Home
Returning to Harmony
I am a victim of Canada's residential school system. When I say victim, I
mean something substantially different than "Survivor."; I never attended a
residential school, so I cannot say that I survived one. However, my parents
and my extended family members did. The pain they endured became my pain, and I became a victim.
When I was born, my family still lived the seasonal nomadic life of traditional
Ojibwa people. In the great rolling territories surrounding the Winnipeg
River in Northwestern Ontario, they fished, hunted, and trapped. Their years
were marked by the peregrinations of a people guided by the motions and
turns of the land. I came into the world and lived in a canvas army tent hung
from a spruce bough frame as my first home. The first sounds I heard were the
calls of loon, the snap and crackle of a fire, and the low, rolling undulation of
Ojibwa talk.
We lived communally. Along with my mother and siblings, there were my
matriarchal grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Surrounded by the
rough and tangle of the Canadian Shield, we moved through the seasons.
Time was irrelevant in the face of ancient cultural ways that we followed.
But there was a spectre in our midst.
All the members of my family attended residential school. They returned to
the land bearing psychological, emotional, spiritual, and physical burdens
that haunted them. Even my mother, despite staunch declarations that she
had learned good things there (finding Jesus, learning to keep a house, the
gospel), carried wounds she could not voice. Each of them had experienced
an institution that tried to scrape the Indian off of their insides, and they
came back to the bush and river raw, sore, and aching. The pain they bore
was invisible and unspoken. It seeped into their spirit, oozing its poison
and blinding them from the incredible healing properties within their
Indian ways.
For a time, the proximity to family and the land acted as a balm. Then,
slowly and irrevocably, the spectre that followed them back from the
schools began to assert its presence and shunt for space around our
communal fire. When the vitriolic stew of unspoken words, feelings, and
memories of their great dislocation, hurt, and isolation began to bubble and
130 | Richard Wagamese
churn within them, they discovered that alcohol could numb them from it.
And we ceased to be a family.
Instead, the adults of my Ojibwa family became frightened children. The
trauma that had been visited upon them reduced them to that. They huddled
against a darkness from where vague shapes whispered threats and from
where invasions of their minds, spirits, and bodies roared through the
blackness to envelope and smother them again. They forgot who they were.
They struck back vengefully, bitterly, and blindly as only hurt and frightened
children could do.
When I was a toddler, my left arm and shoulder were smashed. Left
untreated, my arm hung backwards in its joint and, over time, it atrophied
and withered. My siblings and I endured great tides of violence and abuse
from the drunken adults. We were beaten, nearly drowned, and terrorized.
We took to hiding in the bush and waited until the shouting, cursing, and
drinking died away. Those nights were cold and terrifying. In the dim light of
dawn, the eldest of us would sneak back into camp to get food and blankets.
In the mid-winter of 1958, when I was almost three, the adults left my two
brothers, sister, and me alone in the bush camp across the bay from the tiny
railroad town of Minaki. It was February. The wind was blowing bitterly and
the firewood ran out at the same time as the food. They were gone for days,
drinking in Kenora sixty miles away. When it became apparent that we would
freeze to death without wood, my eldest sister and brother hauled my brother,
Charles, and me across the bay on a sled piled with furs.
They pulled us across that ice in a raging snowstorm. We huddled in the furs
on the leeward side of the railroad depot cold, hungry, and crying. A passing
Ontario provincial policeman found us and took us to the Children's Aid
Society. I would not see my mother or my extended family again for twentyone
years.
I lived in two foster homes until I was adopted at age nine. I left that home at
age sixteen; I ran for my safety, my security, and my sanity. The seven years I
spent in that adopted home were filled with beatings, mental and emotional
abuse, and a complete dislocation and disassociation from anything
Indian or Ojibwa. I was permitted only the strict Presbyterian ethic of that
household. It was as much an institutional kidnapping as a residential school.
For years after, I lived on the street or in prison. I became a drug user and
an alcoholic. I drifted through unfulfilled relationships. I was haunted by
fears and memories. I carried the residual trauma of my toddler years and
the seven years in my adopted home. This caused me to experience postResponse,
Responsibility, and Renewal | 131
traumatic stress disorder, which severely affected the way I lived my life and
the choices I would make.
