Residential survivors are people of strength, resilience and caring despite the colonial inflicted genocide and atrocities against them.
Many of the members in today’s communities that are not from Indigenous backgrounds, and had no knowledge or education on what was happening to the youth of Indigenous communities.The public discourse was accepted, that residential schools provided a valuable educational resource to Indigenous children.
In reality, the opposite was true. Residential schools were predominantly places of abuse and had low educational value. The schools were places where one culture, and one people were systemically devalued in the favour of another.
To understand the need to acknowledge and correct the wrongs of the past and the continual wrongs of the present, we must educate ourselves. For years, the school system used materials in education that only gave voice to the colonial interests. Many Canadians grew up uneducated, knowledgeable and full of devastating rhetoric about the truth of First Peoples. The education is only beginning. We are all responsible for learning the truth, questioning old rhetoric and being better.
Please watch these survivors stories to understand what happened and why support and recognition of the value of First Peoples culture is so important today.
Wawahte: Stories of Residential School Survivors- Full Documentary: https://moodle.tru.ca/mod/url/view.php?id=1121268