The stories the survivors shared were hard to hear—for church representatives, for the public, and for seasoned journalists. Many professionals cried at these events. But the stories, of course, were much harder to tell than hear. It would be the first time many survivors spoke of their experiences publicly. And even for those who had already spoken or written about their experiences, it had the potential to tear old wounds raw. Some testified that they had put hours of work, sometimes years, into assembling all their memories together into a statement they could say aloud. While much was laid bare, some things will always be too painful to share and were withheld. But although the stories were harrowing and painful, almost every survivor ended on a note of hope and pride, showing individual and collective resilience. They said the school was a systematic attempt to take away their culture. But it failed. “I am still here,” was repeated many times, “still Mi’kmaw.”
Most speakers had suffered not only during their residential school years, but for a long time afterward. Healing came through therapy, from devoted friends and family who refused to give up on them, or through embracing their cultural heritage and championing their rights: Mi’kmaw song, dance, drumming, language, and deeper ways of perceiving the world and being in it. Humour was essential. Some thanked Mi’kmaw artists like survivor Rita Joe for instilling cultural pride in them. Survivors also spoke of their unstoppable personal determination to spread the word about the rich history of their people, how it was strong enough to survive Canada’s attempts to destroy it. Most were still on the healing journey. Many spoke of the need for a community-wide cultural revival, and for young people to learn the Mi’kmaw language from the Elders who still have it.
It took deep inner strength for survivors to sit before thousands and tell these personal stories, to expose the worst they’d been through and tell their truth. Some admitted that it hurt them all over again to do so, that they could feel the pain of it in their bodies. But testifying was part of the healing process. Forgiving was, for some, even harder. As one survivor put it: “Deep down I have to forgive myself first.”
Fittingly, the day closed with an honouring ceremony for Nora Bernard.
Men and Women of the Cloth Responding
“I have inherited a black mark…I have a long, long way to go before I can understand your hurt.”
– Tony Mancini, Catholic archbishop of Halifax to the Mi’kmaw community at the TRC Halifax session
Only when settler Canada can acknowledge its shameful past with open eyes, without excuses, and apply the lessons in those mistakes to justice, shedding our “civilized” sense of superiority, will there be hope for Canada. The Shubenacadie Indian Residential School isn’t just a historical fact. Although it is rarely discussed, it is a living history that resonates today. It is not enough to say that those who ran Shubenacadie, or even those who founded it, were part of a racist system. It is an accurate statement, but it falls short of the truth. These people were not passive floaters caught up in a racist stream. They were active players in a cruel and violent attempt at cultural genocide.
Since its formal apologies at Millbrook and Indian Brook more than twenty years ago, the Catholic Archdiocese of Halifax-Yarmouth has been reluctant to discuss Shubenacadie publicly. The Archdiocese did not consent to a formal interview for this book. Deacon Bob Britton, chancellor for the Archdiocese, chatted with me briefly over the phone and answered my first email. “Frankly I am not in a position to answer your questions,” he wrote. “When I review our archival information we have little that relates to the origins, operations, and management of the school.” This is in part because the Truth and Reconciliation Commission required that the churches hand over their records, which are to be entered into a database that will eventually be available online. Britton also told me that the Sisters of Charity were responsible for the “management of the school” and therefore had better records—or at least they did until their mother house burnt down in 1951. But priests appointed by the Archdiocese actually managed the school; Sisters of Charity nuns staffed it. And the school was open for another sixteen years after the fire, yet the Sisters of Charity and Archdiocese records of those years seem scant. What they did have now belongs to the TRC, and the TRC isn’t ready to share.
When I asked what the Catholic Church has done since Shubenacadie closed to repair its relationship with Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik communities, Deacon Britton noted that the Archdiocese started a mission parish at Indian Brook, called Saint Kateri Tekakwitha—after the Mohawk saint—in the early days of the residential school. Britton wrote that this parish and the one at Millbrook, Sacred Heart Church, “provide a visible presence of the church’s mission—the proclamation of the Gospel and the care of the people of those two communities.” No one returned my calls and emails to those parishes, seeking more details. But Rita Joe, in her autobiography, wrote fondly of Christmas Eve mass at her church in Eskasoni: “The Christmas songs were sung in English and Mi’kmaq….During the early part of the service, our priest spoke in Mi’kmaq—a full page of our language, we were so surprised that we clapped. The attempts of the priests and the nuns in the choir to speak our language always moves me.”
Some survivors managed to find Sisters who had taught at the school—visiting them or exchanging letters—with varying results. Survivor Elsie Charles Basque, who was the first certified Mi’kmaw teacher in Nova Scotia and the first to work in a provincial public school, told journalist Darlene Ricker that she received an apology from one of her former Shubenacadie teachers. The Sister said she and her colleagues had no control over the system. Rita Joe and Isabelle Knockwood both wrote about their experiences contacting former teachers. Knockwood wrote that only some of the Sisters acknowledged the severity of punishments at the school. And even those who did felt the abuses were the fault of an individual or individuals, not a condemnation of the school itself.
