NIKAAWII OTIPAACHIMOWINA (MY MOTHER’S STORIES)
LORRAINE SERENA SUTHERLAND
SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIRMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY
NIPISSING UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES NORTH BAY, ONTARIO
© LORRAINE SERENA SUTHERLAND MAY 2014
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ABSTRACT
This thesis examines Cree residential school survivor accounts from the James Bay territory spanning a 40-year period from the 1930s through the 1970s. They attended St.
Philips Indian and Eskimo Residential School, an Anglican operation, in Fort George, Quebec;
St. Anne’s, a Roman Catholic institution, in Fort Albany, Ontario; and Horden Hall, an Anglican residential school in Moose Factory, Ontario. This thesis also includes original research with one particular survivor of St. Anne’s, nikaawii (my mother), who attended from the age of 2 through 17.
The tipaachimowina (stories) of these Cree survivors reveal that residential schooling altered their lives in many ways. Because of Canada’s education policy, children were often placed in these schools for long periods of time. Many were not able to develop or master the traditional skills of their parents. Others were not able to reconnect with other members of their families. Most experienced sadness and loss; some endured physical and sexual abuse (the latter seeming more prevalent in Roman Catholic schools) at the hands of school personnel or peers.
Tipaachimowina are oral history, and this unique method of Cree sharing enabled survivors to tell about their experiences. It is through this method that some survivors were able to come to terms with what they lived through and are still living through. Their tipaachimowina reveal pride, resilience and a will to live.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge and thank my late grandparents, Moses and Juliette Sutherland for their wisdom and determination and for sharing their Cree traditional values and knowledge with their children and grandchildren.
I would like to acknowledge and thank nikaawii for sharing her tipaachimowina with me. This research would not have been possible without you. I am happy and very proud to call you my mother. Kisahkiheytin mistahey (I love you very much). Also, I would like to say thank you to my brothers Adrian, Andrew, and Robert and my sisters Judy, Iris, and Karen for your love and belief in me. Adrian, thank you for your spiritual guidance and for your love of the land.
I would like to thank my husband Norman for always supporting me in my life and in my education. I would like to thank Forrest and Ariel, my beautiful children, for being patient and for understanding the importance of this work.
I would like to thank Attawapiskat First Nation Education Authority (AFNEA) for supporting me financially in the early years of my educational journey. I would like acknowledge and thank the late Xavier Wesley for telling me to “just go” to Moose Factory, Ontario, even though I had not received “confirmation of funding” from AFNEA; it came after I boarded the plane to Moosonee, Ontario. If it had not been for Xavier’s belief that I would get sponsored I would have missed my first course in the Aboriginal Teacher Education Program (ATEP) and I would not be where I am today.
I would like to thank and acknowledge the Chief and Council in Attawapiskat, Ontario for granting me permission to conduct my research in the community. I would like to thank and acknowledge Nipissing University’s Office of Aboriginal Initiatives for also granting me permission to do research in my home community. Both were instrumental in supporting me in bringing forth Ininiw tipaachimowina (Cree stories).
I would like to acknowledge and thank the Elder-in-residence at Nipissing University, John Sawyer, for sharing his tipaachimowina with me. Your guidance throughout this process has been invaluable and has made my journey at the graduate level that much easier. I would like to acknowledge and thank my very good friends Melissa and Jennifer for listening to my trials and tribulations while going through this process. Thank you Melissa for taking the time to read and edit many of the chapters in this research.
I would also like to acknowledge and thank my supervisor, Dr. John Long, whose guidance and wisdom have truly been invaluable. I am grateful for your feedback and ongoing support. I would like to acknowledge and thank Dr. Katrina Srigley for hiring me many years ago as a research assistant and for continuing to include me in your research endeavours. Your guidance and support throughout the years have truly made this work possible. To my external examiner, Dr. Carly Dokis, thank you for believing in me and for supporting this work. I would like to acknowledge and thank the late Stan Lawlor Jr., Dr. Steven High, Dr. Peter Cook, and Dr. David Calverley for their love of history, which laid the groundwork in my undergraduate years at Nipissing University in my seeking and sharing tipaachimowina as a graduate student.
This research was made possible by Mushkegowuk Employment and Training Services of Mushkegowuk Council in Moose Factory, Ontario. I wish to thank them for their support.
Kichii miigwetch (Thank you very much). vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
CHAPTER ONE Significance of Research Topic ...... 5
CHAPTER TWO Historiography & Theoretical Orientation ...... 6
CHAPTER THREE Re-Assessing Residential Schools ...... 14
CHAPTER FOUR Recovering from Residential Schools ...... 20
CHAPTER FIVE Cree Enculturation ...... 24
CHAPTER SIX Cree Residential School Survivor Accounts ...... 30
CHAPTER SEVEN Tipaachimowina (Stories) as Methodology ...... 35
CHAPTER EIGHT Nikaawii Otipaachimowina (My Mother’s Stories) ...... 43
CONCLUSION ...... 55
APPENDIX Cree Glossary ...... 58
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 60
1 INTRODUCTION
A Fond Memory
He stood motionless on the riverbank for what seemed to me like an eternity. The cool wind pressed up against his rough-tanned leathery skin, his lean body stood tall and firm on the ground beneath him. His faded green trousers, a Northern Store special, danced on command with the soft mystical wind. He stood in a trance as if there was nothing he could do but obey the wind.
Something caught his eye and he looked off to his far left. His eyes instantly became small slits as he squinted in the direction of the mysterious something in the river beyond. My gaze automatically switched to the waterfront and gained my undivided attention. A small white speck swished in and out of the water beyond our reach. It disappeared and magically reappeared as if to prove its existence to all the onlookers.
I later learned from my grandfather that it had been a beluga whale. The mysterious, white whale swam through our river en route to the bay. The grand waters there offered freedom and unlimited movement. Whales are seldom seen swimming in the Attawapiskat River. I never saw that whale again; perhaps it chose to hide from my view.
On that day many years ago, I can still remember my grandfather’s words of wisdom as he spoke to me (in Cree): “High above, up in the sky is where our Creator is, and he is the one who makes choices for us living beings on earth.”
He paused and looked up to the sky, then returned to me. “We are not always free to do what we want, just like the animals.” I stood beside him and listened carefully. He cleared his throat and continued. “This world we live in is sometimes strange, but when we believe in the Creator high above, then we have nothing to fear. So long as we trust in the Creator.” I often heard of my grandfather speak about this being, and wondered whether that being heard him. I knew, deep within, that whatever my grandfather spoke was true.1
This is a memory from my childhood, living with my grandparents in Attawapiskat,
Ontario. It exemplifies the way in which Ininiwuk (Cree people) share tipaachimowina (stories).
Tipaachimowina come to Ininiwuk in many ways. Some come through sharing stories, through the lived experience and memories of being on the land or by interacting with others, and sometimes they come to us in our dreams. Tipaachimowina inform who I am and how I make sense of the world. Tipaachimowina are my knowledge, guidance, and wisdom.
This thesis examines how Canada’s policy on Indian education under the Indian Act tried to extinguish Indian ways of preserving and practicing our traditional ways.2 With the introduction of residential schools, children were removed from their families and traditional
1 Lorraine Sutherland, A Fond Memory, May 1998. 2 The use of Indian, Aboriginal, First Nation, and Indigenous are used throughout this paper and are consistent with the sources employed. 2 lands. The ties that bind families together were severely weakened. Stories were shared less often and traditional memories were replaced with new ones; many of these were sad, often filled with heartache; some of them were horrific. Although Canada’s residential schooling failed to provide adequate, healthy, and safe schools for Indians in Canada, most children survived; they lived to tell their tipaachimowina of this sad chapter in their lives, and they rekindled their memories of earlier, happier times. My mother used storytelling as a means to rekindle earlier and happier memories of her life on land with her father and this, in turn, provided her with a way to come to terms with her residential school experience now, as an elder.
This research contributes to a growing body of literature on Indigenous methodology.
Tipaachimowina is Indigenous methodology. As a methodology, seeking and sharing tipaachimowina does not only actively invoke and bring forth Ininiw knowledge systems; it also reaffirms and validates an Ininiw researcher like myself in navigating, making sense and finding my place in academia. Tipaachimowina, when shared in academia, show us that other “ways of knowing” exist and they have existed since time immemorial and are just as valid.
Tipaachimowina helped me, and I hope they will support other Indigenous students in rediscovering and incorporating ancestral knowledge in their own research.
This research builds on the research of scholars like Andrew Armitage, Darcy Leigh,
Ryan Dunch, Sarah de Leeuw, Kim Anderson, George Fulford and Louis Bird, controversial activist Kevin Annett, and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP). Armitage shows that the stages of assimilation were similar in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Dunch and Leigh discuss imperialism and colonialism and how these policies affected and contributed to the Indigenous struggles in North America. de Leeuw, Anderson, Fulford and
Bird reveal how state and church used education and religion as vehicles to assimilate Indian children into the wider Canadian society, while Annett and RCAP reveal and how assimilationist polices stripped Indigenous peoples of their traditions, languages, and relationships with the land. It also builds on a much broader scholarship on residential schools 3 in Canada.3 My research specifically speaks to the experiences of the Omushkegowuk (people who live in the muskeg).
Following this introduction is Chapter One: The Significance of Research. This chapter introduces my mother, elder Agnes Sutherland, a Cree woman from Attawapiskat, who is a residential school survivor. Chapter Two: Historiography and Theoretical Orientation examines the development and implementation of Canada’s Indian education policy. Chapter Three: Re-
Assessing Residential Schools unveils the horrific circumstances in which Indian children were educated and the ways in which the Canadian government tried to improve the condition of
Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Chapter Four: Recovering from Residential Schools discusses ways the Canadian government supported residential school survivors in healing and moving forward in their lives, while also “renewing” previous relationships between Aboriginals and
Canadians in a positive way through educating the Canadian population. Chapter Five: Cree
Enculturation discusses what pre-residential school life would have looked like. Chapter Six:
Cree Residential School Survivor Accounts examines what Cree survivors experienced while at residential schools in the Omushkegowuk region, an environment vastly different from what they would have experienced if they had not been “involuntarily” institutionalized. Chapter
Seven: Tipaachimowina (Stories) as Methodology discusses how tipaachimowina are shared.
Chapter Eight: Nikaawii Otipaachimowina (My Mother’s Stories) illustrates how one family of
Ininiwuk, my own, shared and passed down knowledge through tipaachimowina, as we have done since time immemorial. The conclusion shows that while the Canadian government and religious organizations tried to do away with the Indian, they were not successful, as we are still
3 Other research on residential schooling in Canada, not used in this thesis due to the length allowed for this paper, includes: George Blacksmith, “The Intergenerational Legacy of the Indian Residential School System on the Cree Communities of Mistassini, Oujebougamau and Waswanaipi: An Investigative Research on the Experiences of Three Generations of the James Bay Cree of Northern Quebec” (PhD dissertation, McGill University, 2011); John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999); J.R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).
4 present and holding on to our traditions, our language, and our relationship with the land and
Creator.
5 CHAPTER ONE
Significance of Research Topic
My mother, Agnes Sutherland, is a Cree woman from the Omushkegowuk territory. She was born in 1950 on her father’s traditional hunting grounds along the Opinnagau River, located approximately 130 km north-west of Attawapiskat, Ontario. In 1952, at the age of two, my mother was placed in an orphanage attached to St. Anne’s Residential School in Fort
Albany, Ontario because my grandmother, Juliette Sutherland, was sick with tuberculosis and hospitalized there, later staying to work for the Oblate mission as a cook. My mother was not an orphan, as her parents were still alive, but when my grandmother was sick they were not able to care for her; until the age of 14, for most of the year, she was not permitted to live with her parents because of Canada’s Indian education policy.
This policy required Indian children to attend residential schools like St. Anne's as a means to assimilate Indians into the wider Canadian population as “civilized” and Christian people. At the age of four, my mother was transferred from the orphanage to St. Anne’s to start her formal education. Thirteen years later, she graduated from grade eight. St. Anne’s residential school was located approximately 235 km south of our ancestral territory on the
Opinnagau River. For ten months out of twelve, during these formative years, my mother was separated from her parents, grandparents, and extended family. My mother's life was, and continues to be, shaped by her residential school experience. She was not able to teach Cree traditional roles and skills to her children and grandchildren, aside from the Cree language, because her own enculturation was disrupted and school did not adequately equip students for life after graduation. My mother's memories of what she experienced in residential school and on the land with her family during her time away from residential school, in the summer months and after her graduation, are crucial in understanding how my mother imagines herself as a
Cree woman.
6 CHAPTER TWO
Historiography and Theoretical Orientation
To understand why my mother spent her formative years in a residential school, it is important to realize how relationships between Europeans and Indians evolved. Andrew
Armitage, in his study of assimilation policy in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, proposes six stages in Canada. The first, or “early stage,”4 involved the meeting of two separate and distinct groups of peoples. Along the St. Lawrence River and around the Great Lakes, it developed into a fur trade partnership between the Indians and French.5 Further north, in my homeland, the Omushkegowuk territory, a parallel relationship involved my ancestors and the
British, beginning in 1670 with the formation of the Hudson Bay Company (HBC);6 the fur trade lasted until the mid-twentieth century.
