The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - History, Family, and the Legacy of Residential Schools

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

The effects of government policies like the Indian Act and the residential school system are still felt by Indigenous people today. Tanya Talaga explores this enduring legacy in her new book, "The Knowing," in which she retells Canadian history through an Indigenous lens, and tracks her family history all the way back to her great-great-grandmother, Annie. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The effects of government policies like the Indian Act and the residential school system are still felt by Indigenous people today. Journalist and author Tanya Tlaiga explores this enduring legacy in her new book, The Knowing, where she retells Canadian history through an Indigenous lens and tracks her family history all the way back to her great-great-grandmother, Annie. She's a columnist with The Globe and Mail and founder of Mokwa Creative Production Company. And Tonya joins us in studio for more. Thank you so much for joining us. For sure. Let's talk about Annie.

This is the book centers around her. Who is she? Annie is my great, great grandmother. And I didn't know very much about her. I didn't know anything about her at all. And it was actually my mom who is in her 80s. She's 80 years old, actually. And it was my mom who has been constantly asking me to find Annie, find her great grandma.

She knew that she was somewhere buried in Toronto, but she didn't know where she was. And for a long time, I was given this file folder from my uncle, Hank Bowen, after he passed away, full of all of this family information. It had birth certificates, it had marriage certificates, death certificates, and it was this huge puzzle. We were trying to find our relations. He was trying to find Annie, his grandma, and also find out any information he could

about his mom, Liz, and why she was so silent and just didn't say anything about where she was from, which Indian residential school she attended, how come she didn't say anything about where she was from, which Indian residential school she attended, how come she didn't speak her language, why she wasn't proud to be who she was. It was like almost like a giant black hole about her past. And so Annie was her mom. Uncle Hank was looking for Annie for over 80 years and when he, that fell to me. My mom has been saying to me, please, let's find her. And that is what this book is about

and the journey we've been on is about. As a journalist, you know, there are plenty of barriers in finding information, but this is a unique challenge. Thankfully, you have that folder with some starting points, but walk me through some of the barriers that you faced trying to find some of the historical records on Andy. Well, as I said, my uncle Hank, he started this and he started this in the age before the internet.

And so there was no Google search that he could go to. Then NCTR records were not online when he was searching. He was looking in the 70s, 80s, 90s. He would constantly write letters to government officials trying to find information out about his mom, Liz. And he would get letters back from the government, the dot matrix printer. I have so many copies from the Department of Indian Affairs or from the Ontario government's vital statistic branch that says we have no record of Liz Gauthier being born from 1900

to 1910. It was like she just totally did not exist as a person. And that was sort of the beginning of his odyssey and something he was constantly hitting his head against the wall. Well, how come no one can help me? I know she exists. I know she was a First Nations woman because look at me and how come there's nothing about her?

The story of finding Annie really magnifies the story of all of our families, First Nations, Metis, and Inuit families, looking for their lost loved ones. People, our family members that went to Indian residential school, that went to Indian hospitals, tuberculosis, sanitaria, asylums, they didn't come home. We all have stories in our family of people who didn't come home. We all have stories in our family of people who didn't come home. And so the search for records, for accurate records, is something that all of us are experiencing if you are an Indigenous person.

We are lucky if we can go back at all to the 1840s. I was able to go back that far and that was with monumental help. But access to records shouldn't be that difficult. But if you're a family member looking for a lost loved one, it is. Why is that? Because if you are an Indian, your records have been destroyed, they are no longer available, they've been thrown out, they've been misfiled, they're written down wrong.

I can't tell you how many times we see the spelling of a name totally. Multiple times, right? Yeah, I have one relation, his last name was spelled seven different times. It's crazy. That is crazy. I want to pick up on the help that you got,

because you got a lot of help. There's a lot of different organizations that are doing a lot of important work and trying to collect these records. Tell me a little bit about that because it also leads you into Facebook where you kind of find some relations there. Yeah, yeah, well, you know, it's not that much of a mystery, but all First Nations people love Facebook. You know, it's how we all communicate on Facebook Messenger. So the story was actually a fan of mine, someone who had read my books.

His name is Ryan Shackleton, and he has a company called No History. He had read Seven Fallen Feathers and All Our Relations. And he is an archivist. He is a researcher. He works in Ottawa, and that's what he does. He knows how to find information. And I've been an investigative journalist

for a couple of decades. I know how to find information, but even this was a stumbling block to me. It's like, how do I find out anything about Annie? All we had was a death certificate, really, that said that she died here at the Ontario Hospital in 1937. And so Ryan mentioned to me, you know,

if you ever need help with anything, let me know. And so I called him up one day and I said, you know what? I actually need your help. And he said, okay, no problem. And it was Ryan that actually found the census from 1881 that showed that Annie, her last name was really Carpenter, and that she was born in 1871, she was 10 years old at the time of the 1881 census, in Fort Albany. So that's along the James Bay coast.

