Up Ghost River (32 page)

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“When I was sixteen. I went with him to Montreal.”

“Have you told the police?”

“No.”

“Are you going to tell the conference?”

“I haven't decided.”

“You should.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Sorry man. Wow. Fuck. I don't know what to say.”

“It's okay.”

“Are you okay?”

“I am now.”

He put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed me, and looked at me with sad eyes. I met his gaze at first, then I could tell that we both wanted to be alone with our thoughts so I drove him to Nicholas's, where he was staying.

At the St. Anne's Reunion and Keykaywin Conference, we had worked hard to create a safe space for people to open up about abuse, inviting social workers, mental health workers, a justice of the peace, elders, First Nation chiefs, and a professor of native history to speak about the effects of residential schools and child abuse. In the mornings, there were presentations by experts about how residential schools can affect someone's life, and then we asked anyone to open up about their experiences. We knew they'd be in a raw and vulnerable state after talking, so we searched for a Cree healer who could come to Fort Albany to help out. No one whom I'd worked with in Edmonton was available, so my colleague, Mary Anne Nakogee-Davis, arranged for a Navajo healer whom she had met and said was renowned among his people, Albert Damon from Window Rock, Arizona.

Where to put all these people? That was a constant challenge. We rented an outdoor tent for some of the presentations, but we also had to hold some of the sessions inside St. Anne's school for lack of any extra space. The only place we could find with any privacy was an old classroom where a committee involving myself and two others—Andrew Wesley, director of aboriginal child family services in Timmins, a distant relative of Sister Wesley, and Alex Spence, director of the Timmins Ojibway and Cree Cultural Centre—would listen to the testimonies in private. Many came to us to begin to tell stories. It was difficult for them. You could tell by the way they spoke with their eyes lowered. Soft voices. Weight shifting between dusty
running shoes. Most people didn't mention names. They said, “a man came upstairs, and he made me kneel down”; “they came into the bedroom, and I couldn't see their faces.”

Over the next seven days, we heard accounts of homosexual and heterosexual rapes, forced masturbation, fondling, and the cover-up of a murder.

A boy several years younger than me, Simon John Thomas, took me aside and told me three support staff at St. Anne's took him and his friend down to the basement. They raped them among the sacks of potatoes, then took them back upstairs to the dorm.

Joel Wesley, who was a few years below me, and Andrew Wesley's brother, said he and his friend, Abraham Nakogee, both sixteen, were running around the school's track. Nakogee complained of chest pains to Brother Lauzon. He was told to stop whining and to keep going because he was fat. He had a heart attack and died. Joel was told that if he ever talked about it, he would be punished.

A woman in her forties, Lucy, stood up in an open session and told the crowd of about two hundred people that when she was fourteen, a nun came into her bedroom and led her to one of the storage rooms. Two brothers were waiting and they raped her. After it was over, they told her that she would be whipped forty times if she said anything. A few months later, she was taken to the infirmary and made to have an abortion.

“I miss him. I miss my baby,” she said. She stared off into space, like she was lost in another world, the world where her baby still lived.

She sat back down and her story seemed to hang there, silencing the room.

Later Andrew Wesley, Alex Spence and I escorted Lucy outside. She said she wanted to go to the place where she was made to have the abortion. We walked across the school grounds, over the bridge to the site of the old infirmary, which had since closed down. Andrew
said a prayer for the baby. Then we all took it in turns to hug Lucy. Afterwards, she said she wanted to be alone.

We left her and I walked across the grass to the Albany. The sun had started to set, and the spruces across the river had sunk into shadow, the rocks' reflections rimmed by darkness. I started to cry.

