The Current - Weekend Listen: The kid who confronted his abuser at residential school (via See You in Court)

Episode Date: October 3, 2026

Willie Blackwater is just 13 when he holds a knife to his rapist's throat, demanding an end to his recurring abuse. It’s the first time Willie stands up to his residential school supervisor, but it���s far from the last. Years later, after a fateful encounter with a cop, Willie decides to break his silence — joining a group of survivors that help convict Arthur Henry Plint of 18 counts of sexual assault. But for Willie and his friends, it’s not enough. And a risky idea starts to form. Can they take on the architects of the residential school system? Host of See You in Court, Falen Johnson and journalist Jackie McKay meet the man behind Blackwater vs. Plint, one of the first court cases where residential school survivors took their abuser to court, eventually paving a legal path for thousands of other Indigenous children forced to attend these schools. This episode is part one, episode two can be found here: https://link.mgln.ai/SYICS2xTCxEP2The stories behind the legal battles that changed Canada — and the unlikely people who made it happen. Some were sh*t disturbers, some were convicts, and some were just regular folks dragged into a fight. Each week, See You in Court digs into a case that challenged the status quo, and asks: what kind of person takes on the law? What are the costs? And what would our lives look like if these cases never happened? Because let's be real, just because a case is closed doesn't mean the story’s over. More episodes of See You in Court are available here: https://link.mgln.ai/SYICS2xTC 

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This episode includes some strong language and details about sexual abuse, residential schools, and intergenerational trauma. Please take care while listening. It's early morning and 13-year-old Willie Blackwater is getting ready for the day.

He's a student at the Albany Indian residential school. On this day, he tells his dorm supervisor he isn't feeling well. Decades later, he can still remember it clearly. And he said, you don't look sick to me.

I said, well, I'm not. I just want to be with you. And his eyes let up. The supervisor, 50-year-old Arthur Henry Plint, tells Willie he can stay behind and the other kids head to class. Willie's plan is working perfectly. Plint makes him a special lunch.

Wow, it's the best bloody meal I ever had in that damn horrible institute. And after lunch, Willie plays his part as he's played it before. He starts massaging Plint, and when he does, the man closes his eyes and relaxes. And all Willie can think about is the knife tucked in his boot. Willie makes his move. He pulls the knife from his boot and holds it up to Plin's throat. I said, I wouldn't move over you. I've been working on this bloody knife for six months.

If I wanted to, I'd slice your bloody head off. And you won't have time to scream or nothing. This moment in 1968 is the first time Willie stands up to his abuser. but it's far from the last. It was a rare and dramatic moment, a man confronting his abuser in a British Columbia courtroom. We're saying that they ran a school which permitted and in fact facilitated the activities of a predator.

They were like simmering as they heard this evidence. People were really, really angry. The humiliation of it, it's like a disease. This man represents to me a scab. I'm Phelan Johnson, and this is C-U-in-Court. a podcast about the cases that changed Canada. This story is about Willie Blackwater and 27 others who were sexually abused by Arthur Henry Plint

and how they fought back against the architects of the Indian residential school system. Jackie McKay has the rest of the story. So Jackie, I'm First Nations and I know you are Métis. And I'm pretty sure both of us have heard our fair share of stories about residential schools. but Willie's story, it's really remarkable. Yeah, it's hard to imagine the kind of courage Willie would need to have to do this.

And this was only his first act of resistance. And I wanted to know the whole story. So I met him in his home territory. What are we looking at it? That's my grandmother's property right here. That's where we lives, where I grew up. It's a cold spring day in Kisby, a Gitzan village nearly 800 kilometers northeast of Vancouver.

The snow is melted and the forest ground is brown and dry as Willie shows me around. Yeah, this village used to be way smaller than this. It's probably tripled or four times as high as it used to me. It just used to be small. Willie is 71 and has a full head of salt and pepper hair in the spirit of a much younger man. And Willie, he lights up when he tells me about his grandmother's home. Her house wasn't that big, but it was just packed Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, everything right now. And the more packed we are, the happier she was.

So, yeah. We're standing in an empty, overgrown lot right beside the road running in and out of the village. There's not much to see. No decaying structures or timberboards left from the road. the lively home where Willie grew up. Standing here, like this, reminds me of when my dad took me to Regina Beach, Saskatchewan, to show me where my Métis great-grandparents lived.

Willie tells me stories like my dad. You know how kids are all looking forward to electronic games, shuffling over Christmas? One of them is about his favorite Christmas with his grandfather, where he makes him a sled. And my grandmother, I call mom, Mary Blankwater bought me

three huskies that was my Christmas present and I called the dog Huey, Louie and Dewey my grandmother said where'd you come up with this name sir? I don't know, it just popped on my head

Where were the dogs? The dogs were all over the place as soon as I opened the door and I hear Huey and that's all I got and they come running right across the village there's a street named after Willie's grandmother. Mary Blackwater Drive. Yeah, that's my grandmother's name, Mary Blackwater.

She was a highly respected elder in the community, known for her massive garden. It's now the site of Kispiak's Elementary. Yeah, this is a big property. Yeah. But what did you grow? Everything. The soccer field outback is where Willie, his siblings and cousins would dig potatoes.

You said it was some of your best memories at this garden. Well, whenever we harvested, it was more like playtime because that's when all our cousins get together and we play around, but we work hard too and everything. And it was amazing. You know, like I said, I only wish and pray that, can go back to the same kind of life that I had before a residential school. If things were different, maybe Willie would be living in his grandmother's house today.

And it wouldn't be the empty lot on the road out of town. But that's not what happened. Willie doesn't see it coming and neither do his grandparents. It's the end of summer in 1965. Willie is 10. And just like all the other summers, he and his family leave their home to go work at the fish cannery a few hours away near Prince Rupert. Near the end of the season, he and his two brothers are loaded onto a bus. Willie doesn't remember how it happened or where or whether he got to say goodbye.

But he does remember that drive. They sit on the bus for two days, eating sandwiches and sandwiches. sleeping. The bus was fairly empty when we left in Trooper, but as we went along, I was getting fuller and fuller, and some kids didn't know how to use the bathroom by themselves, so they messed themselves, and it was pretty stink and everything. The bus just drove and drove, so no stuff on anywhere, just to pick up kids, that's it. As they drive on and on, Willie.

wrestles with his feelings and wonders if his grandparents sent him there. All kinds of hatred came up for my dad, my grandmother who I called mom, our community at Kishbyon. I thought nobody wanted me anymore. All the children are scared and no one knows exactly where they're going until they pull up at the Albany Indian residential school in the middle of Vancouver Island. Willie and his brothers are sent to different dorms. They never kept their families together.

Yeah, it must have been hard when they separated, you guys. Yeah. That security and that family foundation was broken from the moment we stepped on the bus. The first night, Willie doesn't sleep.

The dormitory is foreign, lined with bunk beds that house kids he's never met. Willie tosses on his thin mattress, feeling the wire springs beneath him. All I thought about when I was sleeping on there is how I used to sleep on a brush out in the Lachup. She was my grandfather with my dad. Things only get worse. The school is violent.

The staff hand out regular beatings. And so do the kids. I see the bigger kids hurting the younger ones. I was a feisty young child as I was brought up in a bush and brought up in the territory. My first antique was to protect the younger ones. Willie's dormitory supervisor is a man named Arthur Henry Plint. And out of everyone at this school, he's the most dangerous to Willie.

Within a month of Willie's arrival, it starts. We're all sleeping, And he woke me up and he said, Willie, your dad's on the phone, family emergency, he wants to talk to you. And that's how he got me through his room. And when we got to his room, then he said, oh, your dad's not on there. I just wanted to talk to you.

And that's when he started molesting me. Yeah, it happened once a week for about three years. Did you just live in terror of him that whole time? No, I learned to hate him. So does Willie tell anyone about the abuse? He says he tries more than once. He says he tells the principal, Mr. Andrews, who gives him the strap, and then sends him back to Plint for a second beating.

The first summer home, he tells his grandfather, who calls the school. but his grandparents have to send him back. It was literally the law for all indigenous children to attend Indian residential school. With no choice, Willie goes back that fall. And when he gets there, Plint beats him again for speaking up. When you go through pain, you adapt. My mind leaves my body and I start thinking about being back on our territory.

my grandmother, you know, and all of that, being out in a garden, all of those things to take immediate pain away. Willie is one of more than 150,000 children who went to Indian residential school. These kids were taken away from their communities, forbidden to speak their language, or practice their culture. And it all started with the first church-run school. in Brantford, Ontario back in 1831. Yes, that is a place I know well, the Mohawk Institute.

That is where some of my family went. There really isn't an indigenous person that hasn't been touched by this, and that's by design. It was an official policy that Canada would fund these church-run schools. At the time, the Secretary of State said, In order to educate the children properly, we must separate them from their families. Some people may say this is hard, but if we want to civilize them, we must do that. And so they opened more than 130 of these institutions from coast to coast to coast.

And this was all in service of Canada's first government, which had a stated plan to, quote, take the Indian out of the child. Yeah. But not all kids were going to let them. I spoke my language all their time. This is G.J. He's one of Willie's few friends at residential school. And we're calling him G.J. Because his identity is protected under a court publication ban.

And if you're on the back field, you're playing, you yell to one of your own family members or a friend in your language. One of the little stool, please will run down, tell the supervisor or the principal, and then your name's on the PA system. You go down there, you get whipped for speaking your language. But I didn't put... He got a lot more tortured than most of us did

because he was quite adamant about not letting go up his kitchen and ways. He told us that he, no matter how much they beat him, he wasn't going to let that go, and he didn't. Like Willie, G.J. has many nights where he is shaken awake by Flint and taken to his bedroom. How many times did you run away? Oh, God. You could be surprised. I did everything I can to get off that island and get home.

When we're hitchhiking, when you heard of Volkswagen, you stuck you some out because you know it'd be hippies. You get out there, they pick you up and take good care of you. Wait, hippies for real? Like, not just like one batch of hippies, but like multiple encounters with hippies? Yeah, multiple encounters. with hippies.

Remember now, Nanaimo was a hippie town, eh? Way back when. I hate to say it, but that's where we smoked their first joint. So hippies were good news when they were hitchhiking. Okay. Yeah, Volkswagen and hippies, they mean safety. But there were other sounds G.J. would need to listen out for. If you heard this big float, you know, it's either a Cadillac or a Colleg.

So you're hiding in the bush. Again and again, he gets picked up by the cops and brought right back. He says he tells them about the abuse and why he's running away. But they never believe him. G.J. faces a laundry list of punishments back at school. He's locked in a closet and made to stand for hours. He scrubs the school steps with a toothbrush. But G.J.'s most common punishment is in the kitchen, washing dishes and peeling potatoes.

Willie ends up there, too. My friends would call me sad sack because I used to peel potatoes all the time, right? But the boys also have time to think. While they're there peeling those potatoes, G.J. plots his next escape. And Willie plots revenge on plant. From the first day it happened, I had to figure away how to stop it. One day, while working in the kitchen, Willie has an idea. He knows how he can get back at plant.

When no one is looking, Willie takes a kitchen knife and hides it with a sharpener. He spends six months getting it ready, which brings us back to 13-year-old Willie. holding this knife to Arthur Clint's neck. By that time he was pissing himself and shitting himself, I said, I want you to leave me alone. But more importantly, I want you to leave all of us alone. Yeah, I'm not the only one. I know that for a fact that I just see your fucking ass creeping around in the dormitory.

If you touch any one of us anymore, I says, I will slice you up. I won't kill you. I will slice you up. Make you bleed, make you hurt. When you choose Athabasca University's online MBA program, you'll get more. Experience more flexibility to pursue your degree while balancing work and family.

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The following is paid content for Desjardin. Lately, it feels like everyone has a take on Gen Z. There's a misconception that everybody in our generation wants things handed to them. Which is so unfair. A lot of the circumstances that other generations got to have, we simply do not have. So when Dejordan asked me to go out and hear directly from young people, I was all in. Because between sky-high rent, $10 lottes, and the AI Revolution, got a lot to unpack. We went out to see what Gen Z's reality actually looks like, and we made a web series of

of it. It'll be on CBC Gem. It's called Countess In, and honestly, I think you guys are going to love it. At age 13, Willie Blackwater is a student at Albany Indian Residential School. After years of sexual abuse from his dormitory supervisor, Arthur Henry Plint, Willie holds a knife to his throat and demands that he stop. So, Jackie, does it work? Willie says it does. Plint never touches him again. But that's not the only thing he wants.

Willie's heard of this boarding program where kids live with local families instead of at the school. He tells Plint he wants to be boarded out. And he is. Willie moves in with a local New Chonnell family the following year. This family, the Watts, treat them like a son. It was completely different. It brought the idea. of family back.

Although he keeps attending the school, Willie's worst days and nights are behind him. He falls in love with the Watts' daughter. We even plan to get married after graduation. But at the same time, Willie is struggling to cope. He was taken from his home at just 10 years old and endured years of sexual and physical abuse.

Now he looks for ways to a erase that pain. But nothing works. I used to go home in the summertime, and I started drinking. A lot of my friends at home feared me whenever I drank because I'm like a jackal and hide. When you get bruising to me, the memories of all the abuses, just come right in, and I take my anger out on people that I love. and my friends that I treasure and everything and beat the living crap out of them.

He doesn't want to hurt the family that took him in, especially their daughter. And the best way to do that, he says, is to protect the people he loves from himself. So he decides not to go back to the Watts and finish high school. So I think she was my first true love because I didn't want to hurt her

the way I heard. other woman that I win with after that. But the hurt just keeps on coming for Willie. He returns to the north and works at the fish cannery and then a logging camp. He tries to drown the pain and booze, but that isn't always enough. So he adds pills and pot to the mix. He thanks God for his deadly fear of needles that keeps him away from much harder drugs. Eventually, he meets a woman he will marry.

and they have a baby girl. For decades, Willie doesn't say a word about what happened at residential school. And it might have stayed that way, but one day, in 1994,

a cop shows up. It was a situation where I was at his door, at his house, and I'm opening up wounds that I'm sure he does not want to open up. This is Constable Al Franchuk. I spent 26 years in the RCMP, and most of my postings were all in British Columbia.

Al and Willie differ on how they first met, even on why. But Willie agrees. Al's version sounds a lot like him. I do remember going to Mr. Blackwater's house in Kitsagucla. So I pulled into his driveway. I parked the police car. I happened to look in my review mirror, and I was just making sure that I would,

was respectable, like I didn't have anything on my face and stuff like that. And when I went up the stairs, he opened the door, and I introduced myself, and he looked at me, he says, so is your nose clean? And I said, yeah, it is, actually. It started laughing, right? No. He got a good memory, eh? I like to joke with everybody.

So I don't know if that was a joke or what, so. But the laughter doesn't last. Al is here to ask Willie about the one thing he never talks about. Just recently, Al got a call from down south. RCMP are looking into Plint. They need Al to talk to some former Albany Indian residential school students in the area. Plint is being investigated for sexual abuse. But he says, I do want to ask you, Willie.

He just, have you ever been sexually abused? That's all he said, and I just broke down crying. I cried for about half an hour, I think. Then he says, do you want to press charges against a perpetrator? After Willie leaves that school, he's kept what's happened to him a secret, so it's been decades. So why now? Why tell this cop? I wanted to know the same thing, and Willie has a simple answer.

The trust came because that's the first human being that ever asked me if I ever had been sexually abused, so I don't think that man realizes the immense impact that he had. Obviously, he was on his mind, all his life of what happened to him, and then he was ready to talk about it. So Willie goes down to the police station and makes a statement. And you said this is part of a bigger investigation. Yeah, so Willie and others in the community and across BC are starting to speak up about Plint. And the cops are finally the ones that are believing them.

Arthur Plint, the former supervisor of a poor child, Burney residential school, had pleaded guilty to 18 charges. of sexually abusing native boys. It's March, 1995, and Plint is in a Port Albany courtroom. Also in the courtroom are many of the men he abused when they were just boys. As little as six.

Clint is separated from the room in a prisoner's dock. He was in, looked like a cage. He was sitting in a cage from the best of my memory. Willie sits in the courtroom, GJ2, and while Willie doesn't take the stand, he knows the statement he gave Al is one of many that helped lead to Plint's guilty plea. Still, for some victims, their written statements aren't enough. They want to tell the judge themselves, the terror Plint inflicted upon them in the many years a struggle that followed.

It was a rare and dramatic moment. A man confronting his abuser in a British Columbia courtroom. Art Thompson takes the stand. He comes armed in regalia, a cedar headband in two streaks of black paint down each cheek

to ward off evil. He's a renowned New Chonnell artist and spoke to CBC two days after Plint sentencing. Mr. Thompson, was it a difficult decision for you to make, to go into the courtroom, to go into the witness box and talk about your experience? Was that hard to decide to do that? It wasn't really hard for me.

There were seven of us as victims there that were charging a plant for a lot of these all 18 offenses. Right. Their pain was my pain because I was. brutally assaulted by this animal. I'm wondering if there was a connection, Mr. Thompson, between taking away your culture and abusing your body. Exactly. You know, the humiliation of it?

Yeah. You know, it perpetuates. It perpetuates. It goes into communities and it infects communities. It's like a disease. This man represents to me a scab. You have to peel off that scab to see what's underneath. so that you could apply your medicines to it to get rid of it.

And the medicines for me is law, you know, your law. Justice John Hogarth hears the victims loud and clear. I do not think that words can possibly project my concern with respect to what has been said. I do not hesitate to say, however, that so far as the victims of the accused in this matter are concerned, the Indian residential school system was nothing but a form of institutionalized pedophilia and the accused so far as they are concerned being children at the time was a sexual terrorist. At 77 years old, Plint is sentenced to 11 years in prison. He is convicted of 18 counts of sexual assault.

We're just in shock that he was actually found guilty, and then when we went out of court, there was a media out there, and they said, well, is this the end of it? Willie doesn't know what's to come, but he knows it isn't over. That's when we started thinking, well, we may have to think about taking this effort further and get the church and the government accountable for what happened to us and their institute. And this fight shifts into a new gear.

It's no longer about one guy. It's about a whole system that permitted abuse. Willie, G.J. and the others feel like Canada and the church need to be held responsible. So, they find a lawyer. Willie and some of the others said, what do we do now? And I said, well, that's up to you. And they said, well, we want to sue. Peter Grant is well known in Gittsand territory.

He was the lawyer for the hereditary chiefs in the landmark Delgamouk title case. Now, he's taking on something just as big. I thought, well, how can I refuse these? They have had no justice. How can I refuse these people? So we took it on. I told him, I don't know how we're to pay you, but we need to go through with this. It's a long shot.

I said, you know, I don't know if we'll even come close. So is this the first time that this kind of fight is happening? At this time in the mid-90s, similar cases are popping up across the country asking for accountability from the government. There's a big conversation about what actually happened at residential schools. But these aren't easy things to litigate. Compared to Willie and his friends, the church and the government have endless money and resources. Willie has no idea what's actually coming. The United Church in Canada did everything to break us,

did everything to make us like we're liars. This is not the reason why we're taking the bloody government of church to court to have more of our brother than I. I just wanted to quit. I just thought, this is bullshit. On the next episode of C-U. in court, we'll see the cost of taking on the system and the work it takes to change a country.

country. Part two of the story will be in your feed next week. If you or someone in your family are a survivor or an intergenerational survivor of the Indian residential school system, you can call the Indian Residential School Survivor Society at 1-800-7210066. You're listening to See You in Court, a podcast about the cases that changed Canada. The show is hosted and produced by me, Phelan Johnson. This episode was written and reported by Jackie McKay. Our producer is Claire Bonnyman. Catherine Rolson and Julia Pogel are our senior producers.

Sam McNulty is our sound designer. Carla Hilton is our executive producer, and special thanks to John Northcott and Jeff Collier for additional voice work. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.