Canada's Dark Secret | Featured Documentaries

[Music] [Music] my name is Roberta Hill I'm from the Mohawk nation Grand River Territory I'm a survivor of the Mohawk Institute residential school I was here as a student from 1957 to January 1961 and I came here with six of my family a lot of bad memories here that's for sure these are really familiar to me used to play on these on the girls side I was playing down in the basement on the girls side and my mother had come up to the visiting area and the little kids had said your mother's here you want to go see her and I and I ran I ran but when I got to the doorway over there I froze right in front of the stairs and I couldn't move and I just stood there crying and crying crying and the more I cried the the worse it got and I could see myself I could actually like an out-of-body experience I could see this little girl crying and it was me but and the little girl said well if you don't don't you love your mother don't you want to see your mother a nice you know and I did I really did she says she's gonna leave you you know she's gonna leave if you don't go see her so at that time I knew that she would go then I things just kind of came back and he's just like tears I just took off running up those stairs and I went to sat on my mother and at that time all I did was cry I just cried and cried and I wasn't because I didn't want to see and I loved her it was just so hurtful to have to part with her again because my mother was really she was a really good mother you know [Music] not much to say about good times here they're all ridden by the bad bad is enormous there's a tremendous amount of evil that went on here so the whole institution itself was run by fear so it was very regimented more like a military-style you lined up for everything to line up for your meals you lined up to go to school you lined up to go to church it was just like that follow that routine and you would be okay if you followed and didn't break the rules you know so you just learn to follow the rules I didn't have the freedom as a as a child or as a young teenager I was always kind of under the supervision of somebody but we got about six o'clock and we're sent down to the call to play room and it was always cold in the basement early in the morning still a lot of chill in the air and yet they put us in a big cement room and we had two people armed however we could we learned all kinds of farm work I worked on a farm so long that I picked up a certain discipline where hard work could get me where I'm going and I think at some point there was somebody here that I don't know if it was a kid or a supervisor told me I would never leave here you know so that really stuck in my mind that I was gonna be in this place forever you're isolated all you see is this world around you this is it that was my world I didn't learn about all those other things that were going on until my adult life I didn't know there was all those other residential schools I don't think anybody in Canada knew that much so it was kept very secretive and yet when you start to look at every residential school across Canada you find the same things and I came to the well again Sidhu organized about six or seven years old and I spent six years here I was picked up on an Indian reserve at Raven Town and walking on a room [Music] we are going to visit my grandmother one day a nice July day back in 1955 there was four of us in one girl my sister then we came over that little rise over there and we hidden buried down here and a black car pull alongside of us and we didn't know who was at the time the driver said would you like a ride there he said no we didn't know where they were we kept on walking and they kept pace with us in their car and they kept trying to get us to get in and we refused her couple hundred yards that way and they offered us some way screaming jello at a restaurant in tempo and I had ice cream after we finished we all loaded back up into the car but they never went back the way they came they went around away from the Reiser I fell asleep and I never woke up until we were coming up the Mohawk Institute but after I got old enough I realized I was kidnapped like I said my dad didn't know the firebending Affairs in the churches they didn't care how they got the children here [Music] Oh [Music] Oh I believe it was February about two years ago I was on the board of sessions that are Chisholm United Church and Chisholm Township it's about five miles out of here and my first flat board of sessions meeting in fact and there was two other members in the minister and myself and the minister was going through the agenda that we were to talk about that day and she mentioned the residential school system and all of a sudden I started to shake and broke down crying had no idea why I didn't know what this was about at all from that I ended up going to my doctor and for some deprived help for depression and he referred me to a psychologist in North Bay and took her probably 20 minutes to determine that biggest part of my problem was from that incident 50 years earlier I was stationed there in the RCMP we had a territorial jail there which most times I was a jail guard at night and this day shift I happen to be assigned to whatever came on through the door it would be sometime between November of 64 and April of 65 on a day shift I was assigned to assist an agent from the residential school system to pick up two children from a family in Fort Smith the Northwest Territories I went to the door of this home and the woman who lived there knew why we were there to know if she know that her two daughters were being sent to residential schools the mother was crying both children were crying probably six and eight years old and I took the six-year-old from her arms actually and turned them over to the agent he jumped in his car and took off to the airport and I was facing the end of it I I saw I never saw him I don't remember the children's names but I'll never forget the cries [Music] at the time I didn't like the idea of taking kids away from their family and it bothered me and of course being in the RCMP I had no alternative who couldn't complain about it the only thing I knew about the Indian Residential schools was a place where they get formal education and I didn't see any problems with it since then I've come to realize what they were about and I've know differently now and that's part