Residential Schools: Canada Confronted With Difficult Past

Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami President Mary Simon shakes hands with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as Assembly of First Nations Chief Phil Fontaine watches, after the government's official apology for residential schools, in the House of Commons on June 11, 2008. The Canadian Press/Fred Chartrand

The difficult past and present of Canada’s indigenous peoples are once again in the spotlight after First Nations groups took it upon themselves to locate unmarked graves at two former residential school sites.

The issue of missing children and unrecorded burials was the subject of Volume 4 of the 3,500-page Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report that was released in 2015. The Liberal government allocated $33.8 million in the 2019 budget to establish a residential school death registry, but funding for the program was only recently made available.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks about residential schools in the House of Commons in Ottawa on June 1, 2021. The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld

Ken Coates, a professor in the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan, says finding the gravesites is important for the First Nations community. He says the discovery acknowledges in a more public way what the community has been saying for years, and provides an opportunity to grieve the past.

“It’s a chance for some closure,” he said in an interview.

Dustin Twin Sr., an elder with the Swan River First Nation in northern Alberta, agrees.

“The nations and the families can grieve, and put some closure and know what happened to the children,” Twin told The Epoch Times.

Twin, 74, attended the Joussard residential school in northwest Alberta from age 8 until he was 17, from 1955 to 1964.

He says his grandparents cared for him before he was sent to the school, and he missed them very much while at the school. He has very bad memories from his experience at the school, which he says led him down a path of alcoholism and a troubled life. The school was very “militaristic” and authoritative, he said, and the nuns running it didn’t treat the children with kindness, making him feel he was “inferior.” He recalls that some would sometimes even call him and his peers “le sauvage,” which can be translated from French as “completely wild.”

Twin says he only had a chance to see his grandparents during Christmas and summer holidays at first. Then when he was older, he was able to travel back on the weekends if he could arrange his own transportation for the 50-kilometre trek home.