Our Wonder Mill: The Children Remembered - trigger warning for residential school survivors

June 22, 2021

The Children Remembered - trigger warning for residential school survivors

White Whale Indians visiting their children at the school

White Whale people visiting their children at Red Deer Institute: "These people travelled over a hundred miles..." Red Deer, Alberta, 1914 UCCA, 1993.049P/861N

It’s interesting the different responses people have to stormy weather. One person loves to stand on the porch during a thunderstorm, oohing and aahing over every streak of lightening, as long as it’s not too close. Other people find the loud booms and crashes too much for their ears and nervous systems. Today’s scripture sounds the same; Jesus sleeps in the boat while the disciples search desperately for bailers and life jackets.

And Jesus seems arrogant when they wake him up. He knows he can still a storm, but how were they supposed to know this? He knows that death is not something to be afraid of, but how were they supposed to know that they should face death with faith instead of fear?

I have been feeling rather stormy myself since the news of the residential school unmarked graves. Mostly I feel the same kind of rage I felt three summers ago near Grand Prairie, standing by the grave of my uncle, an unnamed baby. That in itself was sad, but the enraging part was that he and another baby were hidden under a bush while at the other end of the field were tall crosses, angels and other monuments to pioneers and homesteaders. Why were these two little babies treated like pariahs in a graveyard, excluded so starkly from the community? They died before they were baptised, and that meant they were not allowed to be in consecrated ground; this practise continued until the mid 1950’s.

The news this month from Kamloops reminded me of that, only worse. Those graves were not just isolated, they were undocumented. We don’t know who they were, when they died, what their names were, and that level of neglect is stomach churning. But it’s not a surprise. There are thousands of children across this land who died while at residential schools, and we’ve known this for years.

Back in the 1980’s when I was studying to become a teacher, we watched a movie about residential schools. It was from the point of view of a young, idealistic schoolteacher like us, coming to a residential school. She had great intentions to love and care for the children, rescue them from ignorance and poverty, and assumed that she was doing God’s work. One scene had her picking at her thanksgiving dinner of roast turkey with all the trimmings while she knew the children would be eating porridge for supper again. The systemic underfunding, racist attitudes and hopeless anger of the children burned her out. She left with a broken heart. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the room when that movie finished. In the 80’s. We knew.

In the 90’s I took a course in Indigenous History from the U of A. The first nations classmates couldn’t use their credit cards in stores without producing proof of identity as the clerks assumed they the cards were stolen. They didn’t get served in restaurants. They said we whites were uptight about being punctual, and all we thought about was time and money. They told how horrendous the legacy of residential schools was, because their parents and grandparents had experienced abuse and cruelty. My mother-in-law did a video project pairing music from Les Misérables with the story of an indigenous young woman coming to the city to get away from family violence back home. The girls would arrive at the Greyhound bus station where church volunteers and pimps would wait for them. They were easy targets for the pimps, and the children ended up often in foster homes. In the 90’s that video was made. We knew.

We heard the call for a national inquiry into the schools, and learned from the TRC. I took our very first batch of prayer shawls down to Edmonton in 2013 where they joined thousands more donated by churches. I handed out shawls all day, listened to the body language, the anger, the stoicism, the quiet hope. That day was full of stories and pictures of children who didn’t come home, and the anguish of parents who never heard what happened to their little ones. In 2013. We knew.

Today we can’t pretend that we don’t know any more. We can’t deny what happened in the name of Jesus, in the name of civilization, in the name of progress. On the United Church website, Red Deer Industrial Institute – The Children Remembered they wrote:

When medical officer Peter Bryce penned his 1907 report on the poor health and high death rates of children who attended Indian residential schools, Red Deer IRS had the dubious distinction of reporting the most deaths during the year of his investigation… These numbers do not reflect the full extent of fatalities… because [sick] children were routinely discharged from school... Bryce estimated that the death rate at the schools was about 25 percent but rose to 40 percent when the children who were sent home were taken into account.

In 1907. We knew.

So what do we do now? We are being tossed in a tumultuous storm in a boat built on assumptions of British superiority. We are hearing the thunder of generations of grieving human beings who were crushed in our attempts to assimilate. We are seeing the lightening flashes of pain and outrage of people who are learning their history for the first time. We listen, remembering Jesus who said “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones, it would be better if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.”

Generations of Christian missionaries and teachers put more than a stumbling block before children. Our ancestors in the faith. Founders of our church.

The storm they started then is hitting us now. How do we respond? Maybe it is time to turn inward and reflect on what we have known, should have known and need to know. It is time to turn outward in humbleness and listen to what others know. It is time to act in love, speaking what we have known all along, testifying to the truth that the system was made by people like us and it can be dismantled by people like us. It is time to act. In 2008, an archaeological survey at the Red Deer Industrial School, located the remains of 18 individuals and a number of wooden headstones. In 2005, members of Sunnybrook United Church identified 12 of them, including 13-year-old David Laroque, and 14-year-old Irene Stoney, who both died of tuberculosis. That was a good start. And right now, we can write our MLAs and insist that the current curriculum for children in K-6, which talks about residential schools in age-appropriate ways, is protected and strengthened, not ignored and diminished.

Jesus calls us to stop having faith in ourselves and start having faith in him. That when we are humble, we can work with those others who are in the same boat with us to build truthful, trustworthy relationships that calm the storms and heal us all. May we have the courage to do so.