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Chapter 7: Broken Children
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All residential school children shared one thing in common: the great loneliness they endured. Physically isolated from their homes, the children became additionally isolated from one another when siblings and relatives were separated by gender. They also became distanced from their cultures when they were forbidden to speak their own languages. The children missed their families, and being part of supportive communities. Thousands of Aboriginal children died while in the care of the schools from malnourishment, disease, overexposure to extreme weather, physical abuse, and suicide.
^ Baby George was an orphan who was brought to the Carcross Indian Residential School by Bishop Bompas. He died of tuberculosis in the Whitehorse hospital and was buried near Dawson Road, about a mile from town, date unknown. Photographer: Yukon Archives, T-18
Broken Children
Before long, Aboriginal communities began to experience the full effect of the dysfunction, and indeed devastation, caused by the residential school system. Generations of Survivors have been raised, from as young as four or five years old, in a "family" made up of government and church officials, and school staff. Far short of parental role models, teachers and school administrators used harsh disciplinary methods, and neither encouraged nor showed affection. The residential school system deprived Aboriginal children of their traditions, and of a safe and supportive home in which they were cherished. It produced generations of people who lacked essential interpersonal and relationship skills. Many Survivors were not equipped with the skills to become loving partners and parents, and had difficulty expressing parental love; many did not know how to handle conflict in a constructive way. When these Survivors became spouses or parents, they did not always interact with others appropriately. The abuse and neglect that Survivors suffered at the schools often resurfaced in their own relationships, where the abused became the abuser. This perpetuated a cycle of violence within families, and produced generations of "broken children," many of whom also went on to attend residential schools.
As parents struggled with the trauma of their own residential school experiences, they remained powerless to prevent the same from being visited upon their own children when it was their time to attend residential school.
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Grant Severight, Survivor
St. Philip's Indian Residential School, Kamsack,
Saskatchewan
"I was raised by my grandparents, [and] I loved my grandparents. I would have stayed in the bush with them rather than being put in a Residential School. I remember missing them and the dislocation I felt, the disconnection I felt to my family. Eventually that whole dislocation and disconnection kind of built walls in me that took me years to deconstruct again. The feeling of inferiority I felt ---
All over the Reserve we were happy there but when we would go outside the perimeter we would see these White farmers who were flourishing and just wealthy. Somehow even as a young man I used to wonder why is that? Why is it we don't have anything and why did I feel different when I went to town with my grandparents? We weren't treated with any kind of dignity. We were more or less just tolerated by the merchants in town.
That had a lasting impression on me, that feeling of not being equal. I probably carried that into all of my other relationships later on. Somehow it fired within my spirit anger. I really felt unfair treatment. But at that time I really had nothing to compare that with. I just thought that was the way it was for us people.
We don't have the closeness of family any more. A lot of the grandparents and a lot of the parents who went to Residential School lost that familial sense of belonging. In the course of having grown up like that you always try to emulate the people that raised you. If you were raised in coldness and detachment, you're going to carry those same ways of raising your own children in that atmosphere.
I know men who really believe that they should break the spirit of their children, to discipline them and to control them. I remember them saying, "break their spirit, break their spirit, don't give in to them." That's exactly what happened to them. The whole consequence of that is men don't know how to feel, or they don't know how to show their feelings. There is no nurturing any more."
Grant Severight
St. Philip's Indian Residential School, Kamsack, Saskatchewan
