Friends, with reference to an article about former Dene leader, Joachim Bonnetrouge of Fort Providence ("Life after leadership", News/North Feb. 19), there is indeed a lot of undue weight put on our leaders these days. My father was Chief of Radelie Koe, Fort Good Hope, for a good quarter century, and as Joachim says, this kind of a position puts the family in a 24/7 type of situation, basically in service to community.
One of the results, though, is that from all of this contact with community you find yourself, as I now do, putting the final edits, to my upcoming autobiography, From Bear Rock Mountain; The Life and Times of a Residential School Survivor, now due to be out in October. Here is an excerpt, A Deeper Cultural Divide:
We children were caught right in the middle
Besides being forcibly separated from our parents for eight months out of every year the timing was all wrong.
The months of the year we were taken to the residential schools – from September, just when our people would return to the land for winter – was traditionally a time for the young boys to learn the art of hunting and for the girls to learn how to sew with caribou and moosehides.
We returned in June to go out to the fishcamps, yes, but we boys were not expected, nor even allowed to handle the fish as the girls did. They in turn didn't have access to the hides needed to make moccasins, gloves and other clothing.
What resulted was that we grew all grew up not knowing what it meant to be a part of a society which respected those who could provide to the community.
Of course our parents were happy to have us back, but had been pushed to the side in a very real way, as far as our cultural education was involved. They had no way of bridging the emotional and psychological gap, our ways of being largely one based on survival. Even our grandparents were helpless to step in to help.
The churches saw to it that whomever still had anything in the way of traditional medicine ways was shunned for their savage and evil ways.
In time all we could do was go through the motions of life as we knew it before, even to the point of being glad to be going away again.
The kind of deep-seated lack of identity is something we yet have to resolve, and perhaps never will.
We were definitely guinea pigs caught in a foreign culture which only valued the way we could think. All First Nations' culture places just as much importance on how much a person cares for others, the ability to do a great number of physical activities on the land and a spiritual connection to the Dene way of life.
What makes the residential schools a genuine cultural genocide is that our own people were eventually made to feel that they did not have a right to their own children and, by extension, to the future of our First Nations, be it Inuit, Metis or Dene.