Jacqueline Hookimaw-Witt

My name is Jackie Hookimaw-witt. I am First Nation, I am from Treaty 9 Territory. Right now, I live in North Bay, Ontario. I was living in Oakville before to do my culinary studies. It’s a combination of things, what I heard from my father and from my great-grandmother and my grandmother and what I’ve been reading when I did research on archives. Well, for me, because it’s very personal, like the persons that I heard from these stories are from my, like, my father, my grandmother, and my fathers’ – you could say he’s my cousin as well – and when they share these stories, it’s very traumatic, its very emotional and they really wanted their stories to be heard because it involves their loved one that passed away and they wanted accountability, they wanted, you know like answers, like why did this happen? It’s a story about the child that died and it’s a story about the children that died when they ran away together. The Residential School was St. Anne’s Residential School and its situated in Fort Albany, Ontario.
Yes, I think there’s like, many voices, because I’m sharing this story from my father, and also from my grandmother, and also my grandmother had a sister and she was from that other family whose child went missing, who died at St. Anne Residential School. So, and its like the family are related, they’re the ones who lost their children at St. Anne’s. So, there’s like a family genealogy, so its like I’m a third generation, like when you look at the background, of the family in question. Well, I know that when I listen to stories, they were taken away by a ship, like it was contracted from Hudson’s Bay Company and my elderly friend told me they call it “a crying children’s’ ship” because he said whenever it came and left, you could hear the children cry as they were departing from Attawapiskat river going to Fort Albany to go to St. Anne’s. So, that’s what they called that ship, and I have a photo that I can include. Well, there’s, what I hear is like, they were child that were like living under threatening conditions. A lot of threat and a lot of secrecy, like nuns telling them ‘Don’t talk about what happened to the boys’ and even, when there’s officials involved, it seems like a big cover-up, that you’re not supposed to know the truth, they want to bury the truth, but the truth has to be told what actually happened.
What I heard, like my Dad spoke to one of the friends that spoke with the friends, so the planning, how they went about it was ‘We’d leave at night time, when everybody’s sleeping’ and they would save their food and they snuck into the kitchen and they collected some bread and that’s what they took with them, like whatever they could find and they saved it for their journey to leave the building. And also, what I heard was that, when there was no availability of transportation being available, like there was perhaps like a dog team, but at that time they went away to Moosonee, probably to do visits with the Bishop. So when there’s no dog team, then that might have been the opportunity for the boys to run away because they might know, they might be, nobody to go after them when it’s not there.
You know, one of my cousins, he was elder, while he was still alive he was reaching out for help because he was saying that he had a sister that died at Residential School and he wanted some official means to open the case and I reached out to people but I didn’t have much luck. And, what he told me, was that his sister, I guess they were playing – and my father also confirmed that, he said we were just playing, we were just like throwing balls at each other… and some how the baseball, it hit the window of the building and it crashed and it cracked the window, and the brother came running out, and they took… they grabbed that girl inside the building. And my Dad said, they heard like, a sound of a, splashing, like real sounds of somebody being beaten and they heard her screams like… he said they were in like deep agony, her screams, and he said they were standing outside the building and he said ‘I peeped’ and he was quiet after, and he said, there was silence after, they didn’t hear that girl scream.
And then later, he said, they were told that she got sick and she passed away and that’s all he said. And I didn’t really know what to say, I was visiting him that afternoon, he was sitting outside, and my brother opened the window and he said ‘oh Dad, a lawyer phoned here, they said you witness or you know about that girl that died at St. Anne’s that got killed… my brother has schizophrenia, so when I heard that I just thought, he’s in his world, so I just said to my Dad what’s happening with him and that’s when he was quiet and told me what happened. And then, I remember, we went to church together, and I saw his friend, he’s our cousin as well, the one whose sister who died. And then, when at the church, where you’re at the part where you shake hands, my Dad reached out to his friend but his friend wouldn’t take his hand… and so after the church, I ask my Dad, I guess he’s upset with you and he said, you know, I couldn’t talk to the lawyer, ‘Because I can not take God to court’ he said. And I told him, well these people are just human beings that did that, you don’t have to be afraid. And, so I tried to explain to his friend, that he was a little boy that he’s scared, you know, and I told him you both elderly and try to make peace with each other. And so, Benoit held out his hand and shook hands and then after, like, my Dad he was passing, I noticed that he was afraid, like he had caught a terrible disease from the hospital and his health went up and down, he went on a bad trip, and then when we had the teleconference he said ‘Am I being punished, what did I do wrong?’ And, I said no Dad, you caught a very deadly disease and your body was fighting with antibiotics and your body went on a trip. And he said, ‘Thank you my daughter for telling me that.’
