Residential School Victims [footprints]

Thousands perished from disease, malnutrition, fire.

Large numbers of children who were sent to residential schools never returned home. In light of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final national event held at the end of March in Edmonton, this month’s Footprints is dedicated to the memory of those children who died from the harsh conditions they experienced, or perished while trying to escape from them.

In Stories Moshum and Kokum told me, Arnold J. Isbister tells of an elderly neighbour, Mrs. J., who makes a late night visit to his parents’ cabin in a snowstorm.

Writing from the perspective of his son, Isbister describes how the youth falls asleep soon after Mrs. J. arrives, but in the morning questions the visit. Why did the old woman venture out in such impossible weather?

Grandfather answers that the widowed woman braved the storm because it made her unbearably lonely. Howling winds and swirling snow reminded her of the death of her beloved brother and father years before.

That night, Mrs. J. recounted stories of a happy childhood until her brother Matthew was taken away to mission school. She missed him terribly, especially that first Christmas when he wasn’t home to make the family laugh. She felt optimistic when the family received word around Eastertime that he was ill because now he would have to come home. But when her father went to get him on Matthew’s white horse, he was informed the boy had died. Heartbroken, the father built a travois for his son’s body and was too distraught to notice the approaching spring storm when he set out for home.

After eight days passed with no sign of her father and brother, Mrs. J. knew something was wrong. Her mother asked other families and the local priest to join in a search, and finally Matthew’s white horse was spotted standing in the midst of a prairie. Beside him, a pile of snow almost hid the frozen bodies of Mrs. J. kin. Matthew was wrapped up in blankets, and his father held him in his arms as if to keep him warm.

Mrs. J. never stopped grieving her loss, and her mother died of despair two years later, Isbister’s grandson learns.

As most Canadians know, many families lost loved ones at residential school, but the far-reaching impacts are still being uncovered.

By January of this year, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission determined that more than 4,000 residential school children died. That figure, though, is based on partial federal government records. Commission officials expect the number to rise as its researchers delve into records from Library and Archives Canada, the churches that ran the schools, and elsewhere.

The commission is getting closer to revealing the extent of the substandard conditions students endured. If threats like physical, emotional and sexual abuse, malnutrition, disease, or fires didn’t kill them, many died as runaways.

One heartbreaking incident that drew rare media attention in 1937 involved the deaths of four boys – two age eight and two age nine – who fled the Lejac residential school in British Columbia in mid-winter. They were found frozen together in slush ice on Fraser Lake, barely a kilometre from home. An inquiry at the time found one boy, wearing summer clothes, had “no hat and one rubber missing and his foot bare.”

The largest killer of students, by far, was disease. For decades, starting around 1910, tuberculosis took many lives. Records from a school in Spanish, Ont., record the flu epidemic killed 20 children over a grim three-month period.

Conditions that called for healthy children to be housed beside sick children, and the fact that buildings were poorly ventilated and students were often malnourished and incapable of fighting off disease, resulted in great loss. These kinds of actions and shortcomings could have been reversed, preventing many fatalities.

“Aboriginal kids’ lives just didn’t seem as worthy as non-Aboriginal kids,” observed Kimberly Murray, executive director of the commission, in a National Post article.

She said fires also took many lives, despite repeated directives in audits calling for fire escapes and sprinklers.

Many schools refused to spend money on fire escapes, building poles outside of windows so the children could slide down. With doors and windows locked to prevent children from escaping, though, they were unable to reach the poles.

The commission’s research manager Alex Maass, said student deaths were so much a part of the residential school system that architectural plans for many of them included cemeteries that were laid out in advance of the building.

Maass has also found that death reports were consistently done until 1917, when they abruptly stopped.

“It was obviously a policy not to report them,” he said.

Allegations of manslaughter and murder have been made by school survivors testifying at commission hearings, but these remain unproven. A story of a nun throwing a newborn baby born to a student into a furnace has been uttered by at least one survivor.

The late Harriett Nahanee, who attended a school in Port Alberni, B.C., said she saw a fellow student kicked down the stairs. The last time she saw the child, she was lying on the floor, not moving or breathing, her eyes wide open. The RCMP later claimed the girl died of pneumonia.

The names of children who died – along with how they died and where they are buried – are being assembled by the commission’s “The Missing Children Project”. Many believe the commission has so far just scratched the surface, and many more names will be added as documents are released and investigated.
Residential schools began to operate in Canada in the 1870s, with the last one closing its doors in 1996. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been researching the legacy of residential schools since 2008, and will release a final report of its findings in 2015.

One of its numerous mandates is to establish a national research centre to serve as a permanent resource for Canadians to appreciate the far-reaching damage these schools wreaked on Aboriginal children and families, and to move toward reconciliation and healing.