Stage echoes | Omer St-Onges: words of a survivor

Omer St-Onges is neither an actor nor a playwright; he was a deep-sea fisherman for nearly 20 years. But first and foremost, this Innu native of Maliotenam is a survivor who has chosen to share large parts of his life – including his painful passage to the religious boarding school – in a play entitled utei (heart in Innu) and presented at the Studio Hydro-Québec of the Monument-National.

Stephanie Morin
The Press

Omer St-Onges was only 6 years old when he was separated from his family to go and live for a year in a boarding school with his twin brother. “My parents only spoke Innu. At boarding school, they spoke to me in French, a language I did not understand. I was even forbidden to communicate with my brother in Innu. I was lost. And I hated my father and mother for abandoning us. »

Now 60 years old, this father of four children wants his story not to disappear with him. He wants to tell the shadows of his existence, but also his childhood in the woods, with the soundtrack of his mother’s songs in the tent and the legends his father told in the evening. “For a long time, I’ve wanted to have our lived stories heard,” he says. We had hard times: alcohol, drugs, suicide. I was 12 when my first close friend committed suicide; we went to school together… But there is beauty too. Like when I was little and my brother and I played with our father’s racquets. We thought life was going to be good…”

Essential testimony

Omer St-Onges insists: with utei, he particularly wants to tell about the suffering – his own and that of his people – but not make anyone feel guilty. “People should not feel guilty about the history of Canada,” says the man who says he still bears several scars from his time at residential school. “Even today, I am unable to enter public toilets if there is someone. That’s where the clerics were waiting to grip us… The man also had problems with consumption which he has now managed to overcome.

The director and co-founder of the Menuentakuan theater company, Xavier Huard, lent a hand to Omer St-Onges to carry his word on stage. “The piece was created through a long process of discussion,” says the director. It’s a great opportunity for the public to get in touch with this part of our history. Especially that Omer tells it in a benevolent way. When the people of this generation have left us, there will be no one to bear witness to all this. »

Alone on stage, Omer St-Onges will carry on his shoulders all the weight of this essential word, but terribly difficult to deliver. To get there, he will, he says, think of all his friends “who couldn’t get out of it” and who, like him, are not lucky enough to be able to testify about what happened to them.

The spoken word, he knows, can aid healing. During the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, he worked as a spiritual guide for Aboriginal people who came to bear witness to the scars left by their time in residential schools. “I helped them so that they came out relieved of their testimony…”

And it is also to end his show on a lighter note that Omer St-Onges invites all those who attend to share tea with him at the end of the performance. “To say thank you to people for taking the time to listen to me. »

Utei: a survivor’s story is presented from March 3 to 6 at the Studio Hydro-Québec in the Monument-National.

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