Survivor says treatment at former residential schools cannot be “swept under the rug”

LNN spoke with Mike Bruised Head, an Elder with the Blood Tribe who is also completing a doctoral degree at the University of Lethbridge. He said he is “not surprised” by the discovery of the bodies in Kamloops.

Bruised Head is a residential school survivor himself, having gone to St. Mary’s School on the Blood Reserve for over 10 years, beginning in 1964 when he was seven years old.

He told LNN that when he went to the school, “many of us [students] had heard from previous students and students in the early 20s and 30s and all the way [back] that bones, or bodies, were very close to the buildings.”

Bruised Head noted that in 1945, a request was made to the school’s principal by an Indian agent to have Indigenous workers re-dig graves next to the school site, to make them even deeper.

He said that when he was in his teens at St. Mary’s, he would grab laundry on Thursday nights with some of his friends. Together, they would play ‘chicken’, turning the lights off down the long hallways of the school’s basement leading up to the laundry room.

“The older boys had told us the school was haunted,” Bruised Head recalled.

“Toward the end of the long hallway was the old boiler room and every now and then, we would hear babies crying, you know, and we would run like the dickens.”

Bruised Head added that, “I always wondered about the old-fashioned coal incinerators and I heard stories that possibly, something happened to young infants.”

DUNBOW SCHOOL

When speaking with LNN, Bruised Head referenced Dunbow School, “one of the first Catholic missions, or boarding schools” built around the Highwood and Bow rivers in Calgary.

According to the Heritage Resources Management Information System, Dunbow was constructed in 1880. Bruised Head said it shut down in 1922. His great-grandfather was a student at Dunbow.

“[He was part of] the first group of boys that were herded like cattle or tied together [by their] hands so they wouldn’t run back. At that time, some of the boys were let go at 16-years-old, and the girls at 18.”

Bruised Head explained that in 1995, flooding of the Highwood and Bow rivers eroded one side of the riverbank, and “people that were close by swimming or canoeing noticed these bones along the riverbank and they thought they were buffalo bones.”

“As they checked them out, they went on to discover an old graveyard.”

He said children forced to go to Dunbow were “anywhere from five to six-years [old and] up to 16-to-18 years.”

Bruised Head explained that, “some [students] passed in the first Dunbow Residential School and parents weren’t notified immediately. They were told [in] so many summers, come back for your daughter and son, and some were sadly informed then, ‘oh you know, your daughter [or] son passed away a year ago, five, 10 years ago, whatever. They were never informed.”

“The other thing that was puzzling and it still [is], there were bones that were less than five years old and we’re talking maybe possibly one-year-old, two-years-old and from what I heard, some fetuses.”

He said when he heard about the Kamloops discovery, Dunbow immediately came to mind.

“It’s no longer just sexual and physical abuse of residential school students. It’s genocide, it’s murder – that’s all I can describe it [as] because there’s no other way to describe it.”

READ MORE: Discovery of Indigenous children’s remains evidence of Canada’s genocide: experts

St. Mary’s Residential School closed in 1988.

WHAT NEXT?

Bruised Head said it’s very important to keep the conversation going on what happened at residential schools.

“I want the Education Minister [Adriana] LaGrange and Premier [Jason] Kenney to allow the teaching of residential schools in grade one, even kindergarten. All these young people [need] to realize what we went though.”

“In 1976 when I left boarding school, I said to myself, I am not Catholic. I am not going to be Christian right after what I went through with the physical abuse and the atrocities I saw. When you hear young boys whimpering in the middle of the night, something happened.”

As for what else should be done next, Bruised Head wants there to be a thorough search of all the sites of former residential schools, to identify other remains that may lie beneath the ground.

READ MORE: Canadians can expect more remains to be found at residential school sites: Sinclair

In addition, he said, “I want an apology from the Northwest Mounted Police, which is now the RCMP. I want an apology from the [Indigenous and Northern] Affairs and those interior ministers of defense that allowed that.”

He’s also demanding an apology from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on behalf of Canadian leaders of the past. Bruised Head said the Kamloops discovery is “just the tip of the iceberg” and is horrific.

READ MORE: Commons holds special debate on remains of 215 children found at residential school

“There has to be an accountability at this day and age, and it cannot be swept under the rug.”

Bruised Head said he’s going to be researching the call to have Indigenous workers dig graves deeper at St. Mary’s School in 1945.

by Justin Goulet

Survivor says treatment at former residential schools cannot be “swept under the rug”

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