Category Archives: Indigenous–Indian Residential Schools

The Case of Richard Thomas

Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

Duncan McCue of CBC travelled to Penelakut, an island off the coast of B.C., and the site of the Kuper Island Residential School. The community has torn down the reviled building, but the dark memories of what happened at the nearly-century old institution linger. Survivors James and Tony Charlie gave him  a tour of their old school grounds, and they looked into the mystery of what happened to one boy, Richard Thomas, who did not make it out alive. He died at age 15. He was he was the brother of Belvie I blogged about earlier.

The only thing that was certain about Richard’s death was that it was not caused by natural causes. Richard was found dead hanging from a rope thrown over a light fixture where the students discovered the body. Some children suspected the priest who had been regularly mean to Richard for some reason also killed him. Others think Richard was driven to suicide by the intolerable repeated abuse that he suffered. The priest was charged with sexual assault in another case, but died before the trial.

The first few years at the school Richard actually wanted to become a priest. That was a big deal. Indigenous people rarely had such aspirations.

However, Richard’s enthusiasm for the priesthood dwindled after a few years in school. Days before his graduation from Kuper Island, Richard phoned home and let his family know how excited he was about his graduation. He also said when he got home he was going to talk about everything at the school. He did not say what it was.  His family never heard from him again. Two days later the police called and told the family Richard had committed suicide. They didn’t believe it. Why would a boy who was so excited about his graduation commit suicide so close to the glorious event? It made no sense.

The coroner told them it didn’t seem right and suggested they look into it.

Richard and Belvie’s mother tried to find out from the Oblates, a religious order who ran the school at Kuper Island. She was told, “You have heard all you’re going to hear.” People had told McCue that the reason Richard was upset was that he had heard his parents were divorcing. This was not true. They were never divorcing. They remained together.

Another story circulated through the school that Richard had been killed. Given the circumstances this made sense. Belvie believed Richard was murdered. Much of the podcast series by the CBC explores what happened to Richard Thomas.

The Police Investigate Kuper Island

Exploitation, Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools, Sexual harassment/Assault

 

I will give a trigger warn ing here. Some of this post is very graphic and people might find it disturbing.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported about a 1939 police investigation into the Kuper Island residential school that had been sparked by a series of cases involving children running away from school/home. After months of archival requests, the CBC team got a copy of the report. It was a RCMP report about 6 boys who took 2 canoes from indigenous people on the island.

The RCMP officer who was investigating though did not do what officers usually did, namely march the kids back to school. He was actually interested. This officer actually asked the children for a statement. He asked the children why they had run away. 2 students said they did not want to go back because it was “ bad.” Another said a priest, whom he named, tried to commit “unnatural acts” with him. Parents of all 6 boys did not want to send their sons sent back to the school. The fathers were very angry. One threatened to go to the school with a shotgun. The officer suggested follow up was needed. As a result the RCMP gathered more than 50 statements. The officer said, “I am convinced conditions are not as they should be re the school.”

Here is a statement by one student:

“One day just before Christmas [name redacted] took me out on his boat. He told me to take my pants down in the boat as we were going to go to bed. “If I didn’t,” he told me, “I am going to throw you off the boat into the water.” He got into bed beside me. He tried to stick his thing into me. He could not get it in. So he asked me to play with his thing. I had to do it because I could not get away from him.’

 

There were multiple reports from girls who said the church Fathers were assaulting them in the laundry room. McCue said “the volume of statements here is staggering. This isn’t just one or two kids who are saying this. This is dozens of children.”

Then the Department of Indian Affairs [‘DIA’) got involved. What did they do? They tried to have the officers labelled as insubordinate! But they changed their strategy after reading the statements of the children. The priest who took the boy out in the boat was assigned to another mission in another province, where, of course, he was free to molest again.

A school employee was dismissed.  The Department of Indian Affairs (‘DIA’) arranged for him to leave the province too. As a result, the local Catholic Bishop sent furious letters to Ottawa. Bishop J.C. Cody wrote, “Though quite cognizant of certain breaches of morality, I fail to see any advantage in ruining an institution because of some individuals supposed or even real misdeeds.” He didn’t even care if the allegations were true! Since the suspects were out of the province the case was closed. No further investigations. No charges were laid.