The truth of my life is that I am an intergenerational victim of residential
schools. Everything I endured until I found healing was a result of the effects
of those schools. I did not hug my mother until I was twenty-five. I did not
speak my first Ojibwa word or set foot on my traditional territory until I was
twenty-six. I did not know that I had a family, a history, a culture, a source for
spirituality, a cosmology, or a traditional way of living. I had no awareness
that I belonged somewhere. I grew up ashamed of my Native identity and the
fact that I knew nothing about it. I was angry that there was no one to tell me
who I was or where I had come from.
My brother Charles tracked me down with the help of a social worker friend
when I was twenty-five. From there, I returned to the land of my people
as a stranger knowing nothing of their experience or their pain. When I
rejoined my people and learned about Canada's residential school policy, I
was enraged. Their political and social history impelled me to find work as
a reporter with a Native newspaper. As a writer and a journalist, I spoke to
hundreds of residential school Survivors. The stories they told, coupled with
my family's complete and utter reticence, told me a great deal about how
my family had suffered. I knew that those schools were responsible for my
displacement, my angst, and my cultural lostness.
For years I carried simmering anger and resentment. The more I learned
about the implementation of that policy and how it affected Aboriginal
people across the country, the more anger I felt. I ascribed all my pain to
residential schools and to those responsible. I blamed churches for my
alcoholism, loneliness, shame, fear, inadequacy, and failures. In my mind I
envisaged a world where I had grown up as a fully functioning Ojibwa, and it
glittered in comparison to the pain-wracked life I had lived.
But when I was in my late forties, I had enough of the anger. I was tired of being
drunk and blaming the residential schools and those responsible. I was tired of
fighting against something that could not be touched, addressed, or confronted.
My life was slipping away on me and I did not want to become an older person
still clinging to a disempowering emotion like the anger I carried.
So one day I decided that I would visit a church. Churches had been the seed
of my anger. I had religion forced on me in my adopted home and it was the
churches that had run the residential schools that shredded the spirit of my
family. If I were to lose my anger, I needed to face the root of it squarely. I was
determined that I would take myself there and sit and listen to the service.
132 | Richard Wagamese
As much as I knew that I would want to walk out and as much as my anger
would direct me to reject it all, I would force myself to sit and listen and try to
find something that I could relate to. I chose a United Church because they
had been the first to issue an apology for their role in the residential school
debacle. They had been the first to publicly state their responsibility for the
hurt that crippled generations. They were the first to show the courage to
address wrongdoing, abuse, forced removal, and shaming. They had been the
first to make tangible motions toward reconciliation. It put them in a more
favourable light with me.
I was uncomfortable at first. No one spoke to me as I took my seat in a pew
near the back. There were no other Native people there and I used that fact
as a denunciation. When the service began, I heard everything through the
tough screen of my rage. Then I noticed the old woman beside me sitting with
her eyes closed as the minister spoke. She looked calm and peaceful, and
there was a glow on her features that I coveted. So I closed my eyes too and
tilted my head back and listened.
I ceased to hear the liturgy that day. I could not hear doctrine, semantics,
proselytizations, or judgment. Instead, with my eyes closed, all I could hear
was the small voice of the minister telling a story about helping a poor, drugaddicted
woman on the street despite his fear and doubt. All I heard was the
voice of compassion. All I heard was a spiritual, very human person talking
about life and confronting its mysteries.
So I went back the next week. I went back and took my seat, and I listened
with my eyes closed. After the scriptural text was read, the minister analyzed
it by placing it in the context of his impatience and the lessons he had learned
in the grocery line and in the freeway traffic. Here was a man responsible for
directing the lives of a congregation talking about facing his own spiritual
shortcomings. There was no self-aggrandization, no inferred superiority.
There was only a man telling us how hard it was to behave like a spiritual
being.
I went back to that church for many weeks. The messages I heard were all
about humanity and about the search for innocence, comfort, and belonging.
I do not know just exactly when my anger and resentment disappeared. I
only know that there came a time when I could see that there was nothing
in the message that was not about healing. I heard about compassion, love,
kindness, trust, courage, truth, and loyalty and an abiding faith that there is a
God, a Creator. There was nothing to be angry about in any of that; in fact, there
was nothing different from what Native spirituality talks about. After I came
home to my people I sought out teachers and healers and ceremonies. I had
Response, Responsibility, and Renewal | 133
committed myself to learning the spiritual principles that allowed our peoples
to sustain, define, and perpetuate themselves through incredible changes. I
had adopted many of those teachings into my daily life, and every ceremony
I attended taught me more and more about the essence of our spiritual lives.
