CANADA
Toronto Star
Vitaline Elsie Jenner is a Survivor who didn’t go quietly. When they came to tear her from her family at Fort Chipewayan in Alberta, she fought to stay with all the fury a terrified child could muster.
Mama, Mama, kâya nakasin! she called out in Cree, the only language she knew. Mom, Mom, don’t leave me!
But like 150,000 other aboriginal children she soon found herself in a notorious residential school — “a world dominated by fear, loneliness, and lack of affection,” as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission put it in its searing summary report into one of Canada’s darkest, most shameful eras, made public on Tuesday.
It was a world in which children were beaten for speaking Cree and other First Nations, Métis and Inuit languages, as Christian teachers tried to “civilize” their young charges. “They took my language. They took it right out of my mouth,” says Rose Dorothy Charlie. “I never spoke it again.” Some children, forcibly uprooted into an alien culture, were known only by numbers. Gilles Petiquay recalls being 95, then 4, then 56. The schooling they received was substandard. All too often the growing children were hungry; milk and meat were luxuries.
“There was no love, there was no feelings, it was just supervisory,” says Jack Anawak, one of 80,000 living survivors. “We would cry like little puppies or dogs, right into the night, until we go to sleep; longing for our families,” says Betsy Annahatak.
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