CANADA
Huffington Post
Wayne K, Spear
In many respects, my friend and colleague Garnet Angeconeb is representative of the countless Aboriginal children beaten and raped in Canada’s Indian residential schools. For years he told no one, including his wife. Angry, pain-filled and confused, he drank heavily to dull his feelings. The turning-point in his life arrived during a business trip to Ottawa, on October 31, 1990:
That morning, I got up, showered, dressed, and headed downstairs to meet a colleague for breakfast. “Hey, look at this front-page article on the residential school issue,” he said as he sipped his coffee. I had my own copy of the Globe and Mail tucked under my arm. There, on the front page, was an article about how the then-Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Phil Fontaine, had publicly disclosed that he had been physically and sexually abused while attending an Indian Lake residential school. As I read the article, I began to feel an indescribable pain crawling all over my body. Through this haze of pain, I struggled to admit to my colleague that I, too, like many former students, had experienced sexual and physical abuse while at residential school. I was also enraged by the psychological and spiritual scars inflicted on me and the other students. My colleague and I grew almost completely silent. The silence continued as we ate our breakfast. After a while, my colleague quietly asked, “So you were abused in residential school?” Not knowing what exactly to say, I responded, “Yes, I was abused — sexually.” I told him that a man at the school named Hands, who eventually became an Anglican priest, had abused me and many others at Pelican during the 1960s. I felt a wave of rage overtake me. I had a huge lump in my throat as I struggled to hold back the pain I had buried for so many years. Then, as if a floodgate had been thrown open, I cried uncontrollably. It was the first time I had ever told anyone that as a little boy I had been sexually abused at residential school. For the next year I tried to figure out how to deal with that admission. I had to tell my family (I have been married since 1978 and had never spoken of the abuse to my wife). It took a lot of soul-searching — I had so many doubts.
As Angeconeb recalls years later, Leonard Hands made a deliberate point of refusing to apologize to him either during the January 5, 1996 Kenora District Court sentencing or in the years leading up to his death in 2000: “he specifically stated he was not apologizing to me. He wasn’t allowed to use my name but said he was specifically excluding “G.A.” from his apology. He claimed he had already done so during our meeting in 1992, and that I had refused his apology. It angered me but I realized he was a man going down and that it was his only way of lashing out and trying to regain some control.” No longer among the living, Hands would be the object of posthumous forgiveness. In this way, Angeconeb would begin to let go of the rage and confusion, taking a huge step forward in his personal healing and spiritual growth.
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