Indigenous educator on her family's residential school history

Brut America

"Some students died by suicide, some died in fires or fleeing the schools, trying to escape abuse."  Her grandparents were residential school survivors. Now, she is opening up about her family's history of trauma as Canada confronts its dark past.

Transcript

00:00Some of them died in fires or fleeing the schools trying to escape the abuse.

00:05Some of them died by drowning or freezing while trying to escape.

00:23My grandparents and their siblings went.

00:25There's a very strong legacy of residential school survivors in my family,

00:30which means I unfortunately have some intergenerational trauma.

00:48I know that that community had told officials that there was a mass grave.

00:54Already there. So the community knew and a lot of other people knew.

00:59And that was also a common practice for children to be kind of disposed of like that.

01:07I definitely feel like there's a big cloud over Canada right now.

01:11It's just everywhere. It's just like you can't really get away from it.

01:15I certainly can't get away from it.

01:17First of all, this is heart-wrenching.

01:23Second, I would just like to take a few seconds of silence to honour every soul.

01:32To watch movies or to watch videos and think of my Mushom, my Cree word for grandfather,

01:59going through that is just, it really breaks my heart.

02:02And imagining like my younger cousins, like what if that was them?

02:06Like that could have been them.

02:08It really is just heartbreaking to work through.

02:12The last school that closed in 1996, I was actually in my community.

02:17And they tore down that school collectively as a group.

02:24And they built a school that I actually went to.

02:27I spent kindergarten on the land that that residential school was on.

02:31It's really kind of surreal for me to think about even now.

02:39I think that some people don't understand why Indigenous people are still hurting

02:44from stuff that happened so long ago.

02:46Well, not even so long ago.

02:48Like yes, it was introduced like in the 1800s, but it went until 1996.

02:59And from just saying that they went to residential school, it's like why?

03:03Like who made them? Like why?

03:05There's so many gaps in that education.

03:08And it's so obvious why other people outside of Canada don't have any details.

03:15Because people in Canada barely do.

03:19I try really hard to incorporate decolonized language,

03:27decolonized content into the programming.

03:30And we talk a lot about a medicine wheel,

03:32which is just like a circle with colours in it

03:37to kind of represent pieces of life and the earth.

03:42And it's a circle because we're all together, side by side.

03:46There's no top or bottom.

03:48And that's really where we try to help children visualize

03:54the earth and their community as side by side

03:57instead of them on top or them on the bottom.

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