Earlier this week, Edmund Metatawabin, a member of the Order of Canada and the former chief of Fort Albany First Nation, travelled hundreds of kilometres from his home in Peetabeck, in Fort Albany. His destination: Ottawa, to appear before the standing Senate committee on Indigenous peoples.
This scene has repeated itself countless times. Dr. Metatawabin is a member of an ever-shrinking group of St. Anne’s Indian Residential School survivors, who all too often make the time to fly to Toronto or Ottawa, largely at their own expense, to relive the violence they experienced as children in the pursuit of justice for the abuse committed against them at the Catholic institution along the Albany River. He was joined in Ottawa by fellow survivor Evelyn Korkmaz and their lawyer Fay Brunning.
For more than two decades, St. Anne’s survivors have fought for their truth. But Canada’s department of justice has fought them every step of the way – a needless, shameful and expensive exercise that should infuriate every Canadian. The federal government has the power to stop this insanity once and for all – to end the countless hearings and roadblocks that they have put up – and for the sake of the soul of this country we call Canada, it must.
Dr. Metatawabin told the committee that he entered St. Anne’s when he was six, and was there for eight years. He documented his time there in his memoir, Up Ghost River, which was a finalist for the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award. But that wasn’t enough, apparently – he had to say more. “Genocide is not always necessarily a one-time event. It is, in the case of ‘Indians of Canada,’ an attrition process happening over an extended time,” he told the committee.
As he’s done too many times before, Dr. Metatawabin outlined the St. Anne’s survivors’ years-long push for justice, which began after a 1992 reunion where many shared their stories of abuse; the next year, the Peetabeck Keway Keykaywin Association (PKKA) survivors’ group was formed. Then, an Ontario Provincial Police investigation led to charges against seven St. Anne’s staff members, with five eventually being convicted. In 2012, as Ottawa was reviewing compensation claims for residential school survivors, Ms. Brunning found that federal lawyers had sat on thousands of documents, including testimonies of abuse from 700 people. At one point, survivors were told there was no evidence that sexual abuse was committed at the school.
This is the crux of the problem: Canada’s rejection of the truth.
Federal lawyers, he says, have accused the St. Anne’s survivors of engaging in a “frivolous and self-indulgent legal process that would not serve the wider public. The issue of standing is being used against PKKA to deny the traditional collective approach common in Native societies.” Shockingly, he added, “these same lawyers claim being forced to ingest your own vomit is not harmful because it is your own bodily fluid. We just wonder how they know that.”
Dr. Metatawabin went on to talk about how he and other children would be made to sit on a homemade electric chair, constructed by a Brother Goulet, and shocked, “much to the amusement of the staff and visitors.” He described punishments in gruelling detail, including a whip that was “20 millimetres long, by seven millimetres wide, by two millimetres thick, of which six small ropes were attached, and at the end of each rope, a metal nut was tied.” He spoke of the sexual predators who came to the dorms at night.
For St. Anne’s survivors, the pace of justice has been excruciatingly slow. Last October, a 97-year-old Ottawa woman became the third nun and the eighth St. Anne’s staff member to be charged in connection with sexual assaults there.
“They are resilient, dignified, honourable people,” Ms. Brunning, who has given so much of herself to represent them, said to the committee. “I can not thank them enough for what they have done for themselves – for the youth in their community and for the general public, for all of us who hope honesty and truth will win out in the end.” She then demanded that a proper inquiry be held to “draw back the curtains” on what happened in the justice system to allow this to happen.
This pursuit for justice isn’t about the survivors any more, Dr. Metatawabin said – it’s about the youth, about teaching them to be proud of who they are and where they are from. To that end, he called for an “elders’ institute,” which could be co-operatively run by them, and where they could pass on language and other teachings.
That – and believing their plight – is the least Canada could do for these courageous survivors.
Tanya Talaga