{"id":287809,"date":"2021-06-30T21:36:24","date_gmt":"2021-06-30T18:36:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/screaming-into-silence-macleans-ca\/"},"modified":"2021-06-30T21:36:24","modified_gmt":"2021-06-30T18:36:24","slug":"screaming-into-silence-macleans-ca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/screaming-into-silence-macleans-ca\/","title":{"rendered":"#Screaming into silence – Macleans.ca"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Screaming into silence – Macleans.ca<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Cindy Blackstock: I believe those little spirits buried on the grounds of residential schools came to ensure the work gets done to end the injustices facing survivors\n <\/div>\n
\n Cindy Blackstock, a member of the Gitxsan First Nation,\u00a0is the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family\u00a0Caring Society of Canada and a professor at McGill University.<\/em><\/p>\n

Residential school survivors knew where the children were buried because some of them had dug their graves. They told their truths to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and gave the country a national plan in their 94 calls to action for ending the injustices facing this generation of First Nations, M\u00e9tis and Inuit children, and to ensure nothing like this happ<\/a>ens again. Some of us heard them, but what they said was too confrontational for most\u2014so people called them \u201cstories\u201d and looked away. The survivors must have felt they were screaming into silence.<\/p>\n

The buried children died afraid and alone\u2014away from their families\u2014in \u201cschools\u201d that were more akin to re-education camps, run by the Canadian government and the Christian churches from the 1830s to 1996. Many could have survived if public will had forced Ottawa to implement the life-saving reforms posited by Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce, the chief medical health officer of the Department of Indian Affairs in 1907. Bryce found that tuberculosis was ravaging the malnourished children at 20 times the rate of others, fuelled by dramatically unequal \u201cIndian\u201d health funding and poor health practices. As the 1907 headline of the Evening Citizen<\/i> reported, there was \u201cabsolute inattention to the bare necessities of health\u201d and the schools were \u201cveritable hotbeds of disease.\u201d Other news<\/a>papers wrote that the children were \u201cdying like flies,\u201d compelling lawyer Samuel Hume Blake to say in 1908, \u201cIn that Canada fails to obviate the preventable causes of deaths, it brings itself into unpleasant nearness to manslaughter.\u201d<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0What I told my child about the Kamloops graves\u2014to honour the 215<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Canada refused to implement Bryce\u2019s reforms and pushed him out of the public service in 1922 for refusing to stay quiet. That same year, Bryce walked onto the premises of Ottawa bookseller James Hope & Sons with his pamphlet, \u201cThe Story of a National Crime.\u201d More headlines followed, but then the story died\u2014and so did the children. Bryce died in 1932 and he was erased from Canada\u2019s history. His family says his greatest lament was that \u201cthe work did not get done.\u201d He must have felt like he, too, was screaming into silence.<\/p>\n

First Nations, M\u00e9tis and Inuit parents often spoke up but were ignored, and many were arrested for refusing to send their kids to these death traps. While the parents were in jail, the government took the kids. Over the decades, people of all walks of life regularly peppered the federal government with reports of child abuse, neglect and death in residential schools. Canada just waited out the media<\/a> storm and continued business as usual.<\/p>\n

I was born in 1964 in northern B.C. I could have been in one of those schools, but I was spared. I remember being the only \u201cIndian\u201d kid in my classrooms and wondering where the other Indian kids were. The townspeople had an answer for that\u2014Indians were too dumb to learn, were drunks and would just grow up to be on welfare.<\/p>\n

I began to hear the truths about residential schools decades later. At first only faintly, and then with growing strength as survivors told their truths, with great pain, so they could make sure this never happened to their grandchildren. It all made sense: why so many numb the pain with alcohol and drugs, why others disappeared and died amid deafening public silence. The government\u2019s colonial project was made possible by purposefully feeding the populace a steady diet of distractions, misinformation and stereotypes.<\/p>\n

The Prime Minister talks about the horrors and injustices in the past tense\u2014probably to avoid any accountability for the serious harms the government continues to foist on this generation of First Nations, M\u00e9tis and Inuit children.<\/p>\n

Canada used the Indian Act to drive kids into residential schools, and it is still in force. The country says I am a \u201cstatus Indian.\u201d I have a card saying so, but it expired decades ago and I don\u2019t plan on renewing it. I want no part of Canada\u2019s racist game<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet I am a player in this wicked colonial game, and so are you. The Indian Act is still around despite a royal commission laying out a 20-year plan to get rid of it in 1996 and the public service inequities that Bryce pointed out more than a century ago.<\/p>\n

One hundred years after Bryce\u2019s report, the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society and the Assembly of First Nations filed a human rights case against the federal government. Canada fought the case tooth and nail, relying on legal technicalities bereft of any serious consideration of how the inequities were affecting Indigenous children being separated from their families and placed in foster care at higher rates than in residential schools, experiencing irremediable harm and, in some cases, death. In 2016, the Human Rights Tribunal ordered Canada to immediately cease its discriminatory conduct. The government welcomed the decision and then did not comply. The tribunal has been forced to issue 19 further orders and has linked Canada\u2019s ongoing non-compliance to the unnecessary foster placements of many kids and to the deaths of three.<\/p>\n

I used to know how much children\u2019s caskets cost because I had to raise funds for them so often.<\/p>\n

Canada did not kill the kids directly\u2014it put them in situations where their deaths were far more likely. Children like Jordan River Anderson, who died in a hospital in 2005 at age five never having spent a day in a family home because Canada and Manitoba were fighting over payment for his at-home care due to him being First Nations. Or like 15-year-old Shannen Koostachin, an inspiring Cree education leader who fought her whole life for \u201csafe and comfy schools\u201d for First Nations students before dying in a 2010 car accident, hundreds of miles away from her family because there was no high school in her community. Then there were the seven First Nations youths found in a river in Thunder Bay, Ont., after they\u2019d gone there for high school because Ottawa was too cheap to build one near their home communities. Not every child died, of course, but others have never seen clean water come from a tap or grew up in foster care at 14 times the rate of other children due to the multi-generational residential school trauma and inequitable federal public services.<\/p>\n

In mid-June, federal ministers who have worn orange shirts and orange ribbons held news conferences about \u201callowing\u201d First Nations names on Canadian passports and, more substantively, passing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into Canadian law. I could not view those conferences because I was in Federal Court watching Canada\u2019s lawyers try to overturn two tribunal orders requiring it to compensate First Nations children it had discriminated against (and they are still children) and to avoid paying for public services for Indigenous kids off-reserve and without Indian Act status. I also attended a news conference with survivors from St. Anne\u2019s residential school in northeastern Ontario who wanted the federal government to drop its legal battle against them. That school actually had a homemade electric chair for punishing students.<\/p>\n

I believe those 215 and 715 little spirits buried on the grounds of the Kamloops and Marieval residential schools came to ensure the work gets done. We need to keep talking to the elected officials about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, even if we think they are not listening, because ultimately they will all hear us in the voting booth.<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in print in the August 2021 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cScreaming into silence.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
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