too young to realize, the priest said, that this was for her own good.
She stops in the telling.
We wait for her to continue. One can hear the silence in the conference room. How many times have we used the words "for your own good"? How many times do we continue to use this phrase? Act on its assumption?
I had once been a teacher in an Indian residential school. The children I taught on James Bay, children as young as seven, were taken from their villages to live at the school with no hope of seeing their families except for ten days at Christmas and two months in the summer. Did leaving villages in large groups make it any easier? For them? For their families? I try to imagine the town where I now live stripped of its school children. If my daughter and son were taken away, would I be able to forgive?
The speaker does not tell us the name of the school, but I imagine it is prefaced with the word “saint”. The saints gave their lives to constant prayer and acts of piety. Catholic Indian residential schools and the Anglican Indian residential school where I worked carried a saint's name, but not his spirit.
Her new school housed a large communal showering area. Cement walls, floor, ceiling. A steel bathtub was waiting for her and a steel bin. Scrubbed, hair cut, doused with disinfectant, dress burned, she was deemed ready to put on a school uniform.
My James Bay students wore uniforms, but I had never witnessed the first week of orientation--the baths, the hair cutting. What happened to the children's clothes? Their belongings? It seems incredible to me now that I never bothered to ask those questions.
The conference speaker describes the school beatings and humiliation. She laments the loss of language and culture, the loss of who she was.
Catholic schools, Anglican, Presbyterian, United Church, Mennonite, Non-Denominational Christian. So many God-fearing institutions. So many individuals eager to bring children to salvation.
I know what she says is true. Because she is bearing witness to her life, because others have written about the destructive nature of residential schools, because I was once a teacher in a residential school.
I tried to stay away from playing savior. Being skeptical of salvation, mine included, I was far more interested in learning about my students' way of life. In class, I encouraged them to write, draw, share their stories. But as I listen to the speaker, these efforts seem pitifully thin.
She comes to the end and introduces her son, a man in his twenties, who is sitting in the row behind mine. He stands and we clap politely, if not enthusiastically. “This is the first time my son has heard the whole story,” she says.
An awkward silence settles on the room. Some listeners who were shuffling papers into briefcases, readying to leave, stop, while others stare down at their workshop notes. Ten years younger and he could have been one of my students. A generation ago, he would have been in a school like his mother.
Our speaker has shared a story of survival and courage; her story is a public story. I find myself shaking.
She asks if there are any questions, comments.
Before I know it, I rise to speak. My voice is too loud for the room. "Are we to say that everyone who worked in residential schools is now to blame?" I do not add that I worked in a residential school and that now, without wanting it, I am wearing the cloak of collective and personal guilt. Guilt for not doing more, for not asking the questions, for not paying attention. I am asking for understanding, for forgiveness.
The conference participants turn to look at me. Some squirm, look at watches, cross or uncross legs.
"How would you define blame?" the speaker asks. "And is that enough? I am demanding that we examine what has been. I am asking that we understand the role we had and have now.”
The last federally run Canadian Indian residential school, Akaitcho Hall in Yellowknife, was closed in 1990. A mere eight years before the conference. The pain remains. The survivors of the residential schools are still with us, so too, are their families.
Her son walks to the front, puts his arm around his mother. She has passed her story to him, and he will pass it to his children and they will never be able to walk away from it. On their way out, they stop by my chair. "I did not mean to upset you," she says.
I am deeply ashamed, because this was not the time to question her story, but to listen. I nod, apologize for my outburst. My words are correct and inherent in their correctness is their feebleness. I do not admit to my role. No thank you. No words directed to her son. Not taking her hand in mine. Not even a simple exchange of names.
Dinner is in an hour. The conference members file past me; they congratulate me on speaking up. No, I struggle to say, you don't understand. The past needs to be remembered. The question wasn't for us, it was for me, but no one wants to talk now. No one wants to hear another story of residential schools. This is past; it's history. Besides, they weren't involved.
“Just one thing,” I say as the women walk by. “Did anyone write down our speaker's name? Her first name?” No one. We will take our notes, go back to our classrooms, initiate projects. Some will really believe that this is enough.
What were my students' names? What was her name? It haunts me still.
