"Kill the Indian in the child's heart": Canada caught up in its history

Amos (Canada) (AFP) - He is five years old and clings in tears to his grandmother's skirts. Jimmy does not want to get on the bus, leave his Native American family and this forest in Canada where he lives with his community.

But a policeman jostles the old lady and grabs him. Moments later, he is on the bus with other Native American children. Amid cries and sobs, the journey begins. We are in 1969. His life changes.

At the end of the road, a few kilometers from his home: the "Indian boarding school" of Saint-Marc-de-Figuery in Quebec, 600 km north of Montreal. Jimmy Papatie will remain there until it closes in 1973.

In a few hours, the scene is set for these Aboriginal children torn from their families by order of the Canadian government: their hair, traditionally worn long, is cut. In the shower, they are rubbed with a hard brush: they are the "dirty Indians".

They must change from their beaded moccasins, moosehide jackets, Algonquin clothing, to put on a uniform. They are addressed in French, a language they do not know, their mother tongue is banned.

And then, at the end of this long day, they are stripped of their names. From now on they will be a number.

"We didn't know where we were going. We didn't know what was going to happen to us. In a few hours, it's a total uprooting - linguistic, cultural, spiritual", says Jimmy Papatie, 57 , seated in a restaurant near the site of the now destroyed boarding school.

Short brown hair, tattoos on his forearms, the former leader of his community today wants to speak candidly about this "terrible" time.

Until the 1980s, these boarding schools, which appeared in the 19th century, were one of the cornerstones of the policy of assimilation of Amerindians, who today represent 5% of the population.

Now considered a "cultural genocide", this dark page in Canadian history has been brought back to light after the discovery in recent months of more than a thousand unmarked graves near former residential schools. Revelations that shocked the country.

In total, some 150,000 Inuit, Métis and First Nations children (Dene, Mohawks, Ojibway, Crees and Algonquins, etc.) have been sent to 139 establishments across the country, run by churches.

Each school year begins, the Indian Affairs agent, accompanied by police officers, goes around the indigenous communities - mostly nomadic - to take the children. Since 1920 and a change in the Indian Act, parental consent is no longer required.

The purpose of these institutions: to educate, to evangelize, to assimilate.

Often, the children were brutalized, sometimes abused. Thousands never returned, dying of malnutrition, disease or abuse.

- A number -

"In boarding school, I no longer had a name, I was number 70". Fred Kistabish, 77, with sunglasses and a thick lumberjack shirt, often returns to the site of the Saint-Marc-de-Figuery boarding school where he lived for ten years.

Today, there are only a few stones left covered with weeds. A small memorial has been erected there, displaying old black and white photos of the students. Dozens of small shoes were placed in front, symbols of the children abused in these institutions and of those who did not return.

"This is where I became someone else", continues Mr. Kistabish, advancing his cane in hand on these places covered with snow at the beginning of winter. "But they couldn't completely change me."

The "most difficult thing", recalls the former chief of the Pikogan reserve, located a few kilometers from the boarding school, was to see his sisters without being authorized to speak to them. "When they saw me in the cafeteria, they cried… that was hard."

Isolation, also a real heartbreak for Alice Mowatt placed in the same boarding school between the ages of six and 13.

Years later, she put down in small notebooks the most memorable moments of her childhood at boarding school "so as not to forget" and "to free herself from them".

On the first pages, the shock of arrival is accurately described: "I don't remember the way to boarding school, I guess I was following my sisters. But on arrival we were divided by age groups, that's when I realized I was going to be alone now."

"At that time, I was six years old and I didn't know a word of French. These were the hardest times of my life", confides this 73-year-old former librarian with long hair gray.

Around her, in her kitchen, each object, each utensil bears a small label with her name in Anishinabe, her mother tongue. "It's for my grandchildren, so that they have a few words left in our language."

At boarding school, many forgot their language, some children remained silent for months. Speaking anything other than French or English was the certainty of being punished.

Beatings with a ruler, a belt, days spent locked in a closet, soap in your mouth...

"Because you were talking when it was forbidden, because you didn't settle down fast enough, because you didn't get out of bed fast enough... They had 50 million excuses to hit us," said Dawn Hill, 72.

This former teacher, short white hair and rectangular glasses, who went to boarding school in Brantford, south of Toronto, has a look that is lost in the void when she dives back into this period. "It was an unforgiving world. You never felt safe."

Located away from any habitation, at the end of a long alley lined with maple trees, this boarding school, run by the Anglican Church, was one of the first to be built in the country. He has just launched research on his site to try to find children's graves.

- A thousand graves -

More than a thousand unmarked graves have been found since May on the sites of former boarding schools. And many searches are underway throughout the country - between 4,000 and 6,000 students are said to have disappeared, according to the authorities.