Historian Sylvia Van Kirk characterizes the fur trade as a partnership based on equality and mutual respect. Her research indicates that French men often married informally into
Indian society and took on many, if not all, of the customs of the Indian people. While the
British initially did not marry, this did not stop them from having relations or taking with Indian women.7 Van Kirk points out “the fur trader did not seek to conquer the Indian, to take his land or to change his basic way of life or beliefs. The Indian … was neither subject nor slave.”8 The fur trade in the Omushkegowuk territory is another example of this mutual relationship.
Historical geographer Victor Lytwyn describes my ancestors, the Omushkegowuk, as an ancient people who developed “complex trade and redistribution networks with neighbouring groups.”9 These long-established trading systems continued into, and contributed to, the fur
4 Andrew Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995), 70-73. 5 Ibid. 6 Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in the Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 (Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer Publishing Ltd., 1980), 9; Victor P. Ltywyn, Muskekowuck Athinuwick: Original People of the Great Swampy Land (Winnipeg: UBC Press, 2002), 126. 7 Ibid., 201. See also Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1980). 8 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 2, 9. 9 Ltywyn, Muskekowuck Athinuwick, xiii, 202. 7 trade era. Lytwyn argues that the Omushkegowuk were major players in the fur trade because of their geographical location, which “placed them in a strategic position to become suppliers of furs, food, and other support to the newcomers, and to act as intermediaries with other Indian people in the interior interested in the fur trade.”10 If the Indians, and specifically the
Omushkegowuk, were valued and considered equal partners in the fur trade, then how did this policy of mutual partnership change? When and why did the long-established customs of the fur trade shift to civilizing, converting, and assimilating the Indian peoples? How and why did the policy toward Indian people become steeped in notions of inferiority and race?
Armitage argues that the “the period of the Royal Proclamation” was the second stage in the Indian-European relationship.11 The British recognized Indians as past allies against the
French and still invaluable in the tensions that later became the American Revolution. The
Royal Proclamation created administrative boundaries and reserved vast hunting lands for
Indian use, while trying to protect Indian land from uncontrolled settler encroachment.12 The
Royal Proclamation did not apply in the HBC territory.
In the third or “transitional stage” following the War of 1812, Canadian social policy was established.13 Colonial governments “develop[ed] a new set of policies based on a worldwide view of Britain’s imperial and civilizing role” in countries like India, Africa, Australia, New
Zealand, and Canada.14 The policy for Canada included the 1876 Indian Act, which “was aimed at ‘inducing the Indians to change their present ways for more civilized Habits of Life.’”15 This involved eliminating pagan and primitive ways of living.
10 Ibid., 126. 11 Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation, 70. 12 Ibid., 73-74. 13 Ibid., 74. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 75. 8 Feminist scholar Darcy Leigh argues that government policy deliberately lowered the status of the Indian from adult to that of a child or “infantalised savage.”16 The Indian was seen as inferior and childlike, justifying the Canadian government in assuming a paternalistic and powerful role in subjugating the Indian under British control.17 The Indian man was defined as head of the family, thereby removing any notions of equality that existed previously between men and women in Indian and fur trade societies. Van Kirk argues that Indian women who were the “country wives” of non-Indian fur traders were highly esteemed and valued, but this changed when white women began to infiltrate the fur trade territory. White women became
“active agents in the growth of racial prejudice.”18 Intermarriage was frowned upon as white women came to be viewed as more desirable, civilized and Christian mates.19 This shift also
“dispossessed Indigenous women of their power in their own societies”20 and defined them through their marital status, “re-enforc[ing] or creat[ing] inequalities between men and women,”21 promoting a Euro-Canadian paternalistic family model within Indigenous societies.
A fourth stage of assimilation followed Confederation. Here the imperial and colonial mentality of superiority was further defined, implemented and enforced by the Canadian government aided by the Roman Catholic Church and other religious denominations. Ryan
Dunch’s work on cultural imperialism and Christian missionaries indicates that assimilationist policies towards non-European groups were inherently racist in nature, stemming from the
16 Darcy Leigh, “Colonialism, Gender and the Family in North America: For a Gendered Analysis of Indigenous Struggles,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2009): 78. 17 Ibid., 76. 18 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 200-201. 19 Ibid., 180-207. 20 Leigh, “Colonialism, Gender and the Family in North America: For a Gendered Analysis of Indigenous Struggles,” 78. 21 Ibid. 9 belief that the British people were “intellectually, morally, and spiritually superior.”22 This ideology served as the basis for the Indian Act’s schooling provisions.23
Sara de Leeuw’s work on schooling reveals how missionaries believed that if children were removed from their familial environment and taught from a young age, civilizing them would be easier.24 Mastering the local language “was at the heart of the missionary enterprise.”25 George Fulford and Louis Bird point out that the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a
Roman Catholic order, made a point to learn Ininiimowin (Cree language) when they began visiting the Omushkegowuk territory seasonally starting in 1847.26 The Oblates established a year-round mission at Fort Albany in 1891 and further north, at Attawapiskat in 1903. They also established St. Anne’s Residential School at Fort Albany in 1903.27 Fulford and Bird indicate that the Oblates were instrumental in “compil[ing] word lists and grammars that laid the groundwork for publishing Cree catechism books, prayer books, the Old and New
Testaments.”28 The results were astonishing: “by the 1880s an estimated 76 families representing 420” people were converted.29 A syncretic Cree religious movement pre-dated the
22 Ryan Dunch, “Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity,” History and Theory Vol. 41, Issue 3 (2002): 310. 23 See the Indian Act section 114, subsection (2), http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/I- 5/page-35.html#docCont (accessed 01 May 2014), section 119, subsections (1), (3), and (6), http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/I-5/page-37.html#docCont (accessed 01 May 2014), and section122, subsections (a), (b), and (c), http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/I-5/page- 38.html#docCont (accessed 01 May 2014) for specific details about who was responsible for enforcing and ensuring how Indian children were and continue to be educated in Canada. 24 Sarah de Leeuw, “’If Anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young’: Colonial constructions of Aboriginal children and the geographies of Indian residential schooling in British Columbia,” Children’s Geographies. Vol. 7, No. 2 (May 2009): 124. 25 Dunch, “Beyond Cultural Imperialism,” 322. 26 George Fulford and Louis Bird, “‘Who Is Breaking The First Commandment?’”: Oblate Teachings and Cree Responses in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, in Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History, Jennifer S.H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert ed. (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003), 296. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 297. 29 Ibid., 296. 10 arrival of the Oblates and a shaman’s dream predicted the priest’s arrival, which would have made my ancestors receptive to them.30
A key conversion tool in the Omushkegowuk territory was the now infamous “Red
Book.”31 The Red Book contained “70 dramatic full-page illustrations of scenes” depicting images of good and evil.32 Louis Bird, a survivor of St. Anne’s Residential School, recalls how the Red Book was used to denounce Cree ways of worshipping Kichii-manitou (Creator), for our traditional practices were considered heresies. The Oblates taught that those “who worship devils, animals, the sun, stars, false idols, he who does drumming, shaking tent, evil singing, evil feasting, evil smoking and dream quests,”33 were breaking the first Commandment to have no other Gods.34 The image of burning resonated very powerfully with Cree beliefs and was one of the key fear tactics priests used to teach the Catechism.35 The use of fear as a means to convert the Indian was a common practice among other religious groups and was considered the only way to eliminate pagan rituals. Father Saindon, a priest at St. Anne’s in the 1920s, believed the use of imagery found in the Cree culture made it easier to convert children.36
Schooling was a central theme of the 1876 Indian Act, but it was implemented and enforced in different parts of the country, with or without treaties. Unknown to my ancestors, the
Omushkegowuk territory became part of Canada in 1870 with the Rupert’s Land transfer, but
Indian Affairs officials had little interest in this remote region. John Long’s work on Treaty No. 9 distinguishes between its education provisions and its schooling provisions.37 Treaty commissioner and infamous senior Indian Affairs official Duncan Campball Scott believed
30 John S. Long, “The Cree Prophets: oral and documentary accounts,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society XXX, no.1 (April 1989): 8-11. 31 Fulford and Bird, “‘Who Is Breaking The First Commandment?,’” 297-298. 32 Ibid., 298. 33 Ibid., 301. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. For other Christian concepts that assisted in Omushkegowuk conversion to Christianity see John S. Long, “Manitu, Power, Books and Wiitihkow: Some Factors in the Adoption of Christianity by Nineteenth Century Western James Bay Cree,” Native Studies Review 3, no. 1 (1987): 1-30. 36 Fulford and Bird, “‘Who Is Breaking The First Commandment?,’” 300. 37 John S. Long, Treaty No. 9: Making the Agreement to Share the Land in Far Northern Ontario in 1905 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 307-308. 11 Indians in the Treaty No. 9 area, people who included my grandparents, did not “require an advanced education on ordinary subjects. They require […] training and instruction in cleanly modes of life both in the preparation of food and personal surroundings, as well as the most important hygienic rules.”38 Scott felt that this “training and instruction” would be hard to dispense to people like my grandparents. “The Indians are all hunters,” he observed, “they come in with their winter’s catch of furs during the month of June and leave for the woods again not much later than the first week in July. Day schools cannot, therefore, be of any practical utility.” Instead, Scott favoured disrupting families and interrupting traditional enculturation, for he believed that “any benefits which arise from Indian education must come from adequate boarding schools.”39
Schools were not mentioned when the treaty commissioners met with my ancestors, and neither was the Indian Act; they were part the “hidden agenda” of Treaty No. 9.40 My ancestors from the Opinnagau River watershed were probably not present when Treaty No. 9 was signed;41 if they had been, Scott’s promise that we would continue to hunt and trap, as we had since time immemorial, would have convinced them that our traditional form of education would continue – on the land, using our ancestral language, our families intact.42 Indian education policy, for the Canadian government, was about civilizing the Indian. For religious denominations like the Roman Catholic Church, education was about Christianizing the Indian.
Two different policies, created for two different reasons, more or less came together to attempt to dismantle the ancient belief systems of my people, the Omushkegowuk.
Aboriginal scholar Kim Anderson claims residential schools damaged Indigenous womanhood and caused harm to the emotional and social fabric of the family.43 The policy of
38 Ibid., 311. The reference to "hygiene" echoes the recommendations of A.G. Meindle, a physician who accompanied the treaty commissioners. See pages 303-306. 39 Ibid., 313. 40 Ibid., 359. 41 Ibid., 337. 42 Ibid. 43 Kim Anderson, A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2000), 89. 12 “removing the children [from their families] was another effective way to conquer Native peoples – ripping the heart out of our communities, which was done first by forcibly placing our children in residential schools.”44 Children who attended residential schools, according to
Anderson, were stripped of their culture, identity and language; as a result, Indigenous people were less than whole when they left residential schools.45 Residential school survivor Theodore
Fontaine believes those who survived “residential schools were mentally crippled by the experience.” Although “most survivors left school in their teens or early 20s, … they were trapped at age seven or slightly older in psychological, emotional and spiritual age.”46 Children were not able to learn traditional knowledge at the desired age because ties with the family were disrupted during their formative years.
Scholars Kayo Ohmagari and Fikret Berkes explain that traditional “bush skills” were normally passed down vertically, from parent to child, or grandparent to grandchild.47 The child watched and learned from the adult, practicing through trial and error until skills were mastered.48 Children who attended residential schools experienced a delayed transmission of this knowledge.49 Similarly, anthropologist Peter Sindell indicates the desired age for Cree children to develop specific “roles” was at the age of five or six.50 Developing roles at this age included: “‘caring for smaller siblings,’ contributing ‘food to the family by picking berries,’
‘snar[ing] rabbits, hunt[ing] birds, and sometimes accompany[ing] their parents into the bush to check traps or to get wood, water, or boughs.’”51 Sindell argues “prolonged residential school experience makes it difficult if not impossible for children to participate effectively in the
44 Ibid., 162. 45 Ibid.,163. 46 Theodore Fontaine. Broken Circle: The Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools (Victoria: Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd., 2010), 120. 47 Kayo Ohmagari and Fikret Berkes, “Transmission of Indigenous Bush Skills among the Western James Cree Women of Subarctic Canada,” Human Ecology Vol. 25, No. 2 (Jun., 1997): 211. 48 Ibid., 206-208. 49 Ibid., 215. 50 Peter S. Sindell, “Discontinuities in the Enculturation of Mistassini Cree Children,” in Conflict in Culture: Problems of Developmental Change among the Cree, N. Chance ed. (St. Paul University Press, Ottawa, 1968), 89. 51 Ibid., 89-90. 13 hunting-trapping life of their parents.”52 Attendance at school “radically disrupt[ed] this development,”53 therefore, cultural learning was delayed and in some cases, never mastered.