What I heard from that minister those Sunday mornings was not any different
from the root message of humanity in our teachings. With my eyes closed there
was no white, no Indian, no difference at all; the absence of anger happened
quietly without fanfare.
It has been a few years now since I sat in that church. I have not receded back
into the dark seas of resentment, rage, or old hurt. Instead, I have found a
peace with churches and, in turn, with residential schools, with Canada. See,
that church changed my personal politics. Sure, there are genuine reasons
to be angry. The hurt caused by the residential school experience, both of
the Survivors and of those like me who were victimized a generation or more
later, are huge, real, and overwhelming. But healing happens if you want
it bad enough, and that is the trick of it, really. Every spiritually enhancing
experience asks a sacrifice of us and, in this, the price of admission is a keen
desire to be rid of the block of anger.
When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission makes its tour of the
country and hears the stories of people who endured the pain of residential
schools, I hope it hears more stories like mine-of people who fought
against the resentment, hatred, and anger and found a sense of peace. Both
the Commission and Canada need to hear stories of healing instead of a
relentless retelling and re-experiencing of pain. They need to hear that, despite
everything, every horror, it is possible to move forward and to learn how to
leave hurt behind. Our neighbours in this country need to hear stories about
our capacity for forgiveness, for self-examination, for compassion, and for our
yearning for peace because they speak to our resiliency as a people. That is how
reconciliation happens.
It is a big word, reconciliation. Quite simply, it means to create harmony.
You create harmony with truth and you build truth out of humility. That is
spiritual. That is truth. That is Indian. Within us, as nations of Aboriginal
people and as individual members of those nations, we have an incredible
capacity for survival, endurance, and forgiveness. In the reconciliation with
ourselves first, we find the ability to create harmony with others, and that is
where it has to start-in the fertile soil of our own hearts, minds, and spirits.
That, too, is Indian.
mean something substantially different than "Survivor."; I never attended a
residential school, so I cannot say that I survived one. However, my parents
and my extended family members did. The pain they endured became my pain, and I became a victim.
When I was born, my family still lived the seasonal nomadic life of traditional
Ojibwa people. In the great rolling territories surrounding the Winnipeg
River in Northwestern Ontario, they fished, hunted, and trapped. Their years
were marked by the peregrinations of a people guided by the motions and
turns of the land. I came into the world and lived in a canvas army tent hung
from a spruce bough frame as my first home. The first sounds I heard were the
calls of loon, the snap and crackle of a fire, and the low, rolling undulation of
Ojibwa talk.
We lived communally. Along with my mother and siblings, there were my
matriarchal grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Surrounded by the
rough and tangle of the Canadian Shield, we moved through the seasons.
Time was irrelevant in the face of ancient cultural ways that we followed.
But there was a spectre in our midst.
All the members of my family attended residential school. They returned to
the land bearing psychological, emotional, spiritual, and physical burdens
that haunted them. Even my mother, despite staunch declarations that she
had learned good things there (finding Jesus, learning to keep a house, the
gospel), carried wounds she could not voice. Each of them had experienced
an institution that tried to scrape the Indian off of their insides, and they
came back to the bush and river raw, sore, and aching. The pain they bore
was invisible and unspoken. It seeped into their spirit, oozing its poison
and blinding them from the incredible healing properties within their
Indian ways.
For a time, the proximity to family and the land acted as a balm. Then,
slowly and irrevocably, the spectre that followed them back from the
schools began to assert its presence and shunt for space around our
communal fire. When the vitriolic stew of unspoken words, feelings, and
memories of their great dislocation, hurt, and isolation began to bubble and
130 | Richard Wagamese
churn within them, they discovered that alcohol could numb them from it.
And we ceased to be a family.
Instead, the adults of my Ojibwa family became frightened children. The
trauma that had been visited upon them reduced them to that. They huddled
against a darkness from where vague shapes whispered threats and from
where invasions of their minds, spirits, and bodies roared through the
blackness to envelope and smother them again. They forgot who they were.
