Our Residential School
The Reverend Bob Gay, former Downtown Chaplain


November 25, 2001

The important word is "our." Our Lord's Prayer, our lord's table, our church. We are people of a book, a religious heritage, a faith history. The past is part and parcel of our present and our future. Church history - United Church history - is our history. By the time Evelyn and I arrived in Saskatchewan the Round Lake Indian Residential School north of Broadview and Whitewood was, as they say "history." Its main building had been torn down. The lakeside site became a summer camp. For the children from nearby congregations Camp McKay was "our" church camp. A 1954 flood had twisted and destroyed the iron bridge linking the site to Indian reserves on the other shore of Round Lake. We told the campers that long, long before that bride had been built, Rev. McKay had met with the Indians on the bench land to advise them to stay out of the Riel rebellion. Our missionary saved the day. What could be more heroic than that? Later the federal Government would ask him to translate the terms of treaty Six for Ahtahkakoop's people. But his Cree had too many Assiniboine words in it for the hundreds who had gathered at Fort Carlton.

Foundation rocks were re-used for a memorial cairn. A caragana hedge led to a campfire circle. Its two room school building was the center of a residential school reunion. Christine Bear, a former student, was re-united with a school mate who was a white missionary's daughter. Mrs. Bear's grandsons rode their horses accompanying a neighbour and his mule train. All had come to honour whatever happy memories her contemporaries wanted to recall.

What had really happened in that or any other residential school was a sad silent ghost of the past about which we and our campers knew almost nothing.

Why call it "ours"? In 1958 I recall a Wheat Pool delegate telling Kipling members that for the Pool's executives it was always "our profit making company" and "your money losing Western Producer." Time may have changed that around. In 2001 two books and a presbytery task have brought the "our" concept home to me. Deana Christensen's Ahtahkakoop has been nominated for several awards. As a recent chief and school principal Christensen wanted her students to know their ancestors' struggle through 80 years of change. I was relieved that as I read to the end of his life, the two best students had just started to attend a residential school. I didn't want him to witness what came next. John S. Milloy's A National Crime is the other book. It has unfolded the next hundred and one years of history that we now wish we did not have to face. Early in his book he uses a student's challenge to make that history "ours."

Milloy is associate professor in the department of Native Studies at Trent University outside of Peterborough, Ontario. The Mohawk student wrote, "If I were to be honest, this is not my story, but yours." Milloy admits he had misgivings as a white researcher of trespassing upon Aboriginal experience. Through documents in federal and church archives, he saw that the former residential school student was correct. "The residential school system was conceived, designed, and managed by non-aboriginal people. It represents in bricks and lumber, classroom and curriculum, the intolerance, presumption, and pride that lay at the heart of Victorian Christianity and democracy that passed itself off as caring social policy. And persisted in the twentieth century as thoughtless insensitivity." Strong words. He finds the evidence to back them up. "The system is not someone else's history, nor is it just a footnote or a paragraph, a preface or chapter in Canadian history. It is our history, our shaping of the 'new world.' It is our swallowing of the land and its First Nations peoples and spitting them out as cities and farms and hydroelectric projects and as strangers in their own land and communities." That past demands our involvement. "It is critical that non-Aboriginal people study and write about the schools. Not to do so on the premise that it is not our story is to marginalize the story as we did Aboriginal people themselves. To reserve it for them as a site of suffering and grievance is to refuse to make it a site of introspection and discovery from which we can understand not only who we have been as Canadians but whom we must become if we are to deal justly with the Aboriginal people of this land."

Milloy stresses the fact that he "has never experienced a residential school or lived in a community whose children had been removed to such an institution; has never felt the purposeful denigration of his identity." That phrase "denigration of identity," it seems to me, includes and excludes any situation in which members of the dominant group may freely choose to send its children to an influential residential institution of learning for an advantage we value or covet for them. The dangers of ridicule or abuse encountered there are somehow badges of privilege and honour, reinforcing rather than denying the homes, communities and ways of life into which they have been born and raised. How could a faith group ignore its own commandment to "honour one's father and mother that your days may be long"? How could education dare to stamp out a child's natural curiosity and desire to learn? Schooling should reinforce and honour and build on one's roots, not deliberately attack or denigrate language, faith and future.

We can agree with Milloy that there is a story of Canada's Indian residential schools and the church's partnership in them, that can only be told by those who have had those experiences. "Many are now doing just that - retelling their experience in print and at school reunions, community circles and courtrooms, revealing that pain in a traumatic process of healing."