of the story that I want to tell it took up maybe five minutes of my life and I buried it back in 64 65 and about fifty years later it came back to haunt me here in the paws [Music] [Music] we were sitting at this at this very spot I'm not sure if it was exactly the same table but we were sitting at this very spot odda at a board meeting you remember Ron you were on the board at the time and and the board at that time had decided that they wanted to study this book called a healing journey for us all and part of that took us into residential schools well let me let me say first clearly that I think the residential school history within Canada is one of the the greatest tragedies if not the greatest tragedy in our whole history as a country it's the damage that's been done to so many lives and the damage that it continues to be done and that will be felt generationally is is just it's beyond one we it's hard to even take it in [Music] presidential schools are schools that were set up by the government of Canada and there are other countries that have the same thing but it was a policy that was put into place to bring all as many indigenous people as possible into these schools to educate them into the European Way of life to take you away from your culture your language all your traditions and that's what it's about in order to sever those ties in your culture in your language they had to separate children from families and communities we wore uniforms you all dress the same you had your hair cut the same you were all one and it was to assimilate us to make sure we didn't have a union left in us when we I think left here they took us to the church every Sunday we had say prayers and things like that we weren't allowed to talk in our language we had to speak English but it wasn't indoctrination like you didn't put us in one room and teach us indoctrinate us all day long or anything like that it's just the way the routine of the place it was in it was in the routine that you didn't speak anything but English you went to white man's school you went to white man's church you were the white man's clothes all those were built in wasn't a classroom lecture kind of thing it was it was ingrained in the system there's about 11 years they there it was taken from them there was no mother no father figures nobody said good night or come and see you if you were sick for something nobody looked at you except that they put us in a big playroom similar to this dining room and we sort of looked after ourselves what was going on across this country that so many children were being taken so many children were being put into residential schools and my thing is if if they were such a wonderful school they were models everybody should have had them non native Europeans everybody should I had a residential school not just one race of people it's a very racist policy you know but that's what the intent was it was to kill the Indian and the child and pretty much they've done it so you get punished for being who you are [Music] it's a school where we were punished for the release of infraction thing the the punishments were were severe and punishment for things you never did you never did him I I don't think I ever did anything wrong that would deserve a strap never and yet you got it you never knew what when you went over the line they let you know by giving you a beating beating sounds so simple but it was more than that it was terror that accompanied each beating Ford Alvin II when you have children put in an electric chair for entertainment or for punishment those are crimes against humanity and yet different things and I've heard of other guys have an electric currents and they brought us into a place I call the press room where most of the beatings went on and we went in here one at a time and got a good shellacking with the letters leather strapping like everybody was afraid of it but everybody knew they were gonna get it sooner or later II just remember them crying there was a lot of crying in this place a lot of Tears and yet we find out it was like thousands upon thousands of children that were being abused despite the beatings and the ferocity of some of the beatings we still defied the authority to run away [Music] The Voice it--how is over 60 boys displayed the summer each of us are lonely beyond despair from within we each had our own battles to fight we were lost lonely scared and confused where our biggest battle was to keep our secrets our lives are shrouded in secrecy no one could know we all collectively knew that kids were being raped and molested in large numbers sodomized by beasts no one could know no one would ever know Sodom and Gomorrah had to be a nicer place so he tried to escape the carnal sin what irony those cut were ferociously been relentlessly beaten with the leather machinery belts carried by all the staff including the principal the Canon beaten until their screams echoed out to the arse and among the barns down the laneway and up the city streets beaten until there was silence that was the scariest despite this we ran away I believe each of us tried to at least once to escape that voice prison the hellish place with demons all of Oh [Music] yeah it's open there's the boilers at that far end is where I got molested time and time again day after day boy did I ever wished something would come by or somebody would miss me somehow and nobody ever came and I just came out of there feeling so dirty rotten loathe you can imagine and I thought every kid out there knew that I had what happened to me but I think it all happened to them because none ever bothered me none ever asked me what happened in there so I think we all got it at one point or other but it is a nasty dirty place but here's where I got molested right here I remember standing against this wall there and he was had his way with me and I was just whoa that high [Music] it's the time in my life and I felt so dirty and so so all alone when you had me down in the boiler room and he took my clothes off and I just standing here little guy just disgusted it or what he was doing I think it's very very possible that children did die here but we'll never know that's just I've heard too many different stories for it to be all lies if they're not buried here they're probably buried somewhere on the property and it's just one of those things that in time we may come across it but this this we can investigate if