The Pain Never Ends....
by Gilbert Oskaboose

A few months back I created a web site for the survivors of residential schools in Canada. I thought it could be a place where we could keep in touch, exchange information on lawsuits and lawyers and share other vital information.

Its been quite an eye-opener. The web site has been swamped with e-mails from all over Canada and the United States. Every day I get dozens of e-mails from all over from survivors and the children of survivors. I even got a few from the grandchildren of survivors. The site can be found at www.inorth.on.ca/~giboskab/ .

My God, the pain and abuse and spiritual confusion out there in Indian Country is horrific. The effect of those infamous residential schools is spreading through successive generations like wildfire. Lives are being destroyed daily. Suicide, sexual abuse, physical abuse and spiritual confusion are pandemic in my beloved Indian Country.

One lady wrote in about being sexually abused by seven of her brothers. Every one of then had suffered sexual abuse in residential school and they brought the damn thing home with them. She disclosed the abuse and one brother now swears she is "dead" to him. Totally disowned her for speaking out and trying to stop the abuse. Another family totally destroyed. Her mother, another survivor, is in complete denial and cant hold the family together any longer.

Another 31 year old daughter of a survivor writes about an abusive partner, a child that was abused, her own disclosure and community backlash, a mother in denial still supporting the Catholic Church, the court process. The nightmare just keeps going on and on. It never ends.

I dont think that anyone anywhere will ever truly and fully understand the length, the depth and the breath of the residential school era and it subsequent impact on Indian Country. Its something we will never recover from, only survive. It may take a dozen generations or more before the dark shadow of residential schools is finally wiped from our collective consciences.

No one will ever understand the effect on successive generations. And how do white lawyers see all this? They dont. They dont see it at all. Government opposition lawyers in our case dont even see the pain of "secondaries" (The children and grandchildren of survivors). They have been dropped from our lawsuit. They also say that no white Canadian judge has ever ruled on such things as loss of family, loss of language or loss of culture, therefore these things do not exist in Canadian law! Incredible eh?

It appears that justice in Canadian law is not only blind but narrow-minded and stupid as well. Hell, our very lives during and after residential school have been precedents in themselves.

What other group in Canada was brought up minus their parents, minus their languages, minus their cultures etc? What other group was raised by childless white nuns and white men wearing black dresses? What could we have possibly learned of "parenting skills" from teachers who believed that sex and the human body was evil and "sinful". What could we have learned of love in institutions where none existed?

A number of native writers have said that only death will bring closure and peace from the residential school experience. Im inclined to believe them.