Removing children from their parents’ influence proved to be a tactic that would alter the dynamics of Indian families for generations. The residential school policy was responsible for denying and dismantling traditional Omushkegowuk social and cultural systems. The Indian Act authorized the Canadian government to take control of Indians, stripping my ancestors of their independence as Omushkegowuk men, women, and children and reclassifying them as intellectually, morally, and spiritually inferior. These policies were implemented and enforced so the state could gain access to resources on Indian lands without resistance. A monumental shift from the mutual partnership of the fur trade to the paternalistic relationship of the Indian
Act defined how Indians in Canada were treated. Mutual respect was set aside, in an attempt to spiritually conquer my ancestors, disrupt our families and remove us from our land, changing our basic way of life and beliefs, subjugating and controlling us.
52 Ibid., 92. 53 Ibid., 90 14 CHAPTER THREE
Re-assessing Residential Schools
In 1943, a Parliamentary Committee was formed to discuss the ‘Reconstruction and Re- establishment’ of Indian policy.54 Armitage calls this the fifth stage, which was the move away from assimilating Indians to integrating them. He defines this time as the “process of tightening the administration of the Indian Act,” which was to determine how Indians could be made to fit into Canadian society.55 This meant new guidelines were being proposed in 1948 for future
Indian policy which would allow women to “voice” their concerns in band affairs, extend enfranchisement to all Indians, extend provincial services to Indian peoples and finally, allow
Indian children to attend school with non-Indians to better prepare them in becoming contributing members of society on and off reserves.56 Previous policy had placed Indian children in schools far from the reaches of non-Indian society and the consequences of this
“separatist” approach proved inadequate in Indians becoming contributing members of society.57
The Minister of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration asked “the University of
British of Columbia to undertake, in conjunction with scholars in other universities, a study of the social, educational and economic situation of the Indians of Canada and to offer recommendations” for full integration of Indians.58 H.B. Hawthorn led this study - published in
1966 and 1967 in two volumes as A Survey on the Contemporary Indians in Canada – revealing the need to “improve the condition of the Indian.”59 Previous Indian policy failed to
54 Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation, 78-79. See also Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Looking Back, Looking Forward, http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/webarchives/20071211055641/http://www.ainc- inac.gc.ca/ch/rcap/sg/sg28_e.html (accessed 10 May 2013). 55 Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation, 79. 56 Ibid. 57 H.B. Hawthorn, A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada, Volume I (Ottawa: Indian Affairs Branch, 1966), 131-132. 58 Hawthorn, A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada, Volume I, 5; H.B. Hawthorn, A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada, Volume II (Ottawa: Indian Affairs Branch, 1967), v. 59 Hawthorn, A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada, Volume I, 5-6, 164. 15 provide “Indians [with] knowledge, skills and attitudes” to function beyond the reserve.60 Of the many recommendations made by Hawthorn, switching residential schools to day schools and placing Indian children in provincial schools were paramount in preparing them for full integration.61 Support from the churches was not immediate but, with time, religious denominations such as the United Church of Canada, the Presbyterian Church and Anglican
Church began to see the benefits of integrating and transforming their residential schools to day schools. One of the benefits of day schools was parental involvement in mission activities, allowing for whole families to become Christian.62
The Oblate Order did not support integration - they believed Indian children learned best in isolation. The Oblates argued the “Indian home does not prepare the child adequately for the schooling process designed to meet the needs of the non-Indian Canadians.”63 As a result of this belief, many Catholic residential schools like St. Anne’s in Fort Albany remained in operation until 1963 or later.64 Hawthorn’s report concluded that residential schools did not benefit the Indian and, as a result, Indian Affairs relieved religious organizations of their role in
Indian education by 1967.65 This was also the time when provincial schools began including special and remedial programs such as English as a second language, developing curriculum that was inclusive, and providing a school environment that supported and respected Indian learners.66 While this was a positive move, curriculum in day schools such as St. Anne’s remained religious and Euro-Canadian in nature and did not reflect the needs and learning styles of the children.
Sindell’s fieldwork with the Quebec Cree in 1966-1967 reveals that pre-school-aged children did not come into contact with non-Indians until the age of five or six. He argues
60 Hawthorn, A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada, Volume II, 85. 61 Ibid., 8-13, 85, 96. 62 Ibid., 52-54. 63 Ibid., 57. 64 The Aboriginal Healing Foundation, Final Report of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation Volume I: A Healing Journey: Reclaiming Wellness (Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2006), 278. 65 Ibid., 25-26 66 Hawthorn, A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada, Volume II, 12-14. 16 children at this age had “clearcut traditional models for identification: parents, grandparents, elder siblings, and closer kin. Most of these kinsmen display[ed] behavior and attitudes” for learning and interacting with one another.67 Children often learned much of their skills through observing members of their immediate family. They were not expected to follow strict rules and
“were not dependent upon others.”68 Once children entered residential school much of what they had experienced went against what was expected or tolerated at school. Many had to adjust to being away from home while also conforming to school rules.
Children were separated according to age and sex - interaction between siblings became less frequent and superficial over time. Children no longer had the freedom to explore their surroundings as everything to eating, sleeping, and brushing their teeth was regimented.69
“Behavioral patterns and values” acquired during the pre-school age were often disrupted within one year of attending school.70 Several years at school meant children were forced to deal with issues of conflict - conflict with their identity. The policy of integration at the provincial level sought to include culturally relevant material, but this did not occur in isolated communities like Fort Albany and Mistassini.
Armitage argues that change came in the sixth stage, which he classifies as “self- government.”71 First Nations began campaigning in the late 1960s and 1970s to govern themselves. It was not until 1983, that First Nations were recognized as “distinct” peoples in
Canada. This recognition still did not give First Nations the “autonomy” they desired. We were
67 Sindell, “Discontinuities in the Enculturation of Mistassini Cree Children,” 85-86. 68 Ibid., 86. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 92. 71 Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation, 80. Examples of “self- government” include reaffirming Treaty and Aboriginal rights through the formation of the National Indian Brotherhood in 1968, which later became the Assembly of First Nations in 1982, an organization that advocated and continues to advocate for Aboriginal Rights in Canada. See The Assembly of First Nations, The Story, http://64.26.129.156/article.asp?id=59 (accessed 29 April 2014); See also The Assembly of First Nations, Pursuing First Nation Self- Determination: Realizing Our Rights and Responsibilities, http://www.afn.ca/uploads/files/aga/pursuing_self-determination_aga_2011_eng[1].pdf (accessed 29 April 2014). 17 only given the responsibility to manage “welfare, education, and child welfare” programs while the Indian Affairs Branch with all its powers continued to oversee all things related to Indians.72
By 1991, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) was established to
“investigate the evolution of the relationship among Aboriginal peoples (Indian, Inuit, and
Métis), the Canadian government, and the Canadian society.”73 The commission initiated by then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was to “advise the government in their findings”74 because
Successive governments have tried – sometimes intentionally, sometimes in ignorance – to absorb Aboriginal people into Canadian society, thus eliminating them as distinct peoples. Policies pursued over the decades have undermined – and almost erased Aboriginal cultures and identities.75
The goal then was to come away with recommendations for ways to restore and recognize
Aboriginal peoples as having a shared history and allowing them to find their place in Canadian society according to their cultures and identities.76 RCAP reveals clearly that the relationship between Canada and its Indigenous population had not been positive. RCAP was instrumental in bringing forth the abuses Indian children suffered at the hands of religious officials and teachers in residential schools.77
Along with abuse, issues of tuberculosis impacted the overall health of Indian children in residential schools due to overcrowding. Healthy children lived alongside infected peers and recovery was often slow and, in some cases, children died as a result of their illness.78 RCAP also points out that many of the schools were unfit for use due to structural issues, lack of care, cleanliness and poor sanitation.79 Indian Affairs Chief medical officer P.H. Bryce believed the
72 Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation, 81. 73 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Looking Forward, Looking Back. 74 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Getting Started, www.aandnc- aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100014597/110010001437#chp1 (accessed 10 May 2013). 75 Ibid. See also Aboriginal Healing Foundation, A Healing Journey: Reclaiming Wellness, 9. 76 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Getting Started. 77 Ibid. 78 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Looking Back, Looking Forward. See Jody Porter, “Aboriginal nutritional experiments had Ottawa's approval,” CBC News, July 30, 2013, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/aboriginal-nutritional-experiments-had-ottawa-s- approval-1.1404390 (accessed 01 May 2014) for experiments conducted on Indian children in residential schools in Canada during the 1940s and 1950s. 79 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Looking Back, Looking Forward. 18 government was guilty of “‘criminal disregard’ for the ‘welfare of the Indian wards.’”80 Despite these facts, little had improved when day schools were introduced.
Hawthorn, Sindell and RCAP do not mention genocide, but the way in which religious orders operated residential schools was considered a crime and was punishable by international law under the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide, adopted on December 9, 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly.81
According to the United Nations, under Article II, genocide is the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:”82
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.83
Section (e) applies to the removal of children from their families and placing them in residential schools and section (b) applies to causing mental as well as, social and cultural harm to children as a result of removal. Sections (a), (b), and (c) apply to abuse and neglect and section (d) applies during the 1950s and 1960s as indicated by controversial activist Kevin
Annett in his work titled Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust.84 Why no one sought to rectify any of these issues despite the many reports issued by Indian Agents and medical and administrative officials is shocking.
Like Hawthorn’s report, RCAP concludes that the achievement levels of most graduates in residential schools did not meet provincial standards, nor did the students have the required
80 Ibid. 81 United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html (accessed 06 June 2013). 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Kevin D. Annett, Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust: The Untold Story of the genocide of Aboriginal people’s by church and state in Canada (Vancouver: The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada, 2001), 43-48. http://canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org/genocide.pdf (accessed 10 June 2013). Reports from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) also discuss these atrocities. 19 skills to work off of a reserve. Poor achievement levels date as far back as R.F. Davey’s 1945 report. As the Director of Educational Services on Indian education, Davey inspected 21 schools with a student population of “9,149 residential school students, … [and found only]
‘slightly over 100 students enrolled in grades above grade VIII … [and] there was no record of any students beyond the grade IX level.’”85 Education levels increased when residential schools transitioned to day schools. “By 1959, the number of children in grades 9 to 13 in residential and day schools had increased from none in 1945 to 2,144, and in the next decade, it rose even more rapidly to 6,834” and “the rate of closures in the next decade bore witness to that; by 1979, the number of schools had fallen from 52 with 7,704 students to 12 with 1,899.” 86
Clearly there were long-standing issues with residential schools and as a result, integration was believed to be the answer in resolving these issues. Hawthorn’s report,
Sindell’s work and RCAP were instrumental in shedding light on the gaps in education, as well as how residential schools disrupted the enculturation of Indian children. While Hawthorn believes Indians were distinct people he also believes that, if they were to survive, integration was best. RCAP re-affirms the distinct identities and cultures of Aboriginal peoples and many of their recommendations were based on healing and reconciling the historical relationship in
Canada.
85 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Looking Back, Looking Forward. 86 Hawthorn, A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada, Volume I, 94, 131-132. 20 CHAPTER FOUR
Recovering from Residential Schools
Prior to RCAP, some residential school survivors made steps towards healing and sought compensation on their own. Programs such as Alcoholic Anonymous groups, National
Native Alcohol and Drug Abuse (NNDAP), and support services for family violence were available to those who wished to use them.87 Survivors also filed civil and criminal lawsuits against the Canadian government and churches.88 While both processes could be viewed as positive moves towards reclaiming one’s identity and culture, they proved to be lengthy and, in some cases, negative in that they did not provide immediate or desired results.89
Residential schools according to Annett were a “purposeful act” of genocide, which forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families with the intent of extinguishing their spiritual and cultural beliefs “under the guise of education.”90 Efforts by Annett to have the
Canadian government and church officials charged for crimes of genocide have not been possible but survivor lawsuits and Annett’s activism forced the Canadian government on a national and international level to re-examine and reconcile its 150-year role in tearing apart families, disrupting cultural transmission, and threatening Indigenous languages.91
RCAP published a “five-volume, 4,000-page report [that] covered a vast range of issues; its 440 recommendations called for sweeping changes to the relationship between
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people and governments in Canada.”92 This achievement would
87 Aboriginal Healing Foundation, A Healing Journey: Reclaiming Wellness, 55. 88 The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement’s Common Experience Payment and Healing: A Qualitative Study Exploring Impacts on Recipients (Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2010), 5; Aboriginal Healing Foundation, A Healing Journey: Reclaiming Wellness, 12. 89Ibid. 90 Annett, Hidden From History, 12. 91 Aboriginal Healing Foundation, The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement’s Common Experience Payment and Healing, 1; The Parliament of Canada, “The Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples,” www.parl.gc.ca/content/lop/researchpublications/prb9924-e.htm (accessed 08 June 2013). 92 The Parliament of Canada. 21 set the stage for a series of moves towards “reconciling” and “renewing” the relationship among
Aboriginal, Government and non-Aboriginal peoples where previous governments had not.
