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What happened to the children?--A collaborative project


Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is overseeing something called the Missing Children Project--a bold attempt to track and record the fate of every indigenous child who passed through the notorious residential school system. It's a kind of census of calamity. What follows is the framework of one story. I'd like to collect many more. If you have personal knowledge of a child who died while attending a residential school, and whose true story has never been fully told, please contact me at adams.claude@gmail.com, or post a comment to this blog. In so doing, you will be adding to the documentation of a sad chapter in Canada's history.

Jack Lacerte was barely three years old when it happened, but he has a vivid recollection of the day back in 1937 when the two priests knocked on the door of his home in Fraser Lake, B.C. The black-robed clerics wanted to speak to Jack’s dad Philippe, a caretaker at the local residential school.

Two days earlier, on New Year’s Day, four young homesick boys had left the Lajac School without permission. The youngest was seven years old. The eldest, nine. It was dark, and 20-below zero, but they missed their parents so they sneaked out of the school and started walking home, across the lake. By midnight, police later said, all four had frozen to death within a kilometer or two of their destination. But their bodies would lay in the snow for more than 16 hours before police and local townspeople even mounted a search party. (See photo above.) Their names were Andrew Paul (8), John Michel Jack (7), Justa Maurice (8), and Alan Willie (9). A fifth boy, Paul Alex (10) left the school with them that night, but returned on his own.

“Indian Affairs is sending investigators to look into this tragedy,” the priests told Phillip Lacerte, standing in the doorway. “They’ll be asking questions. You knew the boys. We want to make sure you have the story right. We’re here to tell you what we want you to say.”

Jack says his father objected. He told the priests he was raised in a Catholic school in Quebec, that he couldn’t tell a lie. The priests said he had 24 hours to consider his refusal to co-operate. But Philippe was adamant. He couldn’t take part in a cover-up. He realized that what he had to say about the treatment of the children at Lejac would reflect badly on his black-robed superiors. So he took a stand on principle, but it carried a bitter price: That same day, Philippe Lacerte the school terminated his job, and he and his family were thrown out of their home on school property. All records of his employment at the school were erased. Jack Lacerte says his father sank into depression, and became an alcoholic. He died in a work accident in the 1950s.

Meanwhile, the full story of the Indian boys—why they ran away, why it took nearly a day before anybody started to look for them—has never been told: One more grim, shameful and incomplete chapter in the history of Canada’s residential schools.

* * * *

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has a profoundly difficult mandate: to bring some kind of emotional closure to the survivors the 130 Indian residential schools. There are approximately 80,000 of these survivors, many of them past the age of 60, and almost all of them carry the psychic (and sometimes physical) scars of their experience. They have received compensation, and counseling, and an apology from the government and the churches.

But the TRC’s most challenging task may involve not the living, but rather the dead. Its Missing Children Project, headed by Ontario historian John Milloy, is seeking to create a comprehensive record of every child who never returned home. What are the numbers, 5000? Or, as some suggest, as many as 50,000? Did they die from TB or malnutrition? Where are the medical records? Did they die while fleeing abuse at the hands of their teachers? Where are they buried? Or if they survived, did they return to their homes, or were they passed on to foster parents?

Why should we concern ourselves with things that happened 70 or 80 years ago? What relevance do events like the Lejac incident have today? Milloy sees his project as a fundamental historical settling-of-accounts. For Canada’s aboriginal peoples, though, it’s much more than statistics. Says native activist Maggie Hodgson: “It is so important to know how we came to this place of collective grief. If we have these figures, then our people can begin to talk about their own holocaust.”

The challenges of the Missing Children’s Project are many: the problem of lost (or destroyed) records, the failing memory of the survivors, the missing graveyards and the unmarked graves, the agonies of the families, like the Lacertes, who were indirect victims of the schools policy. Was this a genocide, as some suggest, or a monumental act of carelessness, as Milloy characterizes it?

Who am I?

A year ago I did a long investigation for Reader’s Digest magazine on the inadequacies of the compensation package that the Canadian government gave to the survivors of the residential schools. I got to know the players, and in my interviews with them, one question kept coming up: What happened to those many thousands of children who didn’t come home? I promised myself that I would try to answer this question, and I got to know people like John Milloy, and Maggie Hodgson. And people like Kevin Annett, a defrocked Anglican minister who claims the schools were part of was a deadly conspiracy. That’s an extreme view, which I don’t subscribe to, but many of Annett’s questions have not yet been satisfactorily answered.

Why should you care?

The residential schools are one of the darkest parts of 20th century Canadian history, and what they produced are at the heart of the country’s aboriginal problem. We’ll never understand the alienation of a million aboriginal Canadians, until we understand that impulses that created and maintained these schools, and what they did to several generations of children, whose deaths live in us all.

10 comments:

Linda Youngson said...

I care!

I came across your blog looking for info on Lajac Residential School - The photo shocked me BUT I believe people need to see evidence such as this to believe that such horrific things really did happen.

Preparing for a presentation in a university course, I went to the archives in Halifax, Nova Scotia to get photocopies of the scalping orders for Native scalps of 2 governor of Nova Scotia, Governor Edward Cornwallis in 1749 and 1750 and Governor Charles Lawrence in 1756.

Unfortunately, I knew without this evidence most people would not believe me.

You are brave to allow comments - I have found most comments to Aboriginal stories are nasty, unsympathetic, vicious and hateful.

For some reason, it seems that Native people are relegated to the bottom of the rung. How often do you see Aboriginal people in ads or as news anchors etc.?

It is such a shame that we tolerate this in Canada - that the Native peoples of Canada are not even given the respect we give to all the other people whose ancestors come from around the world.

Thanks for this article!

Please put a site search option on your blog - It is an option you have now with blogspot. It will help me find related articles of your in the future.

mandy said...

It is very interesting to read stories like this that really did happened in the past but was not told for everyone to know and learn from. I know there are many good boarding schools and residential schools out there and I also know that you have a reputation to keep, and all I wish is that you are not like any other that will ruin the reputation. Let us be practical, parents send their students to you in order for them to learn and that’s it! All you have to do is to train them to become a better person, educate them and introduce them with moral values no more no less.

Anonymous said...

Is this a bad dream???? :(
I hurt that this is what my history is.

Unknown said...

canada does not have an "aboriginal problem" anymore than germany had a "jew" problem....the problem lies with the abusers, not the abused. victims of genocide should not be labeled a "problem".

Jennica Hager said...

Thank you Mr.Adams for your thoughts about the Missing Children. I'm aboriginal myself, and to hear that young children couldn't live on to become adults and to not fulfill their lives is hurtful. To see that someone is willing to find out about the missing ones is very thoughtful.
Thank you for the article.

Anonymous said...

Thank you. I had family in Lejac.

Res School Surivivor said...

I thank you for this article, there needs to be more of these and an investigation into the names of all those who worked there and partakes in this abuse. Let the public know who these people were and for the innocent children who were abused, and those who died at these schools, to know that it was not their fault.

Anonymous said...

The US is no better than Canada and has made no reparations to the Natives here in my opinion. So very, very sad. My schooling in the 60's and 70's was so white washed it is ridiculous. I hope for peace in all the natives of the America's.
Marge Cullen
Minneapolis, MN

Unknown said...

I am am author of a book that is coming out shortly. Where would I get permission to use this in my book.

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