THE INTERVIEWER: Johnny, I’ll ask you about your family. Who in your family went to Residential School?
JOHNNY BRASS: Everyone on my mother’s side of the family; my mother, my aunts, my uncles and my grandparents.
Q. Did they ever talk about their experience?
A. Very little, other than my mother talked about it.
Q. What did she say?
A. She talked more about the different things that had happened to her while she was in school, the physical abuse. It was more about that than about the good things that may have happened there for her. It was more about those experiences and the trauma. Those are the things that I used to hear about from her. She went there for ten years.
Q. What school was that?
A. Gordon’s.
Q. Is your mother still alive?
A. No, she isn’t. She has been deceased now for it must be about ten years, I think.
Q. And your uncles and aunties who went, did they speak about their experiences?
A. No. Actually I have an aunt in Vancouver and an aunt out in Saskatchewan and an uncle in Saskatchewan. They are the only ones that are living now, and not really. They don’t talk about it a lot. I’ve always questioned a little bit around it but I don’t get a lot back from it. More of it came from my mom and my deceased aunt, from about 2 years ago, who used to talk about it. Those 2 were 2 years apart so they pretty well went to school the whole time together. So their experiences and things that happened were very similar.
I guess maybe the one thing I was really grateful for with that is that they had the opportunity to be a witness for each other, so one would verify the other one’s story, or I would hear the story from my mother of something that happened and my aunt would talk about those things, too.
I guess maybe it was kind of reassuring for me that those experiences did happen and it wasn’t something that was made up or anything like that because some of the things I heard about were really harsh. It was really hard for me. To say how could one human being do that to another, especially to children, who to me were helpless. I guess maybe —
I can understand some of that, too, just through my own experiences of growing up in a world that wasn’t mine. I grew up in foster homes. I was taken away from my mother and father when I was 3 years old, and not meeting my mother until I was twenty years old and never knowing my father at all. My father was Ukrainian. The only connection that I have with my father’s side of the family is —
One of his brothers lives next to my Reserve in Saskatchewan, so I go over and I visit with him. So that’s the closest connection that I have to that family. Many of my family members are —
Just their feelings, and I’m not sure just all what it is about having a connection with First Nations People, and accepting that I’m their brother’s son, and those things. My uncle has been really appreciative towards me and respectful towards me, so with that him and I have been able to develop a really close relationship. I feel lots of times with me sitting with him and stuff like that, and just some of his body language and things like that, that there’s much about me that reminds him of my father. My father has been deceased since 1984 so I never got a chance to meet him or know him. But I feel that my uncle tells me a lot just through his body language and accepting me and who I am because of how I do certain things and express myself. It helps with that connection.
Q. Why did your mother have to give you up?
A. I think it was drinking. She actually said that she went to a funeral. We were in Dawson Creek and she went to a funeral in High Prairie, Alberta. When she came back we were gone. We were never able to go back to her after that. We were put into fostering. I have a twin brother. Him and I were raised together, and 2 other brothers that went to another family and they were adopted, and a sister that was adopted out. One brother I met when I was seventeen. He’s seventeen months older than I am, and he was living in Vancouver. He came. He remembered us, so he came back and looked for us. He found me and my brother.
And then my sister, I met her when I was thirty-two, and one brother who is thirteen months younger than I am, I still haven’t met him. I’ve talked to him a couple of times on the phone, but I haven’t had the opportunity to meet him yet.
It’s interesting because when I see pictures and things like that, him and I are the closest in resemblance. He grew up with my older brother, Leon. So Leon tells me that Earl and I are very similar in many ways. So I’m hopeful that one day we’ll meet.
Today, this morning, I was speaking with my brother in Vancouver and I just found out this morning that their mother is deceased as of last Wednesday. My sister is always —
Her and I share lots and she has always said that she felt that perhaps the day that their mother goes somewhere else that perhaps Earl would come to the table because of his loyalties to her and those things, so it has been a lot of those things that have kept us separate.
Q. Do you think the disconnect was related to Residential Schools? You know, your mom went to Residential School and she started drinking and lost her children. It’s a symptom, for sure. Do you personally feel that?
