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onfrontin residential school abuse earching for ways to heal t will take yet nother gener- tion be/ ore he is accustomed to life under he new condi- tions, and efore the ben- efits of agricul- ure and indus- trial education ombine to make of him not a reformed ndian of the ast, but an entirely new roduct, quali- ied for the duties and rights of bol of the attempt by Canadian gov- ernment and churches to destroy Native culture and spirituality. British Columbia Native chic Bill Wilson, for example described ho "they took m mother whe she was eigh to an Angli school in Bay. She stil bears the SC Canadian citi- zenship. -Mary M.C. Lavell, first president of the Woman's FIie HIiis lndlan Resldentlal School, Salcarres, Sask., 1928: lingering scars. of a cat-o-nine tails, adminis tered by a Anglican nun who though Missionary Society of the United Church. R ev. Wilf Dieter was seven years old when he was taken from his ome on Saskatchewan's Peepeeskis eserve (about an hour's drive from Regina) to File Hills Indian Residential School near Balcarres. It 1 was the end of August 1933. "My first 'days," he says, "were lonely days. :ifhe 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 any- thing of myself, that Indians didn't need an education." Linda Bull, from Goodfi.sh Lake Relerve in Alberta, had heard similar IIOriea 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 farm- ers' homes. "But then they weren't allowed to stay home," says Bull. 'They were shipped back. Their par- ents 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 sym- she could sto her from speaking her language." Later, Wilson looked slowl around the chapel in which his semi nar on land issues was being held. " am very uncomfortable in this place,' he admitted. Then he looked at th non-Native people present. "But I · defend your right to worship as yo please." What happened in those schools "They let you know that foolin around wouldn't be tolerated," say Dieter. "A taste of the strap usuall convinced you. One thing that ente my mind is hearing and seeing some one else punished, it seems to bu more than if you were receiving th strap." Children were sometimes beate simply for slipping into their Nativ tongue. "The whole governmen church, Indian Affairs, they were in it together," says Dieter. "If th abuse was reported today, the stra marks on our rear ends, they would charged. " /J. I ~4/