I was sitting in the Crown lawyer’s office in Sudbury. Diana Fuller was prosecuting all the St. Anne’s cases. She had a nice space—there were papers everywhere, but the window looked out onto some flowerbeds and a park.
“So, no students?” she asked. I had told her about the conversation with Tony. I had asked her to limit the court case to only the staff, and not to prosecute any of the allegations of physical and sexual abuse committed by St. Anne’s students.
“No,” I said. “It’s not fair to them. Lots of them were just repeating the behaviour that they learned from the staff.”
“God. Poor things,” she said.
“And I don’t think they want to testify anyway. St. Anne’s was a lawless place. There was a lot going on. It was difficult to survive.”
“And did anything like this happen to you?”
“No student touched me, no.”
“What about the staff?”
I told her about being sexually assaulted by Brother Jutras.
“And this happened when you were seven,” she said.
“Yes. Seven or eight.”
“Which is it? Seven or eight?”
“I’m not sure.”
Diana sighed. “This is hard, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s the hard thing about memory. It changes. Especially when there’s alcohol involved.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m not here to judge. But before we put you on the stand, we need to iron this stuff out.”
“Good idea.”
“And we have to be a bit careful here.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I put bad cases on the stand, it weakens the good cases.”
“Bad cases?”
“That’s not the right word. Sorry. Cases where we don’t have much hope of a conviction.”
“We don’t have much hope of a conviction?”
“Let me tell you about sexual abuse cases. First, all of them come down to indecent assault. We won’t even try for male rape because it’s so hard to prove whether penetration occurred. In your case, you were fondled. So that’s indecent assault.”
“Oh,” I replied.
“And there’s the timing. I mean it happened during a medical exam, right? So maybe he was actually examining your penis. I mean, who knows?”
“But he wasn’t a doctor.”
“I thought there weren’t any doctors up there?”
“There weren’t.”
“Exactly. Which is how the defence will argue it. Then there’s also the case of the testimony. In sexual abuse cases, it’s always your word against theirs. Rarely are there witnesses. So then it comes down to believability and alibi. You have to describe what happened in a way that makes the jury see and feel the event. That convinces everyone beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“Oh,” I said again.
“I’m just your lawyer. But given what’s at stake, I urge you to be very careful before proceeding further.”
I never told the police what happened with Mike. Technically, it wasn’t part of our case against St. Anne’s, as he wasn’t employed by the school and it happened after I had graduated.
Because of my memory lapses due to repeated trauma and alcoholism, they did not use me as a witness against Sister Wesley or Brother Jutras. Still, I went down to Cochrane for some of the court cases so I could support others.
There were seven people charged. Only the staff, thank Gitchi Manitou. Sister Anna Wesley was charged with five counts of assault, three counts of assault causing bodily harm and five counts of administering a noxious substance with intent to aggrieve or annoy, which is how the prosecution charged her with her favourite punishment—forcing the kids to eat their own vomit. Initially, we didn’t think the charge would stick—the defence argued the punishment was legal since the substance was a natural bodily secretion. But Diana brought in an expert witness who argued that vomit, while natural inside the stomach, was unnatural as a food. The judge agreed and Sister Wesley was convicted of five counts of assault and three counts of administering a noxious substance with intent to aggrieve or annoy, and sentenced to eleven and a half months’ house arrest.
The supervisor of the girls’ part of the school, Jane Kakeychewan, was convicted of three counts of assault causing bodily harm, and also sentenced to house arrest.
The only men who were convicted of sexual abuse came to the school after I had graduated. Claude Lambert, fifty at the time, of Saint-André-Avellin, Quebec, who took over once Sister Wesley left, helping the boys with showering, bathing and getting changed, and Marcel Blais, forty-nine at the time, of Ottawa, a kitchen aid—were charged with indecent assault on a male and convicted.
David Murray Stein, forty-nine, of Timmins, who was a few years younger than me, went back and worked at the school as a cafeteria helper in the late 1960s, and was accused of molesting four boys. He was charged with indecent assault and gross indecency. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one year in prison. Afterwards, four more boys came forward, and he was sentenced to another year.
Brother Goulet, who built the electric chair, was never charged for his role in electrocuting the boys, as he had already died. The lawyer decided not to pursue charges against anyone else who electrocuted us because it was too hard to prove that the shocks were an excessive use of force.
Brother Lauzon was never charged for his part in Abraham Nakogee’s death because he’d died several years earlier of cancer.
Brother Jutras was never charged either. Joe decided not to testify that he’d allowed himself to be masturbated in exchange for a slice of bread, as he was too embarrassed. Others came forward, but then we discovered that it didn’t matter as he was already dead. On November 21, 1979, Brother Jutras passed away due to complications relating to gangrene and a broken leg.
