The Canadian Residential School Experience: A Personal Perspective

11 June 2008 marked a historic moment in the Canadian House of Commons when Prime Minister Steven Harper officially apologized to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples of Canada for a devastating government assimilation policy: the residential school confinement of their children. This systematic internment lasted a century and yielded multiple generations of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children who were wrenched away from their families and forced to live in schools where their language and culture was banned and where many were abused physically and sexually. ‘The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history and will never be repeated,’ Prime Minister Harper said to a gallery full of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis representatives from all across Canada.

I was one of those representatives on that historic day. I am also one of an estimated 87,000 residential school survivors and I am here to share a personal experience and offer a personal perspective of the devastating legacy that this course of action has left on the lives of generations of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples of Canada.

I recall my pre-school years as being a happy, loving childhood with much nurturing, surrounded by family which included parents, grandparents, siblings, and other extended family members. At the age of five years, my older brother and I were taken away to residential school, which, incidentally, was a mere five-minute walk from where we lived.

I remember looking forward to school because I was going to be able to learn English and be able to decipher what the bubbles said in the comic books that I would look at for hours!!

Strangely, my parents did not prepare us for what to expect at school and I soon found why they couldn't … my mother still held on to the painful memories from the decade she had spent in the very school she was now forced by law to enrol her children in!