How one survivor of Canada’s residential schools reclaimed her identity

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Warning: This story contains references to child sexual abuse which some readers may find disturbing.

Alberta, Canada - The mid-morning autumn light spills through the kitchen window as Martha Cardinal threads her hands through the wisps of sage smoke. The 76-year-old’s movements are deliberate and graceful. She reaches up to beckon the smoke over her head and moves the sage in sweeping arcs around her small frame. Then she closes her eyes as if in silent prayer. This is her daily smudging ritual and each breath she takes is a quiet act of reclamation.

When she has finished, she opens her eyes, settles into her wooden kitchen chair, and declares, “I feel good.”

The Cree elder shares her home on the Saddle Lake reserve in central Alberta with her daughter, son-in-law and four of her grandchildren. It is a busy, bustling home filled with the paraphernalia of three generations – full kitchen cupboards, shelves bursting with cookery books, schoolwork and trinkets – set back behind a grove of orange- and yellow-tinged pine and maple trees.

Home and family are important to Martha. “I’m blessed to have them here with me,” she says.

Martha is a survivor of Canada’s Indigenous residential school system and the Sixties Scoop. From the 1870s to the 1990s, Canada operated a system of church and state-run residential schools that forcibly separated hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children from their families, communities and cultures with the intention of erasing Indigenous languages, spiritual practices and identities. Abuse was rife at these schools and thousands of children did not survive them.

The Sixties Scoop was an extension of the residential school system and ran from the late 1950s through the 80s. During this period, thousands of Indigenous children across Canada were forcibly removed from their families by child welfare services and placed into non-Indigenous foster homes or adoptive families, often far from their home communities. Part of a broader government policy aimed at assimilating Indigenous peoples into mainstream Canadian society, authorities typically justified these removals by citing poverty, poor living conditions, or perceived neglect.

Martha was 10 years old when she was taken.

‘I felt abandoned’
But tragedy first struck a year and a half earlier.

Martha grew up on the Frog Lake Cree Nation, a reserve some 103km (64 miles) east of Saddle Lake. She remembers an idyllic childhood spent foraging for berries and fishing in the lake. The family didn’t have much, but they had each other, and their mother was the glue that kept them together.

The day her life changed “was warm and sunny”, she recalls. She was playing out in the bush with her brothers and sisters when they heard a commotion. Soon after, they saw their mother being carried out of the house and placed in a neighbour’s horse-drawn carriage.

“[Mom] told me before she left, ‘My girl, take care of your brothers and sisters.’ She made me promise,” Martha says, softly.

Later that evening, their father returned home alone. Their mother had died of a brain aneurysm. She was 27 years old and left behind nine children between the ages of one and 11. Martha was the second oldest.

Martha’s gaze drifts out of the kitchen window towards a line of trees and a recently ploughed wheat field beyond, as she says: “I felt ... abandoned by my mother for her to just leave us like that.”

Gulping back decades of grief, she reflects on the final words her mother spoke to her. “I think she knew she was going to die,” she says.

It was a few days later, at her mother’s funeral, that Martha understood the finality of death.

“She was lying there,” she says before pausing. When she speaks again, her voice is quieter. “She had a blanket on her. I asked, ‘Is mom sleeping? Is she going to wake up?’ My dad said, ‘No, your mom is gone.’”

The siblings kissed their mother goodbye and then followed a wagon “over a big mountain of a hill” to take her to her burial place.

“I didn’t want to remember what happened after that,” she says, her fingers resting gently on the edge of the kitchen table.

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https://www.aljazeera.com/features/long ... r-identity