And there she was, Annie with an E. And she had brothers and sisters and parents and it was listed she was a Cree Indian. And that, you know, it was just amazing to me that she was brought alive by looking at this census record. And from that starting point, I was able to start looking, Ryan was able to start looking. And as soon as I found out that she was from Fort Albany, I was like, oh my gosh, I mean, I I found out that she was from Fort Albany, I was like, oh my gosh.

I mean, I have been. I know people from Fort Albany. I have been on the Albany River, Kastashawan, before. As a reporter, as a journalist, I have covered stories about the Ring of Fire for over 10 years. And so I reached out to people that I knew there, Mike Meditwabin and his brother Edmund. And so I reached out to people that I knew there, Mike Metatwabin and his brother Edmund. And I also on Facebook, I found this page that said James Bay Community, you know, FYI.

And I'm like, well, I've got a question. And so I asked, does anyone know anything about the Carpenter family? And within like 45 minutes, Paula Rickert, who is a genealogist from Muscree First Nation, she got back to me. It was actually Paula that really unlocked most of the secrets of my family on the maternal side. She was the one that knew all about the carpenters. She goes, oh yeah, I've got them all on my family tree.

She goes, you're related to this person, this person, this person. It's really amazing. She has a tree of 13,000 names of Cree, all related along the James Bay Hudson Bay coast, all the way down to Norway House, actually. I want to talk about the book's name, the Knowing. What does that mean to you? Sort of gets back to what I was saying earlier too, about how every First Nations family and community,

we have people that just did not come home. We all know about a great uncle or a brother or a friend, someone who just disappeared. We don't know what happened to them, but we know that they're gone. Fast forward to Kamloops. Three years ago, I was at To Come Loops to Shotma for the discovery of the 215. When that was first announced, I was one of the journalists that was invited to come to the community and to report on the story. And when I was there I kept hearing everybody talking about

the knowing. We all knew family members that did not come home. And as soon as I heard that phrase, and that was what the community was using as well, I just knew wow this is exactly like what's in my family and in all the First Nations families that I know. It is a knowing. And so to me, the book had to be called The Knowing. All right. I want to read a little excerpt from your book.

It reads, every single First Nations Metis and Inuit family has a story like ours, has lived through a similar trauma. Every single family, Not one was left unscathed by the demonizing policies of the Canadian government and those of the provinces, the British Crown, and the Christian churches. Laws were written with the sole intent of crushing First Nations into submission so that the colonizers could easily take the land and everything on it or underneath it. This is a hard but true reality for Canadians to realize but it is one that Indigenous peoples have always known. So similar to that as to what you

said. As you did research and write this book, what did you find about other families who have lost parts of their history? Well you know like that passage, so many people have had our same issues, same problems. One of the stories that I center around is a family that I had met actually when I was at Kamloops. I was sitting, I remember this so clearly, one day, I think it was around the third day that I was out three years ago. I was sitting on the very front field of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

It was later in the day. And all of a sudden, from the corner of my eye, I could see these trucks pulling up. And one of the trucks had this long, beautiful wooden canoe. And all these people start getting out of the trucks. And they were dressed in their regalia. And they lifted this canoe up off the truck and they were dressed in their regalia. And they lifted this canoe up off the truck and started to carry it onto the field.

And there was drumming and there was singing. And suddenly all of us who were sitting there in the field, we were all in this ceremony, transfixed, watching what was going on. And they took this canoe and they placed it in the middle of the field. And then they turned towards us. And I think it was Russell Williams who said to everyone, we are here to bring our children's spirits back. He said, they have been here for far too long,

and we've come to tell them that it's OK. They can come home now and get in the canoe and come with us. From that first initial meeting of the Williams family, I went to go find them. I introduced myself to them as they were leaving that day, and I followed up with them over a couple of years. I went to go visit them. And Gary Williams in particular is someone that I'm thinking of, and his family members that were lost in residential school.

