Generational Genocide
A drunken, enraged father lurks about, ranting, raving, almost foaming at the mouth-His presence haunts the children when they see that glossy look in his eyes and know that their father is not there. Huddled in the farthest corner of the bed, in the dark, five young children are shaking in fear and crying for their mother. But their mother cannot come. She is being beaten. It usually only happens when the father is drinking but sometimes the drinking would be followed with days and nights of darkness. The sounds of fists pounding on her body are soft, but her screams fill the entire house.
This type of home environment in which deplorable abuses occur is common amongst Aboriginal People in Canada. The intergenerational trauma inflicted upon them after first contact, including the Residential Schooling Policy has had severe detrimental effects on Aboriginal People. The 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples acknowledges this truth by commenting about, “the incredible damage- loss of life, denigration of culture, destruction of self-respect and self-esteem, rupture of families, impact of these traumas on succeeding generations”.
Residential School has had an impact on me. Both of my parents are Residential School survivors. The abuses that my parents experienced in these schools shaped them, damaged them, and affected their parenting skills. The first paragraph is a small part of what my life was like as a young child. This being said, as a result of my parents attending Residential School, the effects bled into my life. It has bled into my siblings lives and has bled into our children’s lives. It is intergenerational. We are, as Aboriginal People, all Residential School survivors.
I called my father this morning to ask him some questions about his experiences in Residential School. He spent six years in the St. Martin Residential school in Wabasca, Alberta, from 1961-1967. I have been asking him questions for years, but he can only give me a little piece at a time. It pains him to talk about it. I don’t like seeing my dad in pain. It’s heartbreaking. Today, he was more open to sharing with me than usual, after I told him I was going to write this essay. Something in his voice changed as he spoke¬¬ - something I could not distinguish. He admitted some things that hurt me to the core of my being; these bits of truth were unexpected and traumatizing. It shattered the illusion of my dad being a strong, successful and proud Aboriginal man; it reduced him into a lost and scared little boy with no identity. I could hear it in his voice; he felt ashamed. He told me that “he lost himself in there….” He was abused and punished, and his way of life was deemed savage and uncivilized. The one incident I will tell you about, out of respect of my father’s privacy, is the mildest story he told me. He once got punished for speaking his own language by being tied to the basement furnace during a winter month. He remained tied to the furnace for one full day. This one story, along with all the rest he has testified to, is tragic. His story is only one of thousands. These stories of Residential Schooling are not in the history books about Canada.
Too many Canadians are uninformed about the history in regards to Aboriginal People. One of the reasons for this is the lack of education in the current school system, which creates ignorance about the issues Aboriginals face. History books talk about the Christopher Columbus and his so-called discovery of North America. How can he discover a land which was already occupied? This is our land, and it has been for thousands of years. In fact, the University of Alberta stands upon Treaty Six Territory. I wonder how many students are aware of this fact. The history books also always mention Thanksgiving, in which the “Indians” shared their food and knowledge with the colonial settlers that arrived. The history books are glossed over and fail to educate Canadians about what is important: about the genocide that occurred.
Aboriginal people are survivors of 500 years of a systemic genocidal system. According to Freideres and Gadaz, in their book Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, “from the first time of contact 80% of Indigenous people have been annihilated. He estimates that 60 million Indigenous People were annihilated in the 20th century alone”. This is Canada’s history. An important aspect of the genocide occurred when the Residential School policy came in to effect in 1845. This is when the assimilation process began. According to the colonial settlers, Aboriginals were considered savages and in need of salvation. Thousands of children were ripped from their homes, their lives and placed in these schools. Residential schools are a tragic chapter in the lives of Aboriginal People, in which attempts were made to eradicate the children’s way of life. There have been numerous studies done on the abuses that occurred in these schools. According to Saakvitne, in the book Reclaiming Connections: Understanding Residential School Trauma Among Aboriginal People, some “trauma stories are of intentional cruelty, malevolent, multiple perpetrators, abusive activities by groups of people, and abuse that occurs in the context of elaborate rituals with or without religious content. Hearing these stories can stir strong feelings (and sometimes doubts) in the minds of the listeners)”.
I’m sick to death of hearing the phrase “get over it”. I’ve already died many times within the genocide of my ancestors. How can I simply get over 500 years of oppression, genocide and assimilation policies? Some people say that, as Aboriginal People, “we do it ourselves, we make bad decisions….” but how can one make a choice when no choices are given? Do you really think my people choose to want to live on the streets, or choose to live in a hazy world full of darkness and addictions? Do you really think we choose to grow up in homes where we get abused, neglected and hurt? The stories I have collected are evidence that Residential Schools affects all of us to this day today, we carry the trauma inside. It is 500 years’ worth. Ignorance makes me sick. If you can’t sympathize, at least try to understand. Do you, as my listener, also doubt that these stories are true? What kind of life would you have if you began being raped at age 4? Being starved as a child, and stealing ketchup packages to make watery tomato soup? Or being beaten up all of your life, being told you are nothing and that you will never amount to anything? Some of us grow up in one big grotesque party with drunken strangers who never knew about the things they did to us, things that haunt us to this very day. Some of us didn’t have a mother or father to raise us. Many of us had nobody to turn to, no one who cared. If you had experienced a life like this, where would you be?
If you never had a home and got tossed around in the system, from one abusive foster parent to the next, where would you be? If all of your entire life, you had no one to take care of you or teach you anything about life, where would you be? You would be just like us, lost in the cracks within society, suffering from the intergenerational damage done by the Residential School System.
©2013 Sandi Auger
