Thank you for allowing me to be here today to speak.
I grew up on the Muskowekwan First Nation located in Saskatchewan. The residential school on my reserve was operating from 1889 to 1997. The public school in the nearest town was a place for learning for the reserve children, the residential school children, and the farm and town children.
My home was about four kilometres from the residential school. I could see the lights from my deck at night. Many children ran away from this school and encountered a really rough terrain in my backyard. Sloughs, mud, uneven ice in the winter, and a dumpsite made it a dangerous path for children to take who ran away. We lost some of our community members in this area due to the conditions in the winter.
My earliest memories were of police searching this area if the staff at the residential school couldn't find a missing child or missing children who had run away. The residential school children made friends with the reserve kids, and many of the older kids in my community actually housed these children for as long as they could.
The children did not want to be there. Many of them did not return; many of them committed suicide while they were on visits with their family. My brother lost his friend in grade 1, and I lost one of mine in grade 4.
The children who left the residential school did so with little education; many left with a grade 6 or grade 7 education. Many ended up in the child and family services system and many committed suicide or passed in tragic accidents. Most ended up with drug and alcohol addictions and are homeless or working in the sex trade today.
Talking about residential schools is not a comfortable conversation, but we must talk about the devastating impacts these schools had on indigenous families and communities. We must come up with solutions to the social and economic issues we face today.
It's been 25 years since the residential school closed on my reserve. We have no supports in place for anyone who attended this school. We don't have elder resources, timely mental health supports, or even addiction and health services. The nearest place to access these services is either 45 minutes or an hour and a half away from my community.
I don't think the committee will ever be non-partisan, so let's make sure that we include people from all different viewpoints and include people of all ages, because the general public seems to think residential schools were a hundred years ago. In actuality, the youngest residential school survivor in my community turned 33 this year, so this was in our lifetime, my lifetime.
Oftentimes I find that people are quite surprised at how young I am when I speak on panels or I write about residential schools. I write about the impacts that this had on my community, but we need people who can speak for reserves. Like myself, community members will tell you what is needed. I feel like our voices are overshadowed by politics, and in the spirit of reconciliation, I hope that we can bridge the gaps among all levels of government. This is the only way we will move forward.
We don't have time when people are dying on reserves from suicides and addictions. We don't have time when mass murders are happening on our reserves, and we don't have time when my family, my nieces, still live on the reserve. We don't have time.
What I want is this: We need accountability from every level of government. When funding announcements are made, we need to make sure these funds get to the communities that need them and we need to see the outcome of what this money did. We don't currently have that, and that is very frustrating, especially from my viewpoint, when I don't see things happening as quickly as they should be.
Another thing that we need to address is poverty. We must allow our communities to prosper. When I looked at the sections in the TRC report, I saw that number 92 mentioned building relationships and having “access to jobs”, but what about the funding? How do we get these jobs? How do we get access to training? Those are the questions I am asking today.
I thank you all for being here today to listen and to hear my story, which is not very well heard out in the general public. Lots of people don't know about the impact that intergenerational trauma had on me and my family and my community.
Thank you.