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ABSTRACT
The Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement ushered First Nation, Metis, and Inuit people, along with their non-indigenous neighbours in Canada, into a transitional justice era. Indian Residential School survivors still alive today were finally able to share their truth about the human rights violations they experienced as children while in Indian Residential Schools. As a Health Canada Resolution Health Support Program worker I was able to witness the resilience embodied by the most courageous people I have ever met: able to survive the cultural genocide inflicted by the Canadian government, and their sweeping policies to get rid of the Indian in the child.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on contributor
Rocky James completed his Bachelor of Arts in First Nations at Vancouver Island University in 2006. He completed his Master of Arts in the Faculty of Human and Social Development at the University of Victoria in 2010. Rocky is currently working on his Philosophy Doctorate in the Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program (ISGP) at the University of British Columbia, Canada. His focus of research is on the wellbeing of Indigenous gay, bisexual, and trans men. Rocky's passion in life is in developing social policies through the lens of Indigenous oral and community histories.
Notes
1 R. James, Lateral Violence a Process in First Nations Institutions (Victoria, British Columbia: The University of Victoria, 2010), 48.
2 Ibid.
3 ‘Detailed Notice: The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Has Been Approved’, 2006, http://www.residentialschoolsettlement.ca/detailed_notice.pdf
4 For a complete list of options visit http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=807
5 shows the general features of a truth statement across the lifespan for an Indian Residential School survivor in either an IAP or TRC statement gathering session, and is based on my own anecdotal observation.
6 Harry P. Reeder, Theory and Practice of Husserl’s Phenomenology (Villejuif Cedex, FRA: Zeta Books, 2010), 27.
7 For a greater account of the oral histories of the matriarchs on the paternal side of my family, refer to B.M. Cryer, Two Houses Half-buried in Sand: Oral Traditions of the Hul'q'umi'num' Coast Salish of Kuper Island and Vancouver Island/Beryl Mildred Cryer; Compiled and Edited by Chris Arnett (Vancouver, BC: Talon Books, 2007).
8 A. L. Stoler and K. Strassler, ‘Memory Work in Java: A Cautionary Tale’, in The Oral History Reader, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2006), 370–96.
9 R. Perks and A. Thomson, ‘Central American Refugee Testimonies and Performed Life Histories in the Sanctuary Movement’, in The Oral History Reader, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 1998). Stoler and Strassler (ibid., 284) further assert, ‘From the vantage point of the postcolonial, the notion of a history of the present has strong resonance and appeal. Colonial architecture, memorials, and archives and the scientific disciplines that flourished under the guidance of colonial institutions are dissected as technologies of rule whose “legacies” and “influences” are embodied in our comportments and leisures, lodged in our everyday accoutrements, and embedded in the habitus of the present’. Phenomenology provides an opportunity to explore the evidence of indigenous oral history as a lived experience, specifically, my experience. This loosens the limitations of exploring and experiencing evidence, but being able to maintain a critical eye.
10 R. Perks and A. Thomson, ‘The Voice of the Past: Oral History’, in The Oral History Reader, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 1998), 25.
11 R. Perks and A. Thomson, ‘Central American Refugee Testimonies and Performed Life Histories in the Sanctuary Movement’, in The Oral History Reader, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 1998), 501.
12 G. Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 36–7: ‘The nature of survivance creates a sense of narrative resistance to absence, literary tragedy, nihility, and victimry. Native survivance is an active sense of presence over historical absence, sence, the dominance of cultural simulations, and manifest manners. Native survivance is a continuance of stories’.
13 The Canada Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ‘Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’, 2005, 208.
14 G. Coulthard, ‘Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the “Politics of Recognition” in Canada’, Contemporary Political Theory 6 (2007): 437–60.
15 Ibid., 442.
16 For more detailed information about Health Canada’s Resolution Health Support Program visit the following website, http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fniah-spnia/services/indiresident/irs-pi-eng.php
17 J. Smith, ‘Phenomenology’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, eScholarID:122046 (2009). doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2009.03.001
18 The following is a list of abuses and harms Indian Residential School survivors experienced in Indian Residential School. The list helped adjudicators in the IAP decide how to financially compensate survivors for abuses and harms suffered: http://www.iap-pei.ca/information/level-degre-eng.php
20 For the full definition from this source refer to http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conservative
21 Julia Harrison, ed., ‘Marius Barbeau and the Methodology of Salvage Ethnography in Canada, 1911–51’, in Historicizing Canadian Anthropology (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2006), 52–64, at 53.
