Fly Away
Snow Goose
Transport to Fort
Providence residential school is only the beginning of their ordeal, for the
teachers believe it is their sworn duty to “kill the Indian inside.” All
attempts at escape are severely punished, but Yaotl and Sascho, along with two
others, will try, undertaking a journey of 900 kilometers across the Northwest
Territory. Like wild geese, brave hearts together, they are homeward bound.
Orange Shirt Day is a statutory holiday in Canada, which means that federal workers have the day off, but U.S. readers probably won't be familiar with it. Orange Shirt Day is the brain child of Phyllis (Jack) Webstad, a North Secwepemc woman. It honors those who, like herself, survived the Canadian Residential School system.
In 1973 her grandmother took six year old Phyllis to town to buy her some new clothes for school, and Phyllis chose a shiny orange shirt. In 1973, such bright "hippy" colors were fashionable and in many native communities across the Americas the color orange signified new beginnings and good fortune. Of course, when she arrived at school, she was stripped of all her clothes, including the precious brand new orange shirt, a shirt she would never see again, no matter how much she wept and begged. Phyllis would never see her grandmother's gift again.
I have read of far more harrowing stories of things that happened to children in these schools, while researching Fly Away Snow Goose. These schools, run by private religious organizations, were tasked with "civilizing" the indigenous children, which meant forcing the children--by means of corporal punishment--to speak only English or French and adopt Christianity. The children became unable to speak to their relatives, and thousands of years of culture vanished. When the children, now teens, were finally released, they found they no longer belonged, but had become strangers among their own people. At the same time, they were mostly trained for manual labor and still despised for being "Indian" in the white world.
Sexual, physical, and emotional abuse occurred in a system which government studiously ignored and barely funded. The brutalized older children in the schools were sometimes abetted by staff in their cruelties to younger ones. On the American side of the border, the mission of the residential school was frankly declared to be "to kill the Indian inside."
Sometimes more than culture and language was killed, too. Disease was a continual threat to the children, as so many students were herded together into old buildings without adequate sanitation, clean water, sufficient food, or heat. Influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis (69% of the students at one school) were endemic. Ground penetrating radar surveys recently done on the grounds of one large residential school in B.C., has raised suspicions about a large number of unmarked graves. In many cases, relatives were never notified about the death of a child.
Every Child Matters is the motto of the Orange Shirt movement. Sadly, this is a motto the world at large has yet to adopt.
~Juliet Waldron
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Before the filles du roi…Desperate to escape her past, Jeanne, a poor widow, accompanies a richer woman to Quebec. The sea voyage is long, one of privation and danger. In 1640, the decision to emigrate takes raw courage, but the struggling colony of Quebec, so far a collection of rough soldiers and half-wild fur traders, needs French women if it is ever to take firm root on the Canadian frontier.