Duncan McCue of the CBC reached what I believe was the right conclusion: “As far as the government and church were concerned, investigating and prosecuting wrong doers took a back seat to protecting the school’s reputation.” After full investigation nothing happened!

So, for Belvie, one of the girls at the school, the abuse continued. One day a father told her that her brother was sick and asked her to follow him to the infirmary. That was unusual because girls usually did not mix with their families or others in the school. There she met another man—one of the priests. He grabbed her and covered her nose and she passed out. When she regained consciousness, she was on the floor naked. She did not know what had happened. She went to the bathroom because semen was running out of her body. She was 11 years old.

Although Belvie did not report it to the authorities it is highly unlikely that anything would ever have happened. As Duncan McCue said, “In the 85-year history of the residential school at Kuper Island, only one person was ever charged—Glen Doughty. But it was clear there were many serial abusers at the school. Not just one bad apple as you so often hear. And it wasn’t only male employees. ”

Belvie made a startling remark about the nuns: “They had no time for us, unless they were sexually abusing us.” Belvie endured 5 years of abuse at Kuper Island, until she left in 1962. But her brother Richard had to stay. More about him later

 

Propaganda Canadian style

Exploitation, Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

There are not many photographs of school children at Kuper Island Residential School, but there were many formal portraits of the school bands. Children stood ramrod straight posing for the photographs. The schools showed off the bands as a way of showing the general public the good works at the schools. It was part of the program of propaganda. Propaganda Canadian style. The media ate it up and fed it to the Canadian public without any critical thought to what was happening. The media like the rest of us were blissfully ignorant. But they helped spread the government’s message about how lucky the young Indian children were to be going to Montreal from Kuper Island British Columbia on a trip with their band.

As Duncan McCue the host of the CBC podcast pointed out,

“The media was complicit in helping to manufacture support for residential schools. In one feature the missionaries are portrayed as fighting an uphill battle in their efforts  to educate children because ‘as soon as a boy or girl returns to a home environment they lose all ambition, and initiative, reverting to the reserve to become drunks.’ Though the reporter does acknowledge there was a certain prison atmosphere to Kuper Island.”

 

This propaganda showed the public what great things the churches and government were doing for the benefit of Indians. Who could not be impressed? Especially when young children who had often never been away from their home reserves went to big cities like Montreal. Imagine that! What a thrill that must have been for the Indigenous kids.

The bands from Kuper Island residential school played all over Vancouver Island and even the mainland. Every Remembrance Day and many other events throughout the region had a band from that school. Canadians responded enthusiastically to those bands.

Remarkably, Father Brian Dufour, an Oblate brother from Kuper Island Residential school,  hatched a plan to take the band to perform at Expo 67. I remember as a young lad recently graduated from High School I drove to Montreal for that festival with a bunch of friends. We were also incredibly excited by that. I sadly, don’t remember if I heard that band or not. We did hear musical performances. The only band I remember was a group called Three’s a Crowd. My friends and I were much more interested in drinking at bars and looking for young ladies. The bars were illegal for us, but that did not stop us. The girls largely and sensibly  ignored us rubes from the prairies.  We had a lot of fun. We were not concerned about “Indians”. We were pitifully ignorant.

Tony Charley was invited to join the band and got to go on this exciting trip to Montreal, the largest city in Canada at the time. For the big trip to Expo the children were dressed up in Hollywood “Indian” garb-buckskin and feathers. It did not matter to anyone that it looked nothing at all like traditional west coast regalia. After all, it was all a show wasn’t it?

But the kids were a hit at Expo, led by the charismatic Father Brian Dufour. The school raised more than $10,000.

Everyone was happy. Well, most were happy. Mayor Drapeau welcomed them to Montreal. It was a place for mutual understanding and peace Drapeau said.

Tony and his brother James were invited by Brother Dufour to stay an extra month. What lucky guys. It was a surprise and they jumped at the chance. They had no parents to ask for permission. In other words they were the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. They just agreed to stay with Brother Dufour into August. August was when I arrived with my buddies in Montreal. I often wonder if we somehow crossed paths.

Brother Dufour asked James to sleep with him one night and Tony the next. They were very inexperienced young boys. Tony was about 15 years old. His brother James was younger. Each of the boys confided to the other that Brother Dufour did “funny things to them at night.”  They did not know what they meant, but both were very uncomfortable with what happened.

