Front Burner - Renamed, shamed. Searching for an Indigenous boy’s true identity

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

On the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, the story of a quest to find the true identity of a boy who died at residential school, and was identified only by a cruel nickname.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. In the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg, there is this huge scroll and it's filled with this long red cloth.

An Indigenous-led investigative team from CBC went to see it in person recently, where senior archivist Jesse Boiteau unrolled it for them. It's quite large, so there's no real easy way. On the cloth in white lettering are the names of 2,800 children who never returned home from residential schools. So by releasing these names to the public, it is our hope that our future research efforts as well as knowledge within the communities will help fill in a lot of these gaps to ultimately find out more information about these children. In all the names on that scroll, one stood out. So here is the case of the child who passed away

who was referred to only as Dummy Bad Boy. He was found within the TRC's research within one single document. It was an administrative document and it just sort of nonchalantly in passing mentioned the death of Dummy Bad Boy. So we added it to the register with the hopes that we would get the name out there and someone would be able to point to his true identity. For more than two months, this investigative team has been trying to piece

together that student's story. On the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, I'm speaking to two journalists from that team, producer Jillian Taylor and reporter Gunasee Odeir, about who this boy was and what the difficulties they encountered in their search can tell us about the challenges that lie ahead as First Nations across this country work to uncover and identify the thousands of children buried at residential schools. Jillian, Gunasio,

thank you so much for making the time to come onto the show. Hi, Jamie. Hi, thanks for having us. Oh, it's such a pleasure. So Jillian, what made you want to investigate the story of this particular student? and also being a First Nations woman, seeing this name on the National Center of Truth and Reconciliation's memorial list is just like a punch to the gut. And it's not a feeling that I've only had. My colleagues have it, my friends, family, community members. So it just seems like such a disservice to this young man that that is the name that he lives under.

Yes, absolutely. And for anyone who might not know, it was common practice to separate children from their families and force them to attend these schools. And sometimes they were given new names, right? and sometimes they were given new names, right? Yeah. And so one of the common things is, of course, children were given Christian names because these were Christian-run schools. You know, you look on the registry and you see a lot of Marys

and then you're like, oh, okay, that makes sense. But also in our journey through the records, we found a lot of numbers and a lot of incomplete names. So it was just not a full picture of who these kids really are. Yeah. Gunaseo, the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, of course, made this scroll with all of these names to honor the lives of these children who never came home.

So, you know, I can only imagine it wasn't easy for them to figure out what to do with really derogatory names like this, right? And so did you talk to them about how they make the decisions? So when we talked to Jesse Boteau, who's a senior archivist at the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation. Oftentimes, a death of a child at school will just be mentioned in passing or might be jotted down in the margins of a record. And oftentimes, that's the only information that we have to go off of. So that was really hard for them to make that decision to release all these names. But he said, you know, regardless of how difficult

and how sensitive and how disrespectful it might be to some of these children, keeping that information back would do more harm than making it available and potentially finding the true identity of the children. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Jillian, you started with this name, and from there, what was the first bit of information

that you were able to gather about this student? So it was just that nickname and then Elkhorn School. So that's all we had to work with was just those two bits. And so the NCTR actually released to us the one document they had. It revealed a date, which was super exciting to us because we had no idea what era we were searching in. And the date on that letter was 1897. Yeah. So then we're like, okay, we have a big journey ahead of us because this is so long ago. But it also revealed where he came from. And because the Indian agent who wrote this letter to the boy's father was from the Blackfoot agency. And the boy's father was listed in that document, and his name was Bad Boy. And it clicked for me because I knew that there was actual, a legitimate, still exists to this day, Blackfoot last name, which is Bad Boy. Okay, so you learn that he's from Blackfoot territory in what's now southern Alberta, and he died at this residential school in Manitoba.

And also that his name, Bad Boy, I guess wasn't given to him by the school, that it must have been his father's name. And just a note for our listeners, we're going to come back to that name, Bad Boy, in a little bit. But Jillian, armed with all of those clues, where do you go next? So our next stop was into the National Archives, which are held by the federal government. And it was in there that we were able to find annual reports from the Department of Indian Affairs for the years that he went to school in Elkhorn. And he was mentioned in those documents. And in fact, he was mentioned in those documents several times. So one of the first things we found out is he was just 13 when he was sent what we believe to be over 900

kilometers away to Elkhorn School. So yeah, we were starting to get a picture of him there and then. Tell me what else you found out about what he was like as a person, what he was doing there at the school, if you were able to find anything. Well, it was there that we were actually able to find out where the nickname came from. Obviously, saying dummy is a very hard thing and you know we've made a very strong effort to say it as little as possible but what we learned about him was he was deaf and he could not speak and so we presume that he got that nickname at the school or maybe by one of the administrators, but that is how he ended up with that cruel nickname in all of the Indian Affairs annual

