We Always Remember: Circle for Northern Residential School Survivors is working to protect, promote and preserve stories and memories of former NWT Residential School students and their families. The group is continuing to strengthen ties within communities and build relationships with area leadership, but the situation was different not so long ago.
Ten years ago, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released their final report and the 94 Calls to Action. About three years ago, the TRC recommended that each capital city in Canada, including Yellowknife create a monument to remember the residential school experience.
“Three years ago, the current territorial government started working on it and decided to include a number of us who went to residential school. So that work to create a monument was going very, very slow. And a number of us were getting concerned that the process wasn’t working,” explained Bob Overvold, who is one of the founders of the group.
It took another year before things started to happen, said Overvold.
“Then, about a year ago, we had an election, the government changed and then for a while, we did not hear anything.”
The Survivors approached Marie Wilson, who is a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner, and requested that she speak to the premier to hear about what was going on with the monument.
Wilson was able to arrange a meeting with leadership and found that when the new government came in last November, they had not been briefed on the Truth and Reconciliation Recommendations, explained Overvold.
“And in particular, the request for each provincial government and territorial government to build a monument, they were totally unaware of it.”
Discussions with the premier’s senior people followed, with Overvold now taking part in those conversations.
“They agreed to put one of their senior people in charge of it and work with us,” explained Overvold.
It was around that time that the Survivors formed a Circle, We Always Remember (WAR) as a formal group, including Intergenerational Survivors, to mobilize the TRC’s Calls to Action.
“What we thought is that if we organized as a group, it would be more effective in terms of engaging with the GNWT, whereas before we were just, random individuals, giving our thoughts. So, if the GNWT had an idea, some of us may agree with that, others may not. So our thinking was, if we formed an organization and worked as a group, then we’d be in a better position to affect the type of monument that we thought would be appropriate for the GNWT to build,” said Overvold.
“That’s what started us on creating a Circle of former Residential School Survivors and Intergenerational Survivors. So we continue in order to work with the GNWT and the working relationship is going very well. We’re on track in terms of getting the monument built before their term runs out,” continued Overvold.
The group is continuing to build a relationship with representatives of the GNWT.
“We’re trying to work with communities and we’re still in our very early stages of our organization.”
The Circle advocates for the longterm awareness of the legacy and impact of residential schools on generations of Indigenous people in the territory.
“We will honor the children who survived residential schools and those who never came home through the creation of a monument, resource centre, and related events and activities,” said Overvold.
The organization works with former residential students and their families to heal and share their experiences.
To date, the TRC has documented 33 schools that operated as residential schools in the North. Overvold pointed out that on a per capita basis, more people in the NWT attended residential school than anywhere else in Canada.
And Overvold is among the Survivors who attended a residential school in the territory.
A group of fellow Survivors from Fort Good Hope, who are now in their 80s and early 90s, recently spoke together with Overvold about their experiences in residential school. Their time at the schools go back many years, but the group still remembers what they experienced and the families and communities they were torn away from.
“When they were very young in the 40s, some of them 4 years old, went and spent seven years there before they got home. They went in knowing the language and their culture and came home as one lady said, thinking they are white people now. So, my own view is the further you go back and look back in history and try to get a grasp and understanding of what that experience was, the more damaging was the experience for people, compared to those who went in recent times. Keeping in mind, the last residential school was shut down in the 90s I believe.”
The residential school system not only robbed Indigenous children of their childhood and took them away from the safety of their homes and communities, but also damaged or destroyed links to their traditional ways of life, their Indigenous cultures and languages.
Many children never made it back home, and the search to understand what happened to these children is ongoing. Thousands of children are known to have died due to starvation, disease, neglect and abuse while attending residential schools in Canada.
Just last month, the unmarked graves of five children and two adults were found on Mission Island. The sites were found as part of an investigation into the deaths of missing children who attended St. Joseph’s Residential School. The “mission school” was in operation on the island from 1857 to 1890 before the residential school was built in Fort Resolution which eventually became known as St. Joseph’s Residential School.
The children who were forced to attend St. Joseph’s and schools like it, came from communities across the territory. It was Canada’s first prime minister, John A Mcdonald, who initiated the residential school system with the intention of cultural genocide. The government enlisted the churches to run the schools.
According to the Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, St. Joseph’s was run as a mission school between 1903 to 1957.
During the over 50 years of the school’s operation, documented experiences of periodic fires, outbreaks of illness, an acetylene plant explosion, and food shortages took place.
“A hospital school associated with the mission operated near the residential school until 1939. In the 1940s and 1950s inspection reports noted the dilapidated state of the school buildings. The school was closed in December 1957,” notes the TRC.
To date, the names of 75 students and the date of their death while attending the school are documented on the TRC memorial page, but the number of children who died or never returned home is likely much more.
According to the data collected by researchers, another residential school in Yellowknife, known as Akaitcho Hall was overcrowded and it’s facilities inadequate to hold the number of students forced to live there when the building opened in 1958.
Four students are known to have died while attending Akaicho Hall, which officially closed in 1994.
The violence of colonization did not end when the last documented residential schools closed in the 1990s. The harms that were inflicted continue to have devastating impacts on Survivors and Intergenerational Survivors.
“Young people, even adults their parents, their grandparents, who went to residential school in the 30s and 40s, continue to experience intergenerational issues. There were no drugs back then, but there was a lot of drinking. People came back and really got into alcohol and it created family problems,” explained Overvold.
The impacts and effects on Survivors and Intergenerational Survivors can be traced back to the residential school experience.
“Our communities, Indigenous communities, small communities believe we’re in a crisis right now, in terms of the drug and alcohol problem, which seems to be getting worse and affecting young people in in particular.”
A crisis line is available for Survivors, Intergenerational Survivors and those affected by residential schools 24-hours a day, seven days a week at 1-866-925-4419. A counselling and crisis support is helpline is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week at 1-855-242-3310 or at www.hopeforwellness.ca.