22 Ibid., 63.
23 Cryer, Two Houses Half-buried in Sand.
24 C. Arnett, The Terror of the Coast: Land Alienation and Colonial War on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, 1849–1863 (Vancouver, BC: Talon Books, 1999).
25 The word potlatch itself is problematic. In anthropology it come to be commonly associated with large social gatherings in Indigenous communities located in the Pacific Northwest of North America. First recorded and shared publicly by non-Indigenous ethnographer Franz Boas, the potlatch could be defined as ‘The practice of distributing gifts to guests who had come to witness or participate in important events (marriages, the assumption of a new status, the construction of a house)’ (H. High, ‘Re-reading the potlatch in a time of crisis: debt and the distinctions that matter’, Social Anthropology, 20, no. 4 (2012): 363–379). However, in High's footnotes she clarifies that ‘The word is of Chinook jargon origin and seems to have crystallised into its current meaning in English via the uptake of jargon words by settlers, including, not insignificantly, Canadian laws that were aimed at eradicating potlatches (described as “Indian dances”) that were associated with wasteful profligacy’. The Chinook language was a language developed among Northwest Coast Indigenous people for the purpose of trading and commerce. For a more detailed account of the word potlatch, refer to the canon of Franz Boas, or the work of Claude Levi-Strauss.
26 L.A. Robertson and the Kwagu’l Gixsam Clan. Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las: Jane Constance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church, and Custom (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2013), 162.
27 Ibid., 164.
28 Schedule D can be obtained from the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement website at http://www.residentialschoolsettlement.ca/Schedule_D-IAP.PDF. Refer to pages two to five to understand how the Adjudication Secretariat broadly defined the human rights violations experienced by children while in Indian Residential School.
30 Refer to the World Health Organization’s website of educational materials on the social determinants of health, found at http://www.who.int/social_determinants/sdh_definition/en/; and the Associations of Faculty of Medicine Canada at http://phprimer.afmc.ca/Part1-TheoryThinkingAboutHealth/Chapter2DeterminantsOfHealthAndHealthInequities/DeterminantsofHealth
32 For the full list of the research series go to http://www.ahf.ca/publications/research-series
33 R. Ross, ‘Telling Truths and Seeking Reconciliation: Exploring the Challenges’, in From Truth to Reconciliation: Transforming the Legacy of Residential Schools (Ottawa, ON: The Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2008), 145–59, at 152.
34 James, Lateral Violence a Process in First Nations Institutions.
35 The following is an excerpt from my thesis on how fear-based learning was structured in relationships between Indian Residential School administrators and Indian Residential School students: ‘Step 1: When a residential school educator wanted to isolate a student, the educator would pick one older student to gather a group of students to socially isolate another student; Step 2: The gang of students would isolate another student by intimidating them, roughing them up, and make them feel like they weren’t a part of the group; Step 3: The result, a student would be isolated from any source of community identity in an already hostile environment; Step 4: As residential school students grow up and have families of their own these social coping mechanisms are passed down to the next generation of children, thus beginning the cycle of violence and fear based learning’. Second: Conditioning for Fear Based Learning: Podding in Community: ‘Fear based learning was paramount to pedagogical practice in residential schools; as was demonstrated in a priest using an older student to isolate a younger one. This is one example of fear based learning, and the statement is not a blanket statement about how all school administrators behaved. This example is used because of the ability to tease out information about the effects of fear based learning on the process of lateral violence. Residential school educators would use fear to begin to sever connection to the former source of identity, which were family or community members’ (ibid., 46).
36 C. Helin, Dances with Dependency: Indigenous Success Through Self-reliance (Vancouver, British Columbia: Orca Spirit Publishing & Communications, 2006), 125.
38 Ibid.
41 Reeder, Theory and Practice of Husserl's Phenomenology, 27.
42 Q.L. Driskill, C. Finley, B.J. Gilley, and S.L. Morgensen, eds, Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2011), 33.
43 Ibid.
44 Finley further argues that ‘Colonialism needs heteropatriarchy to naturalize hierarchies and unequal gender relations. Without heteronormativity ideas about sexuality and gender relationships, heteropatriarchy, and therefore colonialism, would fall apart’ (ibid., 34).