Residential schools: Who's HURTING, Who's HELPING, Who's CASHING IN?

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The government has apologized, so have some of the churches, and in the major newspapers, at least, few are denying any more that Native children were abused in residential schools.

With thousands of Indian residential school charges filed against the federal government and the churches that administered its assimilationist policies now in the courts, the full magnitude of the suffering of generations of former students has yet to be revealed and probably never will be.

Many survivors are too embittered by what happened to them, or too intimidated and demoralized to "tell all." Some who filed claims are frustrated by the lengthy delays in getting to trial, so are settling quietly out of court. Others just don't see the point of getting involved in a legal process that could use up the rest of their lives if they don't kill themselves first from the stress.

Survivors who have spoken out say if you file a residential school claim expect your life to get worse before it gets better. Even if you think you put those abuse issues behind you 20 or 40 years ago and you are all right now. You'd better be well along on your healing journey or have a lot of family support, they say, because there's no telling how many times you are going to have to relive the horror and shame once the church and government lawyers get to you. The official apologies mean nothing, they assert, when you get a church lawyer in your face calling you a liar.

Willie Blackwater is a survivor. He joined an action in October 1994 against the United Church in Port Alberni, B.C. that made national headlines March 21, 1995. That's when pedophile Arthur Henry Plint got 11 years imprisonment for his part in the scandal there that the judge said was the worst institutional abuse case he had seen. The church, which knew of the abuse as early as 1960 and did nothing to stop it, issued an apology in late 1998 for physical and sexual abuse that occurred in schools it operated.

Blackwater, who heads the Gitxsan Residential School Healing Committee that has been operating with Aboriginal Healing Foundation funds since June 1, 1999, has gained strength from telling his story over the years. But he has seen two former friends and inmates of the Port Alberni school commit suicide as a result of the notoriety and humiliation they experienced when they became parties to the litigation. Numerous others have destroyed their lives with alcohol.

He didn't come out unscathed either.

He settled out of court because "that's all people wanted to talk to me about." Also because the apologies of the government and the church "contradicts their actions in court."

Blackwater explained.

"They put you on the stand and then you have to tell your story over and over again, every detail, and it's just like they're calling you an outright liar.

"Disclosure has a rippling effect," he said. "Even though lots of people don't admit it-that's because they're in total denial-they focus on their own pain, what happened to them in residential school. But they neglect, like myself, have neglected to acknowledge the pain and suffering, sexual abuse, incest, physical abuse, domestic abuse, all of that, that we have inflicted on others after we left the residential school system. And that's what goes on today."

He admits he grew up to become an abuser and said he could still be prosecuted for what he himself did in the past.

"Even jail is not the hell of residential school," he said, however. "I've survived residential school, I can survive anything."

Blackwater said his motivation to heal is his wife and his 10-year-old daughter. He spends as much time as he can with them to maintain emotional balance.

"I've addressed the majority of (my issues), but you know, to a lot of our survivors (abuse is) an everyday thing. It's just like normal behavior. They don't see it as any different."

Blackwater said sometimes it isn't until a survivor either gets a court settlement or settles out of ourt that the full force of the trauma hits them.

"'Cause then their families are filing . . . civil litigations against them" for the abuses the survivors inflict on their own families. "People are getting charged for sexual abuse and sexual assault and stuff like that from 20 or 30 years ago, shortly after they left the residential school system. Within the family members, that's escalating enormously now."

He said money isn't the main reason.

"It's that people are willing and ready to address what happened to them, not only the survivors themselves but the survivors' descendants." He said people don't always want to go to court, they want to begin their own healing and stop the abuses within families. Disclosure is the way to start, he said.

The abuses perpetrated against residential school students and the families from whom they were forcibly removed for more than a hundred years are well documented. These include varying degrees of physical and sexual abuse and denigration and denial of Aboriginal culture, language and spiritual practices. The government is saying it will only pay financial compensation for physical and sexual abuse and it is completely ignoring the inter-generational effects.

All the survivors that Windspeaker talked to said the regime that broke them down, corrupted them and trained them to pass along their dysfunction to their children is worse than the beatings they took.

Irene Ness, who works with the same people as Blackwater, attended a school run by the United Church in Edmonton from age nine to 17. Disclosing abuses brought out a lot of anger for Ness.

"I hadn't realized how angry I was in my everyday life."

Speaking out "definitely has" helped, she said. She sought professional therapeutic help. She also attended a conference where there were facilitators who helped the participants tell their stories, and another conference where the polarization between the Western and traditional medicine approaches made it more stressfl than helpful.

Ness took counsellor training and starting working in Hazelton, B.C. in June 1999 with survivors. But that was after she recovered sufficiently herself.

"It was "real hell after I owned those memories. I saw my abuser's face on everything. I had nightmares living those events."

Ness said she started with nutritional recovery first at a workshop put on by Eric Shirt from Poundmaker's Lodge, in Prince George. Then "one-on-one therapy helped me put words to the pain. After that group therapy helped.

"The first step is forgiving the Creator and forgiving yourself for enduring it," said Ness. "I had to forgive my abusers" too, she said.

Dr. Charles Brasfield is a Vancouver psychiatrist who has treated or assessed "about 70" residential school survivors. He said several important characteristics surround disclosure of their experiences.

The first time a client discloses "they rarely say everything, because they are embarrassed or reluctant to say at the time of initial disclosure . . . That creates a problem later in the court when they say 'well you didn't say that the first time.' But that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

"Second, there's a lot of concern about how the community will react to what they're saying. And to everybody's surprise, sometimes the community doesn't often react at the beginning. They do later, but initially everyone is unsure what to say so they don't say anything. Which is kind of disappointing, having disclosed whatever it was, that they ought to have some reaction.

"The third one is how much and how comfortably they disclose really depends upon the amount of support they've got at the time of disclosure, and often there's none."

Brasfield said there is often "a lot of distress" after the initial disclosure. He said survivors are anxious about how people are going to react. They get depressed all over again. "Fairly often" they start having flashbacks about what happened.

"And then, of course, it's hard to put the memores away. Many people have not thought about this deliberately for years, and now they can't not think about it. They're always remembering. So they're caught as if it were happening all over again."

Usually people are not prepared for that. He said that they've kept it locked away for 20 or 30 years so they think if they just say what happened it "will all go away." Brasfield said it doesn't.

He also said that most people have been told to let the past stay in the past or not to think about it.

"It's only now, Elders in particular are saying 'no, you have to go back and remember.' And once they disclose, that's what they're in the middle of."

Brasfield said the number one thing he does to help people is "I believe them."

He employs "cognitive processing therapy" in addition. "It's a way of dealing with memories, and there are several structures to that. First is saying it in great detail, and reacting to it appropriately. Not trying to hide the fear or the anger or whatever. And then repeating that, over and over until it's not just a terrible thing that happened; it's a story about the terrible thing that happened. And they're not so overwhelmed by the emotion."

The doctor said the third step is for the person to "realistically re-evaluate whatever thoughts they had deriving from that experience. And that takes quite some time."

He means the survivor takes the same facts he started out with and learns how to put a different, accurate interpretation on them. One example of that step is the survivor learning to stop blaming himself for the abuses done against him and to put the blame where it belongs, on the perpetrator. Another example is the survivor changing his belief that he's the "only one," therefore there must be something wrong with him, to realizing there are lots of others who were abused too. "And it wasn't anything they did. It was they happened to be in the school."

Survivors' outcomes are "very dependent" on treatment, he said. Typically it take