He went to St Anne's Indian Residential School. He wrote this poem:
Nuns and priests drink young blood
Like cheap red wine
Turn us into some kind of Wonderbread
White. Sliced. Enriched.
Ekote is the last word.
I remember bannock
Brown. Rich and Whole
Residential school poem
Recited in park, 1992
Sometime in 1992, sitting in a Toronto park on a sunny summer day, a man from James Bay shared with me a poem he had written about residential school. My memory may not be exact, word for word, but I'm sure it's close to the original. The poem starts with an ominous scene: religious men and women gorging, preying on children. At that time, everything about residential school was 'news' to me. I was fresh out of school, just starting to work as a reporter. He was a street worker, looking for ways to help Indigenous men sleeping on park benches, lost in the big city. He had attended a Catholic residential school in Ontario's far north.
Toronto is a world away from the isolated, fly-in communities along James Bay. St Anne's school was in Fort Albany, one of the reserves along that coast. There isn't much to see on the tundra lowlands, except scrubby patches of spindly, stunted trees: black spruce, tamarack and jack pines. Trees can't grow much in the spongy muskeg, only reaching heights between six and nine feet.
My first national assignment as a reporter for CBC Radi0 was covering the St Anne's residential school reunion in Fort Albany. It was the first gathering of its kind in Canada. Led by the chief of Fort Albany and joined by a few other strong minded former students, they took this brave step to expose the horrific experiences suffered by Indigenous children.
Opened in 1902, St Anne's was part of a network of boarding schools run by the Canadian government and religious orders. When I flew up there in 1992, the school, the rectory and the nun's residence dominated the landscape: massive hunks of cement and concrete, functional and lifeless. In the decades that have passed, all the buildings have burned to the ground.
Photo by R. Celli, 1990's
At the reunion, the former St Anne's students didn't mill around with name tags and reminisce about playful memories. They shared nightmares: chilling stories of beatings, sexual assaults, and being forced to eat their own vomit. They spoke of being dragged out of bed at night. A few talked about being strapped into a home-made electric chair and jolted with electricity. Some said girls were given secret abortions in a tunnel under the buildings. Violence was everywhere: from priests, nuns, cooks, custodians, even other students. By now, the abuses at St Anne's and other residential schools have been well documented. But back in 1992, few people outside of Indigenous circles had ever heard of residential schools. It was well before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or the Missing and Murdered Women Inquiry. No one wore orange shirts or hung banners "Every Child Matters."
The poet in the park didn't want to say what happened to him at St Anne's but I knew it had to be bad. I don’t remember his name, if he was from Fort Albany or Attawapiskat, or whatever happened to him. But I can still see and hear him. He wore a stiff-like-new, dark blue jean jacket and blinding white sneakers. He spoke softly with a distinct Cree cadence. He had a kind smile and an unspoken but very-there sadness. He recited his poem, sitting at a picnic table, so whispery that when I listened back to the recording, I had to crank up the volume. His voice was as faint as the birds chirping in the distance. A hushed and unforgettable encounter as vivid in my mind today as it was then.
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