A. No, I don’t. I feel it’s more to the loyalties, to the different values and beliefs and the different things that were put onto us and not so much about the Residential Schools. I believe we all carry something there, us being separated from our mother for sure, and our father, and our families. But I feel it has more to do with the values and the beliefs and the different things that were put onto us.
How I came to that conclusion within myself was when I started on my healing path about 7 years ago, when I went back to my Reserve and started learning about my culture and the ceremonies and many other things and started taking things inside of myself, that I discovered that to develop a relationship with my siblings, especially with my sister because her and I are very close today and we’ve been building a relationship for twenty years, it was all about being able to put all our issues and our values and our beliefs and the connection with who we were raised with, who I was raised with, understanding that those were given to us but they weren’t ours. And to understand more about where we came from and who we were than just being brother and sister. Because brother and sister —
We are able to say that today in a way that we both feel very close, but it has to do with our culture and our values and our beliefs of today and what was given to us, what we’ve learned, both her and I through counseling and going back to the Reserve. Those things have brought us together.
The issues, all of the things that were given to us, given to me in an unfamiliar environment, it was those things that kept me separated and kept me from getting close to my sister. My sister has met my brother, the one that hasn’t come to the table today. She has always felt that because of his loyalties to his foster mother, that family and Christianity and those things, is what is keeping him from coming to the table.
Q. Did you ever ask your mother about why you were taken away?
A. I did. But it was never ever about her taking ownership or responsibility for that. It was always about something else. That was the one thing that I always wanted my mom to do, to be responsible for that, owning that, and saying that she had a part in that. But she never ever would go there.
There are thirteen of us siblings all together, and I have an older sister Mavis who lives in Vancouver, and up until mom was on her deathbed I wanted mom to own that Mavis was our sister and she never ever would do that. She always said that Mavis wasn’t my sister but that she was my aunt, she was my grandmother’s daughter, because my grandmother raised her.
Q. You said your grandmother went to Residential School as well?
A. Yes. Yes, she did, she went. I only met my grandmother once in my life so I never really had much of an opportunity to spend much time with her at all. I just met her once in Vancouver so I never really got to know my aunt or my grandmother.
Q. She was from Saskatchewan as well?
A. That’s right, she was.
Q. Did she go to Gordon’s school as well?
A. Yes.
Q. What do you think of that place now?
A. I was just recently in Saskatchewan and my wife and I were driving by there, because my wife went to Gordon’s as well. We just happened to —
It was by accident. We made a wrong turn on the road. We were going to Yorkton and we ended up going on the road towards Regina and we drove by there, where the turn-off was. I asked my wife is she wanted to go in there and she said, “No.” Later on we decided that we would like to go back there and go there and just see what it was, and things.
I just sort of feel a chill go through me when I went by there. Yeah, just because I feel that that place was a place of not just destruction for my family at the school, but the destruction that lived on after that. Because I had 2 uncles that perished in the prisons when they were just young men, aunts deceased from drug overdoses in Vancouver, and so on. And I feel that is where it all started, at Gordon’s Reserve, because that’s where they all went.
So I guess for me to maybe take that inside one day and have that as a part of my reality instead of just the fear, is something that scares me, and even my own reality of all of the things that happened to me in Gordon’s Reserve, the school there, was a tribulation to all of that, the separation. Like I say, thirteen of my siblings —
Today I have a relationship with 3. All of the other ones are so distant it’s like we’re not even brothers and sisters.
So I guess maybe for me to go back to Gordon’s one day and just go there, maybe just to say that that place is real, it existed. I would like to go back there.
Q. Why do you think it is important for people to know about the history of Residential Schools in our country?
A. For me —
I was listening today to the first person who was speaking, or when I walked in here, and they talked about the government acknowledging. For me I believe that people in Canada and around the world will hear our stories, and yet at the end of the day I don’t know if the world will ever understand the impact of it as much as if the government, when the government steps forward and possibly even the churches and acknowledges, and that they know and can put a voice to the harm that was done. I believe that if the government, if they can say “these are the things that happened with these people and this is the impact and the results of the government and the churches”, that this is the result of those things, then I believe that if people can hear those things, even our people, the Aboriginal People can actually hear of the things that the government created, that that to me would form a more solid foundation for healing. Because people would have a sense of direction they may go to, to take themselves away from that.