Gary Williams, he went to Kamloops. He also went to Coquiliza. And he went to the Mission School. And his sons also went to the Mission School as well. So he told me the story about his sons, too. And both of his sons have passed away, one from addiction, and the other son, Gary Williams Jr. He died also by taking his own life. And the stories he shared about his sons,

and also his missing cousin Roderick who disappeared at Kamloops Indian Residential School as a young boy and never came home. I follow the story of Roderick in the knowing and what happened to him. Turns out he was buried outside of the hospital that he was taken to on Vancouver Island and the family just had no idea. I want to pick up on another story that you followed, one that, again, you weren't looking at Annie, but you ended up discovering a story of some lost relatives,

Thomas and Samuel Skilder. Tell me a little bit about their story. Yeah. So one of the things with looking for Annie that I, you know, I just didn't really know how this journey was going to unfold and what was going to happen. And it was in my search for Annie and her relations, like, you know, her brothers and sisters, her children, if she had any, their children. That was the maternal side, my mom's maternal side of the family, but also too, there's

another side, the Anishinaabe side of my family that is from Fort William First Nation. And it was just amazing. I was on my way to Algoma University and Shingwok, Indian Residential School is there, and I looked up Shingwok on the NCTR site. It was like honestly the night before I was supposed to go and give a talk at the university. And I started looking because if you go to the NCTR any school page the first thing that pops up is a memorial list of the children who died at the school. And this list had two names on it that just jumped out at me, Thomas Skeletor and Sarah

Skeletor. And when I saw those two names, I thought, oh my gosh, this can't be, because that name Skeletor is not very common. And that was my great grandfather's brother's names, last names, Skeletor. So I contacted Algoma University. There is a researcher there, Jenna LeMay, and I sent a note out to her. She got right back to me and she helped me find Thomas Skeletor and not Sarah but Samuel Skeletor and not Sarah, but Samuel Skeletor. Sam's name was written down wrong in the records. He was a little boy, not a little girl.

And they both passed away. They both died at Shingwok and are buried somewhere on the grounds, sort of behind the school. And so I had no idea that my journey for Annie and her family would take me to my other side of the family. And to find these two uncles that no one in my family knew what happened to them, they both died in the early 20th century.

And Thomas was 18 when he passed away. And I think Sam was around seven or eight years old. And so finding them, I had to tell my whole family. I had to tell Fort William First Nation there are two boys that never came home and they're buried here at Tsinghua. I want to pull up a photo, a black and white photo. This is a photo of women sitting along a fence during the signing of Treaty 9 in 1905.

You mention this photo a lot throughout your book because there is some, perhaps some relevance to any here. What's happening here in this photo? Yeah, so this is a, you know, this is a kind of a fascinating story. It's something that really I discovered, of course, on this search for Annie. So what I did was I tried to trace her steps through the records that I could find, that Paula could find, that No History could find. I tried to find what happened to Annie after she left Fort Albany. She married a man named Samson Wemestegous.

Paula discovered this, and he was from Muscree First Nation. Turns out he was my great-great-grandfather. He was married to Annie. And he passed away in the early 1900s. Annie went with her brother and her sister-in-law, some other family members, and they went up the Kastaschewan, so the Albany River. And the head of the river is at St. Joseph's,

and that is actually Austinburg Post. Today, its rightful name is Mishke-Gogomei First Nation. And why that's important was because in 1905, Annie is captured there on the Mishke-Gogomei pay list, treaty pay list. And it is the pay list that was created at the signing of Treaty Number 9, the very first stop of Treaty Number 9's signing. And why this is also incredibly fascinating is that Duncan Campbell Scott,

the architect of the Indian Residential School System, he designed and signed and created one treaty, and that was Treaty No. 9. And he was there at Osnaburg at that time when Annie was there with her brother Joseph and with her daughter Christina, all this information that we were finding out. And it was right there, believe it or not, on the government of Ontario's own website for celebrating Treaty Week. They have this pay list and you can see Annie's name is right on there along with Charlotte Carpenter and Joseph

Carpenter and all of these people. It's quite astounding. Anyway, so this picture that you see is a photo that Duncan Campbell Scott took himself. He used to take all of these pictures and you could look in the Library Archives Canada and you'll see all of his, in his fonts, all these photos that he took. And these are the women that were there at the time of the treaty signing. And they were waiting for a feast to start. And so every time I look at this picture, I think to myself, Annie is probably somewhere

in this photo. And where is she? Because I don't have a photo of her. I don't know what she looks like. That's fascinating. I want to read another excerpt from your book. And it starts, The closer I get to Annie to retracing her steps, the more alive she becomes to me.