And that’s where I see that, how traumatized he’s been from that incident and he was sort of quiet, and he kept to himself and sometimes I think, whether he would have been more open with us as a family, you know, because it was like, he was just living in his world like traumatized. And there’s other things too, like it wasn’t only him, like there’s other family members that went – I also, like when I was trying to understand this, what’s happening, what happened – I was reading, like I’m glad our people did some research, like there was an article and in the few that was done to my great-grandmother Sara, from Ojibway Cree Culture Centre, and that’s where I saw her words and it struck me, she said, ‘My daughter, she lost her son… at the Residential School, he was killed.’ And she said, the people at Residential School are responsible for what happened, because they should have looked after the children properly. And she said, Sara said, ‘My daughter was in so much pain, after what happened when she lost her son, my grandson…’ she said.
And I could see, like, I was reading in other sources, like sometimes you find things in newspaper when this is happening with St. Annes’ you see how, the colonial system, they tried everything to try to fabricate their own version of the truth by using the tools that give them power – like the RCMP, and the Priest, and the Bishop – and the Bishop that call these kids deserters for running away, like blaming these children rather trying to understand why they were running away. And, I think for me, that’s a powerful word for somebody like a Bishop to say, there’s disorders, you know its like, ‘I will not be bothered’ because I’ve heard other stories where non-aboriginal students, that when they ran away, the next day there was mother superior, the priest, you know, they were there with the snowmobile and other antique modes of transportation and these kids belong to Hudson Bay Company, you know, their father was the manager. It just seems there was a difference of treatment, of who was to be searched for right away when somebody’s missing… and that’s what I find astonishing.
And also, that when I read the report, or a story, that there was a doctor that did his annual visit to St. Anne’s and that’s when he heard about the boys that perished and then when he asked the priest there, ‘How come you didn’t report this to the officials?’ he said ‘Well I did report it to the Bishop in Moosonee.’ And the Bishop didn’t contact the RCMP and all he said was there is disorders, and a year later, the top man in Ottawa heard about this incident and then he formulated a committee, all men – like, there was the principal, the RCMP and himself – and they call it “inquiry” but it wasn’t very beneficial for the family because their report contradicted to what the family had said, that their kids were beaten and threatened… and they just didn’t want their story to be told.
That’s what I’m finding and it’s not just Residential School, it’s so systematic, like they also talked about, not in this St. Anne’s, but what I see happening when I talk about like institutional racism, how systematic it is, like when this Dr. Bryce when he saw what was happening, at the hospital or how the native people were treated… back home there’s a doctor who got his license suspended from the Ontario College of doctors and he says it was because he was blowing the whistle to how native people aren’t getting proper medical treatment. So, I see the ongoing issues how native people, what we go through, its like there’s an apartheid system where we are treated as low class where the others will benefit from the system and we continue to suffer. That’s the legacy that I still see happening and also, it has such big impacts, like lateral violence, like I worked in offices, I experienced lateral violence from my colleagues, and if there’s an Aboriginal person working with Health Canada, there was so much lateral violence, I couldn’t understand it. I was just doing my work, helping vulnerable children, you know, and also with our own community member doing to each other, sabotaging each others work – I think it’s the trauma, and some people call it denial, but I think for me, when I read about psychology, people are frozen, in that terror, and they can not see, its not objective.
So I think that’s where, perhaps we might be, maybe not always correct to say denial. I think its just the trauma, how complex it has become, so its really hard to unravel so that we can maintain more healthy relations of respect to one another in our communities. And also, to reconcile, I think also, when people talk about reconciliation they have these – when there’s a conflict of race relations, they always automatically bring a session where they call it ‘cultural competency.’ For me, I think its politically dangerous, I think you’re watering down the colonialism, how deep it is, I think you really need to examine the policies that’s genocidal to correct the situation. Rather than a non-aboriginal, for competency, say ‘Oh, I didn’t know its not in your culture…’ You know, I think its too weak, it has to be more systematic, it has to be through the heart of this ongoing problem. Well, its very complex, like if you look at it, psychologically, politically, economically, when you know all the actors involved – like, Hudson’s Bay Company, and the fur trade, you know, its all power and balance, and that my biggest fear because you see now a days, when there’s resource development coming to our communities there’s a big protest right now across Canada, you know because people are saying enough is enough – what you are doing to our water, to our resources, you’re polluting our water, we depend on the land its sustainable for us, its our culture its our identity..