Brian Dufour was actually pretty young at the time as well. He was well thought of as a devoted young Christian working hard to better “Indian” children.  According to the CBC podcast, Dufour’s parents were very proud of their son and his work, but they did not know that he would visit boys in their bedrooms during the night to sexually abuse them. After all his parents were good Catholics and thought their son was as well.

Dufour was grooming the boys. That expression was not known in 1967. At the end of the summer, Brian Dufour was transferred to another residential schools and wrote a public letter saying how much he would miss the children of Kuper Island.

Of course, the troubles for Tony and James did not end there. Dufour was gone, but there were other predators in the residential school and they were vulnerable. The propaganda paved the way for the abuse.

Changing the Child

Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

Tony Charley one of the young children who had attended Kuper Island Residential school,  told CBC reporter Duncan McCue that the children in the school were constantly praying. They would wake up and and then were expected to start praying for a good day. Then they would pray to go to lunch. Constant prayer.

As McCue said, this constant prayer was part of a system to “change the child.”  They wanted to change the “savages” into good Christian children. As McCue said,

“this religious and patriotic indoctrination was part of a system designed to change the children. Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott said so in 1920 when he made residential schools compulsory. He said, ‘I want to get rid of the Indian problem. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question and there is no Indian Department.”

 

Of course, this idea was very congenial to the federal government, for as McCue pointed out,

“If there were no Indians there would be no treaty payments, no Indian reserves, no indigenous land rights. Residential schools were not created to deliver a proper education. They were created to assimilate Indians and went hand in hand with other federal policies to steal land. And it was little kids sleeping in rows upon rows of bunkbeds who paid the price.”

Assimilation is sometimes thought of as a benign policy imposed on Indian children for their own good. After, all what could be better for them than to be like us? It is true that many of the non-Indigenous staff thought they were doing the Lord’s work.

This was really Canadian government policy for a long time. Even the liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chretien offered Indigenous people something very similar in 1969 in their White paper. Trudeau and Chretien were shocked that their offer was turned down by indigenous leaders. They didn’t want to be just like the whites. They liked who they were. They saw no need to change who they were. It was the system they didn’t like.

For many years I, like most Canadians thought it was a good idea for Indigenous people to be just like us.

 

Rife with Sexual Predators

Abuse of Power, Colonialism, Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, as we now know, were rife with sexual predators that attacked boys or girls.  As always they chose the most vulnerable.

There were not just a few rotten apples among the religious leaders, like many Canadians believed. I know that was my initial opinion when I first heard about Indian Residential schools as an adult. I thought it must be just a few bad apples. The system could not be abusive. Could it? I was wrong.

The schools were infested with sexual predators. For decades children were kidnapped by legal authorities, taken against their will from their parents and families to get rid of the “savage” influence from parents, and dumped into residential schools often far from home, where the children were isolated from their families and then were vulnerable victims of horrid abuse.  It is not coincidental that where victims are powerless, the exploiters find a safe haven.  That is how abuse works. In fact for decades the Canadian governmnent knew what was going on, but little to stop it.

As CBC series host Duncan McCue said, “The abuse poisoned every aspect of school life, even stuff that was supposed to be fun.”

That is how Canada tried to change “savages” into good Christian citizens

Nights on the Boys Side

Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools, racism

 

It was not just girls that were targeted for abuse at Kuper Island Residential School.

In June of 1966 Tony Charley, a 15-year-old boy at Kuper Island Residential School was told that a young boy had hung himself in the gym.  Duncan McCue a CBC journalist returned many years later to investigate what happened at that school. Why had so many children died there?  After all, it is highly unusual for children to die while in school. At least it is highly unusual for children that are non-indigenous. For indigenous children it was much more common. They actually had a grave yard at the school for children. That too is highly unusual for non-non-indigenous children, but for indigenous children it is not rare at all. Why is that? Duncan McCue wanted to know. So do I.

 

The boy who died was named Richard Thomas. According to Tony Charley, Richard was   “nice and gentle.”  Such boys should not die. No boys should die for that matter. But nice and gentle boys are not usually targets of others. Much about this case though was not usual.