After the healing conference, I gave the Ontario Provincial Police a booklet of testimonies from the conference and they flew in from South Porcupine, near Timmins, 500 kilometres away, to lay charges. Four investigators and one detective sergeant took statements from approximately 750 people. Eighty of them alleged sexual abuse. Almost all of them alleged physical abuse, but most of it was not severe enough to be considered a crime. The 1950s Criminal Code allowed corporal punishment for parents on their children, and as the school was our official legal guardian, the kicks, punches and whippings were acceptable. So too were some of the punishments that terrified us: standing with our soiled underpants on our head and being locked in a dark basement without food and water. These punishments were not considered serious enough for criminal charges since the harm done was mainly psychological.

I was sitting in the Crown lawyer's office in Sudbury. Diana Fuller was prosecuting all the St. Anne's cases. She had a nice space—there were papers everywhere, but the window looked out onto some flowerbeds and a park.

“So, no students?” she asked. I had told her about the conversation with Tony. I had asked her to limit the court case to only the staff, and not to prosecute any of the allegations of physical and sexual abuse committed by St. Anne's students.

“No,” I said. “It's not fair to them. Lots of them were just repeating the behaviour that they learned from the staff.”

“God. Poor things,” she said.

“And I don't think they want to testify anyway. St. Anne's was a lawless place. There was a lot going on. It was difficult to survive.”

“And did anything like this happen to you?”

“No student touched me, no.”

“What about the staff?”

I told her about being sexually assaulted by Brother Jutras.

“And this happened when you were seven,” she said.

“Yes. Seven or eight.”

“Which is it? Seven or eight?”

“I'm not sure.”

Diana sighed. “This is hard, isn't it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That's the hard thing about memory. It changes. Especially when there's alcohol involved.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I'm not here to judge. But before we put you on the stand, we need to iron this stuff out.”

“Good idea.”

“And we have to be a bit careful here.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I put bad cases on the stand, it weakens the good cases.”

“Bad cases?”

“That's not the right word. Sorry. Cases where we don't have much hope of a conviction.”

“We don't have much hope of a conviction?”

“Let me tell you about sexual abuse cases. First, all of them come down to indecent assault. We won't even try for male rape because it's so hard to prove whether penetration occurred. In your case, you were fondled. So that's indecent assault.”

“Oh,” I replied.

“And there's the timing. I mean it happened during a medical exam, right? So maybe he was actually examining your penis. I mean, who knows?”

“But he wasn't a doctor.”

“I thought there weren't any doctors up there?”

“There weren't.”

“Exactly. Which is how the defence will argue it. Then there's also the case of the testimony. In sexual abuse cases, it's always your word against theirs. Rarely are there witnesses. So then it comes down to believability and alibi. You have to describe what happened in a way that makes the jury see and feel the event. That convinces everyone beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“Oh,” I said again.

“I'm just your lawyer. But given what's at stake, I urge you to be very careful before proceeding further.”

I never told the police what happened with Mike. Technically, it wasn't part of our case against St. Anne's, as he wasn't employed by the school and it happened after I had graduated.

Because of my memory lapses due to repeated trauma and alcoholism, they did not use me as a witness against Sister Wesley or Brother Jutras. Still, I went down to Cochrane for some of the court cases so I could support others.

There were seven people charged. Only the staff, thank Gitchi Manitou. Sister Anna Wesley was charged with five counts of assault, three counts of assault causing bodily harm and five counts of administering a noxious substance with intent to aggrieve or annoy, which is how the prosecution charged her with her favourite punishment—forcing the kids to eat their own vomit. Initially, we didn't think the charge would stick—the defence argued the punishment was legal since the substance was a natural bodily secretion. But Diana brought
in an expert witness who argued that vomit, while natural inside the stomach, was unnatural as a food. The judge agreed and Sister Wesley was convicted of five counts of assault and three counts of administering a noxious substance with intent to aggrieve or annoy, and sentenced to eleven and a half months' house arrest.

The supervisor of the girls' part of the school, Jane Kakeychewan, was convicted of three counts of assault causing bodily harm, and also sentenced to house arrest.

