"Searching for Ways to Heal"

It will take yet another generation before he is accustomed to life under the new conditions, and before the benefits of agriculture and industrial education combine to make of him not a reformed Indian of the past, but an entirely new product, qualified for the duties and rights of Canadian citizenship. - Mary M.C. Lavell, first president of the Woman's Missionary Society of the United Church.

Rev. Wilf Dieter was seven years old when he was taken from his home on Saskatchewan's Peepeeskis Reserve (about an hour's drive from Regina) to File Hills Indian Residential School near Balcarres. It was the end of August 1933. "My first days," he says, "were lonely days. The institution was strange to me. There were many children there. The dormitories were so big, everything was strange. The first thing they done was cut your hair to the scalp."

Dieter was a student at File Hills until 1942. When you ask what he learned there, he pauses briefly. "I think it taught me how I would not want to treat people. I was called no-good, that I would never make anything of myself, that Indians didn't need an education."

Linda Bull, from Goodfish Lake Reserve in Alberta, had heard similar stories from her elders. Once, for a misdemeanor, her father and two other boys had their heads shaved, leaving only the letters ID, for Indian Department. Humiliated, they decided to walk home to Saddle Lake from their Methodist school near Edmonton, refusing to take off their hats even when offered rest in farmers' homes. "But when they weren't allowed to stay home," says Bull. "They were shipped back. Their parents had no say in this."

Appalled by what she was hearing, Bull began her master's thesis on the schools, seeking out more stories. "Our elders were not allowed to voice their oppression. They were shut up completely. But to start the healing process, you have to begin sharing."

The residential schools are gone now, closed one by one throughout the '60s and '70s, and the sharing Bull seeks has begun. At a recent Indigenous Peoples Conference in London, Ont., attended by Native people from all over Canada, the schools emerged as a powerful symbol of the attempt by the Canadian government and churches to destroy Native culture and spirituality. British Columbia Native chief Bill Wilson, for example, described how "they took my mother when she was eight to an Anglican school in Alert Bay. She still bears the scars of a cat-o-nine-tails, administered by an Anglican nun, who thought she could stop her from speaking her language."

Later, Wilson looked slowly around the chapel in which his seminar on land issues was being held. "I am very uncomfortable in this place," he admitted. Then he looked at the non-Native people present. "But I will defend your right to worship as you please."

What happened in those schools? "They let you know that fooling around wouldn't be tolerated," says Dieter. "A taste of the strap usually convinced you. One thing that enters my mind is hearing and seeing someone else punished, it seems to hurt more than if you were receiving the strap."

Children were sometimes beaten simply for slipping into their Native tongue. "The whole government church, Indian Affairs, they were all in it together," says Dieter. "If the abuse was reported today, the strap marks on our rear ends, they would be charged."

Still, the atmosphere in the schools clearly varied from place to place, depending on the era and the administration. Times improved from the early Methodist schools, when children were sometimes shackled so they wouldn't run away. Rev. Bernard Lee, principal at Norway House in Manitoba from 1958 to 1967, says that "no one was punished for speaking their language" in his time, although he remembers being shocked by conditions at the junior school in Brandon, where "it seemed like a scene out of Dickens." Much, he explains, depended on the principal. "We had some very dedicated people." He "occasionally had to strap boys for running away in winter. They could have frozen to death." It's an action, he says now, that has "always bothered my conscience. It may have been wiser to give a warning" that the boys would be expelled.

As for allegations of sexual abuse which haunt some Roman Catholic institutions, Lee recalls only one incident at Norway House: a boy came and asked to be sent home, even though he had only an elderly grandfather to take care of him. When Lee inquired why, the boy said he would commit suicide if he wasn't allowed to leave, because the Boys' Superviser was trying to "treat him like a woman." The staff member was immediately dismissed.

But just as in institutions today, sometimes the administration didn't hear everything. "When I was 10 and went to Alberni Indian Residential School," Alvin Dixon, British Columbia. Conference's minister for Native ministries explains, "my 16-year-old cousin was there. He pointed to one of the staff and said, 'If he tries anything with you, hit him in the gut and run for me.' So we dealt with these things ourselves."

Conditions varied in terms of food, too. Government funding for the schools in the '30s and '40s was low; even later, when funding improved, "we received less money to feed students than was given for inmates in federal penitentiaries," says Lee. "We had to manage carefully." Dieter remembers that, although the meals were not bad, "we never got enough to eat, especially when we had to work half a day, sawing wood, cleaning barns, digging potatoes, any kind of harvesting and planting."