reports and some of the other documents we found as well. Wow, that he was working at this school. What was he doing? It actually described him as being a very valuable member of the printing press. The school, being an industrial school, they had trades at the time back in the late 1800s and he worked the printing press. So, you know, they described him as being a smart boy who could read and write and someone who was well liked by everyone. I just want to pause on this for a second and get going to see how these kids are,

they're working right in, in the school. Is that common? Is that, is that normal? Yeah. I mean, if you look at, even if you hear from survivors today, they talk about how we shouldn't even be referring to them as residential schools. Right. And especially, I think, during this time, this is the era of the early era of residential schools doing industrial work and pretty much doing manual labor. Annual reports say they would split their time, you know, like mornings in the classroom and the rest doing these types of trades or farm work. Mm-hmm. These documents that you're getting, these scraps of information from these Indian affairs documents, how might that skew the kind of picture that's painted of these kids' lives and of the life of this teenage boy, maybe in particular? Well, I think we have to be really careful. And as Jesse Boteau mentioned, we should be reading it with a grain of salt because a lot of these documents, you know, it's through the lens of the government.

You know, it's through the lens of the government. So when they were writing these annual reports, they were really like every school principal would be sending a page long report to Indian Affairs to publish. And they would really paint a very rosy picture to attract more students to get more funding from the government. So unfortunately, we might actually might not ever what the students' true experiences were like. Okay. So even with that rosy picture from Indian Affairs, you do have more information now where he worked, some of what he was like, I guess, as a person, or what the documents say that he was like, that he was deaf and didn't speak, hence the derogatory, cruel nickname. And Jillian, those details brought you to the Legislative Library in Winnipeg. And what did you find there? So we were pretty happy to see that in those Indian Affairs report, they mentioned the name of the paper. So I thought, what if Manitoba has copies of this paper? And sure enough, the legislative library did. We were able to find the very first issue printed that he would have helped print all of those pages. He would have had something to do with. And, you know, as I'm flipping through this,

these microfilms and my eyes are crossing, a dummy pops up on screen. And it was actually like this little notice that said he had had his leg amputated because he was suffering from tuberculosis. I've never seen anything like that, you know. Imagining that a paper would take special interest in a residential school student and inform the community of his illness and that he was doing okay after surgery. So with that, I was really hopeful that maybe we'd find more references to him because at this point we still didn't know when he died we knew that the letter to his father from 1897 was to release his treaty payments his treaty money from the government to his father so we knew that he

had died sometime before march of 1897. So back to scrolling through the paper, there was a headline, and the headline said, Dummy is Dead. Thursday, November 12, 1896. Here's the first time we found any evidence of his death. And the article says, Dummy is dead. The above announcement is causing sighs of regret throughout the Washakata Indian home, and in fact, all about town. Dummy was a deaf and dumb Indian boy, a general favourite with all who knew him. He came from the Blackfoot Reserve at Gleachon six years ago and was an apprentice in this office

for two years previous to last spring when he was troubled with tuberculosis in his right leg. The disease member gradually grew worse and two months ago was amputated to prolong life. Shortly after the amputation, consumption developed and the patient wasted away, dying last evening at about 10, 10 o'clock. He was conscious up until, within a few minutes of his death, the funeral takes place at 4 o'clock this afternoon. Wow. So, the whole town knew who this boy was

and they knew his name. Well, his nickname, not his real name. Yeah. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

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That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. This is so sad to think of this teenager so far from home, dying of tuberculosis of consumption. And even then he's memorialized not by his real name, but by this cruel nickname, Dummy. Gunasio, armed with all this information, I understand that your team contacted people in the student's home community of Siksika. And were you able to find any any family members you know unfortunately the the

bad boy last name like they're still descendants of the bad boy family uh that we that we traced back to Siksika but there's no one that actually carries that name anymore because we're you know when the student was um alive we're talking about well over 100 years ago. And I think we came pretty close to finding some possible relatives. But, you know, I just really hope that putting out this story maybe will help try to find them. I know you did speak to an elder in the community, Herman Yellow, old woman. And what did he tell you he thought when he first heard the story of this boy and this name he was given? Well, first of all, I was offended because I thought from the start, I thought, well, it has to be a misinterpretation. start I thought well it has to be a misinterpretation. He was so upset and offended when he first heard that name. He described it as being discriminatory and I think really empathized with what this

child may have gone through. It's sad. I think of it as very sad, simply the fact that this poor young fellow that was taken from our community and taken far away from home. It disturbs me to know the things that he had to go through, especially being physically challenged. Yeah.