The only men who were convicted of sexual abuse came to the school after I had graduated. Claude Lambert, fifty at the time, of Saint-André-Avellin, Quebec, who took over once Sister Wesley left, helping the boys with showering, bathing and getting changed, and Marcel Blais, forty-nine at the time, of Ottawa, a kitchen aid—were charged with indecent assault on a male and convicted.

David Murray Stein, forty-nine, of Timmins, who was a few years younger than me, went back and worked at the school as a cafeteria helper in the late 1960s, and was accused of molesting four boys. He was charged with indecent assault and gross indecency. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one year in prison. Afterwards, four more boys came forward, and he was sentenced to another year.

Brother Goulet, who built the electric chair, was never charged for his role in electrocuting the boys, as he had already died. The lawyer decided not to pursue charges against anyone else who electrocuted us because it was too hard to prove that the shocks were an excessive use of force.

Brother Lauzon was never charged for his part in Abraham Nakogee's death because he'd died several years earlier of cancer.

Brother Jutras was never charged either. Joe decided not to testify that he'd allowed himself to be masturbated in exchange for a slice of bread, as he was too embarrassed. Others came forward, but then we discovered that it didn't matter as he was already dead. On
November 21, 1979, Brother Jutras passed away due to complications relating to gangrene and a broken leg.

A few months after the reunion, Fred called me. He was still living in Timmins, but had come to Fort Albany for the Keykaywin conference where I'd put out the word that I was looking for Amocheesh.

“So about Amocheesh,” Fred said. “I asked around.”

“And?”

“You know he had that drinking problem?”

“Yeah.”

“It's not good. He died. Drank himself to death.”

“Oh my God. What?”

“Sorry, man.”

“How?”

“I dunno. I just heard it. I thought you should know.”

“Was it an accident or a suicide?”

“An accident, I think. Although he was drinking so much that maybe that was a suicide.”

“So what did he actually die of?”

“I don't know. His family are being a bit vague. Just told me that he passed and that I should pray for him.”

“Is there going to be a funeral?”

“It happened a few weeks ago.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Sorry, man.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“I know you used to be close.”

“Yeah, we were,” I said. Now I will never know, I thought. I will never know what happened when Mike Pasko took him to his house in Montreal, and whether he raped him, too.

There is no concept of justice in Cree culture. The nearest word is
kintohpatatin
, which loosely translates to “you've been listened to.” But kintohpatatin is richer than justice—really it means you've been listened to by someone compassionate and fair, and your needs will be taken seriously. We had peacemakers before we had judges, whose responsibility was to listen to all those affected by the crime: the victim, the offender and their relatives. Justice was a matter of coming together to talk about what had happened, how it had affected all those involved and to find a form of payment that would smooth the ill feelings and repair the harm.

I believe that today's version of kintohpatatin would start with us being heard when we tell our stories. In the residential schools, they forcibly took us from our parents, banned our language, dehumanized us by replacing our names with numbers, and turned us into the subjects of medical experiments on the effects of prolonged malnutrition by starving us, a fact that only came out in 2013 when food historian Ian Mosby went to the national media with his research. At St. Anne's, we were usually hungry, a deprivation that
allowed Brother Jutras to bribe the boys with food for sexual favours, although whether this was because of the poverty of the school or by the design of the nuns or government is one of the issues we may never know. We were used to being silenced—whether through the Potlatch laws, which banned our culture and religion, the Indian Act, which gave the Indian Agent total power over the reserves, or the Canada Elections Act, which forbade us from voting.

Many chiefs and parents spoke out about the abuses in the residential schools, including in St. Anne's. These statements were usually met with disbelief or indifference, or they were ignored. What gave many of us the courage to step forward was an unrelated case. In 1989, the wards of Mount Cashel Orphanage took the Catholic Church to court in what became Canada's—and one of the world's—largest sexual abuse scandals. Hearing those testimonies day in, day out gave us the confidence and the voice to start to say that this had happened to us, too.