They struck back vengefully, bitterly, and blindly as only hurt and frightened
children could do.
When I was a toddler, my left arm and shoulder were smashed. Left
untreated, my arm hung backwards in its joint and, over time, it atrophied
and withered. My siblings and I endured great tides of violence and abuse
from the drunken adults. We were beaten, nearly drowned, and terrorized.
We took to hiding in the bush and waited until the shouting, cursing, and
drinking died away. Those nights were cold and terrifying. In the dim light of
dawn, the eldest of us would sneak back into camp to get food and blankets.
In the mid-winter of 1958, when I was almost three, the adults left my two
brothers, sister, and me alone in the bush camp across the bay from the tiny
railroad town of Minaki. It was February. The wind was blowing bitterly and
the firewood ran out at the same time as the food. They were gone for days,
drinking in Kenora sixty miles away. When it became apparent that we would
freeze to death without wood, my eldest sister and brother hauled my brother,
Charles, and me across the bay on a sled piled with furs.
They pulled us across that ice in a raging snowstorm. We huddled in the furs
on the leeward side of the railroad depot cold, hungry, and crying. A passing
Ontario provincial policeman found us and took us to the Children's Aid
Society. I would not see my mother or my extended family again for twentyone
years.
I lived in two foster homes until I was adopted at age nine. I left that home at
age sixteen; I ran for my safety, my security, and my sanity. The seven years I
spent in that adopted home were filled with beatings, mental and emotional
abuse, and a complete dislocation and disassociation from anything
Indian or Ojibwa. I was permitted only the strict Presbyterian ethic of that
household. It was as much an institutional kidnapping as a residential school.
For years after, I lived on the street or in prison. I became a drug user and
an alcoholic. I drifted through unfulfilled relationships. I was haunted by
fears and memories. I carried the residual trauma of my toddler years and
the seven years in my adopted home. This caused me to experience postResponse,
Responsibility, and Renewal | 131
traumatic stress disorder, which severely affected the way I lived my life and
the choices I would make.
The truth of my life is that I am an intergenerational victim of residential
schools. Everything I endured until I found healing was a result of the effects
of those schools. I did not hug my mother until I was twenty-five. I did not
speak my first Ojibwa word or set foot on my traditional territory until I was
twenty-six. I did not know that I had a family, a history, a culture, a source for
spirituality, a cosmology, or a traditional way of living. I had no awareness
that I belonged somewhere. I grew up ashamed of my Native identity and the
fact that I knew nothing about it. I was angry that there was no one to tell me
who I was or where I had come from.
My brother Charles tracked me down with the help of a social worker friend
when I was twenty-five. From there, I returned to the land of my people
as a stranger knowing nothing of their experience or their pain. When I
rejoined my people and learned about Canada's residential school policy, I
was enraged. Their political and social history impelled me to find work as
a reporter with a Native newspaper. As a writer and a journalist, I spoke to
hundreds of residential school Survivors. The stories they told, coupled with
my family's complete and utter reticence, told me a great deal about how
my family had suffered. I knew that those schools were responsible for my
displacement, my angst, and my cultural lostness.
For years I carried simmering anger and resentment. The more I learned
about the implementation of that policy and how it affected Aboriginal
people across the country, the more anger I felt. I ascribed all my pain to
residential schools and to those responsible. I blamed churches for my
alcoholism, loneliness, shame, fear, inadequacy, and failures. In my mind I
envisaged a world where I had grown up as a fully functioning Ojibwa, and it
glittered in comparison to the pain-wracked life I had lived.
But when I was in my late forties, I had enough of the anger. I was tired of being
drunk and blaming the residential schools and those responsible. I was tired of
fighting against something that could not be touched, addressed, or confronted.
My life was slipping away on me and I did not want to become an older person
still clinging to a disempowering emotion like the anger I carried.
So one day I decided that I would visit a church. Churches had been the seed
of my anger. I had religion forced on me in my adopted home and it was the
churches that had run the residential schools that shredded the spirit of my
family. If I were to lose my anger, I needed to face the root of it squarely. I was
determined that I would take myself there and sit and listen to the service.
