Beating the Indian Out of the Child

"I'm asking the provincial and federal governments to add those two schools [St.John's and St.Joseph's Training Schools] to where they're looking for bodies of First Nations children who were sent to residential schools]."

"There were threats from other kids that if you weren't good, the brothers would kill you and you'd be buried in a little corner of the graveyard. Like a bogeyman story."

"I think I can say with almost absolute certainty that every single one of them [First Nations children] was abused. Some of them were beaten senseless. They beat them to unconsciousness, black and blue. I saw grown men beat little frail 11- and 12-year-olds into a pulp."

"I wouldn't be surprised if they killed some of those kids."

"I applaud the OPP [Ontario Provincial Police] for the investigation [reports of students who had 'disappeared', in 1990s], but  know they didn't use ground-penetrating radar and they didn't go back to look at the historical records of kids who weren't alive."

David McCann, 75, former ward, St.Joseph's Training School for Boys

The St. Joseph’s Training School for Boys opened in Alfred in 1933, directly beside St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. This statue of St. Joseph with a child was erected outside the church in 1934 with the inscription “Protegez nous.” Photo by Bruce Deachman /Postmedia

 

One man with a mission. A man who as a child was placed in a 'reform' school setting, like many other young people who acted out, misbehaved, were thought to be in need of segregation from their families and society at large, to be exposed to the stern treatment meted out at a 'school' whose purpose was to discipline them, teach them not to defy authority, to behave as they were ordered to, before they could be released back into society. These were reform schools meant to treat those in the general population whose behaviour fell into the category of juvenile delinquency, young people society felt unable to handle. Among the ward-inmatepopulation, one third was estimated to be of First Nations origins.

According to David McCann, these children of First Nations were placed in the reform school setting for the crimes of continuing to speak their aboriginal languages while at residential schools, of obdurate behaviour, of attempting to run away from the residential schools in a desperate bid to be reunited with their families and their tribes. He was involved several years back in formally approaching the Holy See to appeal to the pope for an apology "for the mental, physical and sexual abuse suffered by children, women and men at the hands of various Roman Catholic religious orders and clergy in the past".

In the 19th Century when the-then Government of Canada enacted legislation to make it law that all aboriginal children attend residential schools in an effort to integrate them into the general society, to make them fit to join society at large, leaving behind their original culture, heritage, language, family and clan, the plan was thought to represent a solution to the problem as it was then perceived, of First Nations resolutely insisting they would continue to respect their heritage by living on the land as they always had. Which meant living on government-supported reserve land, which made government responsible for providing housing, education, medical needs, potable water.

A situation that prevails to the present day, all of it inadequate for many reserves, while others have struck out independently to be self-supporting. But it is the residential school system that remains a living canker in the bitter memory of First Nations, many of whom never saw their children again, when childhood diseases took a dreadful toll and inadequate medical services were available at the residential schools, enacting a larger death count than within the general population. Recently at a number of residential school sites, ground-penetrating radar uncovered the presence of unmarked graves of child residential school inmates.

While the government mandated that children of aboriginal descent must attend the schools, the actual operation of the schools was handed over, along with government grants, to religious orders, most of which were of the Roman Catholic Church. Many children received good educations while at the schools and made successful lives for themselves, but many others suffered from poor and inadequate food allotted them, corporeal punishment meted out, loneliness and general emotional deprivation. Others were beaten, raped and others yet died of tuberculosis running rampant through First Nations communities.

With the discovery of graves of a thousand children uncovered at a number of provincial residential school sites, Canada has been shocked into facing the dire consequences of forcing children away from their families and their heritage, their language and culture, tearing them away from all that was familiar in an effort to prepare them to join a majority population unlike their own. Mr. McCann believes the investigations ongoing into residential school deaths should reach out to include the "disappeared" from reform schools.

He had himself been a ward at age 12 at the reform school 70 kilometres east of Ottawa for a two-year period in the late 1950s where, he said, he was raped and beaten routinely by members of the De La Salle Brothers of the Christian Schools, a lay order that operated both the St.Joseph's and St.John's reform schools. In 1989 Mr. McCann spoke publicly for the first time of what had occurred at St.Joseph's, leading hundreds of other former students to share their own stories of abuse. Criminal trials followed, with convictions of 20 of the order's brothers.

The children at the reform schools, he stresses, were five- to 15-year-old "castaways", sent on to the two reform schools for the crime of wanting to be who and what they were. He was at one point chairman of the Helpline organization representing over 1,600 former students at the two reformatories. It hadn't occurred to him at the time to think about those students who failed to survive their ordeal of reformatory life.  

 

David McCann as a boy

"I never focused on the kids who weren't alive. We didn't delver into that history. My focus was on helping those who were alive", he explains.

"But this is part of the residential schools story. There were between 2,000 and 3,000 First Nations kids at St.Joseph's over the years, and I know they didn't all go home. And whoever is looking into the residential schools should look into those kids and make sure they get their names back."

"They deserve nothing less, their families deserve nothing less and the First Nations deserve nothing less."

"When I die, my family will bury me alongside my parents." "Those kids don't deserve to lie in unmarked graves in Alfred, Ontario."
"They just don't."