We Were Children

Within Canada's history up until the end of the twentieth century, it was government policy for indigenous children to attend boarding aka residential schools run by various denominations of the Christian faith. The policy was designed to assimilate indigenous children into western culture purportedly to give them the opportunity for a better future, the inherent assumption being that western society was superior and what may have been said behind closed door of those in authority that the indigenous peoples were dirty (in all contexts of that word) savages, their culture which should be wiped off the face of the earth. Some indigenous parents welcomed the move in believing the inherent assumption, especially that the children would be getting an education, but in cases where parents did not want to send their children, the children were forcibly taken. Many if not most of the children ended up facing abuse at the hands of the people in authority at the schools, both emotional and physical, the latter including sexual. Many children ended up dying while in "custody" sometimes due to the poor conditions at the schools (i.e. in the spread of such diseases as tuberculosis), they being buried in unmarked graves on site with their parents and/or other family never knowing what happened to them. Because of that abuse, many of the children grew into adults with substance abuses as means to cope, while others committed suicide. Two of the residential school "survivors", Lyna Hart and Glen Anaquod, who attended schools in Manitoba and Saskatchewan respectively in the late 1950s and early 1960s - the height of the policy in what is often coined the residential school "sweep" - recount their residential school experiences as those experiences are concurrently dramatized.