For many people, even myself, the struggles that I went through in my life, I was absolutely lost. I had no idea that I was impacted and how much I have been impacted by being separated from my mother and those things, until I started doing my own healing and wellness. Before that I had no idea of what the Residential School had actually done to me.
I learned that when I went back to the Reserve and connected with Elders. The one thing that really set precedence with me was when my uncle told me, “John, all of our behaviours and attitudes and everything about us is all a given. We’re born into the world innocent. So it’s what people give to us, what they pass on to us, their wisdom, their abuse, their different things. They give those to us.”
So do we live with those for the rest of our lives and pass those on, because we can only pass on what has been given to us. We may want to do something different. Until we learn how to bring that into our lives, we’re not able to.
How I started to come to an understanding of that was how many behaviours, many things that were given to me towards physical violence and verbal abuse and a feeling of not being worthy and those things, well those are things that I wanted and wasn’t able to obtain those things, so I learned how to start doing that. So when I’m with my children today I see the things that I passed on to them when they were little and what I gave to them.
What is challenging for me today even with my younger 2 daughters, twelve and thirteen and them living with their mother, is that it’s like I’m a complete stranger to them. Because they don’t know me for who I was when I was in their lives, because of my values and beliefs and how I was. Drinking and those things were all a very important part of my life and the behaviours that come with that. And to not have those things and be able to pass on positive things that have been given to me to help me become a more positive person, in passing those on to my children and how hard it is for them because of their loyalties towards their mother who indulges in different things like that and how much easier it is to stay in something that is more familiar than something that’s different.
So it’s interesting. I have an FASD son. Him and I have a beautiful relationship together because he’s drawn more towards who I am and how I can connect with him and get right in there with him. He doesn’t hold those things against me from the past, like my other children.
I don’t know that it’s my other children hold things against me, as much as they are always hearing about how I used to be, so it’s loyalties and things like that. I have a wonderful relationship with my son, and it’s hard to obtain that from my other children because they are more used to the way I used to be than the way I am today.
So I understand about given behaviours and passing those on.
Before I started learning about the impact of Residential Schools by going to Healing Circles and Talking Circles and sitting with Elders and actually going to Residential School Healing Circles and listening to people talking about their experiences and the losses and the grieving and the different things, then I started to come to some understanding of what I had lost and what I had become.
It’s interesting growing up I was taught to be afraid of Aboriginal People. I always used to just hear profanity and descriptions of them, and so on. I didn’t have an understanding at all about what it means to be Aboriginal. I didn’t know I was Aboriginal when I was growing up, until I was in my teens, because growing up I looked more Ukrainian than Aboriginal. So there were a lot of things I seen put onto Aboriginal children, school mates and things, that wasn’t put onto me. In fact, even my own behaviour was part of the oppression behaviours. To be able to start to turn that around, there was a lot of grieving that I had to experience to move beyond that and accepting myself as Aboriginal.
Q. Is there anything else you would like to add before we close?
What is your hope for our People?
A. To be able to one day have a life without this pain and to be able to retain our culture and our language and all those things, and have all of that intact and secure, and to be able to live here in Canada without the oppression and the different things being put onto us, as well as just today even sharing with someone who is here in Whitehorse who is not Aboriginal and the difficulty they have in understanding what oppression is. And for me I see the oppressors as still in the oppression themselves because many of them don’t even understand, they just don’t see or feel the impact of how it has been just even for myself, and living in both worlds. Living in the White world growing up and going back to the Aboriginal with my culture and all of the things that I have, yeah, to be able to bring both worlds together. Because we’ll always have that. It will never be different than that, and to have an understanding and a positive environment and to just have this as a learning experience for everyone and to be able to live in unity without all of the negative energies that are still here with us today. And that’s for both Aboriginal People as well as other people.
It’s hard for me today to be with Aboriginal People and hearing our people even putting down other cultures, White people, or whoever because I believe in unity and the world working together as one and not that separation that we experienced.
Q. Thank you.
— End of Interview