Vancouver Island is home to many seemingly idyllic Canadian Indian villages like this one, where bald eagles swirl overhead, deep fir and cedar forests scent the air and windy Nitinat Lake offers plenty of wild salmon, crab and trout for the 200 residents.
But among the island's forests and sheltered coves, Clarence Dennis drifted -- drinking, robbing and hurting his children. Daisy Edwards spent years in a stupor, working as a prostitute after being raped by her father. Jack George Thompson beat his family, stuck a pistol in his mouth and nearly pulled the trigger.
Their stories, like those of many others here, have a common thread: a childhood spent at one of the more than 100 residential schools for Canadian Indians financed for more than a century by the government to force assimilation.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
The abuses at the schools, the last of which was closed in 1986 and which were run by the Roman Catholic, Anglican, United and Presbyterian churches, are well documented. Lawsuits have been filed against the churches and the Canadian government.
With government aid, the villagers are trying to heal, mixing Western psychological tools with traditional religious ceremonies to try to draw a line on a history of abuse that they and social workers say has become a generational legacy.
Root of problems
PHOTO: NY TIMES
No comprehensive study has yet measured the full damage wrought by the schools. But a growing body of scholarly work suggests that their legacy is at the root of social ills in scores of native villages and among Indians who have migrated to large Canadian cities.
One government-financed study noted that almost a quarter of convicted pedophiles, rapists and those who committed incest are Canadian Indians, who make up about 3 percent of the population. The study concluded that there was a link between attendance at the schools and becoming a sex offender. (Canadian Indians were also more likely to be prosecuted, it said.)
The therapies have ranged from individual or group sessions with licensed professionals to traditional native prayer sessions and ritual bathing in rivers and streams. Help centers provide treatments like drumming ceremonies and sweat lodges, the traditional cleansing saunas set up in domed tents where people can confess and chant.
Clarence Dennis, 62, has been homeless and a drifter for most of his life since he left the Port Alberni Indian residential school, which was run by the United Church of Canada. He spent 18 years in jail for robbery and assault. No relationship with a woman ever worked out for long. "I couldn't have sex without thinking about being raped," Dennis said.
He said that Arthur Henry Plint, who supervised the Port Alberni school during two five-year intervals until 1968, and another school administrator took turns raping him, beginning when he was 7. Plint was sentenced in 1995 to 11 years in prison for 16 counts of indecent assault.
Recently, Dennis gathered the courage to return to the school for a cleansing ceremony with his 29-year-old son, David, whom he had abandoned. His face streaked with charcoal, his forehead and midsection wrapped in spruce branches, he closed his eyes as his off-and-on girlfriend sang an Indian song about a deer who escapes a hunter.
"I have been violent with my children and I didn't know where it came from," David Dennis said, adding that he, too, has gone for counseling after years of misbehavior and three months in jail for auto theft. "Every one of my brothers is disrespectful to women. How do you count the casualties on this battlefield?"
Widespread pain
In all, 93,000 living Canadian Indians, nearly 1 in 10, are estimated to have passed through the schools, and hundreds of thousands more have suffered as the children of survivors.
Here in Ditidaht, all those older than 45 attended the Port Alberni school, and all those younger were brought up by a parent or grandparent who had gone to the school and had suffered abuse there. In addition to attacks by school personnel, some students were were raped or abused by older students.
"They put us in the residential schools that taught us violence and now they take away our children for slapping them the way we were slapped at the schools," said Maureen Knighton, 41, who told other women in a healing group how social workers took two of her three children away for three months in 1996 when her drinking got out of hand.
In between chanting, burning sage and cedar in an abalone shell, and brushing themselves with an eagle feather, the women recalled how a government agent forcibly took them from their parents. They said they were made to change their names, give up their language and eat worm-infested porridge, all under the threat of lashings and other punishment.
A fuller accounting of the abuses is beginning to take place in the courts, and in 1998 a former minister of Indian Affairs formally apologized for the residential school program, an acknowledgment many Canadian Indians consider inadequate.
At the same time, the government set up the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, an agency backed by C$250 million to study the legacy of the schools and distribute grants for healing projects for 130,000 Indian people. But the foundation has been forced to trim its operations for lack of funds as the money runs out.
Some native leaders are pressing to take the government to an international court on human rights charges to embarrass it into providing more money.
With the money they have received, public schools in Indian communities are teaching native languages and dance to shore up cultural identity and pride. Scores of spiritual workers are visiting villages to spread the message of healing.
Daisy Edwards, 48, is one such counselor. Visiting a women's therapy group in Ditidaht recently, she recalled her years as a prostitute and the rape by her father, who also attended a residential school. Her path to healing, she said, began the day she stopped herself from beating her daughter. "I looked down to the floor and I saw this terrified face and my daughter saying, `Mommy, Mommy don't hurt me,'" she said. "I spent the next 13 years trying to figure out how I got there."
Appointing blame
More than 1,000 residential school victims have received court compensation in the last decade, and 12,000 more have filed claims. Three years ago the Canadian government set up the Office of Residential Schools Resolution to deal with the issue and distribute small out-of-court settlements.
In early February, the government of Prime Minister Paul Martin announced that it would appeal a lower British Columbia court ruling that held the national government entirely liable for a local residential school settlement. (The government wants churches held accountable as well.) Canadian Indian leaders say the decision was salt in their wounds.
"They broke down our people," said Jack George Thompson, 56, Ditidaht's elected chief. He is preparing to sue the government for damages, saying that he was repeatedly beaten and raped at the Port Alberni school.
Thompson said he drank excessively for 40 years. Now that he is sober he is trying to negotiate new treaty land rights and lobby for more aid. "The government and most people in Canada haven't come to terms with the residential schools," he said. "They don't believe our stories, and while they take credit for pushing human rights and aiding people who suffer in Africa they refuse to look in their own backyard."
In the meantime, healing will come slowly. The complexities of the task, Thompson said, are apparent when he and other village elders gather their people to talk about what kind of touching is appropriate between father and daughter.
A number of the men just shake their heads and walk away, he said. "They don't want to hear about it, because that's just their way."
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and