And, Garacio, I know that you found another name in the documents that you brought to Herman, Yellow Old Woman, a name that sounded like maybe it could have been a Blackfoot name, like maybe it could have been this boy's real name. And, you know, I understand we're not pronouncing it because we're not saying it out loud, because no one's sure of the pronunciation. And this young man's name has already been treated with a lot of disrespect, but I'll just spell it out. One of the ways you found it written N-A-P-I-A-M-O-K-I-N-M-A. And so was this a name that Herman recognized? No. And I mean, that really goes into our reasoning because Herman is fluent Blackfoot speaker. He brought it to other fluent speakers,

and they believe there's likely a mistranslation or a misspelling somewhere. He really said that they're taking their best guess at figuring out what it possibly could mean. And they said that part of the word, the way they sounded out could be something related to a spirit of a male horse. But really, it is a guess. And they didn't even attempt to pronounce it either. It's definitely a misspell. I did mention to you that I brought that word because I write and I read and I teach our language and so for me I couldn't figure it out so I brought it to a linguistic that that is here for actually a couple of them and we couldn't figure out of

the only thing that we can come up with this that it was misspelled. And the closest that we come up with is a spirit of a male horse, is what we can come up with that sounds close to it. So we don't know what the connection that is to his family family or his people his clan okay and also um the family name bad boy i just want to come back to it now where might that have come from herman didn't know where it came from either but but he did talk about how he believes it is a reflection of discrimination Blackfoot families have faced over the years you know he said largely due to like poor translations by government officials or missionaries or interpreters. There's been other instances where family

names have been recorded as not useful or drunken chief or rot eater and ugly. And these are all based on names that were traditionally said in Blackfoot, meaning something completely different. Blackfoot meaning something completely different. So you can really just tell, you know, just by these examples that maybe the bad boy family name is also that reflection of colonial records. Right, right. Like the colonialization of names, of language, which is making this whole process so much more difficult to track down who this young, young man is. And this story is just one student, right? There are now more than 4000 names on the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation's memorial register online. And, you know, on the flip side of this are the unmarked burial sites that have been identified this year at residential schools. So far, preliminary findings have identified more than 1,200 unmarked graves. But I know that former TRC Chair Maurice Sinclair has said he believes there may be well over 10,000 of them. And so, you know, going to see as Indigenous communities work to identify those children and bring their remains home as people work to find the true identities of the children in the memorial register. Like,

what does the story of this one student tell you about the work that lies ahead here? I think it's just really indicative of how much work needs to be done. I mean, we know there are tens of First Nations, Métis and Inuit families who have no idea what happened to their children or their siblings or their, you know, their aunties, uncles, great aunties, great uncles. Residential schools have, you know, they went on for so many generations. And the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has only gone through about a fifth of the records it holds to get that number that's over 4,000. And like we mentioned before, a lot of that could be based off of just one document. So there's just tons of work to do to identify all of these children in a really meaningful way.

to identify all of these children in a really meaningful way. And it also strikes me, you know, the changes to names are really part of this larger project that we've seen this destruction of history here. You know, it's hard to understand history without knowing the names of the people involved. And I'm just trying to compare this to, you know, for example, my mom has been able to trace our family tree back generations just by plugging in names on a genealogy website. But this destruction of names has made it so much more difficult. I mean, I can give an example like my, you know, my name is going to see a deer. But there's a word for deer in the Mohawk language.

And in records, it's spelled wrong. Like it's not, it's supposed to be Oskenundu and it's spelled wrong. But then we're also in the province of Quebec. So you don't even have, like, you know, you have missionaries who are recording names that are supposed to be, you know, in indigenous languages,

but then they're butchering it in English and in French and like two different colonial languages. So it's a huge amount of work to navigate that, those records. Jillian, what happens now with the information that you found? The NCTR says that they are going to update the name on the memorial registry. In fact, Jesse Boiteau said this will be the first time that they've been able to do it. And to see the name kind of get erased off of the registry and put into Blackfoot is going to be a really nice thing to see. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And just thank you

both for the incredible work that you've done here and for coming on to the show and sharing it with us. Gunaseo Jillian, thank you so much. Thanks for having us. Thank you. So before we go today, yesterday, the federal court dismissed two appeals from Ottawa over major rulings affecting compensation and services for First Nations children. The first has to do with a landmark order from the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, which ruled that the federal government didn't properly fund child and family services on

reserve and ordered them to pay $40,000 each to about 50,000 First Nations children and their families. The second appeal was over a separate ruling that expands eligibility for Jordan's principle, a policy that essentially says that if there are squabbles between different levels of government over who pays the health care bills for a First Nations child, Ottawa will pay first and sort it out later. The First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, which launched the human rights complaint that led to the rulings, tweeted,

This is a huge win for children and families again and for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.