One Sister wrote to Knockwood saying there was “so much ingratitude, exaggeration and negative remarks” from survivors, and little acknowledgement of the good things. “What about the meals, clean clothes, and care that was given when they were sick?” Another Sister wrote to Knockwood that she felt sympathy for the survivors because at a very young age they had been taken from home. She theorized that perhaps that experience alone had driven them to remember the worst things about the school—memories that had been magnified over time. “Over the years I have marveled at how well they did in spite of living in a different environment,” she wrote.
Inspired by her friend Isabelle Knockwood’s efforts, Rita Joe took her husband—also a Shubenacadie survivor—to see Sister Justinian in Halifax. Sister Justinian was at Shubenacadie from 1946 to 1955 and was one of Rita Joe’s favourites. At the time of their reunion, the Sister was in her eighties and long retired. “When I walked into her room, Sister Justinian put out her arms for me, and I went into them,” Rita Joe wrote in her autobiography. It was a tearful reunion. But Rita Joe’s husband, Frank, could not contain his anger. He vented at Sister Justinian and Rita Joe scolded him in Mi’kmaw, reminding him how old this former teacher was. “We’ve got to forgive and forget,” Rita Joe told him. Frank said his piece and then confessed he didn’t hate Sister Justinian, he’d just been so badly hurt by the school and had naturally focused his anger on the adults who’d run the place. But Rita Joe wrote that she had always held sympathy for the Sisters, even as a child. In a sense, the couple well encapsulated the varied reactions to the school by survivors. Resentment, anger, and sometimes forgiveness and sympathy.
Survivors and researchers have questioned the Sisters of Charity, as an organization, several times about the school. In 1978, when journalist Conrad W. Paul wrote a series for Micmac News based on interviews with thirty survivors, he spoke with Sister Cathleen Dunne, then public relations director. “Any sister who served while Father Mackey was superintendent said he loved the children and did all he could to help them,” she told him. “The
sisters recall him as an extremely kind man.” Sister Dunne denied the existence of a “dungeon” or “hole”—the closets where survivors remember spending days with only bread and water. Paul wrote of how Micmac News had to change printers to run the series. Their usual printer, the Dartmouth Free Press, would not run it without a signed release from the Sisters. “It was made quite clear that such a request could be and would be buried in red tape,” Paul wrote. “[The Sisters of Charity] said we were not searching for the truth and implied that over thirty independent eye-witness accounts were lies,” but refused to give him the other side of the story or release any documentation on the school.
In 1986 freelance journalist Heather Laskey contacted the Sisters of Charity for comment. She was working on a ten-minute documentary for CBC Radio. “Nobody’d done anything in the white press,” Laskey says. “They knew about the school but they didn’t care.” The congregation again defended the Sisters’ involvement in the school, saying they too had a difficult adjustment to make, that there had essentially been a massive culture clash in an isolated building with little understanding. One Sister told Laskey that unannounced nutritionists had visited the school twice while she worked there and given positive reports on the food. She also said that the children almost always became good readers. Sister Caroleen Browne, communications director, told Laskey the Sisters found some of the survivors’ accounts “unfounded and exaggerated.” She added that religious life used to be more rigid and harsher punishments more acceptable socially: “I believe the residential schools were an attempt to solve a problem, but it was a mistaken attempt.” In 1995 Sister Mary Martin, on behalf of the order, told Dalhousie graduate student Marilyn Elaine Thomson-Millward the same thing.
In researching this book, I met with four Sisters of Charity and conducted detailed interviews and email correspondence with each of them. Their tone has softened considerably when describing survivor stories from Shubenacadie. “The Congregation as a whole, and individual Sisters, take all testimony seriously,” Ruth Jeppesen, communications director, told me. She says the Sisters are “genuinely committed to the reconciliation process and have tried to ensure ‘deep listening’ throughout that process,” that “some are certainly puzzled and saddened by some of the stories that don’t fit with their own experiences.”
As an organization, the Sisters of Charity has yet to issue any official apology for its role in the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. Its first public statement on Shubenacadie came at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2011—forty-four years after the school was shuttered. Sister Donna Geernaert made the statement: “It is with great sadness that we have listened to the stories of Residential School survivors,” she said. “The history of these schools was not one of liberation. They were part of a system that was racist and oppressive. While we wish the past could have been different, our challenge today is to find the kind of education that will liberate.” Sister Geernaert spoke at length of reconciliation efforts made by the Sisters, but didn’t mention in her statement that the Sisters of Charity had been directly involved with the school as teachers, disciplinarians, and administrators.
The Sisters most survivors remember as being particularly violent, sadistic, and cruel are all long dead. In all, only three Sisters who taught at Shubenacadie survive—two locally and one in the United States. They are retired and elderly, and none of them were up for an interview, Sister Donna Geernaert told me. When I sat down with Geernaert, she knew little of Sister Mary Leonard, who along with Father Mackey is remembered as the school’s most vicious adult during its early years. Like the Catholic Archdiocese of Halifax, the Sisters of Charity has little in the way of official records. What remains is being sent to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where it will not be made public until the entire database is complete. It could take a decade or more.