132 | Richard Wagamese
As much as I knew that I would want to walk out and as much as my anger
would direct me to reject it all, I would force myself to sit and listen and try to
find something that I could relate to. I chose a United Church because they
had been the first to issue an apology for their role in the residential school
debacle. They had been the first to publicly state their responsibility for the
hurt that crippled generations. They were the first to show the courage to
address wrongdoing, abuse, forced removal, and shaming. They had been the
first to make tangible motions toward reconciliation. It put them in a more
favourable light with me.
I was uncomfortable at first. No one spoke to me as I took my seat in a pew
near the back. There were no other Native people there and I used that fact
as a denunciation. When the service began, I heard everything through the
tough screen of my rage. Then I noticed the old woman beside me sitting with
her eyes closed as the minister spoke. She looked calm and peaceful, and
there was a glow on her features that I coveted. So I closed my eyes too and
tilted my head back and listened.
I ceased to hear the liturgy that day. I could not hear doctrine, semantics,
proselytizations, or judgment. Instead, with my eyes closed, all I could hear
was the small voice of the minister telling a story about helping a poor, drugaddicted
woman on the street despite his fear and doubt. All I heard was the
voice of compassion. All I heard was a spiritual, very human person talking
about life and confronting its mysteries.
So I went back the next week. I went back and took my seat, and I listened
with my eyes closed. After the scriptural text was read, the minister analyzed
it by placing it in the context of his impatience and the lessons he had learned
in the grocery line and in the freeway traffic. Here was a man responsible for
directing the lives of a congregation talking about facing his own spiritual
shortcomings. There was no self-aggrandization, no inferred superiority.
There was only a man telling us how hard it was to behave like a spiritual
being.
I went back to that church for many weeks. The messages I heard were all
about humanity and about the search for innocence, comfort, and belonging.
I do not know just exactly when my anger and resentment disappeared. I
only know that there came a time when I could see that there was nothing
in the message that was not about healing. I heard about compassion, love,
kindness, trust, courage, truth, and loyalty and an abiding faith that there is a
God, a Creator. There was nothing to be angry about in any of that; in fact, there
was nothing different from what Native spirituality talks about. After I came
home to my people I sought out teachers and healers and ceremonies. I had
Response, Responsibility, and Renewal | 133
committed myself to learning the spiritual principles that allowed our peoples
to sustain, define, and perpetuate themselves through incredible changes. I
had adopted many of those teachings into my daily life, and every ceremony
I attended taught me more and more about the essence of our spiritual lives.
What I heard from that minister those Sunday mornings was not any different
from the root message of humanity in our teachings. With my eyes closed there
was no white, no Indian, no difference at all; the absence of anger happened
quietly without fanfare.
It has been a few years now since I sat in that church. I have not receded back
into the dark seas of resentment, rage, or old hurt. Instead, I have found a
peace with churches and, in turn, with residential schools, with Canada. See,
that church changed my personal politics. Sure, there are genuine reasons
to be angry. The hurt caused by the residential school experience, both of
the Survivors and of those like me who were victimized a generation or more
later, are huge, real, and overwhelming. But healing happens if you want
it bad enough, and that is the trick of it, really. Every spiritually enhancing
experience asks a sacrifice of us and, in this, the price of admission is a keen
desire to be rid of the block of anger.
When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission makes its tour of the
country and hears the stories of people who endured the pain of residential
schools, I hope it hears more stories like mine-of people who fought
against the resentment, hatred, and anger and found a sense of peace. Both
the Commission and Canada need to hear stories of healing instead of a
relentless retelling and re-experiencing of pain. They need to hear that, despite
everything, every horror, it is possible to move forward and to learn how to
leave hurt behind. Our neighbours in this country need to hear stories about
our capacity for forgiveness, for self-examination, for compassion, and for our
yearning for peace because they speak to our resiliency as a people. That is how
reconciliation happens.
It is a big word, reconciliation. Quite simply, it means to create harmony.
You create harmony with truth and you build truth out of humility. That is
spiritual. That is truth. That is Indian. Within us, as nations of Aboriginal
people and as individual members of those nations, we have an incredible
capacity for survival, endurance, and forgiveness. In the reconciliation with
ourselves first, we find the ability to create harmony with others, and that is
where it has to start-in the fertile soil of our own hearts, minds, and spirits.
That, too, is Indian.
Submitted on May 14, 2017 in By David.