On January 7, 1998, two years after its publication, the move to reconciliation and renewal under Gathering Strength – Canada’s Aboriginal Action Plan was unveiled by then-
Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, the Honourable Jane Stewart.93 A one- time grant of $350 million was provided for “community-based healing of ‘the legacy of physical and sexual abuse at residential schools’” and their intergenerational impacts.94 In doing so, three things occurred. First, in 1998, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF) was developed to oversee, manage and distribute monies for healing at the community level.95 Second, the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established. This commission was responsible for providing a place for survivors to share their stories and to educate both
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians about the history of residential schools through social media.96 Third, in 2001 the Legacy of Hope (LHF), a charitable foundation, was established by
AHF, aware that once its mandate was fulfilled, the support needed for healing would not be sufficient.97 The need to continue to “educate, raise awareness and understanding the legacy of residential schools” was believed to be important in the on-going process of healing and meeting the needs of survivors, as well as the rest of Canada.98
In March 2005, “the federal government made an additional commitment of $40 million to enable the AHF to support healing projects for an additional two years and to continue promoting public awareness in understanding healing issues.”99 This was made possible by
AHF’s three-year research strategy that had been initiated in 2000 and ended in 2003 to measure success of their programs whereby an evaluation component was included to provide
93 Aboriginal Healing Foundation, A Healing Journey: Reclaiming Wellness, 12. 94 Ibid., 1. 95 Ibid., 1-2. 96 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). www.trc.ca. 97 The Legacy of Hope Foundation, www.legacyofhope.ca/about-us-About Us/Legacy of Hope Foundation (accessed 18 June 2013). 98 Ibid. 99 Aboriginal Healing Foundation, A Healing Journey: Reclaiming Wellness, 1. 22 participant feedback.100 In 2008, the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper made a
“Statement of Apology”101 to former residential school students for the purpose of “healing and reconciliation” and that Canada recognizes that it was “wrong to forcibly remove children from their homes … [and] to separate children from rich and vibrant cultures” and apologize for their failure in protecting them.102 In 2010, the AHF reported in The Indian Residential Schools
Settlement Agreement’s Common Experience Payment and Healing: A Qualitative Study
Exploring Impacts on Recipients “that the course of resolving the Legacy in an individual may take up to 30 years.”103
The movement towards reconciliation and renewal made possible by RCAP and
Gathering Strength – Canada’s Aboriginal Action Plan provided religious orders with the opportunity to issue their own apologies, specifically those who had partnered with the
Canadian government to operate residential schools.104 The United Church of Canada was the first to apologize in 1986; the Oblates followed in 1991, the Anglicans in 1993, the Presbyterian
Church of Canada in 1994, and the United Church of Canada in 1998.105 Pope Benedict XVI apologized for the Roman Catholic Church in 2009.106 Most apologies acknowledge the wrong they committed in taking children away and stripping them of their identities, cultures and
100 Ibid., 56-57, 124. 101 Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, “Statement of Apology – to former students of Indian Residential Schools,” www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng11100100015649 (accessed 18 June 2013). 102 Ibid. 103 Aboriginal Healing Foundation, The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement’s Common Experience Payment and Healing, 3-4. 104 Aboriginal Healing Foundation, A Healing Journey: Reclaiming Wellness, 11. 105 Ibid. 106 Stephanie Jenzer, “Pope expresses ‘sorrow’ for abuse at residential schools,” CBC News, April 29, 2009, http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/pope-expresses-sorrow-for-abuse-at-residential- schools-1.778019 (accessed 29 April 2014); See also the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), RCMP apology, 2004, http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/aboriginal-autochtone/apo-reg- eng.htm (accessed 01 May 2014). 23 languages. The Oblates, on the other hand, maintain they were, “naively,” part of Canada’s imperialist and assimilationist policy towards Indians but apologized just the same.107
Together with the programs and apologies, survivors of residential schools were given a place to share their experiences, file for compensation under the Common Experience
Payment program, and participate in holistic healing programs across Canada. The programs were successful in that they combined Aboriginal worldviews and healing methods such as healing or talking circles, ceremony, Elders, traditional medicine, land-based activities, and legacy education which also included Western therapies such as one-on-one counselling and family counselling.108 AHF research concludes that while healing and the length of healing for individuals and communities varied, the success of healing was tied to whether or not “cultural and traditional” methods were used in a program and, if they were, proved “essential to its success.”109 This success was understood as “re-enculturation” in that what was previously denied survivors in residential schools “was seen as not only revitalizing in itself but also a defiant demonstration of practices … about which children were taught to be ashamed.”110 The programs provided by AHF, TRC, and LHF were successful in that they allowed survivors to understand what happened to them, allowed them to heal once they understood and in doing so, allowed them to reconcile with their past.
107 Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, “An Apology on Residential Schools by the Catholic Church,” www.cccb.ca/site/images/stories/pdf/oblate-apology-english.pdf (accessed 22 June 2013). 108 Aboriginal Healing Foundation, A Healing Journey: Reclaiming Wellness, 83-84. Not all residential school survivors filed for compensation, shared their stories, or participated in the healing process. 109 Ibid., 124. 110 Aboriginal Healing Foundation. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement’s Common Experience Payment and Healing, 82. 24 CHAPTER FIVE
Cree Enculturation
During the countless generations before residential schools, Cree enculturation was rooted in family and kinship, as well as relationships to land, animals and “nonhuman helpers.”111 Both the physical and spiritual environments defined Cree life from beginning to end. Life on the land could be harsh and, in some cases, treacherous if one did not adhere to
“shared understandings and values.”112 Cree values and adult roles were taught informally from infancy.113 The Cree life cycle passed through four stages – starting at birth was the awaashish or infancy stage,114 second, the napeyshish or ishkweshish which was the unmarried boy or girl stage,115 followed by the napew and iskwew which was the transition from adolescence to adulthood stage, and ending with the kisheyhow or elder stage.116
The learning in each stage built on previous skills through what anthropologist Richard
Preston calls “traditional apprenticeship to adult standards.”117 The “parent-child relationship was one in which adult behavior was repeatedly and subtly held up as an example for the child to emulate.”118 Children learned by example, often practicing newly-acquired skills until mastered. The socialization of Cree children stemmed from the belief that “social control,” found in traditional values, shaped the individual’s “self-control.”119 This was achieved through specific child-rearing practices of “indulgence, affection and admiration.” The only “external control [was] in the form of physical restraint of swaddling or close watching by an adult
111 John J. Honigmann, “The West Main Cree,” in The Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 6, Subarctic, William C. Sturtevant, ed. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1981), 223. 112 Richard J. Preston, “The Development of Self-Control in the Eastern Cree Life Cycle,” in Childhood and Adolescence in Canada, K. Ishwaran ed. (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979), 83-84. 113 Ibid., 84. 114 Edward S. Rogers and Jean H. Rogers, “The Individual in Mistassini Society from Birth to Death” (from National Museum of Canada Bulletin No. 190, Contributions to anthropology, 1960, Part II), 15. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. 117 Preston, “The Development of Self-Control in the Eastern Cree Life Cycle,” 85. 118 Ibid., 86. 119 Ibid., 89. 25 (including tethering),” which often lasted until the child was old enough to care for him- or herself.120 As Honigmann says, “infants as well as young children receive[d] considerable attention from adults of both sexes” and were “emotionally weane[d] at a about the age of five” for the purpose of preparing them for indendence while knowing that “emotional security is never far, should it be needed.”121 The payukoteyno (family) was a “relatively stable unit.”122
My ancestors, the Attawapiskat Cree, had long-established traditional values, which informed how members of an extended family unit lived and interacted with one another.
Around the time of my mother’s birth, George Kiiokii of Ekwan River and Jacob Atooket of
South River still recalled the pre-residential school days when the payukoteyno or nuclear family was rare; extended families included “both own and adopted children, adoption occurring when a parent died,” as well as grandparents, aunts or uncles with their own children.123 Multi- family groups were the norm. Often “2 to 5…travelled in a body and sometimes as many as 8 to 10 settled” for reasons of fishing, resting, socializing, and in some cases, for trading.124
Honigmann argues that these larger family units represented “fluid bands” which were connected by familial, marital, and territorial bonds.125
There were warm, long-lasting ties among family members and specifically, between siblings of the same sex.126 Relations between parents and children were characterized by
“considerable respect.”127 Children learned from close family the skills and attitudes necessary for survival such as making and using tools, erecting a dwelling, making clothes, finding and
120 Rogers and Rogers, “The Individual in Mistassini Society from Birth to Death,” 84-90. 121 John J. Honigmann, Foodways in a Muskeg Community: An Anthropological Report on the Attawapiskat Indians (Ottawa: Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources, 1961), 66. 122 Ibid., 60. 123 John J. Honigmann, “The Attawapiskat Swampy Cree: An Ethnographic Reconstruction,” Anthropological Papers 5(1) (1956): 58-60. 124 Ibid., 58. 125 Ibid., 58-59. 126 Ibid., 60-61. 127Ibid., 60. 26 cooking food. Children had hand-made toys and played games, and were immersed in storytelling as adults passed much of what they learned on to their own children.128
Nimooshoom and nikookoom, my grandparents Moses and Juliette Sutherland, would have been raised in the traditional, pre-residential school environment which Kiiokii and Atooket describe. Nimooshoom recalls, at the age of eighty, in a letter to his brother Louis, life on the land with their parents. He recalls that they “did not see … [other people] for long periods of time”129 and the payukoteyno relied heavily on its members for their survival. Although he did not attend residential school, he had been exposed to Roman Catholicism and believed he was obligated to conduct himself in accordance with the laws of the Creator.130
Survival in Attawapiskat, in pre-Christian times, also included calling on the assistance of powaganak or dream-helpers. Both boys and girls sought powaganak by spending time in solitude, away from the camp.131 According to Louis Bird, children were carefully watched and taught from an early age to develop the skill of dreaming by communicating and interpreting the actions and words of their dream helpers.132 Bird argues that these skills took time to develop and, when mastered, they could be used for “hunting purposes, to benefit … [one’s] family,
[and] to [survive and] defend … [one’s] life”133 on the land and against adversaries, including mitewak or shamans. Life for Cree people was difficult but satisfying, and intimate knowledge of the physical and spiritual worlds was essential to surviving in the environment in which they lived.
In 1941, when nimooshoom was 30 years old, he met and married nikookoom.134
Setting up house for them meant living close to his or her immediate family. For example, a
128 Ibid., 39-48, 56. 129 Moses Sutherland, letter to brother, translated by John B. Nakogee. February 2004, 5. 130 Ibid., 6. 131 Honigmann, “The Attawapiskat Swampy Cree,” 56, 72-73. 132 Louis Bird, Mitewiwin: Audiotapes and transcripts. Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies, University of Winnipeg, 2002, 4-5, 7, http://www.ourvoices.ca (accessed 28 June 2013); Honigmann, “The Attawapiskat Swampy Cree,” 72-73. 133 Bird, Mitewiwin, 10. 134 Moses Sutherland, “It Is Not Like The Way It Used To Be,” But Life is Changing: Volume One (Timmins: Ojibway & Cree Cultural Centre, 1977), 68. 27 “married daughter’s camp … [was] located twelve or fifiteen feet from her mother’s while in other cases married sons live close to parents. In some cases brothers and sisters … [were] clustered together.”135 Setting up house and having a family was important, but this depended on hunting and the gathering of food at particular times of the year, the “frequency of conception” occurred either in the “late fall and early winter” and births occurred from July to
September.136 Hunting and trapping occurred mostly in the fall and winter while summer was for rest and relaxation.137 Hunting and trapping were key for survival, but nuturing and loving one another were just as important.
The life which my grandparents experienced was transformed in a matter of a few short years after they married. For example, tradtiononal food was augmented with “lard, flour, sugar, tea, and baking powder”138 by bartering fur. In addition, Crees were suddenly able to buy
“ammunition, clothing, tenting, and other supplies as well as food” with government relief monies issued as early as 1942.139 In 1945, “Family Allowance” was another form of relief that was issued annually to those families with children. Families received “goods” not cash and only if they happened to be at the post in the fall when this relief was being issued.140 Other changes included government reorganization and redistribution of traplines where no external control had existed previously, and finally, wages were offered and paid by the Hudson’s Bay
Company (HBC) and /or the mission to those who collected wood and food products.141
Despite these changes, life on the land continued.