One document the Sisters of Charity would not share, TRC or no TRC, is the Annals, which the Sisters at the school kept. In the mid-1990s, Sister Mary Martin allowed graduate student Marilyn Elaine Thomson-Millward to view the Annals. According to Thomson-Millward, it was a journal of sorts with insights into what life was like at the school, and revealed much about the Sisters’ attitudes to their work. Ruth Jeppesen sees it differently. “They’re personal house records, nothing to do with the school,” she says. “They would typically include things like the Sisters’ prayer schedule…changes to guidelines and permissions…the kind of things that regulated their life as Sisters.” In this book, I’ve had to rely exclusively on Thomson-Millward’s excerpts and interpretations.
When I met with Sister Geernaert, she said that the Sisters of Charity had participated in a racist system. “I suspect in the 1930s we had no awareness that what we were doing was racist,” she explained. “There was an inherent racism in the system no doubt. The federal government, possibly for the best possible motives, was trying to make Aboriginal people into white people.” She also said that, in those days, the Sisters did whatever the archbishop asked of them. The Sisters at Shubenacadie had diverse experiences. Some wanted to be there and others found it difficult. “I’ve talked to Sisters that have been in the residential school both here and in Cranbrook,” she said, “and I don’t get any sense from them anything other than they liked being there. They appreciated the Native people.” She recalled a conversation with one Sister who had taught at the residential school in Cranbrook, British Columbia—which was also taught by Sisters of Charity—in the last years it was open. She could not believe what she heard about residential schools in general. “Well, that wasn’t us, was it?” this Sister said to Sister Donna. “Because our students were happy.”
But it was.
Sister Geernaert said that other former teachers she’s spoken with enjoyed the experience and felt good about it, that they had accomplished something. She stressed that not every survivor story is one of pain and sorrow. The worst of it, she felt, was the taking of children against a family’s will. “I’ve talked to some of the Mi’kmaq who have been at the school and they went…because their parents wanted them to,” she said. “And they probably had a different experience than those who were taken almost by force.” She also said that “people who had very bad experiences” are the only ones who gave testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings throughout Atlantic Canada in 2011. “There were others that didn’t have bad experiences and don’t feel that they’re in a position that they can actually talk about that…they would probably be ostracized.” She said other survivors have told her they had good experiences.
For non-Aboriginal people, it is perhaps too easy to scapegoat the churches as mainstream society further secularizes, now that religion has met with popular criticism—bolstered by numerous sexual abuse scandals—and fewer and fewer people are involved with the churches. The churches were major players in that racist system, it is true. God’s representatives on Earth perpetrated unspeakable crimes against children. The Catholic Church and its representatives ran Shubenacadie and are directly responsible for the abuses that happened there. But in the days of residential schools, at least until the late 1940s, most white Catholic Canadians shared with the nuns and priests a strong sense of cultural and racial superiority. It was that commonly held belief that allowed the horrors of Shubenacadie to be enacted by politicians, bureaucrats, and clergy.
Returning to Spirit
“Reconciliation is a process which can’t be demanded or rushed.”
–Sister Donna Geernaert
The Sisters of Charity has been involved in the settlement process with other Catholic organizations and the federal government. It has raised and distributed funding for healing and reconciliation programs through its Moving Forward Together campaign. One Sister also played a role in organizing the TRC gatherings in the region. Internally, the congregation comes together once every six years to critically reflect on its missions and practices. At its last meeting, in 2008, the Sisters
reflected on the dangers of unintentional complicity. “We talked about the importance of systemic change and recognizing how we can be complicit in a system that’s unjust without realizing that we’re complicit,” says Sister Donna. But perhaps their most powerful initiative has been organizing a Returning to Spirit workshop.
Returning to Spirit was co-founded by Marc Pizandawatc, an Algonquian man from the Northwest Territories, and Sister Ann Thomson of the Sisters of St. Ann. The program happens in three phases. First, there are two separate but concurrent five-day workshops—one for non-Aboriginal people and one for Aboriginal people. Second, there are two separate but concurrent two-day workshops on communication. And finally, there is a three-day workshop where the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups come together for sharing. The workshops focus on how residential school experiences linger in contemporary life, and how to move beyond healing and into a phase of reconciliation, bridging gaps between people and critically analyzing participants’ beliefs about others.
Between May and September 2012, five First Nations people—including survivors or descendants of survivors of Shubenacadie—and five non-Aboriginal people participated in Returning to Spirit workshops in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia. Sisters Geraldine Lancaster and Joan O’Keefe of the Sisters of Charity both participated. Sister O’Keefe also attended the Halifax and Indian Brook TRC events, and was disappointed there weren’t more people there from the Catholic Church. “People didn’t really know whether they should go or not,” she says. “It wasn’t advertised properly…people afterwards would talk to their friends from the United Church or Anglican and they’d be saying ‘how come you didn’t go to some of it?’…There was still room for more people.” Sister Lancaster helped organize the Halifax TRC event and participated in a TRC preparation event. “It was there that I publicly expressed my sorrow for what had happened at the residential school in Shubenacadie,” she says. It was a powerful expression for her, but nothing compared to Returning to Spirit. “After Returning to Spirit I stood up and I had a broader, deeper meaning attached to my apology. I understood better what reconciliation really was.”
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