Her reality, along with those of my great grandmother Liz, my grandmother Margaret, my mother. I see the weave of their lives, the immense ground they covered, the adversity they faced to make sure their children did not live through what they did. They survived to make sure the next seven generations thrive. You write about the effects of these systems on all Indigenous people, but how would your female relatives have felt with the impacts of government policies especially? Well, it really shaped their lives lives you know. The more I found out about Annie and her story when she was born 1871, five years before the Indian Act, a

racist piece of legislation became law in Canada 1876. And this was also 1871, the year of her birth was right after Rupert's land, this giant fur trading block of land, which I call a plantation in the book, because it truly was, where indigenous people were engaged in the fur trade, were part of it. They were working for the HBC. They were governed by folks that had ties to the slave trade in Britain, Great Britain, all the HBC governors came from there. And you could see the formulation of Canadian policy in the thoughts of who created Canada, the foundations of Canada, where did that come from, where do these policies like

policies of erasure come from in North America, where did the Indian Act come from, the thoughts of having Indian residential schools come from, what was behind all of that. And so Rupert's land was sold to Sir John A. McDonald around the same time of Annie's birth. And so when you ask that question, you can see, and I say this in the book, that Annie and her daughter Liz and her other children, they were born in the mouth of genocide. The beginnings of something, the policies that

were constructed to assimilate, destroy, and to remove our people off the land so settlers could come here and build the country of Canada that we now know today. And so when you look at that and when you look at what happened to Annie in her life, she was enfranchised. When she was later in her later 30s, she had lost Sampson, her husband. She had lost her five children to Indian residential school to disease. She was a young widow. She marries a French Canadian man, and that act erased her identity.

She was no longer an Indian under the eyes of Canadian law. She was cast out of all that she knew. And the funny thing was is that Canadian government at the time thought this was a great promotion, like a reason to celebrate, oh she's no longer an Indian, she's married to a white man now. But that act really just was a massive act of erasure. And then from there to Annie was somehow, and we don't really know why, but in 1930 she was taken to the Ontario Hospital, which is on the grounds of Humber College now. Humber College, you'll notice the really old looking buildings.

That was the Ontario Hospital, which was an asylum, an insane asylum. And we have, that's also another term for it at the time, and we have no idea why she was taken there and why she was never allowed to leave. And she died there in 1937. Incredible story. I want to talk about a trip that you took. You know, through this period of doing all this research and connecting

with family and hearing stories of family that you weren't even looking for but stumbled across. There's a lot of emotion in your travels to Rome in 2022. You go with a contingent of Indigenous leaders and survivors who are seeking an official apology from the Pope. What was that trip like? survivors were seeking an official apology from the pope. What was that trip like? It was wild, to be honest with you. You know, I went because I knew I was of course writing this book. And so I went as a journalist as well. I wanted to be there.

So you know, I paid my own way to go. I was not part of the official delegation. I was just the press on the watching, and I was lucky, very lucky to go. It was wild. I mean, from the time that we were sitting in the airport in Montreal, all waiting to get on a plane all together to go to Rome, I didn't realize that we'd all be taking the same plane together. So all of the Catholic bishops, for example, and the clergy from Canada, they were all

with us on this plane filled with Metis, Inuit, and First Nations survivors. Wilton Littlechild was there, was one of the TRC commissioners. Viv Timmons was there, she's a survivor from St. Anne's. I knew all of these people that were there. Lisa LaFlem was there. I remember her sort of swanning in, and it was just like, wow, there's a celebrity in our midst. And there we were, and it was just a really strange time.

We get on this plane, we go to Rome, then we get into these giant buses, and it felt like we were on tour. Like it was part of a vacation package or something and there was a tour guide Literally that she was working I guess to to facilitate things to make things better for us But she was pointing out the strangest things though like oh, there's via Christophe Colombo for instance You know well for a pile of indigenous people like so well That's not really a... And you were given a reminder on that bus as well,

what really this trip is all about. Exactly, exactly. So there were some really weird times like that. And then there were times where, like, Elder Fred Kelly from Treaty 3, for instance, stood up on the bus right before we went to the Vatican Museum and said, like, let's take a moment here to remember why we are here. You know, all of the family members we have lost are women that we are still losing.

What has happened to our people because of colonization and because of the Christian Church. And he was one of the spiritual advisors that the Assembly of First Nations had brought with us. And it was just like a wonderful reminder. And I remember just being grounded in that moment. Like you can never really forget. But that was just a beautiful, beautiful memory. I want to put on my journalism hat for a second, because there's this idea when we are in journalism school that we're supposed to be objective and remove ourselves from the story. But in this book, you write that that's the reality of being an indigenous journalist.

