Toward the end of the 1940s, on a warm late summer day, a dark green coloured Stake Truck drove up through the gateway of the Mohawk Institute, a residential school for Indigenous children in Brantford, Ont.
The driver disembarked and opened up the back of his truck. He began yelling at a cargo full of Indigenous kids to get out of his truck. There was no ramp. The children, afraid, jumped to the ground. Some of them fell harshly and they began to cry for their parents.
One of them is a tiny, young four-year-old girl who is dressed in her finest clothes. Her thick black hair is tied into pigtails. She is afraid and disoriented when she gains her feet after leaping from the truck and tumbling over.
As she stands up, she finds that she now has a large, tall, white woman in front of her. The woman is screaming at her in a language she does not understand.
Beginning to cry, the little four-year-old tries to tell the woman in her own language (Ojibwe) that she cannot understand what she is being told to do. The tall white woman strikes her hard into her abdomen. She is lifted off of her feet and hurled backward through the air and she falls hard once more.
Thus began her new life at a residential school.
That little girl would not see her parents again but for a few weeks each year and she was enrolled at the residential school until she was 16 years of age. During that time, she and her two older sisters would try to run away from the institute three times.
By the time she had returned to her First Nation home, she had lost her ability to speak her own language. This resulted in an inability to connect with the elder population in her community.
Assimilated into the teachings of the larger society, she and her fellow schoolmates would shun the teachings from the elders. She had been taught that those teachings were evil and that traditional drumming and dancing were the music of the devil.
She would have a lifelong conflict within herself on that issue and it led to much confusion and self-loathing.
Within 10 years after she left the Mohawk Institute, she would have six children (eventually eight) and she would begin to drink heavily on weekends along with many of her schoolmates. Alcohol became a way to try to forget the horrors of her childhood experience.
Eventually, she and many of her schoolmates would develop diabetes which can be attributed to the poor diet at the Mohawk Institute, which the Indigenous children had nicknamed 'The Mush Hole' for the poor quality of food they had received.
That little girl was my mother and she died relatively young at 58 due to complications from diabetes.
She was kind, gentle, loving, thoughtful, and community-minded. She volunteered on many committees including with the church. The residential school experience broke her in so many ways, but they never fully broke her spirit.
In the early 1950s, a young boy is driven in a vehicle through the same gateway that so many Indigenous children before him passed through.
When he is disembarked from the vehicle, he, like those before him, is scared and disoriented. He is ushered quickly inside the large facility where he will be guided through becoming “civilized,” and hopefully dissolved into the larger society with no trace of his Indigeneity left within him.
Within hours, he gets his long hair cut off completely and he is left with a brush cut. As he watches the hair that was once on his head being swept away, he feels his first loss. The memory will stay with him forever.
Next, he is stripped of the clothing he came with. He will never see those articles again. He is made to wear the same clothing that all of the other children at the institute have on.
Thus began his indoctrination to life at the Mush Hole.
By the time he left the institute, the young boy and his brothers would be survivors of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse which would go on to affect him throughout his lifetime.
His experience at the institute ensured he would never be able to adequately form close, loving relationships. His self-loathing was such that he would leave his young family for months at a time to live on the streets in Toronto. He became lost in the dull grey world of the city, painted bleaker by drugs and alcohol.
That young boy was my uncle. He eventually passed away at 56, a younger age than he should have. The experiment by the larger society to change him forever had worked. His tortuous, forced assimilation ended on that day.
He was always kind, full of humour, protective of us and his family. That’s who he was. Residential school created another side to him when they chose to beat the “Indian” out of him.
The gateway to the Mohawk Institute Residential School was a gateway to a lifetime of misery and pain for many survivors. The gateway for many was a gateway to a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse in an attempt to mask the pain suffered there.
In tandem with the ravages of colonialism, which included loss of ancestral land, loss of traditional lifestyle, etc., the gateway to residential schools have served to scar generations of Indigenous people as the hurts continue to ripple through First Nations like a persistent plague.
Canada carries the antidote: Reconciliation.
And reconciliation will be achieved when the gateways to these places are closed forever. Figuratively and literally.
An acknowledgement of wrongful treatment needs to be made by all of those involved in taking those young lives away. And I don’t mean just the ones who died and were buried at these places.
The survivors and their children and grandchildren are still living that loss and hurt. Perpetrators of these historical injustices need to be made to face justice for their ruination of an entire culture.
Doing so will set us on a path to true reconciliation and we can begin to close the gateways that led to cultural genocide forever.
A National Indian Residential School Crisis Line has been set up to provide support for former students and those affected. Access emotional and crisis referral services by calling the 24-hour national crisis line: 1-866 925-4419.
Jeff Monague is a former chief of the Beausoleil First Nation on Christian Island, former treaty research director with the Anishnabek (Union of Ontario Indians), and veteran of the Canadian Forces. Monague, who taught the Ojibwe language with the Simcoe County District School Board and Georgian College, is currently the superintendent of Springwater Provincial Park.
