Residential school reborn as place of healing

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It was once the site of one of Saskatchewan's most notorious residential schools. Now it's a place where, its organizers hope, much of the damage done to Aboriginal people by the residential schools can be repaired.

The Wahpiimoostoosis Healing Centre took in its first patients at the beginning of November. The 24-bed in-patient facility hopes to help break the cycle of violence and despair created by the residential school system, said its program director, Cheryl Lafrance.

The healing centre is located on the same grounds where the Qu'Appelle Indian Residential School, also known as St. Paul's Residential High School, was once located. The Roman Catholic Church ran the school from 1884 to 1969.

About 24,000 Aboriginal students from the province attended the school during those years, said Lafrance. Many of the children were subject to physical, emotional and sexual abuse during their stay in the school. And months away from family inflicted its own damage as well.

"The schools ruined many family bonds," Lafrance said. "Imagine a five or six-year-old child taken away from his or her parents, who aren't allowed to see their child until the summer. There was no contact with the family at all.

"If you were a boy and had a sister at the school, you weren't allowed to speak to her or meet her. You had no sense of family. And if you weren't taught as a child how to be raised by your parents, how could you know what to do when you became a parent?"

The institution was a school in name alone, she added, failing to educate the students in its charge.

"Many of our Elders and others who went through the school say that they had the same textbooks for four or five grades. It was as though the people who ran the school had no interest in providing the students with an education."

The federal government took over control of the school in 1970. The Touchwood File Hills Qu'Appelle Tribal Council, and later the Star Blanket First Nation, gradually assumed more responsibility for its operation throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Renamed the White Calf Collegiate (WCC), the school operated until 1999, when the band closed the school and tore down most of the buildings. Only the Lebret Eagledome hockey arena, a dormitory originally built as a residence for players of the now-defunct Lebret Eagles hockey club, and the WCC gymnasium remain, along with several portable trailers that now house the healing centre's staff.

"The chief and council of the Star Blanket First Nation wanted more treatment programs for those who went through residential schools," said Lafrance, explaining why the decision was made to transform the former school into a place of healing.

"From our experience, the legacy of the residential schools has created more issues than the use of drugs, drinking and crime. Those are caused by underlying issues. And those underlying issues can be traced back to the legacy of residential schools," she added.

"If you don't understand what has happened to our society from the residential schools, the same mistakes will be made by our people."

Slated to run for the next two years on a $1 million budget from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, the healing centre will offer safe healing processes using community-based holistic techniques.

These would include visits from Elders, sweats, pipe ceremonies, feasts, talking and healing circles and other traditional cultural practices, she said.

In order to treat people whose lives were harmed by the residential schools, such facilities must reintroduce Aboriginal people to their traditional culture, Lafrance said.

Many people who are in trouble with the law, who have problems with alcohol or drug abuse, or who are in the midst of a family breakdown may not understand that how their experiences with the residential school system-or their parents or grandparents' experiences-have affected their lives.

"If you spent your childhood in a place where you weren't allowed to worship inyour own way or speak your own language, you grow up with a sense of shame of who you are as a person," she said.

"The first treatment of that person, therefore, is to make them understand that their heritage is not something that should have been harmed."

Patients who come to the centre will spend 28 days in treatment. The centre is also planning for after-care activities once the patient is released from the facility.

"This program isn't designed to completely heal a survivor of residential school abuse within 28 days," Lafrance said. "No program can do that all on its own. We're looking to provide a place where people can get information on the legacy of residential school abuse, and create an awareness that help is available."