The Shadow of Residential Schools and the Darkness that Remains
Last Wednesday, I stood at the gates of the abandoned Fort Qu’Appelle Residential School in Saskatchewan. I was with James Daschuk, author of Clearing the Plains.
The school was torn down years ago.
All that remains are two large brick columns and an iron gate covering. To get there, we had to cross railway tracks and cut through a ravine.
It was chilling to stand at the entrance of an institution where the death rate of children who attended was higher than that of Canadian soldiers who fought in the Second World War.
It is a haunted place. Forgotten by the rest of the province. No plaque.
But Indigenous people understand the significance of those foreboding columns.
At the gates, there is a red dress symbolizing the murdered and missing Indigenous women, hand-coloured rocks, children’s toys, and an orange shirt. The orange shirt represents not only what was taken away from the Indigenous children forced into the system, but has also become a powerful emblem of how we move forward as a nation.
On September 30, children in schools across Canada wear orange shirts of remembrance. I have attended many of these school events. There are youth marches, pow wows, and assemblies. Young people create art to try to make sense of what happened in the attempted genocide of a previous generation of Indigenous youth.
I love Orange Shirt Day. It gives me the firm hope that a new generation can do better in our relations with the original people of this land.
My generation was never taught Canada’s darker history. It is a history that needs to be understood if we are going to move forward. Unfortunately, in the case of St. Anne’s Residential School, there is a significant amount of unfinished business.
The Apology
In 2008, the Parliament of Canada welcomed residential school survivors into the chamber to hear the Prime Minister apologize on behalf of the people of Canada. It was one of my proudest moments as an elected representative of the Canadian people.
The televised apology was replayed in gymnasiums and Band offices on reserves across Canada. I spoke with people in the James Bay region who told me their parents wept for days after hearing the apology. They just couldn’t believe that anyone would ever acknowledge what had been done to them.
To avoid the flood of lawsuits, the government and churches proposed an alternate legal process to adjudicate the thousands of claims of abuse and neglect.
The Independent Assessment Process (IAP) was promoted as a non-confrontational means by which survivors could tell their story in a private hearing, and then an adjudicator would award them the compensation they deserved. Everything would be done anonymously, which the government said would protect their privacy. It also meant there was no way of really tracking what happened in the hearings.
But at the time it seemed like a good process for bringing a dark chapter of Canada’s history to a close.
I thought that was the end of it.
However, in 2013, Edmund Metatawabin, the former chief of Fort Albany, approached me about the fact that survivors of St. Anne’s Residential School in Fort Albany had been subjected to a serious abuse of their legal rights in the IAP.
St. Anne’s Residential School was a notorious house of horrors where generations of Cree children were subjected to rape, torture, hunger and other nightmarish forms of abuse. In the early 1990s, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) launched a massive investigation into the crimes.
The OPP did their job. They went after the Oblate order, the Grey Nuns, and the Diocese of Moosonee for additional documents. They created a list of perpetrators that named 180 people, including the bishops and notorious clergy abusers. A number of criminal trials were launched, but many of the main perpetrators had either died or gone to ground.
In 2004, the Justice Department went to the Ontario Superior Court to formally request access to the thousands of pages of police evidence. They stated that, as the defendant, it would not be “fair” if the government were unable to prepare its defence for the coming flood of legal cases.
In addition to the OPP evidence, the government obtained all the documents relating to 154 civil cases that were underway against the Catholic Church and orders over crimes at St. Anne’s.
Under the IAP the Justice Department had the job of defending Canada, but it also the role of providing the evidence of known crimes at each institution. It was an obvious conflict of interest, but who could imagine that the Justice Department would fail to represent the highest standard of “reconciliation” and “justice” as promised by the Prime Minister and his ministers?
In the case of St. Anne’s the Justice Department opted to sit on the evidence. When survivors testified in the hearings to share their stories, Justice Department lawyers questioned their claims and credibility.
So, who were the adjudicators to believe?
Elderly Indigenous people telling horror stories of being tortured in an electric chair, raped by priests and forced to undergo abortions or the lawyers for the government of Canada, who said there was no evidence that such things had ever occurred?
When Edmund Metatawabin brought his concerns to me, I thought this matter would be straightforward. We would raise the issue publicly, share the false evidence dossier that the Justice Department had prepared. How could the government and courts fail to rectify their mistake?
How naïve I was.
St. Anne’s survivors had been fighting for justice their whole lives. I now joined them in a dozen years of bitter, trench warfare against the power of the Canadian state.
Initially, it went well. In January 2014, the Ontario Superior Court ordered the Justice Department to turn over the evidence to the IAP. The government stalled, which required a second legal order. They were trying to walk out the clock on a process that was supposed to wrap up within an agreed-upon period.
When the Justice Department finally complied with the court order, it responded with a massive document dump with the names of perpetrators and witnesses blacked out.
They refused to update the Person of Interest (POI) reports for any of the “settled” cases, which involved some of the worst legal abuses. One such case was that of Father Arthur Lavoie, who raped and abused children for decades at St. Anne’s.
Survivor H-15019 (all survivors were treated to anonymity) was one of the many victims of horrific child rape. A lawyer from the Department of Justice argued that his testimony should not be accepted as true because there was no evidence to support the claim that the priest was at the school at the time. They supplied a POI report that was a mere two pages in length.