But the children at File Hills were inventive in their attempts to feed themselves, escaping to hunt small game and build a fire to cook it. "We used to steal anything we could to eat, we'd even run for miles on a Saturday to raid homes for a bit of food. At school, every room that had food in it would have a lock. We always managed to pick it. Once in a while the staff would come and search us. This was any time, without warning; they would find brown sugar, bread or fruit on us, any kind of contraband."

There were those who attempted change. "I noticed that the staff were good to us were released by means of too much compassion and loyalty to us," says Dieter. "But I must say our classroom was a peaceful place, because the teachers I remember were very good."

A young teacher named Lucy Affleck at Round Lake Indian Residential School near Stockholm, Saskatchewan in 1929, is one example. "The children lack completely the mothering that only one could give them who lived close enough to them to know their individual dispositions," she wrote to the Superintendent of Indian Missions in Toronto, Dr. A. Barner, after she had been there just over a month. "Mrs. Ross is a strong disciplinarian, wonderfully so, but the discipline they are receiving is not the result of training or the rule of love."

Her anguished letter illustrates many of the difficulties at the schools. In what was a windy, wet October there was no heat in the residence, and "they are still wearing their summer clothing, the boys without underwear of any kind, and the result is that we have a bad epidemic of coughing." Although "90 percent of these children are TB suspects - a few are rather more so - there is no care to prevent serious colds."

Hygiene was a problem. "Bath tubs don't work and the boys have to bathe in laundry tubs...." Toilets don't flush, and "sweeping in the boys' dormitory - you will know what a dust an unoiled floor makes - is done seven days in the week by four girls, three of whom are from families with bad TB records."

She points out that although there is enough food, "it is not well chosen. As there is a great number of pigs on the farm, much of the milk must go to them." Furthermore, underfunding and consequent overcrowding for the sake of government grants meant "we have 10 more girls than beds in the girls' dormitory, and more coming." The principal "keeps in his office apples and oranges bought by the crate which he sells to the children at five cents apiece, and exhorts them to come and buy when he knows they have received money from their parents."

But for her, the main problem was that Round Lake with its small, uncared for children "not knowing what else to do with themselves, running wild in the cold and dark," was simply the opposite of what a school run by the United Church should be. "The religious knowledge these little Indians get is a matter of form only. Of a Gospel of love and light they hear nothing."

It was the same fact a small Wilf Dieter would discover four years later at File Hills, and he echoes Affleck's letter with his memories. "One thing they did was teach us to pray, and we got a lot of Bible teachings. But it was ineffective, because it was taught without reflecting any compassion or love. This was one of the reasons why the students didn't like the word Christianity, because the staff didn't reflect a lot of trust."

In any case, Affleck's attempt to improve conditions was unacceptable. A few weeks later she was called to the principal. "The church demands the immediate dismissal of anyone disloyal to the staff," he said. "You may take either a morning or an afternoon train."

The full results of the schools didn't become clear until a whole generation of children had gone through them. Bull notes how some elders in her community were "so dictatorial," while others, the ones who hadn't gone to residential school, were gentle with their children. The schools had provided only negative parenting skills for children who "became an extension of that institution when they became parents."

This was understandable. "What do you do when you are cut off from your way of being socialized, your your belief system, your language, your culture?"

Removing children from their parents at an early age, and subjecting them to the rigid discipline favored at the time, was disastrous. Bernard Lee, for one, began to realize that "the institution was a poor place to raise kids. They didn't live in homes where they could see parental modelling; I read books on child care, and got reports from England about the results of maternal deprivation."

He began to push for the schools' closure, writing letters to the director of education in Ottawa. In an echo of Bull's words, he says clearly and sadly "children were not learning the arts of parenting." Still, for those from remote reserves, whose families would be on the trap lines all winter, or with no day school where they lived, it had been a way of achieving literacy. "I doubt whether it was worth it. But what would the alternative have been for, say, an Elijah Harper? He came from Red Sucker Lake because of inadequate schooling on his home reserve."

The expressed purpose of the schools was to equip the children to take their place in "mainstream' Canadian society. That meant training in agriculture as well as books, even though for most Native people, life back home wasn't necessarily suited to farming. It made it, Dieter remembers, "difficult to get an education. They kicked us out of school to seed; we had maybe 100 head of cattle, and horses to look after."

Some, like Dixon, admit to rather liking the escape from the classroom. But the sacrificing of book work in order to run the farm was sometimes overdone. In 1935, for example, a United Church commission visited nine of the schools. At Round Lake, they pointed out drily, "it has been found necessary, in the case of most Residential Schools, to have a farm attached to them, but in this particular instance we have... the School attached to a farm... the minds of the principal and the outside staff... too entirely taken up with the development of a show herd of Holsteins" which weren't suitable, in any case, for conditions on the Reserve.