Nimooshoom understood that life on the land was demanding and required a kind of education that one could not receive in a white man’s school. In an interview in 1977, nimooshoom said he believed that the white man’s education laws had disrupted the ways of
135 Honigmann, “Foodways in a Muskeg Community,” 56. 136 Ibid., 26-27. 137 Ibid., 74. 138 Ibid., 99-100. 139 Ibid., 101. 140 Ibid., 110. 141 Ibid., 101-140. 28 the Cree.142 He believed that those who had graduated from residential schools could not transition back into the traditional lifestyle. He believed that the “children were being taught a different way of living.”143 He argued further with this powerful metaphor: “They say it is like we were made to put on a coat we cannot take off. They say it is the white man who put this coat on us. There are many things in that coat that will eventually destroy our culture.”144 In other words, nimooshoom argued “we are destroyed by what the white man said would be good for us,” purposely stripped of our knowledge through white man’s education.145
Compulsory attendance at residential schools prevented children from learning their traditional social and cultural ways of life. Around the time of my mother’s birth, Honigmann observes, “northern schools generally follow[ed] a curriculum differing little from the one used elsewhere in Canada and the United States, which is geared to Euro-American goals and heritage.”146 By the time my mother was in her teens, “a centralized governmental bureaucracy
… controlled the formulation of educational policy and goals, the recruitment of the staff and determination of curriculum” in residential schools.147 This was key in breaking down Indian ways of learning. Cree children learned early on that their traditional way of learning was incorrect and consequently they were ashamed. As a result, children adopted the values of the dominant non-Indian society in order to fit in.
Despite their attempts to fit in, the individual cost was huge. Cree students who
“alternated between the hunting-trapping group, fishing camp, and summer settlement, and the white, … centers where they attend[ed]” residential schools were impacted psychologically.148
The situation “created intense conflicts of self-image with feelings of inadequacy and
142 Moses Sutherland, “It Is Not Like The Way It Used To Be,” 71. 143 Ibid. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid. 146 Honigmann, “Modern Subarctic Indians and Métis,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 6, Subarctic, William C. Sturtevant ed. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1981), 715. 147 Peter S. Sindell and Ronald Wintrob, “Cross-Cultural Education in the North and Its Implications for Personal Identity: The Canadian Case” (paper presented at the Conference on Cross-Cultural Education in the North, Montreal, 1969), 45. 148 Ibid., 46. 29 hopelessness.”149 Cree Indian children were forced by residential schools to “choose between two contrasting sets of values, role expectations, and models for identification,” altering their lives forever.150
Being plucked from their environment at an early age would have been shocking and traumatizing. Children returning home after one or more years at residential school could not easily continue to develop traditional Cree skills, as countless generations had done since time immemorial, as their skills from early childhood were often forgotten or fragmented. The accounts of residential school survivors from St. Philip’s in Fort George, Quebec, St. Anne’s in
Fort Albany, Ontario and Horden Hall in Moose Factory, Ontario provide first-hand evidence of the trauma experienced years ago by the elders of today.
149 Sindell and Wintrob, 45. 150 Ibid., 49. 30 CHAPTER SIX
Cree Residential School Survivor Accounts
It seems that all survivors recall their first day in residential school. They remember being in awe of the size of the school, the other children who were in attendance, the clothing they wore, the sleeping quarters, the cubbies in which they could place their newly-acquired belongings and the number they were assigned upon being admitted. Similarly, they also remember being stripped of their clothes, having their hair cut short and then doused with kerosene as treatment for lice. While survivors share similar memories of their first day, they also share intense memories of loss, sadness, isolation, as well as emotional, physical and sometimes sexual abuse (the latter seeming more prevalent in Roman Catholic schools).
These children did not know what to expect at residential school, an often lengthy period of “involuntary institutionalization.”151 Nothing prepared them for this period in their life and nothing at school, it seems, prepared them for life afterwards. Survivors remembered being held against their will during their formative years – treated like criminals and being punished for crimes not of their making.152 Jane Willis, Simeon Nakoochee, Mary Fortier and unnamed survivors from Horden Hall provide first-hand Cree survivor accounts that span a forty-year period from the 1930s to the 1970s.
Jane Willis attended St. Philip’s Indian and Eskimo Residential School, an Anglican operation, in Fort George, Quebec for eight years.153 She was born in 1940 and was raised as
Geniesh, a nickname given to her as a child by her grandparents who had raised her from the age of three until entering school at the age of seven.154 Geniesh recalls quite clearly wanting to go to school; it was only after being admitted that she realized that her life would never to be
151 Lisa Schuurman, “‘Fenced In’: Horden Hall Residential School At Moose Factory” (master’s thesis, McMaster University, 1994, 35; Jane Willis, Geniesh: An Indian Girlhood (Toronto: New Press, 1973), 121. 152 Schuurman, “‘Fenced In,’” 46-48. 153 Willis, Geniesh, 27, 42. 154 Ibid., 1, 27, 46-47. 31 the same.155 Oftentimes, children did not know that they were being admitted indefinitely; they left school as graduates, aged out at 16, died as a result of sickness, or ran away to escape the abuse they suffered at school. Geniesh did not expect to be separated from her grandparents for eight years; this prolonged separation proved to be a devastating blow to her sense of self- worth and identity.
Geniesh experienced many more blows in the days and years that followed her initial institutionalization; most were from trying to adhere to strict rules - rules that included not being able to come and go as she once pleased, not being able to mingle with the opposite sex, not being able to speak her own language and finally, the relentless admonitions to pray regularly.
Since Indians were viewed as inferior, Christianizing them was believed to offer salvation from their “heathen ways.”156 Geniesh recalls being told to pray, and pray hard, on a daily basis. She was told to pray for the “sins of … [her] forefathers,” although there was never any guarantee that they actually would be saved.157 As a result, Geniesh never knew how much praying would suffice and, over time, she became somewhat ashamed of her parents and grandparents.
To disobey any of these rules in residential school meant punishment. Like Geniesh,
Simeon Nakoochee entered residential school at the age of seven. He attended St. Anne’s, a
Roman Catholic institution, for 10 years from the 1950s and 1960s. Simeon recalled quite clearly that if rules were broken, punishment was guaranteed to follow. Simeon remembered that punishment – such as being strapped, slapped, or punched to the lower and upper parts of the body – was the norm, even for minor infractions.158 Disciplining would inevitably result from losing your place in line, moving too slowly in line, rushing ahead of the line, or simply forgetting your assigned number. 159 Consequences for running away included the strap and, in
155 Schuurman, “‘Fenced-In,’” 26. 156 Willis, Geniesh, 45-63. 157 Ibid., 45. 158 Simeon Nakoochee, “Interview With Residential School Survivor,” interview by Roberta Nakochee, 2010, http:www.YouTube.com/watch?v=PSR1ulyq2rU (accessed 28 June 2013). 159 Ibid.; Schuurman,“‘Fenced-In,’” 83-91 for types and severity of punishment children experienced at Horden Hall. 32 most cases, isolation from peers for days at a time.160 Simeon also recalls the use of an electric chair that supervisors used on the children for their own amusement. He recalls being told to sit in this chair and being given two or three shocks in front of his peers.161 Simeon remembers clearly the shocks he received and the embarrassment that went along with being used as an example. He recalls not wanting to sit in the chair, but doing as he was asked to avoid further punishment. Simeon does not elaborate further on this chair, nor does he mention the chair being used as punishment – yet the chair was at the school.
Mary Fortier also attended St. Anne’s, for two years in the mid-to-late 1960s. Mary started residential school at the age of nine because of circumstances beyond her control. She recalls having been raised in a loving environment surrounded by members of her immediate and extended family. Her attendance at St. Anne’s only came about because her father died unexpectedly. As the main supporter of the family, Mary’s mother could not support them and was forced to place her children in residential school.162 Mary’s mother believed that placing her children in residential school would be best for them and they would receive all the care that she could not provide. Mary recalls going from a loving family to a cold and military-like environment.
Mary remembers a military-like environment where children were “[literally] trained to listen to and go by sound,” with no exchange of words.163 Children learned to show very little emotion during the day but their nighttime was filled with sadness and tears. Mary was old enough to understand that this was not a normal Cree upbringing. And when she did not fall into routine or learn the rules quickly enough, she too was punished. “Failure to comply
160 Nakoochee, “Interview With Residential School Survivor.” 161 Ibid. See Karina Roman, “St. Anne's Residential School: One survivor's story,” CBC News, December 18, 2013, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/st-anne-s-residential-school-one-survivor- s-story-1.2467924 (accessed 14 February 2014) for residential school survivor Edmund Metatawabin’s recollection of receiving electric shocks while at St. Anne’s. 162 Mary Fortier, Behind Closed Doors: A Survivor’s Story of the Boarding School Syndrome (Belleville: Epic Press, 2002), 25-29, 56. 163 Ibid., 56. 33 resulted in severe corporal punishment behind closed doors.”164 Mary received severe physical punishment while at school and often went to bed “ach[ing] from head to toe.”165 During the day she also felt “paranoid, sick and nervous” due to the sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of Father Andrew.166 Mary firmly believed that the beatings and sexual abuse she endured at St. Anne’s contributed to her emotional and physical disability later in life.
If one was not punished physically, one was punished psychologically. Like Simeon,
Mary recalls being taunted and called names. For Simeon, being called “dirty” in front of his peers by one of the supervisor’s was one thing, but to be told that he came from one of the
“dirtiest families” in the local village proved embarrassing and socially stigmatizing.167 Being punished physically and tormented psychologically was not uncommon; in fact this occurred daily and left many of the children with a “diminished self-image,”168 shamed of their origins, and emotionally crippled.169 Mary Fortier sums of the residential school experience in the following statement:
That first night in bed, I realized my individuality had been taken from me. My name was replaced with a number. My personal clothing was replaced with a uniform. My siblings were exchanged for a group of strange girls. My home was replaced by this strict setting. A cold nun replaced my mother’s loving warmth. I had lost my freedom to a controlled environment.170
Like Mary, many children were scarred from their residential school experience and this proved even more difficult when they returned home in the summer months and tried to “re-establish
… bonds with their families.”171 For some, this was impossible. As one survivor from Horden
Hall pointed out: “[It was] like …we had no feelings … [I have] no feelings for my family, no
164 Ibid., 67. See Argyro Logotheti, “Six Moose Factory Life Histories: The Negotiation of Self and Maintenance of Culture” (master’s thesis, McMaster University, 1991) for positive memories of Cree residential school survivors Allan Jolly and Redfern Louttit. 165 Fortier, Behind Closed Doors, 75-79. 166 Ibid., 80-81. 167 Nakoochee, “Interview With Residential School Survivor.” 168 Schuurman, “‘Fenced In,’” 21. 169 Ibid., 99. 170 Fortier, Behind Closed Doors, 56. 171 Ibid., 4. 34 feelings for my culture, no feelings for my brothers.”172 Despite being unable to reconnect with family and participate fully in the traditional lifestyle of their parents, survivors also recalled feeling a sense of relief or freedom when they were away from the school.
Most survivors recall being the happiest when they were away from school. For
Geniesh, being at home meant she was “free to roam, free to think, free to love, laugh, cry and be happy”173 because in school for the longest time, she felt devoid of feelings “subhuman and not very intelligent.”174 While survivors from Horden Hall revealed not being able to perform traditional Cree tasks at the same level of competence of their parents, they also recalled quite clearly the “nurturing and caring” environment in which they lived during the summer months.175
For Mary, this was also true. She remembers quite clearly that summer holidays were meant for “forget[ting] the experiences … [that she and her peers] endured”176 at school; it was a time to be free.
While the first-hand residential school accounts of Geniesh, Simeon, Mary and anonymous Horden Hall survivors show that their formative years were characterized with extreme loneliness, confusion and fear, they also remember being home, on the land and making an effort to support their family during the summer months and after graduating from school. This was the case with my mother Agnes, as well. Her tipaachimowina of life outside residential school indicate that this was when she was happiest. She made every effort to learn the traditional skills of her culture by working alongside her father, Moses.
172 Ibid., 48. 173 Jane Willis, Geniesh, 75-76. 174 Ibid., 103. 175 Schuurman, “‘Fenced In,’” 29-30, 32. 176 Fortier, Behind Closed Doors, 83. 35 CHAPTER SEVEN
Tipaachimowina (Stories) as Methodology
Ininiwuk have always told tipaachimowina and aatanokaana (legends) “to teach the upcoming generation” Cree values and the necessary knowledge for survival.177 Louis Bird describes tipaachimowina as the lived experiences of Ininiwuk and these experiences can be understood as oral history, while aatanokaana can be understood as oral tradition.178 Together these sources serve as the foundation of Ininiw history. Jan Vansina, a non-indigenous historian, describes oral tradition and oral history as a set of “messages.” He categorizes messages in two ways: “news” and “the interpretation of the experience.”179 News is created through eyewitness accounts, hearsay, visions, dreams, and hallucinations, while Interpretation is created in reminiscence, commentaries, and verbal art.180 These are examples of how messages are transmitted. Vansina categorizes “news” as oral traditions and “the interpretation of experience” as oral history. While Vansina’s definition of oral tradition and oral history may be similar to Bird’s definition there is a difference in how these sources are acknowledged and used to inform individuals, communities and nations of what has passed, what is now and what is to come.