You know, that’s why I want to look at it holistically because I also think part of the reason why this Residential School is rooted in this belief that if there is no more Aboriginal people then we don’t have to deal, they don’t have to talk about the land anymore because we don’t exist anymore – Its just some imagination. So, I think that they tried everything for us to assimilate, for us to disappear, so there would be no more question for land claims because its this what sustains power from the resources coming from our traditional territories. Also, when you look at it, also psychologically, what I found, when I lost some body else, from suicide, we had a big emergency back home – reporters came and lots of artists came and then aboriginals from over seas – they said we want to help, you know, and I was, like I lived there, so I met with many, and also I was working in the school while this was going on, I was in high school teaching. I couldn’t believe the artists that came there, like they told me, ‘Well you have to be positive, you have to have hope’ Like how could they tell me this after I lost someone to suicide and she was a student, you know, when they told me that it was just like a stab in the heart, like I’m not supposed to talk about her anymore or how its contributing to other kids when they did that too and I think that was the hardest for me, when these well-meaning artists thought they were helping, they were actually making things worse for me because I was trying to do art activities with kids because I didn’t want we lose more kids. And I worked with my husband, he’s an educator as well, I worked with elders and other people that wanted to help us work with the youth and we had them in art, and through art we saw messages of what they were saying, what was happening in their life, and we took them aside and we talked, we cried, we shared and their okay. I think that’s what needed to happen, some acknowledgment that they needed to be heard and that they needed toffee that somebody cares for them.
So, these were the kinds of programs we were trying to design in our community, as private individuals, I wasn’t associated within the official system, I volunteered my time – but sometimes there was grants available where we could other activities outside the system because I couldn’t see it offering something that could help, because there was so much chaos, trauma and lateral violence so I wanted to make sure that nobody else passes away, you know, so these were the things I notice. And, these people they don’t know, like the artists, the damage they can do to communities when they don’t really want to understand how deep it is, like they have to look with themselves, they have to save themselves first before they come to me and say ‘I’m here to save you.’ They have to look at themselves first, their privileges you know, and you can not tell somebody that they have to be positive when they have no drinking water, they have poor housing, and poor housing, and low standard of education system.
And that’s what I saw too, when I was researching with the St. Anne’s, there was a correspondence with Hudson’s Bay and the fur trade and the Bishop, they were talking about like education and one of the things that struck me was, ‘well half-breeds we’ll teach them math and English, and the others, the Indians wont know this for now’ And, I thought what kind of education system is this? And then when I spoke to my Dad, he said, ‘Well at that time, we were only learning religion’ and he said, ‘I wished that I had learned English, I wish that I had known math, because when fur trade was there, I would have been able to argue with them when we were doing business deals with my fur.’ So, you see, it’s a deep history of fur trade, you know, how they negotiated with the church, like for to use the ship to pick up the children and signing the curriculum like its their business entity in there as well… like its very complex, and I think that what we need to remember, with reconciliation, they have to really accept what is happening and make political challenges with teeth to stop treating Aboriginal people like low class citizens. I think, because there was suicide involved, and I was searching, like there’s been – we wanted an inquest but it didn’t go through, but I saw that there was other inquests that were done already and in like, Thunder Bay or children that died when they were kept in welfare system, social services agencies. I just saw a pattern there, so I told my family ‘what are we doing?’ We know this master; we can never dismantle this house of our master…
And sure enough when I saw his comments, its like, the family, like in general, native people are blamed, like when something terrible happens we’re the victims – it’s like we’ve been blamed, its like we brought this upon ourselves, its like this Bishop saying ‘they were the deserters’ and he didn’t do anything about it and that’s how I feel. The justice system, it’s like we’re dropped and I think this needs to stop. I think this whole situation now, it’s all about abuse of human rights, you know, the housing, the education and the drinking water. Like, its about human rights now and the abuse we go through. So, I think that Canada needs to look at what they are doing to Aboriginal people because they pretend now to be the human right champions but it just seems the world, like it seems that it’s human nature to hurt one another for power. Like, its almost like when you look at European history, the holocaust, you know – when I travelled we went to Budapest and we went to Munich and I visited these holocaust centres, and each wall, each panel had an expression of human right abuse for security and each example – it was like what we are going through in Canada. I cried when I saw it and I thought, my god, its not only the Jews, it’s also Aboriginal people.
Our security, our right to security, it’s violated when we don’t have proper housing or proper drinking water or when economic system doesn’t really help Aboriginal people to get jobs and training, there’s a deep cap with socio-economic, you know, we have the highest unemployment and we don’t have enough skills and they bring in immigrants when they feel there’s shortage of jobs, for whatever sectors, for employment. So, that’s what I see. If they really want Reconciliation I think they really need to listen to our leaders that our sitting in Ottawa that speak with their people from across Canada. That, when they keep saying, ‘well, this is what’s wrong…’ please, they need to listen. They really need to make systematic changes. Then I will surely believe that it’s a great country to live in, but until now, I don’t think so.