We are part of this story. There is no escaping it. How have you navigated not through just this book, but throughout your whole career? That's a big question. And it's not been easy, right? It's not been easy, right? It's not been easy. Sometimes it's easier now, I should say, you know, because there's a lot more acceptance for our stories and for who we are as First Nations people. But it wasn't always that way. I mean, I started off in the 1990s, the mid 1990s in journalism.

And at that time, you know, there were no other First Nations reporters in the Toronto Star newsroom. I didn't know of any other reporters really out there in the mainstream other than Duke Redbird. I remember seeing him on City TV news and thinking, wow, that's so cool. He's just like us and he's on TV. And of course I would see other people on TV like Buffy St. Marie, right? And think, oh, well, you know, if she's doing all these things. And well, Buffy is a whole other story. But you know, Duke is someone that has been here in the city for such a long time and

really was someone who paved the way for us. But when you're a journalist in the 1990s at a newspaper, there wasn't a lot of appetite for the stories that we tell. And when there was an appetite, it was just for a little bit. And then maybe, you know, you could do something later on. And it wasn't until the TRC opened up, it wasn't until 2015 that minds began to shift. Perceptions changed. And that is when it became easier for me, and also too when I was at Queens Park

and I had a lot more freedom because of who I was working with in the Bureau. Like I worked with all these incredible political journalists like Robert Benzie, I know you know well, and Robert Ferguson, and I could you know well, and Robert Ferguson. And I could just sort of do my own thing. And so I did. And I started to write our stories.

I started to write. I was writing about the Ring of Fire. I was writing about murdered and missing indigenous women and girls. I was writing about why there's no water. I was writing about grassy narrows. All of these stories that we're still writing the same stories today. There's just a whole new crop of journalists that are doing the work. But we're also still finding the same problems, trying to make space for ourselves and our

stories and telling them in the way that we want to. And so that's why I started my own company. So I do documentaries, podcasts now, a TV series on this book, The Knowing. And why I did that was because I wanted to tell our stories our way. And I didn't want someone telling me I couldn't do it or tell the story like I wanted to tell it. And Murray Sinclair was the one that had always said, you know, we know what to do. We just need to do things for ourselves. And so that's why I started Maqua.

Makes sense. We have less than a minute left. And I want to show this photo to our listeners and our watchers. This is a photo of your mother, Sheila, when you were finally able to visit Annie's grave. It's not giving too much away for the potential readers, but what was it like to finally get to this moment?

It was a lot, you know, it was a really emotional day. My mom was with us, my daughter, Natasha, and there we were. And she had been looking her whole life for Annie. And since my mom had moved to Toronto, she had been looking for Annie. And since my mom had moved to Toronto, she had been looking for Annie. And there we were. We finally found her. And there's a little bit of a funny story, actually,

with this, is that when we first got to the cemetery, it was Ed Januszewski who found the cemetery and who cleared the land with all of his activism and his help. Because it really is in the middle of Toronto. It's just off the Queen Elizabeth Way, on way to Sherway Gardens just south of the giant Ikea. A path that you drive every day.

You drive it all the time, right? And there's this, it was a dog run. It was just the size of a city block and it was overgrown. There was garbage being thrown in there, but it was a graveyard. There are 1,511 people buried there, and only 10% have grave markers. So Ed and his team, he formed a team, the Lakeshore Cemetery Project, and they petitioned the government to have this cleared and a fence put around it. And so that's what he did 20 years ago. If there are any heroes in Annie's story, it's Ed.

And so from Ed, we were able to find this little piece of, well, the plot where she was. But when he first took us there, he took us to the wrong grave site. And then we were smudging and crying and talking to Annie. But it turns out we weren't. We were talking to some non-Indigenous guy that happened to die and was lying there.

But then he took us to where she was. And then it was just, it's a moment that I will never forget, nor will my mother. And we go visit her. We still visit her. And of course, now the search for Annie, because of that search, Kimberly Murray from the Office of the Special Interlocutor for Missing

Children and Unmarked Graves, she helped us form a group with Anishinaabek Nation, Anishinaabe-Aske Nation, Grand Council Treaty Number Three. And now we're looking for all of the First Nations people that are buried there. We're looking for their families. So Finding Annie has found 32 other First Nations people that are buried in that cemetery. And so now we're trying to find their families and locate them.

The work continues. Tanya, thank you so much. A well-researched book and really important one. So thank you so much. The Knowing is available now in a docuseries, as you mentioned. We'll be out on CBC later this month. Thank you. Shimeigwech.