Western and Ininiw notions of oral history and oral tradition differ according to how this information is viewed and used as a source. Vansina believes oral history and oral tradition are sources but he argues that oral “tradition … [may be] true, but not factual”181 and cannot be used as a stand-alone source; since oral histories and oral traditions are repeated over a long
177 Louis Bird, Telling Our Stories: Omushkego Legends & Histories from Hudson Bay (Canada: Broadview Press, 2005), 60. 178 Ibid. This is not limited to the Cree, but is widespread. See, for example, Julie Cruikshank, The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory (UBC Press: University of Nebraska, 2000) for another example of how Indigenous knowledge systems are embedded and shared through the act of storytelling. 179 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition As History (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 3-12. 180 Ibid. 181 Ibid., 129. 36 period of time, the original intent of the message will have been altered.182 Although Vansina acknowledges oral history and oral tradition as sources and believes that they can support the
“historical reconstruction” of the past, for him they are still not as reliable as written sources.183
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, an indigenous scholar argues that Western history favours a system that is based on chronology. “History is regarded as being about developments over time. It charts the progress of human endeavour through time” and creates “one coherent narrative.184 This is not how Ininiwuk treat oral history and oral tradition. Tipaachimowina and aatanokaana are recognized and accepted as valid sources of knowledge. Ininiwuk consider both oral histories and oral traditions as sources that are open to interpretation. These sources inform the past, present and future aspects of Ininiwuk ways of being and understanding.
Similarly, Margaret Kovach, an Indigenous scholar believes “elements [of stories] are fluid and they interact with each other in a weblike formation. Each value represents a strand in a web that is integrated and interdependent with other strands.”185 Kovach argues further that stories are “timeless” and pertain to every aspect of Indigenous lives.186 The way Indigenous peoples acquire and share stories of the past or present is structured in “observing the relationships within the natural world.”187 These relationships include both the physical and spiritual worlds. Interactions among human beings, animals, and plants are the physical aspect while the spiritual aspect comes in the form of “dreams, fasts, sweats, and vision quests” which are performed during sacred ceremonies.188 Ininiwuk believe that knowledge comes from everywhere and knowledge is not limited by time and space.
182 Ibid., 9-10, 160. 183 Ibid., 199. 184 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples Second Edition (New York: Zed Books, 2012), 31-32. 185 Ibid., 47. 186 Ibid., 66. 187 Margaret Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 34. See Shawn Wilson’s Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2008) for more information on Indigenous research methods. 188 Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies, 65-66. 37 Tipaachimowina and aatanokaana involve the method of listening and sharing, a tradition that dates back thousands of years. Tipaachimowina include both oral stories and quotation stories. Oral stories are about actual events that occurred in the narrator’s past, while quotation stories are the lived experiences of ancestors.189 Both oral and quotation stories served as tools to “to educate the young people,” and “to introduce the life experience [of elders] to them, before they … [themselves] experience” 190 life on the land. Young people were expected to take what they learned and apply it to their own lives in order to find their place in the world.
Tipaachimowina are passed down from grandparent to grandchild, mother or father to child, aunt or uncle to niece or nephew or from sibling to sibling and so forth. Jackie Hookimaw-
Witt, like me, a member of the Attawapiskat First Nation describes tipaachimowina as an exchange between the “listener as the seeker of wisdom, and the … [giver] as the source of the wisdom.”191 For Hookimaw-Witt, “the technique of narrative build[s] our knowledge” of our past, of who we were, who we are today, and who we will be in the future.192 Kovach states
“narratives … [serve as] the primary means for passsing knowledge with tribal traditions, for …
[they] suit the fluidity and interpretative nature of ancestral ways of knowing.”193 Oral stories
“promote[s] social cohesion … [that] entertain[s] and foster[s] good feeling” 194 among members of a given indigenous society. Similarly, Smith believes “the story and the story teller both serve to connect the past and the present with the future, one generation with the other, the land with
189 Ibid., 36. 190 Ibid., 36 & 55. 191 Jackie Hookimaw-Witt, “The Politics of Maintaining Aboriginal Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Roles of Sacred Responsibility to the Land” (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2006), 100. 192 Ibid., 19. 193 Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies, 94-95. 194 Ibid. See Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, page 147 & 149 for how “remembering” and “connecting” through the act of storytelling can support “healing” on an individual level, as well as familial, and communal healing. 38 the people and the people with the story.”195 These stories are crucial in tying generations together.
While sharing stories in the oral tradition is important, Hookimaw-Witt believes that the way Ininiw elders speak and share knowledge is unique; it is based in Ininiimowin. Meaning found in stories is the result of the giver sharing, and the listener listening.196 The listener is believed to come away with an understanding of meaning that is unique to that listener.197
There is an important message or a lesson to be learned within each story, and certain parts may be reiterated in different sections of the story in order to get a point across, or to ensure that a listener is following the story.198 By acknowledging, understanding, and respecting how tipaachimowina are produced and shared, the researcher or listener is better equipped to engage, communicate, and elicit the stories of elders. The listener promises to listen while the giver shares his or her knowledge, knowing the information will be used in a good and respectful way for the benefit of others.
Research Ethics
In order for my mother to participate in my research, I had to seek research ethics approval through Nipissing University because my research involved a human participant and, specifically, an Aboriginal person. This also meant getting approval from Attawapiskat First
Nation’s Chief and Council because my mother is from Attawapiskat First Nation and the interviews took place there. Chief Theresa Spence approved my research, clearing the way for it to receive approval by Nipissing University’s Office of Aboriginal Initiatives (OAI) and the
Research Ethics Board. I also completed a tutorial on the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical
Conduct for Research Involving Human Participants (TCPS 2: CORE).
I developed a consent form outlining the scope of my project, the risks and potential benefits associated with it. In doing so, I was able to conduct research based on Ininiw ways of
195 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 146. 196 Hookimaw-Witt, “The Politics of Maintaining Aboriginal Feminism,” 19. 197 Ibid. 198 Ibid. 39 seeking and sharing tipaachimowina: honouring, respecting, and maintaining a relationship with my mother throughout the research process. I respected the wishes of my mother’s free and informed consent at all stages of my research. My mother knew that if she wanted, she could remove herself from my research at any point. She had the right to choose whether all material would be destroyed at the time of her withdrawal. It was her choice whether I could keep her interviews for family history reasons once the research was completed.
Key to my research was acknowledging and respecting Ininiw ways of conducting, sharing, and recording knowledge. This meant the full involvement of my mother in all steps of my research project, in the following ways: my mother viewed and approved all transcripts and had input in all the writing stages of my Major Research Paper.
Collecting Tipaachimowina
As an undergraduate student I was not aware of Indigenous approaches to collecting and interpreting data at the university level. My first experience with collecting and interpreting tipaachimowina was in 2006 while pursuing an undergraduate degree in history. I wanted to write a paper about my late grandfather Moses Sutherland, so I asked my kookoom
(grandmother) Juliette if I could interview her through my brother Adrian Sutherland. She was living in Attawapiskat, Ontario at the time and due to lack of funds for my travel home, Adrian interviewed our kookoom for me. I recall quite clearly telling my brother over the telephone exactly how he was to conduct the interview. I also recall telling him to make sure that he asked her all fifiteen questions in the order they appeared on the question sheet that I had sent him weeks before. All questions were in chronological order from the time of her birth to her elderhood. I was interested to know how she met, married and shared a life with my late grandfather, Moses.
The interview itself was 16 minutes and 30 seconds in length. At the time, I thought this was great as my grandmother was not one for being interviewed or recorded. I was fortunate that she agreed to be interviewed and I believe the interview may have been short because my grandmother’s understanding of sharing tipaachimowina was not about setting a time and place 40 to share. My grandmother’s understanding of sharing tipaachimowina was sitting in the miigwam (tipi), sitting in the living room surrounded by family and friends, or sitting at the dinner table sipping tea and eating bannock. It was in this fashion that she would share her life as she remembered it. There was never any of this okay “we need to sit down at this time” and share stories, nor was there any chronological order to her storytelling. She never started with “first of all, this is what happened to me when I was a child,” or “the second thing that happened to me,” ending with a “this was my life in a nutshell from beginning to end” sort of deal. My grandmother shared stories of her life according to what needed to be shared at the time with whoever was listening. Sharing tipaachimowina was purposeful and always had a learning component – each listener coming away with his or her own interpretation.
I think my grandmother’s interview would have been different and most likely longer if I had asked fewer questions or if I had asked my brother beforehand to “reword” them or develop his own questions. In listening to the interview for this research, I was surprised at how
Western ways of conducting research literally interrupted and even halted the way in which tipaachimowina are meant to be shared – as a story, natural and free-flowing. I know my grandmother’s tipaachimowina would have been rich and filled with details of how one lived and conducted oneself on the land, how one expected to be treated and how one was to treat others, and finally, how life was good but hard. The first part of my grandmother’s interview was a series of questions that elicited one-word answers from her. The last question asked of my grandmother was, “Would you like to add anything to this interview?” It was in this question that
I was able to get the answers I was looking for. I believe this had to do with the nature of the question – it was open-ended and proved crucial in getting my grandmother to share on her own terms.
Tipaachimowina as Research
Collecting tipaachimowina is not difficult, so long as it is done in a respectful way. It is how one tries to share it in academia that can be daunting. While I know that tipaachimowina is how Ininiwuk share and pass knowledge from one generation to the next, as a graduate 41 student I have struggled with how best to share my mother’s tipaachimowina. While this alone was a huge task, I also struggled coming to terms with how Indigenous histories are often skipped over and, in some cases, excluded at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels. Having to validate who you are, your language, and your way of understanding the world in which you live can be very tiring and frustrating. I have had to do this all of my life, even as a graduate student. There were times in my own research that I wanted to give up because I questioned my research, questioned the validity of what it was that I was trying to do, and finally, questioned my ability to complete my research. I started the 12-month graduate program at Nipissing University in 2012 and then, due to circumstances beyond my control, I was not able to submit my thesis on the designated date in August 2013. I was personally devastated, felt embarrassed, and took this as a sign of failure.
A very good friend of mine told me not to look at it as a failure because we cannot rush tipaachimowina. She said that “Elders need time to share.” I took this to mean my mother was not finished sharing. I interviewed my mother twice last year, but this did not include our many post-interview communications that took place, right up to my defence. I now understand and appreciate that complex tipaachimowina do not come to us in one day; they sometimes come to us over a couple of days, sometimes over a couple months, or over the course of a lifetime.
The answer to the issue I raised earlier, how best to share my mother’s tipaachimowina, only came to me a week before I had to submit my thesis. At this time I sought my grandfather’s guidance, through prayer and smudging, so that I could write my mother’s chapter, the last chapter that still needed to be written.
Scholarship on Indigenous ways of gathering knowledge, thanks to Bird, Smith, Kovach, and Hookimaw-Witt, is growing and this growing body of knowledge has allowed me to utilize the Ininiw method of seeking, gathering, and sharing knowledge. My mother’s interview was an open-ended interview, not structured in any form or shape. The unstructured nature of the interview allowed my mother to share her recollection of an event or events from her past as she saw fit. In keeping with my role as listener and seeker of tipaachimowina, I understood the 42 importance of not interrupting or correcting my mother during the interview. Interrupting or correcting her would have changed the nature of the interview as well as the nature of the seeker-giver relationship, since interrupting or correcting the elder is considered disrespectful.
As a result, my mother’s interviews were 86 minutes in length but also included post-interview communications that covered many themes. Since my mother was the giver of knowledge, the one giving whatever knowledge of the past she wished to share, my role as the seeker of knowledge was to listen and to listen well.
43 CHAPTER EIGHT
Nikaawii Otipaachimowina (My Mother’s Stories)
I arrived in Attawapiskat on April 7th, 2013 and I visited with my mother. Some of the things we did while we visited included going to the Northern Store, getting bottled drinking water from the water treatment plant, and even playing television bingo for an evening or two.
All the while, we knew that at some point an interview or a series of interviews would take place. I never asked her when we could start; I waited but I was also ready. It was not until April
10th in the late afternoon, that my mother asked me to get the video camera ready. My mother only wanted her voice to be recorded, so out of respect for her wishes, I agreed. I believe she may have been nervous and unsure about how the interview would unfold. This, of course, is natural as I also experienced the same feelings. Four minutes into the interview, my mother and I were able to relax somewhat. The interview was short-lived; the video camera turned off because the battery had died four minutes and 26 seconds into the first interview. I had to interrupt my mother and ask her to stop. Imagine my horror. She asked why and I told her that the battery died. My mother laughed and I joined in. We started again after I plugged the video camera into the wall.
My mother had already introduced herself, so after the video camera was ready to go for a second time, she proceeded to get to the topic at hand, which was to talk about her parents and in particular her father, Moses. She started this interview with an introduction of her father. She switched between Cree and English. The words in brackets are my translation and those in square brackets are my explanatory comments:
Ayhow nii aniimoomow nootahwii (I want to talk about my father), Moses Sutherland, ka kii shinakahsoot (that was his name). Nootahwii ka nah moomow (I will talk about my father) ka kiishiski kay muk (and what I knew of him), maygwatch (while) ish koos nii niw eskwewyan (I was a teenager) kashkwa paychii (after I) paychii oonyan (came out of) untah (the) schoolik (school), the residential school. Ayhow kii kooshkahoo (he was good at) nootahwii (my father) eh apitisit (at working). Ayhow dehkay mistikahknow napaywoot ehkoo maga ahnooshchaket (he was good at wood carving) ayhow maga eh dehminahoot (and hunting) ehkoo maga apah sheesh eh 44 kichuchiigunith dehkay (and playing music). I remember he had a violin. He didn’t play it all the time. I remember he played it once. This is what I knew of my father.199
From this point on my mother’s tipaachimowina included memories from different times of her life. The second interview took place on April 12th and emphasized her life on and off of the land, leaving and returning to Fort Albany, and finally leaving altogether.
