Usually, Father Doughty took a boy to his room at Kuper Island Indian Residential School, but occasionally, often under the influence of alcohol, he would just jump into bed with a boy in the dorm and have sex with him while the other children were listening. But the boys all stayed silent about the abuse. As Duncan McCue the CBC host of the podcast series said, “for many the abuse and silence carried on for years, bottled up, ravaging their hearts, minds, and souls.”

These were the “fathers” that were raising indigenous children in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools because the government thought it would be unwise to let them be raised by their savage parents.

For years, after he was an adult, James Charley, one of Doughty’s victims, said, “My wife had to clean up the mess.” That, of course, is a very common occurrence. The children who are abused later abuse others, including the ones they love the most. This is what they learned in  residential school. This is how the problems are rolled down the generations. Religious leaders taught this to them. Victims of abuse later lashed out at other vulnerable people. They didn’t learn to be good parents. They learned to be abusers. This is the hideous legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools.

As one member of the community said, it is a community in which “Psychopaths and Sociopaths raise children and that has everything to do with missing and murdered children.”

The effects of the abuse truly do cascade through the generations. It is never fair for us to suggest to the victims, or even the next generation,  that they “should just get over it,” as I have heard more than once. It really is an ignorant and unbecoming comment to make.