Up Ghost River (33 page)

In the mid-1990s, having been ignored for years, we were able to raise public awareness of what had happened at St. Anne's Residential School with articles in the
Globe and Mail
and the
Toronto Star
. After the healing conference, we went to court, as did others: we were part of a wave of cases against the authorities—the churches and the federal government—that ran the schools. Once word was out, the numbers of cases and victims escalated. In 1995, Mi'kmaq activist Nora Bernard filed what would become the largest lawsuit in Canadian history, representing 79,000 survivors. The Canadian government settled the lawsuit, the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), for $5 billion, which included payment for our experiences—$10,000 for being sent to the school and $3,000 for every year attended. The settlement detailed an additional payment, if the abuse was severe, calculated by the length of time it was experienced. This was called Independent Assessment Process (IAP) compensation.

While the IRSSA was a step in the right direction, it did not go far enough. In 1998, we began raising our concerns with the federal and provincial governments, and representatives from the church that ran the school, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Grey Nuns. I went down to Toronto for the Alternative Dispute Resolution meetings as representative for the St. Anne's Residential School Survivors (Peetabeck Keway Keykaywin) Association. After a few meetings, it soon became apparent that the government did not take seriously the cultural genocide that had happened at the school. When they offered us $30,000 per student, we declined, as we did not want our concerns to be reduced to a dollar figure.

The issue lay dormant for a few years as the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement moved through the cogs of bureaucracy. In 2006, it came time for us to file our IAP compensation. To qualify, the student would have to give testimony and provide supporting documents to secure an IAP hearing. In turn, the government, as part of the IRSSA, was obligated to release any records relevant to the case, and issue evidence “narratives.”

The problem first surfaced when my friends and others from St. Anne's Residential School tried to access their records. Many of us were told that our attendance records were missing, so we had problems proving basic facts, like the years we attended St. Anne's. Others could not access their medical records. When students tried to prove that they had gone to the infirmary for infractions such as being beaten so hard they bled, they were told that those records had gone missing.

It did not stop there. When we tried to prove the issue of widespread abuse, the Department of Justice said they did not have any of the official documents, such as the OPP investigation and court records. And in the official evidence narrative, they denied that the abuse against us had ever taken place. “No known documents of
sexual abuse at Fort Albany IRS,” it said. “No known incident documents of sexual abuse at Fort Albany IRS.”

It was hard to understand how such a flagrant misrepresentation of the truth could come from Department of Justice lawyers. For this reason, many residential school survivors lost faith in the IAP process, and no longer wanted these government lawyers at their hearings. In a letter that was covered by the national press, I wrote to Justice Minister Peter MacKay to remove them.

As we still needed to prove that the abuse had happened, sixty students began to work with lawyer Fay Brunning, tracking down the official records of abuse, with me working as a translator starting in early 2012. Two years later, in January 2014, in a landmark ruling covered by most major national media, we won. Justice Paul Perell of the Ontario Superior Court ruled that the federal government had to hand over all the OPP and court documents to support students' claims for compensation.

With the media attention, a larger pattern of obstruction and secrecy surfaced. It wasn't the first time that Ottawa had dragged its heels on releasing records; the federal government is now under criticism for failing to release millions of residential school documents currently held at Library and Archives Canada. Nor, I'm sure, will it be the last.

In the residential schools, the secrecy began at dawn: we were beaten from the time we first awoke. Speaking out against the injustice in letters home was also cause for punishment. We coped in whatever way we could, often by imitating our oppressors. At St. Anne's, the stronger boys beat the weaker boys either with their fists or with tamarack branches. Sexual abuse was rampant too, with the staff forcing themselves on the girls and boys, and the students forcing themselves on each other. As parents, we continued to imitate the cruelty of the school, ignoring our children or worse, abusing them emotionally,
physically or sexually. Joan suffered my emotional abuse and indiscretions, and my kids endured a drunk and absentee dad. Others, such as Lucy, Amocheesh and Abraham Nakogee, fared far worse.

