CANADA
Toronto Star
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s searing final report into residential schools calls for a “new vision” for Canada-First Nations relations, based on common respect.
Sphenia Jones is a survivor from the Haida Nation. As a child she was wrenched from her family on Haida Gwaii off British Columbia’s coast, put on a steamer to Prince Rupert and then shuffled on to a train bound for a residential school far inland.
For days, children on that train were “crying all the time, crying, crying, crying,” she told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. On the second day she found a baby abandoned in a corner. “I picked him up. I remember holding him … looking at his face.” There was “nothing to eat, nothing to drink,” she recalls. “I couldn’t give him anything.”
Was the baby Sphenia Jones cradled in her own childish arms that day one of the 3,201 children who are known to have died in the residential schools of malnutrition, tuberculosis, influenza and other scourges, many of them buried, forgotten, in unmarked graves? We will never know. But her story rings cruelly true for other survivors. Many of the 150,000 indigenous children who were uprooted from their communities between 1883 and 1996 faced lives of heartbreak, cultural deracination, permanent separation from family, and privation and abuse. As many as 6,000 may have died in the schools.
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