A
great idea who's time has come....There is a brand new initiative coming out of Quebec regarding residential school survivors and their fight against the federal government and the churches that is setting the record straight about who the real guilty culprit has always been, who it is and who it will always be.
The paper - Federal Rules of Engagement - is easily the most intelligent thing I've seen to come out of Indian Country in more years than I care to remember. It's the only initiative I seen to have come from an actual survivor. Copies of the paper are available from: Alvin Tolley, P.O.Box 205, Maniwaki, Quebec J9E 3B4. E-mail alvintolley@hotmail.com or phone 819 449-2563 Get a copy. Make sure your chief and council get one. The paper is continuously being updated and tightened up with additional facts by a master researcher who got to government records long before they "wisely" thought of shredding or hiding them. Wait until you hear the hard facts on government medical and dental experiments on residential school children. It will make you want to puke! Here - finally - is the connection between the present poor health of survivors and what was done to us so many years ago. In one BC residential school over 50 percent of the children died.
The paper - proposed by Alvin Tolley, a survivor of Garnier Residential School in Spanish, Ontario and a senior former bureaucrat disgusted with Canada's cavalier attitudes towards native people says that it is strictly the federal government and not the churches who are ultimately responsible for incarcerating, abusing and compensating any and all survivors.
The paper suggests we survivors should be considering co-operating with the churches instead of fighting against them. It was the federal government that set up those infamous residential schools. They laid down the law. They threatened our parents with fines and imprisonment if they didn't comply. The churches played a minor role, at times an ugly one but nevertheless a minor one. The churches have been approached and initial responses have been cautiously favorable. Better that we work alongside them instead of against them. Less costly for the churches as well. Less offensive to those who still believe in churches. The AFN has been notified and it remains to be seen if chiefs who traditionally get their paychecks and their marching orders directly from Ottawa will side with their own people or with their filthy rich and uncaring government benefactors.
Tolley has started a series of speaking engagements to introduce the paper to First Nations survivors and to seek support from them. He is suggesting that we create our own organization for survivors and set our own agendas. The Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) process currently being plugged by the government is set up strongly in their own favor. We survivors have damn little to say how the system operates, what issues it addresses and what if anything we will ultimately get out of it. In my own case the ADR system dictates how many will be dealt with (groups of sixty) and what issues the government lawyers will work with (only extreme physical and sexual abuse). Things like loss of culture, loss of language and loss of family are being ignored. Our children, who were the ones that inherited the dysfunctional bullshit and other stuff we brought back from residential schools, are also being ignored and brushed aside.
The paper proposes the creation of our own organization. A working name has been suggested. It's the Organization of United Reborn Survivors (O.U.R.S.). Tolley suggests that 100,000 survivors contributing a mere $20 dollars each can go a long way towards setting up a powerful war chest to fund activities. They got my $20 and one more for any brother who can't afford it.
The current 24 ADR initiatives across the country are all pretty well dead in the water as the people come to realize that they are just more government bullshit designed to screw us even more, re-victimize us and re-traumatize us even more. Only ours and one out of James Bay is supposedly still active and still working.
What will work is a genuine native grassroots organization made up solely of survivors, intent on bringing our own truths to the bargaining table and committed to seeing it through to the bitter end. The government should not be allowed to get away with this monstrous travesty.
The federal Department of Indian Affairs used to have nine lawyers working for it. Now it has retained well over 60 to do it's dirty work, delaying cases, stalling..... Combine that with the legal bottom-feeders of the Dept. of Justice and you have some idea how the situation is currently stacked against us. We don't have a hope in Hell unless we unite. They know how fast survivors are dying off. They know how damn poor we are and how likely we are to grab at the first piece of chump change offered.
This new native organization could nullify all those sleazy self-serving activities, and with the help and support of a Canadian general population fed up with government tactics against First Nations people, at long last bring true justice and closure to a bleak and shameful chapter of Canadian history.
I've already put in five years with my own class action lawsuit so I'll stick with it and see where it leads. I will still join the new Quebec initiative and try to help others do better. We can tough it out a little longer. Hell, we're survivors. The government has seen to it you'll get little more than pennies for your pain anyhow. Lawyers who have been known to charge up to 50 percent for their "services" are the only ones who will get fat on this ongoing government attack on survivors.
United we stand. Divided we fall, as individuals or in groups of 60. The choice is yours and that's a helluva lot more of a chance than you'll ever get from the government.