Despite my mother’s involuntary institutionalization of 12 years, a transfer of Cree values and traditional knowledge took place from grandfather to my mother. This transfer of knowledge is evident in the stories my mother shared with me. Her stories revealed that love, happiness, admiration, and respect existed between my mother and her father, even though there were long periods of separation. Memories of life at residential school were not mentioned in the initial interviews, however some memories of her life at St. Anne’s were shared during post-interview communications. With my mother’s permission, they have been added towards the end of this section. All tipaachimowina shared by my mother have been categorized into three themes: Hunting, Trapping, and Traditional Crafts; Nootahwii (My
Father): Work, Tools and Equipment; and Nikaawii (My mother): Education and Familial
Obligations. Setting my mother’s tipaachimowina up in this manner is symbolic of how Ininiwuk share stories – they are in the “here and now” and are not constrained to a moment in time.
These experiences have shaped her life as a Cree woman, and continue, to this day.
Hunting, Trapping and Traditional Crafts
My mother indicated her parents had no sons but had eight daughters. My mother had three older sisters (Pauline, Annie, and Eileen) and five younger sisters (Celine, Mary-Rose,
Francis, Jackie, and Miriam). Her older sisters did not return to Fort Albany after they graduated from high school but she recalls that they did come home during the summer months. My mother essentially became the oldest when her older siblings did not return after
199 Agnes Sutherland, interview by Lorraine Sutherland, Attawapiskat, ON, April 2013. All Cree to English translation was by Lorraine Sutherland using Roman orthography to the best of Lorraine Sutherland’s ability. 45 high school, although her sister Celine was close to her in age.200 My mother and her sister
Celine often worked alongside their father, but my mother spent more time with him. My mother recalls she provided support to her father mostly in the summer months, during Christmas break (after St. Anne’s became a day school in 1963), and when she from graduated St.
Anne’s in 1967. Her younger siblings often helped around the house and supported their mother when she was home. My grandmother worked full-time as a cook at the residential school, and later for Bill Anderson (a long-time free trader at Fort Albany).201
Since the time my mother could remember, she was always supporting her father in hunting and trapping in some form or another. Most of the time, she recalls watching her father with fascination because he had so much knowledge and applied all of it in his everyday life.
My mother went with her father on the land to hunt caribou and geese, and to trap beaver and muskrat. In trapping, she did not set the traps but she watched her father, and she was aware of what he was doing and why he was doing it. Although my mother was not setting traps, she helped with packing, carrying, and loading gear, onto their dog sled, or into their boat, or backpacks. Sometimes they walked using snowshoes, but this depended on the distance they would have to travel, and whether or not they stayed over night.202 After each catch, my mother recalls her father preserving the meat:
Kimooshoom (your grandfather) used to preserve nisguk (geese), weyhaew (snow goose), and waives. I remember he used to put lots of coarse salt on the meat. He laid the meat on top of one another and he place the meat in our shed by our house. He built it. I remember there being a big whole in the ground. When it was time to eat the meat you rinsed them first and then you boiled it. “Ooh! I remember the meat was salty [in an excited voice]! I couldn’t eat it [chuckles].203
If he was not preserving meat, he was selling beaver and muskrat pelts at the HBC, but my mother does not recall how much he would get for them.
200 Ibid. 201 Ibid. 202 Agnes Sutherland, interview by Lorraine Sutherland, Attawapiskat, ON, April 2013. 203 Ibid. 46 My grandfather also worked for two weeks at a time as a hunting guide in the fall for Bill
Anderson. My mother recalls supporting her father in this venture but only after she graduated from school St. Anne’s.
I remember that he used to work as a hunting guide at the Anderson Goose Camp. He would take Americans out in the bay and out to Kapiskaw [located halfway between Fort Albany and Attawapiskat]. I went with him there to help him. I did the plucking and all that. I looked after the tent, while he was out hunting with the Americans.204
I asked if any of her siblings had participated; she indicated they had not because the younger ones would have been in school at Fort Albany at the time and her older sisters were down south attending high school. So she was the only one home. She also mentioned that she went out for high school too, but came home after one month. “I came back because I didn’t like going to school down south. I wasn’t comfortable. I was the only one that came back.”205 In a sense, I think she was relieved to come home because she did not mention any regrets. I get the sense that returning home for her meant that she could continue learning the traditional ways of her ancestors under the tutelage of her father.
While my mother did not work closely with my grandmother, she does recall her having extensive knowledge of hunting and trapping. My grandmother could make a canvas-like tipi, fish nets, and traditional clothing and crafts.
I remember kookoom made a tent, like a tipi, out of kwayisk pahkwassiinaykun (good or proper material). That canvas material, but the thin one, not the thick one. She used an old-fashioned sewing machine. The single-hand sewing machine [pointing to her sewing machine beside her]. The Singer sewing machine was what she used. She made a tent enough for four people to fit inside. It was made like a tipi.206
My mother is not sure where her mother learned how to make the tent, but believes that she made her own version of it by copying the pattern from the store-bought tents that could be purchased at that time. My mother recalls that her mother was always busy, always making things, and always preparing for the season to come. If she was not making or preparing her
204 Ibid. My mother explained that the tourists paddled down the Albany River by canoes from Hearst or Kapuskasing to Fort Albany in the summer. 205 Ibid. 206 Ibid. 47 fish nets, she was making traditional clothing. One year she made a rabbit fur coat and another year a full-length caribou coat.
I remember that she made fish nets too. She hung them inside the house too. She would hang the strings inside the house. I remember helping her by holding up the strings but I never learned how to make them. I was too busy with kimooshoom and I also remember there was a rabbit fur coat. I believe my mother made it. My father used to wear it. I was told he wore it out in the bay one time. He happened to be driving along on his ski-doo and almost got shot because someone thought he was a polar bear [chuckles]. He also had a caribou coat and he wore that one too. They were worn over his winter clothes for added warmth.207
The fish nets were used season after season, but the rabbit fur coat was later sold to an
American tourist and a local bought the caribou coat.
My grandparents were known for making things together. For example, they made tikanagana (cradle boards) and waspisiiana (moss bags) for those that wanted them, and they would sell these to the tourists as well. My mother recalls that her father could sew just as well as her mother. My grandmother adorned her crafts with intricate patterns using beads. My mother recalls that they did this right up into their old age.
They were never idle. They always kept themselves busy. They made lots of crafts. They did things together in order to survive, back home and in the city too. They had a lot of opportunities to sell their crafts by meeting other people at places like the annual Odawa Pow Wow in Ottawa. They would go there and display and sell their crafts. Mooshoom and kookoom also made little snowshoes (aashamishak), cradleboards (tikinakanishnuk), and moss bags (waspishiiyanishuk). You know, your grandmother made her crafts in front of the people. To show them…you know. She also demonstrated how to smoke hide at one point. They really knew how to support one another.208
There was no shame in my grandfather sewing mitts or moccasins.209 My grandparents were hard workers and supported one another as well as their children in every way that they could.
Nootahwii (My Father): Work, Tools and Equipment
My mother’s tipaachimowina, so far, indicate that her father was quite skilled and knowledgeable about hunting and trapping, as well as making traditional crafts. When he was not on the land, he worked in the community doing different jobs so that he could support
207 Ibid. 208 Ibid. 209 Juliette Sutherland, interview by Adrian Sutherland, Attawapiskat, ON, February 2006. My grandmother recalled that her husband, Moses could sew just as well as herself. 48 himself and his family. My mother recalls that he was a very hard worker and was never short of work. He worked all the time. His many jobs included working as a hunting guide for the
Anderson Goose Camp, logging and carpentry for the Roman Catholic mission and hospital, as well as doing a bit of maintenance work for the residential school.210 During the time that he worked as a logger-carpenter for the mission, he was able to build his family home. At one point, he also worked at the Mid-Canada Line radar base at Fort Albany. If he was not working, he was making things like soap and bleach for the home, tools such as snow goggles, or carving miniature geese, beavers, and muskrats to sell to the tourists. He also made camping stoves. Maintaining equipment such as his ski-doo, boat engine, and 12-gauge shotgun was important, because without them he would not have been able to go out onto the land or work in the community.
My mother describes what her father’s job as a logger and carpenter for the mission and hospital was like:
In the winter months, he and other people would cut and haul wood for the school and hospital using makeshift tractor trains. They went into the bush by the winter road. I also remember using a chainsaw to help him gather wood and using the tractor train to bring the logs in. The logs were for heating the hospital and the school. In the summer months, he worked as a carpenter for the missionaries. I don’t know how long he worked or how many years he worked at the mission. He may have even helped build the hospital but I know he did maintenance work at the school.211
There was no mention of whether or not my grandfather was paid in cash, but my mother recalls that he received lumber in exchange for his services. As for working at the radar base, my mother was not sure how long he worked there or how he was paid. Working for the mission seemed to be a steadier job, and it was at this time that he was able to build his first family home.
My father built a house. He had another person help him. Together they built an ordinary house like this size oomah (this one); a regular house like the one we are in. He never got a house from Indian Affairs or any help from them. He built his own house with the lumber he got from the mission. He traded things with them. He worked for them and they paid him in lumber. Celine and I chipped in a little bit too in the summer by helping him with the shingles. He showed us how to put them on the roof.
210 Ibid. 211 Ibid. 49 It was fun. We didn’t do it all the time. It was only one day [aughs]! Just to see how it was done. When we were on the roof we could see everything! I don’t know how long it took him to finish the house. I think it took him a while but it was just the right size.212
His superior abilities in carpentry are evident, along with how much effort and thought he put into building the house. My mother explains:
He built the house from the bottom up. They started with the outside first. There were only three rooms: one big room for me and my sisters, a bedroom for them, a kitchen and a big long porch at the front of the house. That’s how he built it. It sat on the ground. There was no foundation. It was a good house. It was warm. He really was a good carpenter.213
In listening to my mother speak about her father, it is clear that she admired and respected him.
He could do anything. She was witness to many of his abilities and even had a hand in some of his projects.
Building a house was one of my grandfather’s many accomplishments along with making a big boat that was used out in the bay.214 He also made camping stoves from scratch.
He would make wiina mana pookoo ooshishstapiina (he alone would make) anahii (those) ayhowah (like) stoves for camping. Little stoves you know just for the camp. He’d buy sheets of metal; the silver ones, the ones you could buy from the HBC store. I don’t know if he sold them though. I don’t remember because mona pishishick kanom-mahtii (I didn’t always watch him) or I wasn’t home longer than the summer months. 215
The summer months proved to be a good time to make things from scratch, but this was not always the case because he made things in other seasons as well. Summer would have been the only time my mother would have witnessed most things being made by her father because she was in school; for example, she recalls seeing her father carve miniature animals such as geese, beavers, and muskrat and snow goggles out of cedar.
Mina mahga mawtch ki shii dahshiinay ki awmow eh tootukth (And I remember him always doing) wood carvings. He did this at home in a little shed. He made niska (goose) from cedar. He also made beaver, muskrat, and otter. I think mostly otter. He learned how to do wood carvings while he was in the hospital in Moose Factory from another patient who was Inuit. He was a patient there for about a year. He injured his leg from the tractor train. I think it was at the radar base north of Attawapiskat. He
212 Ibid. 213 Ibid. 214 Juliette Sutherland, interview, February 2006. My grandmother explained that her husband, Moses was very good with his hands. 215 Agnes Sutherland, interview by Lorraine Sutherland, Attawapiskat, ON, April 2013. 50 would sell these carvings to American tourists. As for his snow goggles, I tried them once but I never saw them again after that.216
There never seemed to be a shortage of work or things that my grandfather could make, but the reason for doing them was for his family. Making homemade soap and bleach could be seen as a way of supporting the home. While my grandfather may have bought basic ingredients like lye crystals from the HBC, to make soap, he also used ashes from the fire to make bleach. According to my mother, the bleach worked so well that all she “had to do was scrub … [her] socks in the mixture and the socks …. [turned] white.”217 Clearly, it was not always necessary to purchase items from the HBC. My grandfather knew this, and so, he utilized whatever knowledge he received growing up and combined it with modern food and technology. In making snowshoes, my mother recalls her father soaking caribou hide in water mixed with oatmeal. She believed this helped loosen the hide for cutting it into strings to string the snowshoes.218 While my mother may have witnessed her father making snowshoes, she never learned to make them herself; however, she recalls the steps involved.
My mother was quick to learn and enjoyed being out on the land and in the community with her father. She supported her father in every way possible, and the only thing she remembers not wanting to do was fill shotgun shells with gunpowder. My mother remembers when her father purchased the gunpowder-filling machine, and also the first time he used it.
