it touches the lives of parents and children. It is important because it connects our nation's past and future. It is inspiring because those who were oppressed, victimized, and silenced have struggled to heal themselves and regain their voice.
At event after event, people spoke of parents having to send children off to residential school against their will. They spoke of tearful farewells at train stations, shorelines, and in school parlours, of children crying throughout the entire flight to school, and of cold and impersonal receptions given to children on arrival.
People told the Commission of being sent to school hundreds and even thousands of kilometres from their homes. Once they were there, it was impossible for their parents to visit them. In many schools, children stayed in school over the Christmas holidays, and, in some cases, they stayed over the summer as well. Some did not return home for years at a time.
People spoke of the immediate losses they experienced at school. Traditional, and often highly valued, clothing and footwear, handmade by loving mothers and grandmothers, were taken from them and never seen again. Long hair, often in traditional braids that reflected sacred beliefs, was sheared off. Many people had bitter memories of being deloused with lye or chemicals, regardless of whether they had lice. Children lost their identity as their names were changed—or simply replaced with a number. The Commission has heard of how students lost their individuality, were forced to wear uniforms, to march in lines, to wash in communal showers—treated, as several former students said, like they were animals in a herd. In the words of countless students, it was a frightening, degrading, and humiliating experience.
Former students described how they came from loving families and were cast into loveless institutions. They spoke of tremendous loneliness, and of young children crying themselves to sleep for months. Brothers and sisters were separated from each other within the schools, and often were punished for hugging or simply waving at one another.
Food was strange, spoiled and rotten in many cases, poorly prepared, and often in short supply. Many people recalled being punished for being unable to clean their plates. Others recalled that they were always hungry, and were punished for taking food from the kitchen or the garden.
For many, little in the classroom related to their lives. The only Aboriginal people they could recall from their history books were savages and heathen, responsible for the deaths of priests. They told the Commission of how the spiritual practices of their parents and ancestors were belittled and ridiculed.
Children were separated from families to get an education, but many of them spoke of how they spent much of their school days doing manual labour to support the school. Children who had lived traditional lifeways told us that after a decade of education, they did not have the skills they needed to survive when they returned home.
Many people came with stories of harsh discipline, of classroom errors corrected with a crack of a ruler, a sharp tug of the ear, hair pulling, or severe and frequent strappings. The Commission heard of discipline crossing into abuse: of boys being beaten like men, of girls being whipped for running away. People spoke of children being forced to beat other children, sometimes their own brothers and sisters. The Commission was told of runaways being placed in solitary confinement with bread-and-water diets and shaven heads.
People spoke of being sexually abused within days of arriving at residential school. In some cases, they were abused by staff; in others, by older students. Reports of abuse have come from all parts of the country and all types of schools. The students felt they had no one to turn to for help. If they did speak up, often it was impossible to find anyone who would believe them. Those who ran away from abuse said that in some cases, this only made their situation worse. Those who raised complaints often had the same experience. Many compared the schools to jail (in some cases, complete with barbed wire), and fantasized about being able to return home. Those who ran away could find themselves in trouble at home, at school, and with the police.
The Commission was told of children who died of disease, of children who killed themselves, of mysterious and unexplained deaths.
Many students who came to school speaking no English lost the right to express themselves. Students repeatedly told the Commission of being punished for speaking their traditional languages. People were made to feel ashamed of their language—even if they could speak it, they would not, and they did not teach it to their children.
It was made clear that not only language was lost: it was voice. People said their mouths had been padlocked. At school, boys and girls could not speak to each other, meaning that brothers and sisters were cut off from one another.
If they were abused, the only people they could complain to were the abusers. Later, as adults and parents, former students did not want to talk about their experiences to their children; husbands and wives did not wish to speak to one another about their residential school experiences. Some who were not abused or beaten said they had survived by trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. To stay out of trouble, they trained themselves to be silent and invisible. Students who witnessed violence and abuse spoke of how it left them traumatized.
The Commission heard about the hopes that some teachers had had when they started teaching in residential