there's any truth to it if there's anything in there just from the people that I know from the survivors that I know that say that yeah they remember this being something and you don't just put a window at the bottom of a basement for any for no reason I like finding old friends and Winnie is what I know her by from the residential school the Mohawk Institute when we first went in there we were my sister and I were separated into groups and I had one older girl that took me under her wing and my sister Dawn when he looked after her well I don't you know when I was there I don't even know remember going there I don't even remember the people picking me up out of my home I don't remember that all I know I was just there so then I met this this older person while this older girl she kind of took care of me when I was growing up and she told me when she's ready to leave because she was in 12 13 maybe 14 she said that she was going to ask her mother to come and get me and take she to take me home to be her little sister but that didn't happen because she she because she got hurt she got hurt hurt hurt bad I think I think somebody hit her on tree and I don't know I think she died but I'm not really sure but I don't know well anyway I've been able to say in the last few years that they killed her and I was there I saw what happened to her sometimes I dream up her she would come to me in a dream but it hurts them talk about it because I remember every when she's the piggyback me on her her back and we run and play and and when I got hurt she'd pick me up she'd give me a hug him sell me on the crack like boy we should be doing better now after they smashed her in the tree you know that sound sometimes you can hear it on TV on the murder shows guts so that's a song even if a glass breaks today I'll scream and then sometimes my family gets mad at me I said well I can't help it I said that since the sound this scares me and makes me yell loud like that the scene is a drowning child who just shortly before was flailing away with his head above water in a raging river he can swim but the river is swift unrelenting he slips under the surfaces briefly trying to catch another life-saving breath but he knows he's going under for good what terror is brought upon the child's mind no one can imagine those thoughts will go down with him the one to live is seen above in the light on the surface of the river as he slowly sinks his hair is silky and wavy his arms still whatever moving so slowly and reaching for no purpose except that his will tells him to reach up the latest surface fades and his body has no more moving except bed of the current he tumbles laboriously along the bottom and into oblivion I left thinking I'd come back one day and attack those people that had attacked me and I they didn't just attack me I think they attacked everybody but I wrote a book called Dark Legacy and ever since I wrote that book I I don't have this great desire to go back anymore and beat the mopping I I I haven't forgiven whether they're not around to forgive when I realize the effect that this type of government administration had on thousands of people in my time it disgust me that I'm a Canadian and I always thought Canada was the greatest country in the world and I'm ashamed to say I'm Canadian because of what my government has done the government wanted access to mineral rates mining lumbering fisheries all natural resources that Canada has and they all are on a native land of course they were here first so the government I guess determined that rather than go to war with the natives they would eliminate them and I know from my own experience people that I've known they were raised by whites in the residential schools so when they were finished there their parents didn't accept them because they weren't native and the white community did not accept him because they were native so these people knows 150,000 children grew up in limbo with no roots no background and no place they could call home [Music] I knew ahead of time when I was going to leave I went to school that day and and it was the last day of school in summer everything seemed greater than grass even greener the sky was blue and it was just a great day he come home and they're like you're a stranger I'm a stranger to them but they're a stranger to me too so I had to go find who my relatives were how was I connected to this community I knew where I came from I didn't know that but I just didn't know how I fit in 150,000 people her children were taken from their families and has role a result of that seven generations of Native people grew up with no roots this is my friend Carol coochie who'll I've known for a few years and appreciate her friendship and and what kind of things she can tell us about her First Nations so having my father my aunt and my uncle's um gone to residential school my father never discussed his upbringing he was silent the home that we lived in was silent around who he was and how he was raised so prior to the age of 30 I had no idea or no understanding of what had happened to my family and I knew that there was something up like there was something wrong but I didn't know what that was when I was finding all of these things about residential school when I was 30 and my father had already passed away my mother was still alive and I started asking like my aunt questions it began to I began to realize how strange everything was and it began to see what those schools did and what the effect that we had and why my brothers and I had struggled so much with our emotional life this was wrong to take children away from their parents and herd them into a school against their will it just blew me away and then when Ron when you had the courage to stand up and say that this was wrong and that you knew it was wrong when it happened instead of standing up and said I witnessed this and it didn't look that bad I can't tell you what that does for people I really can't and I don't care what bad things you might have done in your life Ron I know it was a whole lot cuz you're a good person they were erased by that they were completely erased but what you don't hear about is what happens to adult people when their kids are ripped away and those kids come back broken but they come back broken to two adults that are insane and that's the other half so nobody is okay you [Music] like thanked and asked all of the survivors to stand up