Children often survived these things by shutting down. There are blanks in my memories, and those of my classmates'; the horrific trauma of fifty years ago becomes today's disjointed, tragic fragments. This, combined with the resultant alcoholism, meant that many of us were considered unreliable witnesses in the subsequent court cases, and so the number initially accused diverged greatly from the number found guilty. Many in the community were angry that I had gone to the police, and then at the final outcome, where the number found guilty did not accurately represent the scale of the horrors we had experienced. That anger turned to a burning hot rage. In 2002, St. Anne's Residential School burned down. Many suspected it was arson, as the building had become symbolic of the abuse, sexual and physical, and the psychic scars that continue to the next generation.

Still, I have to believe it was worth it: the court cases have become part of a growing awareness that has shifted the public's understanding of native history. Residential school syndrome is now a recognized phenomenon, with a body of historical and psychological literature behind it. Each person who comes forward adds to this deepening awareness. If trauma is the wounds of the mind, then the court cases, the media interest, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the prime minister's 2008 Statement of Apology have given us valuable ways to talk about those wounds. These successes have helped us externalize the shame, slowly shifting our anger from the self to the wider system, easing the burden of rage and memory.

How to repair the harm of St. Anne's? That's a journey that I shall spend the rest of my life navigating. I've been on it for a while. My counsellor in Edmonton, Dennis LeRoy, and George Callingbull helped me along the way, as did Joan, Albalina, Shannin and Jassen.
Now we are helping others along their way, too. In 1988, we started looking after Terry, the son of my middle sister, Jane. She was unemployed, and it was hard for her to find her feet, moving between Toronto and Manitoulin Island. He stayed with us, from age ten until he moved to North Bay for high school. In the summer of 1992, before the healing conference, we adopted another daughter, Cedar, eighteen months, whose grandmother had gone to St. Anne's. I don't know if she suffered as I had, but I know that her daughter, Angela, ended up on the streets, pregnant at fourteen. Cedar became our fifth child.

After I stopped being chief in 1996, I started doing whatever I could to preserve our ancient traditions and knowledge and bring them to the youth. I built a sweat lodge in my backyard, and began bringing the youth and elders together, to close the generational divide left by the residential schools. I brought writers such as Joseph Boyden to our community to promote youth literacy and Cree culture. I became a member of the Ontario Chiefs Traditional Knowledge Keepers group, to discuss how to preserve and pass on our traditions in a respectful manner. I introduced Indian Days, an annual event where we would celebrate the sweat lodge, the shaking tent and other spiritual traditions. I started a sawmill that employs four people in the summer months and two during the winter. I would like to expand to offer more employment, although it is hard for any business to grow on reserves because the Indian Act means that we do not own our land, so cutting down trees on reserve land is illegal. There are other provisions in the Indian Act that hold us back: without any assets, we cannot use our businesses as collateral to get mortgages or insurance. The inability to buy insurance discourages budding entrepreneurs, especially because of the high rates of vandalism. Any business investment becomes a personal risk. Without a trained and energetic fire department, and with arson a strong risk,
there's always the danger that we will wake up one morning and have lost everything.

For this work, I have won a couple of awards, including the western elders honorary headdress, “for leadership shown in the fight for the rights of First Nations,” and a community leader award by Nishnawbe Aski Nation, a political union of forty-nine First Nations communities across northern Ontario in honour of “raising the profile of the residential school issue.”

After I heard about my friend Amocheesh's death, I carried the burden with me for a few months, wondering why I hadn't done more to reach out to him. Finally Joan told me to stop bottling it all up. I called Tony. We had gotten closer ever since the conference; he was one of the few people who knew about Mike.