 

The brothers who ran the school belong to the order of Oblates.  These brothers told the students at the school that  Richard  had hung himself because his parents wanted to separate and he did not want that. He wanted his parents to stay together. That was not true.

He had basically been separated from them for most of the time since he had been in the residential school. That was part of the plan in residential schools—separate the children from their families. That is considered a crime against humanity. It should be. What can be more horrid than that? The authorities did not want the children to learn bad habits from their parents who were basically assumed to be unfit parents. Savages in other words.

The nuns and brothers took young kids to see the body of Richard. Again, that seemed strange. Is it possible that nuns and priests took young children to see a dead body hanging in the gym. Why would they do that?

Another strange thing about this was that Richard was days away from graduating from school and was excited to be graduating. Why would such a boy kill. Himself? Friends told McCue Thomas had been looking forward to graduation, as were most children in residential schools. Yet supposedly he killed himself. So McCue investigated further and reported on his findings in this podcast.

 

Canada’s 3rd National Day of Reconciliation

Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

Yesterday Christiane and I were a bit lazy. Earlier in the week we had celebrated Reconciliation Week with our local Seniors group. Yesterday, we spent an afternoon watching on television the ceremonies and programs from Ottawa on Parliament Hill.

When Mr. Justice Murray Sinclair, the Chair of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of Canada delivered the report to the Canadian Parliament he made the following statement: “We have delivered to you a mountain. We have shown a way to the top, but we call upon you to do the climbing.”

As always, he was wise.

Last year, after the 2nd National Day of Reconciliation I was filled with the spirit.  When I saw the Seniors’ Centre in Steinbach filled with white seniors wearing orange shirts,   I was shocked by how far we had come as a country. I was proud. I am still proud. Steinbach has come a long way. This year there were not as many participants. Perhaps there has been some compassion fatigue. That is too bad, though it is understandable. We must remember we have only made a start on the way to reconciliation. We have just started a long journey. We must not quit now.  We still have a long way to go.  We can’t stop now. We are nowhere near the summit.

I really enjoyed the performance from Ottawa of Ry Moran’s song “Feel you.” This song was played as a large group of indigenous people carried a very long banner that listed every known person who died in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. There were approximately 4, 100 names on that list. Many more died but the names are not known. This was our history in this country. It  was deeply moving.

I also really enjoyed the performance of a Mítchif  singer song writer Willows. The song was called, ‘T’wé chu-il. Another highlight, was Mi’Kmaq singer song writer  Emma Stone who performed her song was “Honour Song” which she sang in her own native language. Each year I attend such a national holiday I am impressed at how many indigenous people are trying to reclaim their native language. Each year there seems to be more.  Finally, Oji-Cree performer sang his song “We were here,’ and was joined by other performers as he sang.

I also saw a sign a listener carried: “Indigenous children desire to become indigenous adults.”

A Residential School Survivor told us this about her residential school: “It was a very scary place filled with sadness…but we were there for one another…we had no words…but today I see change.”

One of the participants read part of a letter from Bishop Grandin of Winnipeg to the government of Canada about the Roman Catholic Residential schools in Manitoba:

“If you bring us 100 Indians and half-breeds to the mission convent, when they leave they will no longer be Indians. They will be become good citizens, earn a just living,  and be useful to the country.”

It really was an inspiring day. I wish more Canadians participated, but I was happy to see so many who did.

 

Raised by Psychopaths

Exploitation, Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

As one of the survivors of Kuper Island Residential school told Duncan McCue of the CBC, “we were raised by psychopaths.”  The children were actually taught by religious leaders in the school to inflict violence on each other. Boys in particular were taught to be bullies against their younger cohorts. They were taught by example and they were separated from their parents (called savages by John A. MacDonald) so no one could teach them that what their religious leaders in the school were teaching them was wicked.

The children were raised in very aggressive and violent places and learned to become aggressive and violent in turn.  In fact, the priests or other religious leaders taught the students how to be aggressive towards other students. The older children were taught to be bullies. That is how they were often raised. And many of those children had been ripped out of their parents’ homes often without genuine consent. Those children were also taught that their parents were incompetent parents who did not deserve respect.

Can you imagine what those students learned in that school? Can you imagine what those children were like when they became parents. Can you imagine what the children of their children were like?