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Chapter 9: Enduring Impacts
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Enduring Impacts
The Aboriginal children who attended and lived through the residential school system are now known as Survivors, a term that tragically acknowledges the many children who did not survive the school experience. Approximately 85,000 Survivors are still alive today.
Abused children are often unable to express their feelings about the abuse because they may internalize their anger, fear, grief, and guilt. These unresolved feelings can cause emotional trauma and lead to re-enactment or destructive behaviours, like substance abuse or addiction, self-sabotage, self-harm or harm to others, dissociation (the inability to feel), and risk-taking. Survivors may also struggle with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which forces them to re-live the fear, helplessness, or horror of traumatic events that they either experienced or witnessed. In PTSD, sleep disturbance, hallucinations, or flashbacks are triggered by anything associated with the traumatic events (like a sight, sound, smell, or taste) and, as sufferers, re-live these events. They may also struggle with avoidance, depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues.
"Intergenerational Survivor" refers to any individual who has been affected by the intergenerational dysfunction created by the experience of attending residential school; this includes those who have been abused by persons who are Survivors or victims of survivors and, more generally, those who inhabit dysfunctional communities whose roots lie in the fracturing of family and community wrought by the generations of children who were separated from their families.
In the early 1990s, an estimated 287,350 intergenerational survivors were living across Canada, both on- and off-reserves. Intergenerational survivors have been indirectly affected by the residential schools because they were raised by people who had been so badly abused - physically and emotionally - and these people were, at times, unable to parent their own children. In fact, the lack of parenting skills is one of the most profound outcomes of the residential school system. It is perhaps one of the most inevitable outcomes, too, because of the extremely negative social conditioning of residential school students.
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Basil Ambers, Survivor
St. Michael's School in Alert Bay
" I was [at the school] nine years apparently. I didn't know. We didn't know how long we were there. Nobody cared. We didn't care about education. That wasn't the point. Survival was the thing that we cared about and survival was the only thing that motivated us, all my friends. There's only a little handful of us left. That's all. Dozens committed suicide, drowned or drank themselves to death. Some went under with drugs.
. . . [B]ut you've got to heal. That's number one. You've got to heal. And you've got to look at yourself. You've got to come to the conclusion that you're not a bad guy or you're not a bad woman . . . We need to get back to the roots of a lot of things.
One of the things I tried to promote in one of our [healing] meetings ... was to get back the feeling of respect for our women that we were losing. We no longer respected our women. Quite often we mistreated them badly. We never got to that because of the hurt that people had.
. . . [I]t bothers me when people come up to me and say, "You've got to learn how to live, man, you've got to learn to accept these things. It's happened. It's gone." It hasn't gone. The Residential Schools thing is the biggest factor that has shaken the Indian people down to their roots and it's the thing that has changed our total look on history."
Basil Ambers, Survivor
St. Michael's School in Alert Bay
Intergenerational Impacts
"Intergenerational Impacts" refer to "the effects of physical and sexual abuse that were passed on to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Aboriginal people who attended the residential school system." List of Impacts
For the past five hundred years, Aboriginal peoples have suffered historic trauma. Today, Aboriginal people are beginning to understand that many of their current social problems are deeply rooted in the trauma caused by the residential school experience. This unresolved historic trauma will continue to affect Aboriginal individuals and communities until it is fully addressed, psychologically, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