But the main problem was that removing children from their homes, to be "unhampered by the influence and traditions of the older Indians on the reserve," as one writer of the time put it, was an act of overwhelming arrogance. A 1939 report, for example, by T.B.R. Westgate on behalf of several Canadian churches, declared that "it is the solemn duty of the white man with his advanced knowledge, to interpret to those less privileged than himself, the Indians included, the higher values of this present world...."

The United Church was not exempt. Even Affleck, while she saw clearly the schools' terrible gap between Christian theory and practice, didn't note that Native people had, in Bull's words, "our own systems, which were not recognized. We had our own spirituality."

Few did see that spirituality. Katharine Hockin, later a missionary with the Woman's Missionary Society, was recruited as a recent university graduate to teach at the residential school at Ahousat, B.C., in 1929. She was deeply angered by the principal's lack of "respect for Indian heritage and culture. His concern was to produce Canadian Christians!" He was, she remembers, highly regarded by the WMS at the time.

Back to when the little boy, Wilf, was in school. The 1935 United Church commission on Native education reported that "at the present time possibly 5 percent of the pupils in our schools can be so trained and educated that they will leave the school and integrate themselves in the common life of the Canadian people...." What they aimed for was the remaining "95 percent to become healthful, capable, cultured Christian people...."

Bull puts it more bluntly. The schools were attempting "to make them into good Canadian citizens, to assimilate them, Christianize them, turn them into little brown white men."

But there were, says Dieter, "good people around." When, at 14, he ran away from the school in "Indian summer weather," he was picked up by an RCMP officer. "I thought police were only for arresting and shooting," he says. "Well, I was wrong. Corporal Myers took me hunting all day. Wild birds. I was spotting, he was shooting. But while all this was going on, he was asking me about the school. I told him everything. When I was in his office, he was writing everything I said. To make a short story, he said, I will not be punished. And I was not punished."

There were other people who offered hope: Lee, writing to the government, asking for an end to it; Affleck, sacrificing a job in the Depression in the hope of making things better; individual teachers and staff. Most of all there were the children themselves, Bull's father, and Dieter, and so many others who became today's elders. "Super people," says Bull, her voice softening, "because they were able to look at themselves and be self-reflective. The hardest thing they learned was how to forgive those people who brought them up. When you are dealing with personal spiritual growth, to relieve suffering you have to start dealing with it, not put the blame on anybody. That's one of the hardest lessons."

There is healing in knowing you have defeated attempts to take away who you are. Bull says she "became more Indianized while I was working on this thesis. I hope Native people will get back their pride, get back their own identity, and start promoting their own language, culture, belief system. It's very important to me."

And there have been other steps, including a moderator's task group set up by the United Church, to research and respond to issues raised by the schools. Dixon points to "building blocks for growth" in British Columbia; which enables Native people to receive a Masters of Divinity degree by extension; the Theological Education by Extension Centre, which offers theological education for lay people; the B.C. Indian Land Claims Fund; the Thomas Crosby ministry and its redesigning; and the election of Gitksan hereditary chief Jim Angus as B.C. Conference president. "In the last 10 years, the staff and students of the residential schools in British Columbia have had two successful reunions. We see that as part of the healing process, too."

Bull points to the apology made by the United Church to Native people. "The same hand that abused is the hand that can heal."

But as with any abuse, cultural abuse takes years to surface. It still may take a while. All Native Circle Conference Speaker Rev. Alf Dumont suggests it is possible there may have been some healing, and that experiences may not have been as severe as in Catholic schools. It is also possible, though, that "many people have scars which make it difficult to bring these experiences forward, and this may be the beginning of the process. It may take years to get to the stage where they have a voice."

Nine Years at File Hills couldn't destroy Wilf Dieter's voice. The small boy who slipped over the fence with his friends on Saturdays to hunt partridge with a slingshot - and who later became a United Church minister - says he "never had problems with my identity. I always knew who I was and am aware of my strengths and weaknesses. Identifying both gave me the challenges of my life and made me proud of who I am. Proud of my parents, wife and family, keeping ever closer to our great spirits."

Donna Sinclair

Note: All the schools referred to in this article were run by the Board of Home Missions or the Woman's Missionary Society of the United Church, with the exception of the one referred to at Alert Bay. Linda Bull's thesis will be published as Indian Residential Schooling: a Native Perspective; other historical material in this article is from Sinclair's forthcoming book on the Woman's Missionary Society of the United Church.