How hard it is to witness pain. Our unwillingness to help others bear and work through their pain makes it "ours" again. All Native Circle Conference heard the stories that had to be told and cross-examined in a British Columbia Alberni courtroom. Our United Church congregation there fed and supported those who came seeking redress. There's that word "our" painfully, proudly spoken. When our moderator Bob Smith presented our apology at the Sudbury General Council, that was only a first step. Bill Phipps signed a personal apology in our name to every residential student. Our present moderator Marion Pardy has sent out material to each congregation. In our lectionary study group Maria Shepherd agreed to serve communion. I thought we would read the apology to make it ours and she would respond. But as she broke the bread and lifted the cup she insisted on saying the apologies in unison with us. She even tried to teach us to sing "Amazing Grace" in her native language.

Turn the clock back to the 1890's and focus on early partnership of government and churches in eight Industrial schools and the record turns deadly. I had always wondered why Regina's Presbyterian residence closed in 1905. The experiment failed but it would be repeated again and again. Parents did not want to send their children. A Beardy's graduate wrote, "At the end of the day you want to have your children at home to hold them close. So do we." But at meeting after meeting the churches urged the government to pass laws to forcefully remove the children from their homes. By 1920 those laws were in place.

Lind Barbour wants us to turn the clock back to the good work of Miss Ida Drake. Arriving at File Hills in 1950 she was the first cook to declare that she would have the same menu for the students and staff. Her story agrees with an auditor's document that for food one school spent $26.00 a year on each student, but $56.00 on staff. That is my way of introducing 1950 yearly dollars into this sermon. Her role changed from cook to missionary. She called attention to an urgent need. Someone should be in Regina to help its youth as they arrived in our city. Agreeing, our superintendent of home missions said that she should be the one. But an Indian man helped her move her things into the city. The landlord cancelled her lease on the spot. The WMS had to buy a house for her work and ours. That was 1955, which indicates our level of racism too, if you stop to think about it.

Other amounts of money can be quoted to show how the Federal Government underfunded the churches' schools. Records show that at Duck Lake 50% of the children died: "confined for months on end Ôin (an inadequate) building whose every seam and crevice is burdened with tuberculosis bacilli'." Add to the TB toll of 1903 and 1907, the 1919 post war influenza that struck children and staff alike.

Indian Affairs files document every inadequacy of the schools. Health, sanitation, food and medical, maintenance and cleanliness. For years their only action was to send their reports to church authorities. Superintendents of Missions always accepted their principals' explanations. Nothing changed. T.C. Douglas wrote a firm letter over eight students who had walked home from Brandon to Carlyle. The principal chastized the premier, "If you believe every Indian complaint...you'll have no time left to run your province."

If the best of curriculum and teachers had been available how much could a student learn in a strange language when half her long, hard day was spent in the work that clothed and fed the school?

Indian Affairs began to close the schools and transfer their students and budgets to nearby town schools. 1972 had marked the breakthrough of Indian Control of Indian Education. The last residence was closed in 1976. New elementary and high school buildings would be built on the reserves to Ôsquare the circle.' Ahtahkakoop had encouraged the Anglicans to establish the first day school on his reserve in 1870. Day schools were written into Treaty Six. One hundred and fifteen years later the high school would be built on the reserve that honours his name.

The Downtown Chaplaincy welcomed the Rev. Harry Kuperus when he came from Winnipeg to Regina. The Christian Reformed Church had established the Indian Metis Christian Fellowship. One day he took me to task for the lack of medical treatment disclosed to him by one of our former students who had been beaten severely for stealing apples. Miss Drake and I both knew him quite well. Kuperus challenged me to pay that man's registration and go with him to attend a three day Indian-run conference on residential abuse. Of 310 persons in attendance, there were only ten non-aboriginal participants. And the man I had accompanied told me that he had to spend a lot of time explaining to others why I was there!

At that time only Roman Catholic examples of sexual abuse had surfaced. Our turn was yet to come. Milloy records two examples: a young boy who ran away after he was sodomized by two older boys and a farm instructor's intercourse with two 15-year-old females. Apparently no action was taken.

That Saskatoon conference gave me the opportunity to experience a sweat lodge ceremony. I found it hot, dark, and claustrophobic. After half an hour I did not go back in. One of the elders stayed out with me. And as we sat outside he thanked me for accepting their equivalent of our sacraments. Equality must flow both ways. How can there be a breakthrough until nation to nation, church to church, we meet as equals? The arrogance is ours. The opportunities are few. Why should they trust us?

That it may not be too late, let as God's peoples pray our "Amen."
Preached by Robert Gay
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan