The Daily - State-Sponsored Abuse in Canada

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

This episode contains accounts of physical and sexual abuse.The residential school system was devised by the Canadian government under the auspices of education, but very little education took place. Instead, children were taken from their families in order to wipe out Indigenous languages and culture.In 1959, when Garry Gottfriedson was 5, he was sent to one such school: Kamloops Indian Residential School.On today’s episode, we hear his story and explore how Indigenous activists have agitated for accountability and redress from the federal government.Guest: Ian Austen, a correspondent covering Canada for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Two gruesome discoveries of what Indigenous groups say are the remains of hundreds of children have strengthened the groups’ resolve to hold Canada accountable for a long-hidden brutal history.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. When the remains of more than 200 children were recently found on the grounds of a boarding school in Canada, it forced the entire country to confront one of its darkest chapters, the state-sponsored abuse of Indigenous people. forced the entire country to confront one of its darkest chapters, the state-sponsored abuse of indigenous people. Today, Astead Herndon spoke with our colleague Ian Austin about one survivor's story.

It's Friday, July 16th. So Ian, tell me about this recent trip you went on. Well, I went out to the western Canadian province of British Columbia, up into the mountains there to a small city called Kamloops, to meet a man named Gary Godforsen. Hey! Who's a member of the Kamloops Tsheshuvame First Nation just across the river. And we got into his Ford F-150 pickup truck.

Yeah, because we're going to go up here. To head up into the mountains surrounding Kamloops. Okay, you guys ready? Yeah, let's go. Where his grandmother used to go on a horse and buggy every summer to a cabin up there. It's just right down over there, so. What are we looking for to dig? It's called Sweetwater.

I don't know the English name for it. We were trailed by two other pickups containing Nisa's nephews and other members of Gary's extended family who wanted to find a particular medicinal root. The top part, I mean, the leaves are used for old tobacco, but the root is also... Gary's in his 60s, looks much younger, and he teaches writing at the local university. He's a well-known poet but within his own community, his Indigenous community, he's what's called a knowledge keeper, somebody who passes along the language, the traditional cultural practices to younger generations. I think there's a big rock there. And we kind of made our way up this goat track.

I mean, I honestly didn't think that the pickup trucks could make it. Eventually, we stopped the trucks and all got out. And Gary realized that we were a couple of weeks too late to harvest the root we were looking for. So the two of us sought out the shade of one of the few large trees up there and sat down and talked about what it was like growing up in those mountains. Well, we grew up in a rodeo ranching family, so we were all cowboys, but, you know, I mean, professional cowboys. Some of his brothers, his dad, they were all rodeo champions throughout North America. My dad won the Calgary Stampede in 1945. In what?

In Saddle Bronc and Wild Horse Race, yeah. Your dad must have been a tough guy. Oh, yeah. My mom was a jockey. That's how they met. His mother was also a bit of a force. They say she was a better shot than my dad, but she would never belittle my dad. She was generally regarded, he told me, as the best sharpshooter in the First Nation. She would shoot the deer. Boom.

But she'd say, oh, your dad shot that. She'd tell everybody, Gus shot that. Gary was one of 13 in his very tight-knit family. But in 1959, when he was five, like most of his brothers and sisters before him, Gary was required under federal law to attend a school called the Kamloops Indian Residential School. And what can you tell me about this school?

It was a boarding school set up in the late 1800s, and it was part of a very broad system the federal government devised, ostensibly for education, but it was really about taking Indigenous children away from their families to wipe out Indigenous languages, wipe out Indigenous culture, Christianize them, assimilate them. Most of the schools were run by churches, in the majority of cases, the Roman Catholic Church. So they were staffed by priests, nuns, monks who were known as brothers. And that certainly was the case at Gary's school. Well, the residential school, so the brick buildings were the dorms.

Right. Okay. He actually went to the largest residential school in the country. It had 500 students at its peak. It's a large, red, imposing brick building on a hilltop with a huge apple orchard flowing off to one side. We didn't really learn much in that school, that's for sure. I'll tell you that for a fact. But we sure knew how to make sure gardens were cleaned and how to gather apples.

They call them windfalls. It was not much of a school in his experience. I mean, even the young children were put to work picking apples. It was crowded. At mealtime, you had to fight like hell. Other kids would steal your food, you know. You learned how to eat like this. if your plate's there you you just ate like that guarding and guarding it yeah so kids kids had to steal because they were starving

there was a lot of fighting a lot of a lot of anger. You know, I mean, pretty much the rottenness. But beyond the minimal education, the lack of food, Gary also told me some things that were difficult to hear and they were difficult for him to talk about. Like the older kids that knew us from the reserve said, you guys never stay by yourselves. You make sure, you know, two or three always stay together.

They wouldn't let us be by ourselves. So, but I found out one day why, because we took off, you know, like a little kid, you want to go to the bathroom. We had to go into that old brick building downstairs because that's where the boys' bathroom was. And me and my cousin went, and right beside where the boys' bathroom was, was where one of the brothers' rooms was, sleeping quarters were. So we heard one of our friends in there crying and kind of like screaming, but it was muffled too.

And the door was open. That's the first time I've seen sexual abuse there. And I think I was, like, in grade two. And it was one of our friends, so he was in our class. He was with one of the brothers in there. Oh, God. He's only, like, about seven years old or something. Did you even know what was happening?

No, I didn't know what was happening. We went running out. Yeah. Did that brother, was he still at the school? Yeah. Nothing was ever done about it. And then nobody wanted to be what they call an altar boy because they were considered to be the favorites of the priests.

And so they did everything bad not to be an altar boy. Favorites in ways you don't want to think about. Yeah. Sexual favorites. So that's what they were. The to think about. Yeah. Sexual favorites. So that's what they were. The toys for them. Yeah. So we all, they would tell us, be bad.

Be bad if you have to be. Get a strap if you have to, but don't be an altar boy, you know. How do they, did the nuns aid in this? Did they just turn away? The nuns were just as cruel. Yeah, the nuns were just as cruel. Sister Mary Bernadette, I remember in grade three, we had a girl come in. She was a Chilcotin girl. And my God, that girl was... When that nun, Sister Mary Bernadette, beat that girl, she was trying to force her to speak

English and that girl couldn't speak English because she was raised way back in Chilcotin country. Never, ever, ever been out of her home. Anyway, she got captured and brought to our school. And she tried to make that girl say a sentence and she couldn't because she wasn't familiar with English sounds. She'd put a Bible on her hand, on each of her hands. If she couldn't say it, bang, she got strapped on the back. And that girl collapsed. And she disappeared.

And then I was asking some friends from Chilcotin country, do you remember this girl's, yep, what happened to her? She ran away, she came home and she committed suicide. But she was beaten so bad, that girl. So the nuns were just as cruel, just as cruel. Gary said that at some point when they were home for holidays or the summer, his mother began to notice some changes in his older sisters. He didn't tell me exactly what the changes were, but they were clearly very worrying for his parents. So his mother got together with some other women in the First Nation, and they crossed the river over to Kamloops, the white city, and their message was pretty clear. They said, we're not

sending our children back to the residential school. Our children belong in the school you send your children to. And amazingly, for the time, this was in the 60s, they won. They succeeded. But that was only the beginning of it. Because a much bigger battle against the entire residential school system was yet to come. We'll be right back. So, Ian, you were telling us about the extraordinary story of Gary and his siblings who were in these residential schools, these places where really horrific abuse was taking place, and the extraordinary efforts by his mother to remove her children from these schools. After the family left, what happened to the system? left. What happened to the system? So by 1969, the federal government, which had set it up, got rid of the churches and took over direct management of the schools and instituted reforms.

But the system basically gradually fell apart through the 70s, 80s, and into the 90s. Was anyone held responsible, though, for that horrific abuse that Gary described? responsible, though, for that horrific abuse that Gary described? Well, not at first, but the sort of decline and fall of the residential schools coincided with a dramatic rise in activism among Indigenous people in Canada. Part of this activism involved going to court to seek redress for past injustices and abuses against Indigenous people. going to court to seek redress for past injustices and abuses against Indigenous people. And right at the top of the list of injustices and abuses was the residential school system. So a number of former students all across the country began filing legal actions against both the churches, the federal government. And that eventually led to a landmark decision by the

Supreme Court of Canada siding with some Indigenous plaintiffs. That, in turn, kicked off negotiations with the federal government. And within a year, a settlement had been negotiated on the thousands of lawsuits, the largest class action settlement in Canadian history. And what was in that settlement? Well, everyone who attended the schools received some form of damages. People who were abused qualified for extra damages, but that was very controversial because it involved them having to testify about what happened to them. And it's just way too traumatic for many people, including Gary. They just won't go there. The settlement went way

beyond just awarding damages. The House will now proceed to statements by Ministers. The Right Honourable Prime Minister. In 2008, the settlement led to then Prime Minister Stephen Harper standing in a packed House of Commons. Thank you very much. Mr. Speaker, I stand before you today to offer an apology to former students of Indian residential schools. The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history. And he didn't just apologize for the system and its abuses. Two primary objectives of the residential school system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their home, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture.

