Friends, reading about a recent class-action lawsuit brought to bear on behalf of surviving patients of the segregated Charles Camsell Indian Hospital brings to mind a chapter, The Procession of Carriages, in my upcoming book, From Bear Rock Mountain.
What makes Avery Zingel’s excellent article in News/North so poignant is that, as Mountain Dene film-maker Raymond Yakeleya says, this story is a familiar one to the North, and so personal.
The 29 segregated hospitals are alleged to have been in cahoots with those connected with residential schools in the North. I and many from my hometown of Radelie Koe, Fort Good Hope, were patients, in the Aklavik TB Ward. More were at Charles Camsell.
Stories of experimental surgeries, without anaesthetics, forced sterilizations, sexual assault, electroshock and unmarked burials is what we usually associate with Shoah, the Holocaust. Surely this couldn’t have happened right here, in good Canada? Well, think again.
It is true, and more real than you might think. The scars yet remain, even after almost sixty years. To this day I simply cannot enter the doors of a hospital, even when the patient is related.
In my upcoming book I intentionally draw the connection of the hated Indian residential schools to the Nazi death camps. There are indeed more similarities than one would naturally avoid, for whatever reason such as portrayed in the production Auschwitz, by the BBC’s Laurence Rees – this one macabre story titled the Procession of Carriages – where prisoners at one of these factories of death watch as the Nazi’s rolled off a long line of baby strollers, five wide, for an agonizing hour, watching hopelessly and helpless, wondering what this was all about.
Where are the empty carriages going and why?
One of the more serious questions film-maker Yakeleya has to help answer is, what happened to all of the patients in the Charles Camsell Hospital who didn’t come home at all?
There are certainly many who did, who were not the same after having been to these places. My own grandfather, Peter Mountain, Sr., and even my mom, attended such hospitals and though they remained close, became emotionally distant after.
Whatever happens, I do know for sure that when you put your heart to a story like this one, as Raymond Yakeleya will, you are sure to add more than some hints to what our Dene, Metis and Inuit history is really all about.
Even now, with the deaths and circus trials of poeple like Tina Fontaine and Colten Bushie, we are learning that issues of reconciliation have been set back to their roots, this is, if the various Royal Commissions touched on them at all. Or are they – like the Indian hospitals, reconciliation and the Trudeau Government – simply more in a long line of government programs?
Mahsi, thank you.