Based on the government evidence the case was thrown out. The adjudicator had no way of knowing that the government was sitting on the true POI report that included 2,472 pages of evidence documenting a four-decade spree of sadism and abuse.
None of that evidence was provided by the government, despite the fact that this hearing was adjudicated after the Superior Court had ordered the government to make those documents available.
When H-15019 attempted to have his case reopened, the government argued that even if they provided the evidence, the documents should not be trusted unless they were “tested” – i.e., the survivor had to find a corroborating witness. As these crimes happened decades ago, the government thought it had shut down the problem.
But Angela Shisheesh was a survivor who remembered the crimes, and she stepped forward to testify. The Justice Department then claimed Madame Shisheesh wasn’t allowed to speak because she was under a confidentiality agreement with the Catholic Church from a previous compensation case.
In December 2017, Angela Shisheesh went to court to challenge the government over silencing her voice about the crimes she witnessed as a child.
http://anishinabeknews.ca/2017/12/14/st-annes-residential-school-survivors-in-court/
The crimes committed against H-15019 were horrific. It destroyed his life. The trauma of going to court and being told that he wasn’t believable only added to the abuse.
Similar was the case of C-14114.
When she challenged the IAP ruling after evidence came forward to support her claim the IAP actually agreed to reopen her case. Her file could have been easily settled, but the government refused to update the POI report, making it impossible for the case to proceed. I held a press conference with the survivor Stella Chapman, who gave up her right to anonymity to shame the government into turning over the evidence.
This was a breach of the process that pissed off both the government and the courts.
The judge couldn’t target me, an elected Member of Parliament, but on the very day that I held the press conference with Ms. Chapman, Justice Perrell went into court to attack Fay Brunning, lawyer for the St. Anne’s survivors
Without giving Ms. Brunning a chance to defend herself, he convicted her of contempt of the court even though she had nothing to do with my decision to host a press conference with a survivor.
Justice Perrell claimed that Brunning’s public comments about the lack of justice for St. Anne’s had slandered the court’s reputation.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/judge-st-anne-s-residential-school-lawyer-reprimand-1.4490498
Government lawyers working under Minister Carolyn Bennett followed up on this by demanding that the court go after Ms. Brunning for the legal fees for the government of Canada. Justice Perrell agreed with Canada.
Ms. Brunning was later exonerated.
Millions Spent to Deny Justice
In January 2018, the Justice Department went to the BC Superior Court to obtain a ruling to ensure that no other St. Anne’s cases would be reopened. The decision to take the case to British Columbia made it impossible for St. Anne’s survivors to travel to have their rights heard.
The survivors’ argument was solid. They pointed out that they had been denied the basic legal right of procedural fairness due to the denial of evidence that had been held back by the defendant Canada.
The government took the position that since the term “procedural fairness” had not been written into the IAP, this basic principle of justice did not apply to residential school survivors.
Weasel words.
I used my position in Parliament to challenge the government factum that had been presented in court claiming that Indigenous people weren’t entitled to these most basic principles of legal rights.
The next day, the government lawyers went to BC Superior Court to have a sealing order placed over the government’s legal arguments. As far as I know, that secrecy order is still in effect.
In September 2022, the Supreme Court chose not to hear the case brought forward by the St. Anne’s survivors. They gave no reason for this decision. By that time, the government had spent millions fighting people who could barely afford the bus fare to attend the hearings in Toronto.
The survivors were never looking for a big payout. They were fighting for acknowledgement of a fundamental wrong.
They put together a team, including retired Justice Stephen O’Neil, hoping to negotiate with the government on a way to resolve this miscarriage of justice. One of the ideas was to ask the government to invest in land-based programs that teach young people about their culture.
But Canada never blinked. Not once. In all the years I spent on the St. Anne’s file I could never understand why Canada consistently opted for the most nasty and petty roadblocks rather than to try and find a solution to an obvious wrong.
Every time I encountered a new minister of the Crown I reached out believing they would see the need to address this injustice. But I learned the hard way that the power of the colonial state was still present.
I am proud that young Canadians are learning about the residential school system.
I am proud that Orange Shirt Day is creating a way for people to build something positive out of a very dark time.
But that darkness remains when I think of the viciousness of the Canadian state in defending what it perceives to be its legal interests.
The children of St. Anne’s were stolen from their families by the state. They committed no crime but were subject to horrific abuse. The abuse has been perpetuated by government that believes it must protect itself from liability rather than engaging in the true nation building exercise of healing and reparation.
If only they could sit with the beautiful and proud survivors of St. Anne’s.
I wish I could say there was another outcome to this story. But that is how it went down.
I still believe reconciliation is possible. I believe that Canada is on a better road. But government pronouncements ring hollow to me when I know there is still no justice for the St. Anne’s survivors.
I went to school from K to 12 under the Grey nuns who were part of the St Anne’s atrocity! It makes me sick to think some of them were part of the crimes committed there. We were encouraged to give our pocket change to running that institution!🤬 Thank you, Charlie Angus, for your persistence in exposing these crimes!🫶❤️May my fellow brothers and sisters under these criminal religious order, (the Oblates) finally see justice from a church hegemony that refuses to admit to their crimes!
I am completely saddened and angry about the lack of accountability of the Canadian government in this total miscarriage of justice. There has been no justice for the survivors of St. Anne's. I wish I could give every survivor a hug and tell them that I, at least, am profoundly sorry for what happened to them.