He also acknowledged that it had been set up to destroy Indigenous peoples' languages and their cultures. There is no place in Canada for the attitudes that inspired the Indian residential school system to ever prevail again. God bless all of you. God bless our land. On top of that, the settlement set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It hired an army of historians to comb through the written record,

the government documents, and all of that. But more important, its commissioners traveled the country to communities big and small and took the testimony of 6,700 people, many of them former students, many of them who had never, never revealed to anyone what had happened to them at the schools and what the consequences of that had been on their lives. So what actually came out of the commission? It produced this huge multi-volume report that in elaborate detail laid out the history of the schools and the terrible abuses that occurred there. They were stories that

in many ways echoed what Gary told me. And it had a pretty blunt conclusion there. It said that this system was a system of cultural genocide. It also put out 94 calls to action to Canadians and their governments. Some of them were to deal with the lingering effects of residential schools on Indigenous people in their communities. Some of them were for broader reconciliation among Canadians. And then in another section, it brought up the question of the missing children. What do you mean, missing children? Well, the Commission found that large numbers of children went off to these schools and never came home, and no one knew why. It's important to remember that through the long history of these

schools, they were badly underfunded, overcrowded. The children were malnourished. They were kind of havens for infectious disease. The Spanish flu swept through them. Tuberculosis was rampant. On top of that, there were accidents. Many of these schools burned down. And there was abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse. So death was very, very common at these schools. Generations of survivors from the schools have told stories about the missing children, and they were largely dismissed. I mean, even leading newspapers in Canada in recent years have published op-eds casting doubt on the idea. And then... A devastating discovery has been made in Canada.

A little over a month ago... The remains of more than 200 children have been located. Some as young as three years old have been found buried near Canada's largest former residential school in Kamloops. News breaks that the remains of students were found in unmarked graves at a residential school in Kamloops. News breaks that the remains of students were found in unmarked graves at a residential school. This is such a dark chapter of history for Canada that needs to be told. This is going to be a staggering and heartbreaking moment in Canadian history. And the reason this came to light was that in the past few years, First Nations across Canada have been searching for their missing children. That included the First Nation in Kamloops, of which Gary's a member.

It invited in anthropologists and other scientists with new forms of ground-penetrating radar to search for the students' remains. And what they found shocked the nation. We're now utterly disgusted. There's no other word for it. It was proof of the missing children that no one could deny. How could this possibly have happened? How could it have gone neglected? How did they keep it a secret? Some as young as three years old had been taken from their parents and sent there and died there.

It's absolutely impossible for me to understand how it cannot be regarded as a major crime scene. The day after they found those, my brother Teddy, he phoned me. He says, you're going to come with me today. I said, okay, where are we going to go? He said, I just need you to come with me. After hearing about the discovery, Gary and his brother headed down to the school grounds where the remains had been found, partly for healing and partly to remember the children. We ran into a couple of older guys in their 70s, late 70s, and right away they start talking, and the one guy said, we had to go dig the graves. And the other one said, well, I was the one that had to chop holes in the river in the middle of winter.

And then we had to chop holes in the ice. He said, big holes in the ice. Then we got sent to the dorm. Then Gary told me a horrific story he heard there, one that fit a pattern of stories that I'd heard from other former students at other former residential schools. And then they were talking about, well, my cousin got pregnant.

We knew she was pregnant we were told that that baby was burnt in the incinerator and they're talking all in our language and I'm like I broke listening to these three men talk about that and my brother said listening to these three men talk about that.

And my brother said, I can't be here any longer. He said, I got to go. It's just unimaginable. You know? What do you think should be done for those children now? I mean, do their remains just stay in the ground? Should they be identified? Identifying them through DNA or through science is going to make it real because it'll give them a name.

Their names will come back. Their names will live. So it's worth the try. I mean, it'll be very traumatic. It'll be very, very traumatic. Absolutely. It's going to be horrifying. But I think it needs to be done. And I think by identifying these children,

their descendants, their relatives, will be more at peace. Because there's so many families out there that say, oh, my great uncle ran away never to come back. But maybe that great uncle is one of those bodies laying there. And there has to be closure. There has to be that peace somehow. There's a word in my language called which means for us to return to being human again. We've been beaten down so much over generations

and decade after decade. We're finding our own way back, and we are finding it back through the land, through this, through sitting in the mountains. Sitting in the shade of that tree up there on the mountain with Gary, surrounded by his extended family, one thing was very clear. You know, we're together, and we're out on the land.

I love being out on the land myself. The residential school system brought enormous harm. We'd go up there into the mountains, and we'd go get what medicines we needed. But it did not destroy Indigenous culture. And then, you know, they're always asking me, how do you say this uncle in our language? How do you say that in our language? You know?

Things like that. So it's... that's... that's what gives me hope. Canada doesn't give me any hope at all. It doesn't. But these guys give me hope. Thank you, Ian. Thank you, Ian. Thank you. Since the discovery of Indigenous children's graves in Kamloops,

similar unmarked graves have been found on the grounds of other residential schools across Canada. So far, the remains of more than 1,000 people have been found, most of them children, a number that is expected to grow as searches continue. We'll be right back. Thank you. The Times reports that daily infection numbers have increased at least 15% over the last two weeks in 49 different states, 19 of which report a doubling of daily cases. On Thursday, Los Angeles County said it would require masks be worn indoors regardless of vaccination status to limit the spread of the Delta variant. The county is averaging over 1,000 new cases per day, a 279 percent increase from the average two weeks ago. Today's episode was produced by Soraya Shockley,

Daniel Guimet, Chelsea Daniel, and Austin Mitchell, with help from Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Mike Benoit and Larissa Anderson, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.