for a moment and be here with us survivors please stand the children and the grandchildren of survivors please stand up as well things began to change when the survivors of the residential school experience went to court beginning of the 1980s but not really successful until the mid-1990s when the courts finally ruled that they could sue the government for the abuses that went on in schools and the churches as well the route of the TRC is in survivors themselves survivors said we demand attention and we demand recognition for what it is and was that we experienced in the residential schools I had a problem with I had a hearing problem I was mocked I was teased I would pick nod sometimes I felt that I can't function I was written so that inside but on the outside discussion for my children I tried to be strong [Music] we were the recipient of their most private moments in their life often and we as listeners had to be there for them because we weren't just representing the Commission we were actually representing the hearing of the entire country [Music] well as a commissioner for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission listening to the stories of residential school survivors was difficult emotionally very challenging but there's no doubt that when they cried often we did as commissioners we always made it a point to repeat back to the survivors what it was that they had told us because we wanted them to know that we had heard them and that we believed them before anything happened to me I want to apologize to my family for what I put them through I could I could tell my grandchildren I could tell my great-grandchildren that I love the book but with my own children I can't it hurts it hurts me the think about what I missed it was a very emotional very emotional time because the more you got into it the more the more things started to come up about residential school that you would start to remember than you'd listen to everybody and it was a very very difficult time so I was involved right from that right from when the lawsuit started so the trigger Reconciliation Commission of Canada was asked to assist the survivors to move from an era of being victims of the residential school experience to becoming involved in a process of establishing a better relationship with the government with the churches the story of the truth of residential schools in this country is a story about the resilience of children they have supported me in this work but at great loss to the relationships we could have had in which we will now try to recapture [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] residential school survivors we awake in Canada this is not only about resilience there's a whole lot of truth that has been shared it's also about reconciliation and there there's not going to be any truth in reconciliation in my time or in your time it's going to take two or three four generations to work all this out to get it in history books and have it become commonplace that the guy next door knows what happen the future of Canada well students and be told that this is not an integral part of everything we are as a country everything we are as Canadians that is a promise we make right here all of us today [Applause] [Music] was the the closing ceremonies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had a five kilometer walk from Gatineau Quebec to the City Hall in Ottawa it was approximately seven thousand people participating many natives many non natives there was different church groups civic groups and people just bringing their families out to participate and support the Native communities by the time the Commission's work ended almost seven years later that we had established the credibility the Commission not only in the eyes of survivors but in the eyes of the country the truth Reconciliation Commission has brought an image of Canada forward that now encloses this history the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation was created by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in order to preserve all of the materials that were collected under the mandate to the TRC but more than just preserving these materials survivors right across the country have asked us to ensure that their statements and the other material that was collected finds their way into the hands of educators into the hands of researchers so we have a very important and critical role in continuing to expose the truth ensure Canadians understand the truth of what's happened in this country and further contribute to ongoing understanding healing and Reconciliation in this country Canadians no longer have an excuse though which i think is one of the most critical things about this process of Truth and Reconciliation the I don't know or I didn't know really is no longer defensible [Music] [Music] as all the same to help me cope with anything if you see the wonder of a fairy tale you can make of yuju I'm very hopeful I'm still a bit scared as to what's happening and what could continue to happen I want to see action I want less talk and more action so we all know that something is changing in terms of healing for the native folk and for white and brown and yellow Canada [Music] [Applause] [Music] everyone there's unique they're expressing their their culture and Boyden genuinely things about it the color the outfits the dances the songs [Applause] when every residential school survivors healed I'll be healed and that's that's how it would affect me until they're healed I won't be and I'll keep talking to anybody who'll listen [Music] there's always hope without hope we're done you know there always has to be hope and when I look at my grandchildren I think yeah there's a lot of hope I see positive things for them [Music] you

Channel: Al Jazeera English

Views: 1,321,406

Keywords: human rights, aboriginal children, nopodcast, featureddocumentary, indigenous survivors, Canadian Government, aborogins, Al Jazeera English, education, News, politics, al Jazeera, jazeera, schools, Canada, youtube, novod, school in canada, school in canada documentary, school in canada vs usa, high school in canada, darren espanto school in canada, school in canada high school, school in canada free, Canada's Dark Secret, Mohawk Institute Residential School, canada indegionous people

Id: peLd_jtMdrc

Length: 47min 30sec (2850 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2017