A few months after the reunion, Fred called me. He was still living in Timmins, but had come to Fort Albany for the Keykaywin conference where I’d put out the word that I was looking for Amocheesh.
“So about Amocheesh,” Fred said. “I asked around.”
“And?”
“You know he had that drinking problem?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not good. He died. Drank himself to death.”
“Oh my God. What?”
“Sorry, man.”
“How?”
“I dunno. I just heard it. I thought you should know.”
“Was it an accident or a suicide?”
“An accident, I think. Although he was drinking so much that maybe that was a suicide.”
“So what did he actually die of?”
“I don’t know. His family are being a bit vague. Just told me that he passed and that I should pray for him.”
“Is there going to be a funeral?”
“It happened a few weeks ago.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Sorry, man.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“I know you used to be close.”
“Yeah, we were,” I said. Now I will never know, I thought. I will never know what happened when Mike Pasko took him to his house in Montreal, and whether he raped him, too.
TWENTY-SEVEN
There is no concept of justice in Cree culture. The nearest word is kintohpatatin, which loosely translates to “you’ve been listened to.” But kintohpatatin is richer than justice—really it means you’ve been listened to by someone compassionate and fair, and your needs will be taken seriously. We had peacemakers before we had judges, whose responsibility was to listen to all those affected by the crime: the victim, the offender and their relatives. Justice was a matter of coming together to talk about what had happened, how it had affected all those involved and to find a form of payment that would smooth the ill feelings and repair the harm.
I believe that today’s version of kintohpatatin would start with us being heard when we tell our stories. In the residential schools, they forcibly took us f
rom our parents, banned our language, dehumanized us by replacing our names with numbers, and turned us into the subjects of medical experiments on the effects of prolonged malnutrition by starving us, a fact that only came out in 2013 when food historian Ian Mosby went to the national media with his research. At St. Anne’s, we were usually hungry, a deprivation that allowed Brother Jutras to bribe the boys with food for sexual favours, although whether this was because of the poverty of the school or by the design of the nuns or government is one of the issues we may never know. We were used to being silenced—whether through the Potlatch laws, which banned our culture and religion, the Indian Act, which gave the Indian Agent total power over the reserves, or the Canada Elections Act, which forbade us from voting.
Many chiefs and parents spoke out about the abuses in the residential schools, including in St. Anne’s. These statements were usually met with disbelief or indifference, or they were ignored. What gave many of us the courage to step forward was an unrelated case. In 1989, the wards of Mount Cashel Orphanage took the Catholic Church to court in what became Canada’s—and one of the world’s—largest sexual abuse scandals. Hearing those testimonies day in, day out gave us the confidence and the voice to start to say that this had happened to us, too.
In the mid-1990s, having been ignored for years, we were able to raise public awareness of what had happened at St. Anne’s Residential School with articles in the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. After the healing conference, we went to court, as did others: we were part of a wave of cases against the authorities—the churches and the federal government—that ran the schools. Once word was out, the numbers of cases and victims escalated. In 1995, Mi’kmaq activist Nora Bernard filed what would become the largest lawsuit in Canadian history, representing 79,000 survivors. The Canadian government settled the lawsuit, the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), for $5 billion, which included payment for our experiences—$10,000 for being sent to the school and $3,000 for every year attended. The settlement detailed an additional payment, if the abuse was severe, calculated by the length of time it was experienced. This was called Independent Assessment Process (IAP) compensation.
While the IRSSA was a step in the right direction, it did not go far enough. In 1998, we began raising our concerns with the federal and provincial governments, and representatives from the church that ran the school, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Grey Nuns. I went down to Toronto for the Alternative Dispute Resolution meetings as representative for the St. Anne’s Residential School Survivors (Peetabeck Keway Keykaywin) Association. After a few meetings, it soon became apparent that the government did not take seriously the cultural genocide that had happened at the school. When they offered us $30,000 per student, we declined, as we did not want our concerns to be reduced to a dollar figure.
The issue lay dormant for a few years as the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement moved through the cogs of bureaucracy. In 2006, it came time for us to file our IAP compensation. To qualify, the student would have to give testimony and provide supporting documents to secure an IAP hearing. In turn, the government, as part of the IRSSA, was obligated to release any records relevant to the case, and issue evidence “narratives.”
The problem first surfaced when my friends and others from St. Anne’s Residential School tried to access their records. Many of us were told that our attendance records were missing, so we had problems proving basic facts, like the years we attended St. Anne’s. Others could not access their medical records. When students tried to prove that they had gone to the infirmary for infractions such as being beaten so hard they bled, they were told that those records had gone missing.
It did not stop there. When we tried to prove the issue of widespread abuse, the Department of Justice said they did not have any of the official documents, such as the OPP investigation and court records. And in the official evidence narrative, they denied that the abuse against us had ever taken place. “No known documents of sexual abuse at Fort Albany IRS,” it said. “No known incident documents of sexual abuse at Fort Albany IRS.”
