On a blustery Saturday afternoon in June, 2017, a group of former students returned to their Winnipeg high school to give curious people a tour of the impressive three-story limestone and brick building. The high school stopped operating in 1973 and currently houses the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, but much remains of the original layout.
What drew people to the building was not what it is, but what it had been.
From 1958 to 1973, the building, nestled between from the tree-lined canopy of Academy Road and the Assiniboine River, had been the Assiniboia Indian Residential School.
Assiniboia was different than a lot of residential schools. It was the first Indigenous high school, and one of the few to be located in an urban setting.
“We can’t use same language to talk about this one as others, because it was different, but it was still a part of the residential school system that existed in Canada to get rid of the Indian,” Andrew Woolford said. Woolford is a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Manitoba whose research, according to his bio, “focuses on the field of genocide studies, with an emphasis on cultural techniques of group destruction as experienced by Indigenous Peoples in North America.”
While the horrific physical and sexual abuse that occurred at other residential schools didn’t happen at Assiniboia, at its heart, the school still existed to rid Canada of Indians through assimilation.
Duncan Campbell Scott, the head of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932 (and one of the orchestrators of residential schools), famously wrote: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department…”
According to Theodore Fontaine, residential schools were an “incarceration state of an institution with bosses carrying on a policy of not educating us. They were concerned with getting rid of the Indian.” He added, “I was ashamed when I came out of the school. I was ashamed of Indians, that’s what the schools did to me, and to others.”
Fontaine was a student at Assiniboia for his high school years, but Assiniboia wasn’t the first residential school he attended. When he was seven years old, he started school at the Fort Alexander Residential School. Years later, when the truth about residential schools started to come out, Fort Alexander was one that was known for its particularly horrible cruelty, with many students telling of their experiences of physical and sexual abuse.
While over 200 people participated in tours of the former Assiniboia school’s building, that wasn’t the only component of the reunion. In order to properly acknowledge and give space to the survivors, and to gather knowledge to share, a whole weekend’s worth of activities was planned at the site.
“The reunion was an amazing way to gather knowledge and stories. People brought photos, someone brought a quilt, and these are things that would have never been found if not for the reunion,” Woolford said.
“Elder Betty Ross, who had attended the school, gave lectures and that night they had a graduation dinner of sorts, a commemoration dinner at Westworth United Church where the survivors were fed by members of the community. There was music and teatime where it was just survivors, so they had space and time together just to be. The next day there were three tents and a day of food and speeches and a sunrise ceremony,” he adds.
The idea for the reunion was born from conversations between Woolford and Fontaine. They had met at a conference, and in their conversations, they realized something should be done to recognize the students of Assiniboia.
Because Woolford was cognizant of the importance for the former students to have control over what they wanted to happen, he took a back seat.
“This was a survivor-led project. From the beginning, all I did was ask the Manitoba Research Alliance for funds to meet with survivors with no real set of planned outcomes. Everything was built in partnership with the survivor group,” Woolford said.
Some might question why people would want to hold a reunion for a place that existed to erase their identities. But coming together to talk and share experiences is part of the healing process.
“It’s not like it was a stereotypical reunion where there’s fun and dancing. It was kind of like a re-hashing what had happened, and a lot of times it was informational. It gave us an idea who was still alive,” Fontaine said.
“It was really heart-warming to be able to talk to people who had been there. There was a lot of laughter and joy to sit there across from my colleagues. It was a very, very huge step towards reconciliation and healing. It wasn’t intended just for people to have fun, it was intended to share information,”
On Sunday, a former student came up to Woolford and said the reunion had given them a “chance to create new memories, because we didn’t have good memories.”
Many of the 200 who went on tours of the building were people who currently lived or who had grown up in the neighbourhood. Because so little was known about the school, this was the first time that those who were aware of the building and maybe knew a little about the school’s history could get a fuller picture.
“Reconciliation means coming to terms with what was there and what happened. The benevolence that surfaces between the kids at the school and the community of River Heights, it was very much an ‘us and them.’ But now it’s a little less so ‘us and them’ mentality,” Fontaine said.
For Fontaine, the reunion was an important part of the path he’s on: “I became a victim when I went in, was a survivor when I got out, and now I’m a victor.”
This piece is part of a magazine I created for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. To see the whole document, click here.