B.C. residential school survivor calls for acknowledgment as Truth and Reconciliation Day approaches

VICTORIA (NEWS 1130) — With the first nationally recognized Day for Truth and Reconciliation approaching, one residential school survivor is hoping the conversation around Canada’s past continues.

Eddy Charlie was taken from his home from a young age to the Kuper Island Indian Residential School off the coast of Vancouver Island.

“All I knew was that I was going to a different school and I was leaving my home for the first time. And I think that, for me, that experience of having my hair cut off, and not being able to speak my original language, or practice my culture anymore, had a significant impact on me. It took away my identity and my place of belonging in my community,” he recalled.

Charlie is a part of Orange Shirt Day Victoria, which has been making and selling orange t-shirts for Truth and Reconciliation Day which will be recognized on September 30. He has been an activist in getting fellow residential school survivors to tell their stories.

“Residential schools created a lot of trauma in Indigenous communities, Indigenous children and the generations that followed them. And that trauma is still affecting us 25 years or more after the last residential school closed,” he said.

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Charlie says he experienced emotional, physical and sexual abuse while attending the residential school, the trauma from which still being dealt with by he and other survivors.

“Some of the children that were there were abused from the very first day they began … to the last day, which sometimes lasted 10 years. So when you add up the amount of abuse children experienced, it created a lot of change in the students. And that change is not good. Because a lot of that change changed into anger and hatred. And when these children went back home, they brought that hatred with them,” he explained.

“What residential school did was essentially created the most perfect hate machine ever and released them into the community.”

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Sept. 30 will mark the first nationally recognized Day for Truth and Reconciliation, which will be a statutory holiday for those in B.C., Nova Scotia, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories. Charlie and those from Orange Shirt Day Victoria have held their own ceremonies on the day since 2015, selling their shirts in the process.

Now that it’s a recognized holiday, Charlie hopes people take time to think about those who attended residential schools.

“I hope that more conversation and dialogue about the effects of residential schools happen. And people begin to honor and respect the resiliency of all the children experienced residential schools, all the ones who came back home, and all the ones who didn’t,” he said.

Charlie says the discovery of unmarked graves at former residential school sites, including 215 discovered at the former site in Kamloops, has begun some of those conversations.

“Today, that harm is beginning to be discussed with respect for the first time in a long time. And I hope that it continues to be a conversation that we have all across the land. I honestly believe that the more we talk about residential schools, the greater the opportunity for survivors of residential schools to begin a journey of healing,” he notes.

Orange t-shirts are being sold at retailers around Victoria, as well as the Gordon Neighbourhood House in downtown Vancouver. They are designed by an Indigenous artist whose mother is also a survivor of residential schools.

All proceeds from sales of the shirts go toward supporting survivors of residential schools.

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