Where are the Children?

The children who attended residential schools have come to be known as survivors. The term survivor means an Aboriginal person who attended and survived the residential school system. This acknowledges that tragically, many attendees did not survive residential school. There were the uncounted numbers of students who died shortly after discharge from the schools in poor health or who were buried on school grounds, victims of malnutrition and disease. It is also acknowledged that the experience of residential schooling had long-lasting damaging effects on Aboriginal children. The term survivor honours those who have endured and survived the legacy of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse experienced in the residential school system.

Approximately 86,000 survivors of residential school are alive today. This figure is an estimate based on a 1998 Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development analysis of data from the 1991 Aboriginal Peoples' Survey (Statistics Canada). In 1991, it was estimated that approximately 105,000 to 107,000 Aboriginal people still alive had attended residential school.

The residential school system severed ties between children and their families and communities. Its legacy continues to affect the children and grandchildren of the survivors. The trauma has been transmitted from parent to child creating 'intergenerational survivors.' An intergenerational survivor is a child, grandchild or great grandchild of survivor(s).

It is estimated that there are approximately 287,350 intergenerationally impacted survivors (on and off reserve). This is an extrapolated figure based on information from the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada's (IRS) analysis of the Aboriginal People's Survey 1991.

Although the descendants of survivors did not face long-term confinement in an institution or loose access to family and extended families, the risk of family breakdown and divorce increases in families in which one or more of the parents attended residential school. Survivors did not benefit from transmittal of traditional child-rearing techniques which emphasize the sacredness of the child. Parents who were raised in a rigid, authoritarian institutional setting often inflict harsh discipline on their children and have difficulty showing affection. Children raised in such environments often suffer from low self-esteem.

High rates of suicide, violence and alcohol involvement are reported among children of survivors. However, in many cases, children of survivors are successfully avoiding these negative outcomes, perhaps due to increased awareness of the residential school legacy and also due to survivors making a conscious effort to disrupt their transmission of negative behaviours to their children.

The friendships and alliances built among people from different communities and nations who attended residential school together is an unanticipated residential school outcome which benefits the younger generations. Another significant development in recent decades has been the resurgence of interest in Aboriginal culture and traditions as survivors and their descendants seek to recover what was lost.

At a residential school abuse retreat in 2000, frontline workers, counsellors and elders reflected on the outcomes of the residential school system on the individuals, families, and communities. Although every individual's experience is unique, there are many common patterns.

Sections 113 to 122 of the Canadian Indian Act legally removed the rights of Aboriginal parents to their children, giving the government control over the children's lives. The Indian agents, with the added enforcement of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), had the authority to take children from their families and place them in residential school. Once they were removed from their families, students lost the guidance and nurturing of their kinfolk. Parents, grandparents and extended families suffered equally from the loss of their children. While students attended school, they were separated by gender and from their siblings. Family contact through letters and visits was often prohibited. Children were not taught parenting skills and had no parenting role models to learn from.

Children were isolated from family, community, extended family and their natural environments. Uniform clothing, haircuts and language fostered feelings of anonymity. Traditional and cultural ways were belittled and children were made to feel ashamed of themselves and their families. Children were punished for speaking their own languages. Consequently, the individual suffered the personal destruction of culture, language, traditional modes of spirituality, positive self-identity and confidence. Many experienced deep-rooted feelings of humiliation, shame and abandonment, leading to low self-esteem. Many experienced an inability to express affection. Later, traumatic memories were often triggered by certain sounds and smells.

Upon their return to the community, children could no longer communicate with their elders because of the loss of their first language. Since traditional teachings are often conveyed orally, transmission of culture and values from generation to generation was profoundly disrupted.39 The abusive treatment of Aboriginal children in residential schools contributed to the high rates of family violence experienced in many Aboriginal communities today. Corporal punishment, humiliation and deprivation were routinely used to control students. Many adult survivors use similar techniques in raising their own children and interacting with other members of their community. This is known as lateral violence. Examples of lateral violence include gossip, put-downs, competition, family feuds, religious wars and gang wars.

Conflict between generations arose because of communication difficulties and loss of respect caused by deliberate policies of cultural suppression. Children no longer learned traditional skills such as hunting and fishing. Restrictive laws on hunting and fishing and exhaustion of resources close to local communities, combined with the loss of skills, led to radical changes in Aboriginal diets. The loss of traditional foods is considered a major factor in the development of high rates of diabetes, heart problems and arthritis in Aboriginal communities. Communities and families were often divided among different religious denominations according to the schools that the children had attended. Tensions also rose between Christians and those who kept their traditional Aboriginal spiritual beliefs.

The long-term separation during childhood from family, community, culture and language deeply affected individuals and generations of family and community members.

For residential school survivors, the effects on the family have been felt by parents, spouses, and children through several generations. Parents saw their children removed from their homes, in some cases never to return. The parents of the school children were not given any options, but were forced to relinquish their sons and daughters to the authorities or face criminal charges and fines. These parents did not necessarily understand why their children were being taken and were more confused when the children returned to them with hatred and scorn for their families and ways of life.

The families bore the brunt of the students' feelings of alienation, shame, and anger in all its forms. There were no boundaries to who would suffer at home for those feelings generated in the students by life in the school.

In the school system, students did not learn how to be part of a family. They did not learn how to parent or how to love appropriately. These were things that children normally learned from their parents. Being removed before these lessons could be taught resulted in generations of people who did not know how to be a father or a mother, or how to handle conflict within the family in a constructive and loving way. The resulting behaviours have lead to a considerable amount of family breakdown.

Lack of parenting skills is perhaps one of the most profound outcomes of the residential school system. Survivors of the schools know only the rigid, authoritarian, emotionally distant discipline of the teachers and caretakers in the schools. This became the way many of them controlled their own families. The effects of poor parenting skills became a legacy of several generations of Aboriginal people.

The real purpose of the residential school system was ultimately to remove Aboriginal culture from the Canadian landscape. To that end, individual students were removed from their homes and families, and reprogrammed to think and act in the "white" way. While this attempt at assimilation obviously failed, the outcome for most Aboriginal communities was highly significant and is still felt today.

Many communities were devastated by language and culture loss through the removal of the young people. These children had not yet learned all there was to know and by the time they returned to the community, they did not want to know about their language, culture, and traditions. The shame they were taught to feel prevented their participation in anything resembling "Indian" ways. This resulted in the permanent loss of several dialects and languages, and some of the meanings of traditional ceremonies and cultural markers.

As well, many communities are affected by the legacy of physical and sexual abuse that is having a devastating effect upon the whole community. Unfortunately, these social problems have created barriers to healing within the communities.

On the positive side, many residential school survivors have embraced their Aboriginal heritage as a means of recovering from the horrible experiences of their childhoods. Together, many communities have found this cultural resurgence to be a welcome path to reclaiming the entire community. The shared experiences of the residential school survivors have provided a link between communities and "became the basis of a new discourse and a common issue on the contemporary political agenda."