Residential Schools: Not A Proud Past

Ted Doleman | Jun 30, 2021

In 1996, after an incident at one of our plants in Manitoba, a plan was put in place to have a “Cultural Awareness Program” and I volunteered to be a facilitator. My company and the local Band Council formed a team to develop the program to try and create a better understanding of each other's cultures and to prevent, or at least reduce, any further racial incidents. During that program development I was told of the Residential School Program, the practice of forcibly removing children from their families, that there were physical beatings for speaking anything other than English, and other abuse had occurred. The people telling us about this abduction became so upset that they were sobbing with grief, to the point where while writing this I still feel a cold ache in the pit of my stomach. When I told others what had happened, including someone of Metis heritage, about what we, Canada, had done they said it can’t be true. There were many things we did after that training. We had to face the fact that of the almost a thousand jobs we had north of ’53 less than 20 were filled by First Nations, interestingly most were from apprenticeship program from the 1970s. One of my coworkers and I were working on my car, one of the 20, and I asked him about growing up in Gillam, and he told me he remembered when our Company bull-dozed his family’s home as they were “squatters”. I can still feel the irony and shame of his story. We then established a (second) First Peoples apprenticeship program with the local Band and the Frontier School Division. We began regular meetings with the Band Council to discuss concerns, things began to change, at least a bit. I want to point out to people who say this happened long ago, it wasn’t long ago, and our southern neighbours separated children from their parents, put them in camps, and many will never see their families again. I get that cold ache in my stomach once again.

Part of being in a Democracy is that all who are part of it are treated the same. We are responsible for the actions of our democracy now and in the past. If someone had tried to take my children away, with armed RCMP officers, saying it was to help them would I have prevented it knowing they have heavy arms and if needed the Army to complete the task? Probably not. If I was a child taken away, only being allowed to go back for summers, being beaten to learn a language my parents couldn’t speak or worse, seeing classmates disappear, would I have said what happened? Probably not. If my son and daughters never came home, I would want to know what happened to them, to grieve for them and bury them. Our country’s beginnings were flawed, what we were taught was a lie, and many of the people we honor with statues did horrific things. If a few statues have to be put in storage so our Founding Peoples aren’t offended so what. Ukrainians would be upset if we had Stalin Statues all over the place and I doubt any of us would be accepting them being left up saying “look at the good he did by helping to defeat the Nazis”. We have to get the buried children back to their families, we have to do it now, and we are responsible to get this completed as this is the cost of being a Democratic society. Finally, we have to teach it to our children, our actual history, not the comforting version we were taught not so long ago.

Ted Doleman