It was hard to understand how such a flagrant misrepresentation of the truth could come from Department of Justice lawyers. For this reason, many residential school survivors lost faith in the IAP process, and no longer wanted these government lawyers at their hearings. In a letter that was covered by the national press, I wrote to Justice Minister Peter MacKay to remove them.
As we still needed to prove that the abuse had happened, sixty students began to work with lawyer Fay Brunning, tracking down the official records of abuse, with me working as a translator starting in early 2012. Two years later, in January 2014, in a landmark ruling covered by most major national media, we won. Justice Paul Perell of the Ontario Superior Court ruled that the federal government had to hand over all the OPP and court documents to support students’ claims for compensation.
With the media attention, a larger pattern of obstruction and secrecy surfaced. It wasn’t the first time that Ottawa had dragged its heels on releasing records; the federal government is now under criticism for failing to release millions of residential school documents currently held at Library and Archives Canada. Nor, I’m sure, will it be the last.
In the residential schools, the secrecy began at dawn: we were beaten from the time we first awoke. Speaking out against the injustice in letters home was also cause for punishment. We coped in whatever way we could, often by imitating our oppressors. At St. Anne’s, the stronger boys beat the weaker boys either with their fists or with tamarack branches. Sexual abuse was rampant too, with the staff forcing themselves on the girls and boys, and the students forcing themselves on each other. As parents, we continued to imitate the cruelty of the school, ignoring our children or worse, abusing them emotionally, physically or sexually. Joan suffered my emotional abuse and indiscretions, and my kids endured a drunk and absentee dad. Others, such as Lucy, Amocheesh and Abraham Nakogee, fared far worse.
Children often survived these things by shutting down. There are blanks in my memories, and those of my classmates’; the horrific trauma of fifty years ago becomes today’s disjointed, tragic fragments. This, combined with the resultant alcoholism, meant that many of us were considered unreliable witnesses in the subsequent court cases, and so the number initially accused diverged greatly from the number found guilty. Many in the community were angry that I had gone to the police, and then at the final outcome, where the number found guilty did not accurately represent the scale of the horrors we had experienced. That anger turned to a burning hot rage. In 2002, St. Anne’s Residential School burned down. Many suspected it was arson, as the building had become symbolic of the abuse, sexual and physical, and the psychic scars that continue to the next generation.
Still, I have to believe it was worth it: the court cases have become part of a growing awareness that has shifted the public’s understanding of native history. Residential school syndrome is now a recognized phenomenon, with a body of historical and psychological literature behind it. Each person who comes forward adds to this deepening awareness. If trauma is the wounds of the mind, then the court cases, the media interest, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the prime minister’s 2008 Statement of Apology have given us valuable ways to talk about those wounds. These successes have helped us externalize the shame, slowly shifting our anger from the self to the wider system, easing the burden of rage and memory.
How to repair the harm of St. Anne’s? That’s a journey that I shall spend the rest of my life navigating. I’ve been on it for a while. My counsellor in Edmonton, Dennis LeRoy, and George Callingbull helped me along the way, as did Joan, Albalina, Shannin and Jassen. Now we are helping others along their way, too. In 1988, we started looking after Terry, the son of my middle sister, Jane. She was unemployed, and it was hard for her to find her feet, moving between Toronto and Manitoulin Island. He stayed with us, from age ten until he moved to North Bay for high school. In the summer
of 1992, before the healing conference, we adopted another daughter, Cedar, eighteen months, whose grandmother had gone to St. Anne’s. I don’t know if she suffered as I had, but I know that her daughter, Angela, ended up on the streets, pregnant at fourteen. Cedar became our fifth child.
After I stopped being chief in 1996, I started doing whatever I could to preserve our ancient traditions and knowledge and bring them to the youth. I built a sweat lodge in my backyard, and began bringing the youth and elders together, to close the generational divide left by the residential schools. I brought writers such as Joseph Boyden to our community to promote youth literacy and Cree culture. I became a member of the Ontario Chiefs Traditional Knowledge Keepers group, to discuss how to preserve and pass on our traditions in a respectful manner. I introduced Indian Days, an annual event where we would celebrate the sweat lodge, the shaking tent and other spiritual traditions. I started a sawmill that employs four people in the summer months and two during the winter. I would like to expand to offer more employment, although it is hard for any business to grow on reserves because the Indian Act means that we do not own our land, so cutting down trees on reserve land is illegal. There are other provisions in the Indian Act that hold us back: without any assets, we cannot use our businesses as collateral to get mortgages or insurance. The inability to buy insurance discourages budding entrepreneurs, especially because of the high rates of vandalism. Any business investment becomes a personal risk. Without a trained and energetic fire department, and with arson a strong risk, there’s always the danger that we will wake up one morning and have lost everything.
Up Ghost River Page 25