Survivors of residential school system share emotional stories as Truth and Reconciliation Commission wraps up in Ottawa

Kathy Absolon’s voice shook as she spoke, quietly, of her mother and her mother’s siblings who were never able to find any kind of healing after the racism and abuse they experienced as children.

“The residential school was a time bomb that went off in my family,” she said.

Absolon’s mother, who is now 83 years old and lives on North-Eastern point Georgian Bay, attended the St John’s Indian Residential School in Chaplea, Ontario from the age of five to 15.

Her aunts and uncles also attended the institution and Absolon said the experience of residential school has had a serious and negative impact on her family, on how they all connected with each other. It tore them apart, she said, and left them scattered to the wind.

Aboslon and many other survivors, or family members of survivors, spoke candidly Monday about the intergenerational effects of Canada’s Indian Residential School system during the final days of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Ottawa.

Sharing circles facilitated by members of the Indian Residential School Survival Committee gave those like Absolon the chance to talk openly in a safe space about their families’ stories and, perhaps, take a step towards healing.

Parents don’t know how to parent and aunts and uncles don’t know how to be aunts and uncles, she suggested.

“Because of what our parents went through, they didn’t know how to help us,” Absolon said. “Our parents were struggling and mediating with alcohol, and my mum for most of my life medicated her grief and her depression and her inferiority with alcohol, as did the rest of her family.”

Absolon added that she doesn’t believe her family has had a chance to do something like she did Monday and that sharing might help them find some peace.

“Maybe they will know that what happened was wrong,” she said.

John Moses from the Upper Mohawk band near Brantford took a few minutes Monday morning to read out a letter written by his father, Russ, who passed away in 2013.

Russ Moses had been in residential school as well — the Mohawk Institute — and was asked many years later, in 1965, after 15 years of military service to provide some thoughts in written form on his experience at the school for an annual convention for Residential School principals and administrators.

“He and his older brother Elliot, his younger sister, my aunt Thelma, attendee from 1940 to 1947,” Moses said.

As he read out the letter, the son talked about the terrible food his father and his father’s fellow students were fed, the dietary deficiencies, the treats and feasts of one egg per student per year at Easter and of a bit of sugar added to a Christmas breakfast.

The children, he said, weren’t treated as human beings and were beaten with the smallest pretext.

“[If a child is] tired, hungry and lice-infested, and treated as a subhuman, how in heavens do you expect to make a decent citizen out of him or her?” he continued to read.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has heard thousands of testimonies over the past 7 years from survivors of Canada’s Residential School system. The purpose of the Commission has been to reveal past wrongdoings of the Canadian government and churches, and also to restore trust and form a new kind of relationship between aboriginal peoples and non-aboriginal peoples in Canada.

“The years that an Indian child spends at Indian Residential School has a very great deal to do with his or her future outlook on life,” Moses, in the words of his father, said.

“In my own case, it showed that Indians are different because you made us different.”

The Commission wraps up in Ottawa, with a number of events, panels, exhibits and opportunities for further healing, from May 31 to June 3. A summary of the TRC’s final report will be released June 2 with the full report to follow in the month’s to come.