She thought for sure there would be an explosion because after he filled each shell, he would have to hit the metal cap into place and this always scared her.219 In the long run, however, it was economical.
My grandfather believed it was better to do jobs himself, and so purchasing a gunpowder machine was a logical thing to do. Purchasing anything was an investment. My grandfather regarded his gun, ski-doo, boat engine, and chainsaw as investments, and when he invested in something he made sure it lasted. He was meticulous about maintaining his
216 Ibid. 217 Ibid. 218 Ibid. 219 Ibid. 51 equipment and keeping his gun clean. He taught my mother how to use and fix minor things on the ski-doo, boat motor, and chainsaw. My mother recalls being taught how to fix a ski-doo track:
I never sighed when he told me to do things, even when fixing the ski-doo. This could be hard. I remember the hardest part was trying to put bolts underneath where the track was. I remember him saying, “Hold, try to hold the bolts.” You know he’d tell me to put a stick underneath or between the skid-doo and the track to hold it up. I remember that being the hardest part - fixing the ski-doo. I never complained. I just did it.220
My mother recalls fixing the ski-doo as being one of the hardest things she had to do. She knew that she would have an idea of what to look for and possibly fix the ski-doo if it ever broke down. My mother also remembers learning how to operate the boat and the chainsaw.
In the winter, he taught me how to use the chainsaw, how to use the ski-doo and in the summer he taught me how to use the boat. We used the boat to go to the Goose Camp in the fall. I had to learn to do these things. I was the only one who took an interest and really listened!
With everything that my grandfather did in his life, my mother was a witness. She learned early on the importance of having a strong work ethic, to do her best, no matter how hard something was, and that family was the most important thing.
Nikawii (My Mother): Education and Familial Obligations
My mother does not share many memories of her life at St. Anne’s, but she did recall being separated from her sisters. She also remembered that boys and girls were kept separate from one another. The boys and girls slept, ate, and played in different rooms at all times.
Priests and nuns also ate separately from the children, as well as from one another.221 My mother also recalls witnessing two boys at different times receiving electric shocks at school.
She does not indicate if she herself was a recipient of the shocks, or whether or not she experienced other forms of abuse.222
My mother recalls the moment she graduated from St. Anne’s. This was one of the happiest days of her life. She remembers thinking she would never have to return and that she
220 Ibid. 221 Agnes Sutherland, post-interview communication, Timmins, ON, May 2013. 222 Ibid. 52 now could literally come and go as she pleased. She could go swimming, stay out late, and eat whatever food she wanted. High school was a brief experience. My mother was sent to North
Bay, Ontario and she attended Algonquin High School long before it was a French language school. Since her parents were back at home, she was placed in a boarding home. My mother recalls feeling out of place and she never could feel comfortable both in the Italian boarding home, and at school. She only lasted one month.223
When my mother left Fort Albany for the first time to attend high school, she had no idea that other types of native people existed. She explains: “When I came out from the residential school I didn’t know there were other Indians too. I thought we were the only ones on the reserve. The only Cree people [laughs]!”224 I was surprised at her statement, and I asked her if the nuns or priests ever talked about other First nations. She answered with this:
No, I thought we were the only Indians. I knew there were students coming into the school and they were mostly from the James Bay Coast. I think some may have even come in from Ogoki, Geraldton, and Armstrong, but I only knew that after. I don’t know how long it was before I realized that they were other Indians. It was when we were sent out for high school that I realized that other Indians existed. The missionaries at the residential school never told us there were other Indians.225
My mother did not elaborate further on this topic because she was not able to. Many residential schools like St. Anne’s were built away from other First Nations and larger city centres. My mother did know of U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the Cold War. She recalls being told that if war ever broke out, all first-born sons of age were going to have to enlist in the army. This was a scary time and left quite an impression on my mother, as she believed that her life as she knew it was going to end.226 Since war did not break out, she left for high school, only to return a short time after. She remained at home with her parents until she was called on to babysit for her older sister Pauline, who was living in Toronto, Ontario.
My mother explained her reasons for going to Toronto as she described her first experience seeing hippies:
223 Ibid. 224 Agnes Sutherland, interview by Lorraine Sutherland, Attawapiskat, ON, April 2013. 225 Ibid. 226 Agnes Sutherland, post-interview communication, Timmins, ON, February 2014. 53 I went to Toronto a year or two after graduating from St. Anne’s. That’s the time when my older sister Pauline wanted a sitter. She asked my parents. She wrote a letter asking my parents if I could go and babysit while she worked at the hospital for night shifts. She was a nurse. I only stayed there for one year. My sister took me for a walk down Younge Street and to a place on Avenue Road. Avenue Road was where the hippies lived or hung around. I saw a couple with their child and I was surprised the child was wearing a Pamper only. I also saw another person wearing boots that went right up to their knees. It was interesting! They had long hair and I think flowers in their hair [laughs]. I would stare at them and my sister tell me “Don’t stare…it’s rude.” But I’d stare anyway. I kept turning my head to look you know [laughs]. That’s how surprised I was. I didn’t know what kind of people they were. I didn’t know they were called hippies.227
In a few short years after graduating from St. Anne’s her life experience and knowledge of the world expanded. Despite experiencing some culture shock, she was able to babysit for a year before returning home for a couple of years. She also went to Ottawa to babysit for her older sister Eileen for one year. By this point, my own sister Judy was three years old. My mother returned home again, but only stayed for a short time and then moved to Attawapiskat.
She lived with an aunt on her father’s side for a short time before her sister Eileen asked her to babysit again.228
By 1975, her parents moved to back Attawapiskat. By this point, all of their daughters had gone through St. Anne’s, and there was no reason for them to remain in Fort Albany. Life in Attawapiskat continued as it had in Fort Albany. My grandfather continued to work on the land as well as holding odd jobs here and there. My grandmother continued to work as a cook, and she worked at the hospital. This was also the time my mother moved to Ottawa and lived there for seven years.229 I was born in Ottawa in 1975, and my younger siblings followed. My mother had seven children: four girls, and three boys. My mother recalls enjoying her life in
Ottawa. She felt that it was of supportive community there: “We had a lot of support from other people, especially around Christmas.”230 By the 1980s, my grandparents moved to Ottawa to be closer to their children and grandchildren, as most of them lived down south.231 Both of my
227 Agnes Sutherland, interview by Lorraine Sutherland, Attawapiskat, ON, April 2013. 228 Ibid. 229 Ibid. 230 Ibid. 231 Ibid. 54 grandparents headed north in the late 1990s because my grandfather was ill. He died in North
Bay in 1998. My grandmother returned to Attawapiskat with her husband’s body and laid him to rest on January 21st, 1998. She remained in Attawapiskat and lived out her days, for the most part with members of her immediate and extended families. She died and was laid to rest on
March 14th, 2011.
My grandparents lived full lives and witnessed many changes in how people lived on and off the land. I am struck by my grandfather’s determination in teaching his daughters about life on the land and how to adapt to the changing environment in which they lived. My grandfather understood that despite these changes to his traditional lifestyle, it was crucial that he passed down whatever knowledge he had to his children. My mother, along with her sisters, were the recipients of this knowledge.
My mother ended the interview with the following statement: “I’ve always wanted to talk about kimooshoom weyscutch (long time ago).”232 While her statement may be humble, it speaks volumes about why calling on the past is important. In my mother’s sharing recollections of her life, I am able to make connections to the times and places in which her tipacchimowina are situated. I recall some of my own memories of my grandparents in
Attawapiskat as a child and later in Ottawa as an adolescent. These memories confirm and validate how I feel about who I am as an Ininiwiskwew. Calling on the past through tipaachimowina is crucial in reaffirming my roots, my identity, my relationship with the land and
Creator, and finally, in preserving my language.
232 Ibid. 55 CONCLUSION
Armitage proposed that the relationship between Europeans and First Nations happened in six stages in Canada. It would seem that the first and second stages, “the early stage” and “the period of the Royal Proclamation” (which lasted much longer in the far north), proved to be the most beneficial for Indians - including my ancestors, the Omushkegowuk. It was in these stages that Indian peoples were treated with respect and were regarded as partners. It was also in these stages that the fur trade existed and where “friendship” treaties were formed; later came the numbered treaties as well as the Indian Act. The numbered treaties along with the Indian Act were supposedly meant to ensure and protect Indian ways of living while also providing them with education and health care. The First Nations signatories, like my ancestors believed that by signing the treaties they could continue to speak their language, and live on the land with their families intact, regulating themselves and living in relative freedom or independence, like so many generations before them.
This was not to be case. It is evident that the third and fourth stages proposed by
Armitage, “the transitional stage” and “the stage of assimilation,” proved to be the most damaging to First Nations. The Indian Act was used instead to “civilize,” Christianize, and finally, attempt to subjugate First Nations like the Omushkegowuk. It was in this policy that assimilationist and racist notions were unilaterally applied, thereby ending previous relations that had been built on respect and friendship. Religious organizations like the United Church of
Canada, Roman Catholic Church, Presbyterian Church, and Anglican Church took on this role as proxies for the government of Canada.
Together, the Canadian government and religious organizations worked to build and fill schools with Indian children. The first schools were industrial day schools, but these did not provide the desired results in a timely fashion. The Canadian government changed its tactics and implemented residential schools so that children could be removed from the influence of their parents for longer periods of time. Over a 150-year period, in some parts of Canada, 56 children were ripped from their families, generation after generation, resulting in the loss of language, the loss of spiritual, and traditional ways.
The literature on residential schooling in Canada (Leigh, Dunch, de Leeuw, Fulford and
Bird, Long, Fontaine, Anderson, and Annett) indicates that Canada’s Indian education policy was ruthless in destroying Indigenous families, communities and nations. These scholars highlight the hidden agenda of Canada’s Indian education policy - removing Indians from their traditional lands and clearing the way for white settlement (except in remote regions) and the extraction of natural resources. The interests and wellbeing of Indians were set aside, in the hope that they would someday “disappear” as unique peoples and become part of the larger
Canadian society.
Armitage’s fifth and sixth stages, “the Reconstruction and Re-establishment stage” and
“the self-government stage;” involved revisiting, renewing, and reconciling the relationships among the Canadian government, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginals. This is when, a closer examination of Canada’s Indian Act and its educational policy was initiated.
The Hawthorn report and RCAP ensued. Hawthorn’s report was published in two volumes, in 1966 and 1967, while RCAP was published in 1991, a quarter of a century later.
Both documents were instrumental in unveiling how the Aboriginal peoples in Canada had been neglected.
Hawthorn’s report specifically stated that many students who attended residential schools were not successful in assimilating into the greater Canadian society. Hawthorn concluded that Canada’s “separatist” policy on educating Indians worked against the goal of assimilation; students who were taught in isolation from the rest of society could not transition into the larger Canadian society. He recommended that Indians should be “integrated” rather than separated. As a result of this report, assimilation was replaced with integration. This did not happen overnight; as the last residential school to close in Canada was in 1996.
RCAP determined that Canada’s residential school policy had deliberately undermined
Aboriginal societies in Canada. The Commission provided many recommendations for 57 ‘”renewing” and “reconciling” the relationships among Aboriginals, the Canadian government, and non-Aboriginal peoples. Two of these recommendations were key: first, acknowledge and apologize to residential school survivors, provide them with a safe place to share their stories, and provide them with compensation for the wrongs that was committed against them; and second, educate non-Aboriginals about residential schools.
Ohmagari and Berkes, Sindell, Sindell and Wintrob, Honigmann, Preston, Rogers and
Rogers, Fulford and Bird, Schuurman, Kovach, Smith, and Hookimaw-Witt indicate that Indians had, and continue to have complex and rich cultural traditions. Despite residential schooling, life on the land continued in the far north, and traditional knowledge was passed down through oral tradition and oral history. My grandparents and my mother are examples of this. The
Omushkegowuk were and continue to be a resilient people. We continue to live on the land, as much as possible in this modern age, and share tipaachimowina. We have not disappeared, nor do we plan on disappearing.
58 APPENDIX
Cree Glossary
Aatanokaana: Legends.
Awaashish: Infant.
Awaashishuck: Infants.
Ininiw: Cree person.
Ininiimowin: Cree language.
Ininiwuk: Cree people.
Iskwew: Woman.
Ishkweshish: Girl.
Ishkweshishuck: Girls.
Kikookum: Your grandmother.
Kimooshum: Your grandfather.
Kisheyhow: Elder.
Kitchiimanitou: Creator.
Kookum: Grandmother.
Mitewak: Shamans.
Mooshum: Grandfather.
Napeyshish: Boy.
Napew: Man.
Nimooshum: My grandfather.
Notahwii: My Father.
Nikaawii: My mother.
Omushkegowuk: Swampy Cree or Lowland Cree, people of the muskeg or people who live in the muskeg.
Opinnagau (Opannigau): There are lots of islands in there.
Otipaachimowina: His/her stories.
59 Payukoteyno: Nuclear family.
Powaganak: Dream-helpers.
Tipaachimowin: Story.
Tipaachimowina: Stories.
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