Indigenous families of residential school survivors in B.C. continue to feel pain, trauma
Posted May 30, 2021 1:28 pm.
Last Updated May 30, 2021 1:51 pm.
KAMLOOPS (NEWS 1130) — For Lorelei Williams, growing up from a young age she knew that she and her siblings couldn’t often ask their mother about her experience with residential schools. The pain of reliving those years was too much for their family.
After attending a residential school and bearing the pain and suffering experienced over several years her mother hardly ever spoke about what she saw or what happened to her, instead coping by turning to alcohol.
“My mom drank. She drank her life away, she was trying to numb the pain from the residential school. I didn’t know about the residential school system until later on in my life, maybe when I was around 18 years old,” she says. “And I also learned that you can’t just ask survivors what happened in the residential school or what their experience was. When I finally did ask my mom I made sure she would be okay because I have seen people. I have seen survivors open up about their stories for the first time and they just collapsed.”
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She says after years of not finding the right words to ask her mother, she was finally about to get some answers about the impacts of residential schools on her mother’s life.
“She explained to me some of the stuff in front of my daughter. My daughter was five years old, playing with her toys, while my mom explained some of the things that happened. One thing that I remember is she said that when she was taken she counted every single mountaintop from the Rez from where she was taken, all the way to the Residential School, she counted every single mountain so that she could find her way back home,” she explains. “When she told me that I burst into tears, I could not imagine what was going on with her parents, my grandparents. I could not imagine what happened to my mom. I was looking at my daughter, my five-year-old daughter who was the same age as my mom when she was taken.”
Williams says while her mother opened up later on in life about her experiences, growing up the anxiety and trauma was easy to spot in her household.
“My mom never ever slept with the lights off anywhere. And we knew that as children growing up. We knew that you could never ever turn off the lights. Because in residential schools that’s when the bad stuff happened. I remember one of our friends came over and saw my mom sleeping, and they decided to turn off the lights for her. She popped up screaming, yelling to turn the lights back on. So, we knew something bad happened to her.
As for her father, Williams says he never spoke about being at a residential school. In fact, she only discovered her father had been at one after an aunt told her following her father’s death, adding while she knew he had grown up in foster care, his time in residential schools remains mostly a mystery.
“I actually never heard any stories from him at all. I didn’t even know he went to residential school until after he passed away. I was just shocked, I didn’t even know. I mean it just occurred to me, ‘oh my God, residential school’, and he did things to numb the pain as well.”
The impacts of trauma are far reaching – Lorelei's aunt and cousin are just two of the thousands of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls across Canada. Her cousin's DNA was found on Pickton's farm. @NEWS1130
— Tarnjit Kaur Parmar (@Tarnjitkparmar) May 30, 2021
Williams has been a fierce advocate for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in recent years. Her own aunt and cousin are just two of the tens of thousands of Indigenous women who have disappeared in Canada. Her cousin’s DNA was found on serial killer Robert Pickton’s farm a few years after her disappearance.
She says with the discovery of 215 bodies of children at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, the number of Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls will only continue to climb.
“I think there’s more added to the list. You know the numbers that are floating around out there, it’s way higher than that when you include all of the girls that were murdered at these residential schools.”
Williams says while there is nothing that can be done to undo the pain and suffering felt by survivors and families of the children who were taken and never came back home, there must be an investigation into all the sites of the former residential schools, to uncover any other bodies that have been buried for decades.
“We’re sure they have to look at all the other schools across Canada to find the bodies so they can bury them properly. None of those kids had a proper burial. There are for sure thousands of kids. I don’t know how many schools there were across Canada, there are so many kids, I can’t imagine the way they were treated. It breaks my heart.”
She says while some may see the horrific discovery out of Kamloops as a shock, it’s not a complete shock to Indigenous communities who have been left to wonder what happened to the children that were taken away, never to return.
“It’s a shock for them because they don’t know Canada but Canada is a racist country. There are so many people out there that don’t want to believe the genocide that happened to our people and that is still happening. The people who say ‘Oh, they just need to get over it.’ I hate it when people say that. This is one of the first times that a mass grave has been found, but we’ve already known it was there. The truth is always gonna come out eventually. I don’t know what more we need to do for Canada to realize it, to understand that, to acknowledge it.”
Now it’s a message she passes along to her own children, the hardships faced by her own parents, and the traumas passed through their family. She says she takes her children to vigils in honour of the 215 children, hoping to teach them about their history as Indigenous people.
“I sat them down and said, ‘you have to understand that we are lucky to be here. This could have been my mom, your grandpa. And we’re lucky to be here because if they didn’t survive, we wouldn’t be here.'”
