After decades, the chilling truth still hurts

Sunlight streamed in through the windows of Iqaluit’s Cadet Hall on the afternoon of March 25, illuminating the flags of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories, as, one by one, former residential school students took the microphone to speak to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Now middle-aged, they told stories of a childhood spent away from their families in the 1950s and 1960s, stories of abuse, heartbreak and loneliness that were more chilling than the -36 C windchill outside.

“How can I forgive the government? How can I forgive the church? It has no heart,” said Monica Ittusardjuat, whose years spent at Chesterfield Inlet’s Joseph Bernier school were filled with confusion and fear.

Run by Oblate brothers and Grey nuns, the school taught young Inuit who were plucked from their families from camps throughout the Eastern Arctic to live at the Turquetil Hall residence in Chesterfield Inlet.

There, Ittusardjuat, who was seven when she first arrived at the school in 1958 from Igloolik, would look out the windows of the school, imagining that she coul jump out. Anything to mentally escape the school, where every moment of her life was regimented, with every girl receiving the same stark cut with bangs.

One teacher threw an eraser at a fellow student, breaking the student’s skin, she told the commissioners. Other threats like “don’t do that or I’ll hang you by your toenails” weren’t acted on.

Ittusardjuat was spanked when she sought comfort from a relative, and was left afraid to speak to her brother.

For the first year she was there, she didn’t hear a word of her first language, Inuktitut, in school.

The school imposed a new way of life, she said, “because we were worthless Inuit,” who needed to be cleansed and given a new look and life — English.

But it was like jail: “we were forced to become white people,” she said, speaking in Inuktitut and English during her presentation.

And, later when she finished school, she ended up marrying a fellow residential school student. As she related it, their life together was a painful litany of alcohol and abuse.

She didn’t know how to be a parent, and would read self-help books on parenting for advice.

Her parents experienced the pain of losing her, she experienced the pain of losing them, and all of this ended up being passed on to her children, Ittusardjuat said.

“We have to heal for our children’s sake. We have to produce something positive for our children,” Ittusardjuat said.

Other speakers related their own stories of their special hells: one man told — after 45 years — about his abuse at the hands of an older woman at the Pond Inlet hostel he lived at for four years, a trauma which left him an emotional cripple.

A happy boy of 10, eager to learn the ways of white people, he became silent and scared after he was raped.

“Every time I thought about it, I turned to alcohol and drugs,” he said.

As an adult he committed a sexual assault and went to jail, “no wonder,” he said, due to the sexual abuse he had endured.

Another woman told how she lost her siblings to Joseph Bernier School until she joined them there.

Sardines and bologna are two foods she can’t stand anymore because the smell puts her back into residential school.

She sobbed as she recalled being gang raped as a 20-year old student at teachers’ college at Fort Smith, an event she said took her 20 years to talk about.

Veronica Dewar, former head of the Pauktuutit national Inuit women’s association, said she travelled to Churchill Vocation School from Coral Harbour as a child of 15 and came back out as a woman unable to fit in anywhere.

“We were alone. We weren’t able to understand our parents. I don’t know how to sew. I’m ashamed.”

And this traumatic childhood included being molested by Catholic priest.

“For 59 or 60 years I’ve been living a life of sorrow. I’ve been living a life of secrecy,” Dewar said. “I thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak.”

The hearing was also a chance for Jack Anawak, a former MP for Nunavut, to speak about what he went through at Joseph Bernier School.

“We were gathered together and our identity, our unique identity was stripped away as our heads were shaved. We were dealt with in a herd, never as individuals. Our spirituality was challenged, only to be replaced by god people, with a consistently cruel unrelenting depravity that most Canadians cannot imagine,” said Anawak, one of the first former Inuit residential school students to speak out.

Today, Anawak said no one would think of handing their children over to a group of strangers.

But many Canadians still haven’t been interested in this “dark chapter” of history and even the public has been confused about why people have wanted to speak.

Anawak called for more support for former residential school students and more acknowledgment in the history books.

Statements gathered during the northern tour will be used to create a collective memory of Canada’s residential school legacy, which will be archived in a national research centre.

The Truth and Reconciliation commission flows from the 2007 Indian residential schools settlement agreement, which called for an independent commission to hear from survivors and contribute to the healing process.

About 70 people listen in Iqaluit’s Cadet Hall on the afternoon of March 25 as a former residential school student tells the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the trauma she experienced as a student. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)