What does Truth and Reconciliation mean to you?

Listening. Hard conversations. Open hearts. In my work, staying current on OCAP (https://fnigc.ca/ocap-training/) and advocating for these principles. Hearing what reconciliation means to Indigenous colleagues, following and uplifting their voices. Thank you for creating spaces like this one to share and hear. - Dawn Macdonald

Listening, learning and relearning history.

Here’s a story of some personal truth as we approach the National Day for Truth & Reconciliation. I discovered a few years ago that my great-grandparents met, in the late 1890s, while employees of a residential school in Alberta. It’s a horrible, gut-punching truth. My first thought, I’m ashamed to admit, was wanting to push that truth down & away. I observed myself wanting to deny. It was an “industrial school,” I noted, so maybe that was different? But I knew that if I was genuine in my commitment to Truth and Reconciliation in the big picture, I needed to also take it on personally. To learn more and face whatever truth there was to find. So I started googling.

I learned that my great-grandparents – Mary and Jim – must have met at the “Red Deer Indian Industrial School,” which was built on the Traditional Territory of the Blackfoot, Tsuu T'ina and Stoney Nakoda Peoples, about 5 km west of present-day Red Deer. It was the first residential school managed by the Methodists and it operated between 1893 and 1919. Many of the students came from Maskwacis, about 75 km north of Red Deer, on the traditional lands of Treaty 6, and it was also meant to bring students from “the Cree and Salteaux Nations of Treaty 6, who lived around and north of Edmonton.”

Mary was born in 1863 on the Traditional Territory of the Anishinaabek Nation, which includes Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi Nation, collectively known as the Three Fires Confederacy; the Huron-Wendat, Chippewa and Haudenosaunee Nations also walked on that territory over time (Bradford, Ontario).​​ Her Dad was also born in Ontario (and his grandparents in England & Scotland), her Mom in England, arriving in Canada at about age eight. Mary was trained as a seamstress and in 1891 she was working as one in Ontario. In 1895 – still unmarried at the age of thirty-two! – she travelled to Alberta (apparently alone) and worked at the school as a seamstress.

Jim was born in 1866 on the Traditional Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation of the Anishinaabek Peoples (in Puslinch, Ontario). He moved to the Red Deer area with his family in 1891. Jim’s Dad was born in Scotland and came to Canada at age 6. His Mom was born in Ontario to parents who had also come from Scotland. I don’t know what Jim’s position was at the school or when he began work there….

Mary and Jim married in July 1897 and started farming elsewhere in Alberta.

I naively hoped, this school maybe wasn't the worst of the lot, since it was run by the folks who became the United Church? Well it turns out this school had one of the worst mortality rates of residential schools in Canada! It was horribly underfunded by the federal government, and “lower rates of pay made it difficult to attract qualified staff and also led to high staff turnover. Poor staff morale was a continuous problem.”

I learned that the school is “considered one of the most atrocious examples of the suffering, abuse and neglect that were rampant in Canada’s residential school system.” And that “Death was a fact of life at the Red Deer Industrial School. According to the Red Deer & District Archives, the first death occurred the same year it opened, in 1893. Of 122 students admitted between 1895 and 1903, 32 children (nearly 30 per cent of the total student population) died from tuberculosis, spinal meningitis and pneumonia following a measles epidemic.”

The industrial school model apparently didn’t prioritize education in the 3 R’s so much as learning “real-life skills” (as if their own parents and grandparents and families wouldn’t have taught them all those skills they needed?!!) … so the children were set to working very hard at things like farming, housekeeping, and, yes, sewing.

I want to hope that maybe my great-grandparents were horrified by what they witnessed, by the children’s suffering and deaths, and that that’s why they left the school. I want to hope that they were nice to the kids, that they cared, that they tried to change the crowded and inadequate conditions at the school, or even protested its very existence. But I can’t *know* any of this. And it’s likely impossible to find out. In any event, what difference would that make? The facts speak for themselves.

So I will remember them – Betsy Lepatac, Emily Stanley, Joshua Jacob, Joshua Saskatchewan, Peggy Bull, Rachel Hairline – just some of those children who are known to have passed away at the Red Deer Industrial Indian School between 1895 and 1897.

Sources:

https://thechildrenremembered.ca/school-histories/red-deer/ https://nctr.ca/resid.../alberta/red-deer-industrial-school/ https://www.reddeerexpress.com/.../a-look-at-the-red.../ https://www.thestar.com/.../shallow-graves-deep-scars... https://www.cbc.ca/.../red-deer-residential-school-burial...

The work that Senator Sinclair has done to help Canadians understand the reality of Indigenous people and the impact of Residential School is incredible. This particular quote is one of my favorites. Senator Murray Sinclair responds to Lynn Beyak's residential school remarks - Bing video

Below is something Robin Bradasch, YukonU's AVP Indigenous Engagement and Partnerships, shared at this time last year in the YukonU Update that really stuck with me:

Henry David Thoreau said “It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.” The Indigenous people of this country have had the courage to speak the truth in the pages of the Truth and Reconciliation Report and in their daily struggle to rise from the devastation imposed on them every day. I respectfully ask you to listen and to hear us, so that we may start with a shared understanding and move towards reconciliation.

What better time to start than Truth and Reconciliation Week?

Learning all I can and feeling honored to learn. I have been listening to this Podcast: The Secret Life in Canada and for this week I recommend S4: The Boy in the Picture. https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/203-the-secret-life-of-canada/episode/15892925-s4-the-boy-in-the-picture

About a widely-shared before and after residential school photo of a long- nameless boy Thomas Moore Keesick. Information https://www.cbc.ca/radio/secretlifeofcanada/sloc-s4-ep-1-1.6335984

and I have been enjoying the incredibly powerful photography of Paul Seesequasis (mentioned in the Podcast)

https://www.instagram.com/pseesequasis/