I picked him up at the airport, and with fishing rods in the back of my pickup truck we drove down to my beauty, the Albany. It was a gentle fall day, the sky dotted with a few clouds that moved slowly, despite the occasional burst of wind. In the early morning, trout and walleye like to rest in the back-eddies swirling by the rocky outcrops mid-river, but by late afternoon, they'd moved to the warmer shallows where we cast our lines. I had some mayfly worms, but Tony, he could make anything dance, and the metallic light from his lure flitted along the gently lapping lake.

We laughed about the time in Grade 5 when Amocheesh had broken character in a school play and had danced across the stage dressed up as a witch. Tony remembered a few more anecdotes, and I laughed along, but to be honest, I couldn't remember them. I've blocked out the good as well as the bad.

“How's the kid?” he asked. I had already told Tony that I was worried about Cedar having fetal alcohol syndrome because of Angela's history.

“I think she's fine.”

“You're lucky,” he said. I nodded. I hadn't been a great dad when my own children were young. I'd almost drowned under the weight of memory and dragged everyone around me into my whirlpool of rage and hurt. And yet, here I was, with all the trappings of success: a chief, married and raising five kids. Cedar had given me a second chance. How had I gotten here? Did I get what I deserved? What about Amocheesh? Did he deserve the life he got? What did anyone deserve?

“Ed?” Tony said, snapping his fingers in front of my eyes.

“Sorry, man.” Easy to get lost in those thoughts.

“Remember that time when you told me not to break the rules?”

“Which time? I was always saying things like that.”

“Damn right … goody two-shoes.”

“Meant I got whipped less.”

“Meant you sucked up more. Geesh. I was talking about the time when we tried to run away.”

“What about it?”

“I tell it to my kids,” he said. “Then I tell them all those Cree stories you told me.”

“Which ones?”

“Rita dying … that kind of stuff.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Yeah, but when our
gookum
died, we did the same.”

“You carried the body and buried her upstream?”

“Nah. We buried her with pemmican. Pemmican and cigarettes. We put it right in the coffin.”

“Good for you. Now that's something.”

For thousands of years, we have crossed the waters of sufferings to seek the path of healing. We take a trip along the landscape of our forefathers to honour the memory and the harms done to the ancestors. We respect their lives so that we can stand proud. We walk and paddle in their shadows to remind ourselves they are still here, all around us, guiding those who listen.

Those traditions continue today. Each year the Dakota Nation revisit their tragic history by marching along the route of their forced dislocation from Fort Snelling, Minnesota, to Lower Sioux Reservation, Minnesota, to honour the harms done to the ancestors. Each year, I dip my paddle into the river of healing, by taking ten youth 480 kilometres along the Albany so they can learn their culture and history, and start to reclaim what was lost in the residential schools. I teach them ancient traditions that have been passed down for millennia, spiritual teachings that helped me heal from my alcoholism and the abuse I endured at St. Anne's. Fundraising for the trip takes place all year round. Some filmmakers even made a documentary about it called
Paquataskamik Is Home
.

In late 2012, such journeys became threatened by a series of laws that were considered a direct attack on the environment and native sovereignty. Bill C-45 and other similar legislation by the Harper government made it easier for development to occur on our land and waterways without our approval. Targeting the health of our land, they jeopardized our ability to fish, hunt and trap, and the deep healing and peace that comes from settling the mind into nature, and connecting to the beyond. And they silenced one of the few remaining rights accorded to First Nations people: consultation over our traditional land. In response, Idle No More was born.

In my household, the political movement became a family affair. Joan, who has for the past twenty years worked toward improving kids' nutrition, received the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal for her volunteerism. Charlie Angus, the Member of Parliament for Timmins–James Bay, and Gilles Bisson, the Member of Provincial Parliament for Timmins–James Bay, travelled to Fort Albany for the ceremony, just as Idle No More ramped up. Joan went to the ceremony but refused the award, as she didn't want to accept a medal from the Crown given the current political situation. I signed petitions, and talked about Idle No More with the Fort Albany youth.