Thousands of survivors have testified to the horror of these institutions, which were intended to "kill the Indian in the heart of the child", before a Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in 2008. Among them , Alice Mowatt who told, at that time, for the first time the sexual assaults she suffered.

After seven years of investigation and thousands of interviews, this commission sheds light on this period so little known to Canadians, concluding that it was a "cultural genocide".

"It can sometimes be difficult to accept that what they recounted could have happened in a country such as Canada which prides itself on being a bastion of democracy, peace and kindness everywhere around the world," describes the commission's more than 500-page report.

"Children have been abused, physically and sexually, and died in these schools in proportions that would never have been tolerated in any other school system in the country or on the planet."

Little by little, the country is lifting the veil on this period: in 2008, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized, his successor Justin Trudeau did the same in 2015.

Recently, it was the Catholic Church that admitted responsibility for the suffering endured by First Nations people. In 2022, for the first time, a delegation of indigenous people will visit the Vatican before a trip by the Pope to Canada scheduled for the year.

"I want the pope to come and apologize to us, us residential school survivors. It's going to take a day, two days to meet with us, but we have to take that time, then we can turn the page", think Oscar Kistabish, 75, passed through Saint-Marc-de-Figuery.

The latter (who is not related to Fred Kistabish) describes himself as a "survivor".

“They robbed me of my youth,” says this man with broad shoulders and long brown hair tied back. During the first months, he says, he was often ill because of "the diet that had changed all of a sudden" but also from fear even if, he says, there were "times of fun" thanks to the hockey discovered at boarding school.

"I learned to no longer have emotions," he says bitterly, explaining that he later, like many, sought to destroy himself slowly, in particular through alcohol.

The residential schools, the whole system, "it created so much trauma in the indigenous populations, transmitted from generation to generation", explains Marie-Pierre Bousquet, anthropologist at the University of Montreal.

"Nobody talked about what we were doing, but everyone knew what it meant when the father came to pick you up in your bed at night", confides Jimmy Papatie who took 45 years before to be able to talk about the rapes.

In total, more than 38,000 accusations of serious sexual and physical assault have been identified by the commission. Fewer than 50 convictions have been pronounced by Canadian justice.

Evoking the "ghosts" who have accompanied him for years, Jimmy Papatie recounts a life made up of falls and relapses: alcohol, drug addiction, suicide attempts, violence...

"I had to be over 50 years old and several therapies to be able to sleep in the dark, to undress in front of a woman, to manage to have a moment of intimacy with someone".

"Today I no longer hide. But I also know that this will not excuse the harm I have done to others", he confides, referring to sexual assaults including he says he was guilty in turn.

Many "didn't make it out," says Dawn Hill, who remains angry at those who weren't prosecuted. "We were just children..."

- "What is our national history?" -

With the recent discovery of unmarked children's graves, Canada also seems to be discovering its past, and the word "reconciliation" is on everyone's lips.

A movement that can be found elsewhere in the world on the consideration of peoples oppressed in particular by European colonialism. In Norway, Finland and Sweden, truth commissions on the persecutions suffered by the Sami people have recently been set up.

And in many countries, a fundamental movement, driven mainly by the younger generations, is calling for people to open their eyes to the mistakes of the past in order to better take diversity into account today.

"This is not the image that Canadians had of their country. Today they ask themselves: + But ultimately what is our country based on? What is our national history? +", continues Marie- Pierre Bousquet, who speaks of an electroshock for society.

"Until now, they saw themselves as a great multicultural democracy, with a glorious past, wide open spaces, not as a country built on genocide."

The discovery of the tombs was a major turning point, say the researchers. "It's as if with this proof, it had suddenly become concrete, real," adds the director of a program in native studies.

But "there is still a lot of work to be done for a true understanding of this episode of history and its lasting consequences," says Sébastien Brodeur-Girard, who teaches at the School of Indigenous Studies of the University of Quebec.

In late September, on the first National Day of Remembrance of Indigenous Victims, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged: "There will be no truth or reconciliation until this country understands not that the history of the Aboriginal peoples is the history of all of us".

To this day, many indigenous people live in poverty and racism persists, note experts and reports.

Amerindians did not acquire the right to vote in Canada until 1960 and in some provinces, such as Quebec, only in 1969.

In 2020, the UN denounced "the wide range of violence against indigenous peoples": problems of access to drinking water, discrimination against children living on reserves, overrepresentation in prisons. .

"The government and the church think that saying + I apologize + that's enough", asserts Jimmy Papatie. "But if all this was sincere, they would really put money on the table to repair. I know what it costs to rebuild an individual, so a whole people...".