Mashteuiatsh, near Roberval, 13 walkers took the road to Quebec Thursday morning to lay at the feet of the pope the sufferings that their elders endured in the secrecy of residential schools for Aboriginals. The starting point was not insignificant: it is here that the last establishment of its kind closed its doors in Quebec, barely 30 years ago.
The building, beige and ordinary, still stands in the center of the village, planted on a hill overlooking the immensity of Lac Saint-Jean. Now a secondary school, it still houses the memory of the abuse endured for decades at the Pointe-Bleue boarding school.
Within the community, memories of this abuse come and go. They are as present in the landscape of the village as the waves that wet the banks of the lake. “Everyone who has lived in the community and who is over 65 has had to endure this system,” says Grand Chief Gilbert Dominique.
His own parents were once boarders. His mother, he says, traumatized by the slaps on the mouth and the slaps in the face that she received each time she was caught speaking her mother tongue inside the establishment, did not never wanted to bequeath it to his children.
The former residents baptized the building with a name that speaks volumes. “We call it the Monster. That’s how we see the building,” explains Gilbert Courtois, a 70-year-old survivor from Pointe-Bleue. For him, the main entrance, flanked by two wings similar to arms, evokes a head, its mouth gaping when the doors are open. “When we crossed the threshold, we had the impression of being devoured,” he recalls.
He himself suffered abuse from the Oblate fathers. “It happened in the shower,” he says. When he thinks of certain comrades of the time, Gilbert Courtois considers himself lucky: “At night, the priests came to look for my bedmate in the dormitory to attack him. It was I who put cold compresses on his forehead when his nightmares made him sweat. »
A native of Mashteuiatsh, Mr. Courtois, unlike many other residents, could return to his family every Sunday. His wife was not so lucky, coming from too poor and too remote a background. “She was kidnapped one morning by the RCMP and by the priest,” he says. Afterwards, she was allowed to see her family only once a year. »
Stand up despite everything
Thursday morning in Mashteuiatsh, the sun barely rises when the community already gathers around the brigade of 13 walkers about to leave for Wendake.
Their pilgrimage is not a process of penance, like that of the pope, but of resilience.
“We are still here, after 500 years of colonization, standing up,” says Jay Launière-Mathias, young Innu at the head of the organization behind the march, Puamun Meshkenu. We are here despite the politicians who have tried to erase us. »
Before leaving, a handful of elders take the floor to tell, sometimes in their mother tongue, how the boarding school broke up their family.
“I was six years old when they took me away,” recalls Doris Bossum. I clung to my mother’s skirts begging her not to let me go. Half a century later, the memory of that day when the police and the clergy sequestered his childhood remains vivid.
“I was uprooted from the love of my parents,” says the lady, proud in her traditional dress.
In Canada, some 150,000 children are said to have, like Mme Bossum, forcibly endured residential schools for Aboriginals.
“All my uncles and all my aunts have been kidnapped,” says Chantale Niquay. His parents were, too: at age seven, his father had to leave his community to become a boarder at Fort George. Now 70 years old, “he is still unable to talk about what happened”, explains Mr.me Niquay. Silence still surrounds the abuse the man endured there, on the shores of Hudson’s Bay, more than 1,000 km from his home.
Bruised until today
The trauma of residential schools has trickled down to the generation born after they closed, to the point of irrigating contemporary Indigenous unhappiness. “Half the people who receive social assistance benefits here are under 25,” laments Grand Chief Gilbert Dominique, who accuses the Catholic Church of trying to “perpetrate cultural genocide.”
Former social worker, Gilbert Courtois, he calculates that “for 30 years, suicide must have taken away about 80 people in Mashteuiatsh” – a community with only 2,000 inhabitants.
Consumer problems are very present, say the two men, and they bring a panoply of social evils in their wake. Homelessness, violence, poverty: the wounds caused by the Pointe-Bleue boarding school remain open, even 31 years after its closure.
“There is still a lot of pain,” testifies the great chief Dominique. Remember that we began to understand the impact of residential schools only 20 or 25 years ago. Before, we did not understand what had hit our parents and our communities. »
departure
The ceremony is over, and the elders of Mashteuiatsh finish depositing the weight of their tragedy in the backpacks of the walkers who will, in a few days, spread it out in front of the Pope.
The march to Wendake gets under way, and the participants set off one by one on the long road that separates them from the capital.
Over the 275 km that stretch before them, these 13 walkers will be, for their nation, both spokespersons and living proof that the Aboriginal peoples continue to move forward, despite and against the sufferings of the past.