TRC politics: John Milloy 'resigned' after giving this interview:
Truth and Reconciliation: An interview with John Milloy
Written by Brett Throop and Graeme Johnson (interview by Graeme Johnson)
Monday, 22 March 2010 14:53
Monday, 22 March 2010 14:53
How many Aboriginal children died in Canada’s state-funded, church-run Indian residential schools, which ran from 1879 to 1996? Where were they buried? How did they die? These are some of the questions Trent history professor John Milloy will be working to answer as the director of Research, Historical Records, and Report Preparation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. He was appointed to the position in January of this year.
In Milloy’s book, A National Crime, he describes how students were subjected to physical and sexual abuse and restricted from speaking their traditional languages. They were also severely malnourished. Students came out without the skills to live in either Canadian or Aboriginal society. In a January lecture, Milloy stated that the death rate of students at one such school was 64 per cent. Across Canada, a large number of students died at the schools or within a year of returning home.
As many as 150,000 Aboriginal children attended Canada’s 130 residential schools before the last one closed in 1996.
The Commission will pour over church and government records in order to produce an official historical record of Canada’s residential schools era.
The Missing Children Research Project is only one part of Truth and Reconciliation Canada’s mandate, which is to inform all Canadians about what happened in Indian Residential Schools and to document the survivors’ stories and those affected by the schools’ legacy.
Arthur had the opportunity to talk to Dr Milloy about the Commission and his role as the Commission’s Director of Research.
Arthur: So what is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
Milloy: [The Commission] was set up by the government, the churches and the Assembly of First Nations by way of an agreement that brought all litigation to an end. There were thousands and thousands of cases against the government and the churches.
Paul Martin and Phil Fontaine, who was then head of the Assembly of First Nations, sat down and said, “This is crazy; it’s costing millions of dollars, survivors are dying, and we’re not moving forward at any speed.”
So, they negotiated a settlement which meant that anybody who had been in a residential school and could prove this, would receive a payment for the years they’d been there, called a Common Experience Payment (CEP). [For example]: we were all in school, it was a dreadful thing, so put your hand up and say, “I was there for five years...” and we’ll multiply the years times the payment.
Then there’s an individual assessment process where you come forward, having gotten your CEP, and say, “I was sexually abused” or whatever. There’s a separate administrative process by which added amounts of compensation are paid.
Arthur: I remember hearing about that settlement and thinking the amount of compensation was completely inadequate.
Milloy: It is completely inadequate, but you have to ask yourself the question, ‘What is adequate?’ There’s absolutely no way of making up for lost youth, lost language, lost culture.
If you talk to survivors, what was most important to them wasn’t the Common Experience payment- what was most important was the recognition that what they had been saying all along was true.
Arthur: So, you were asked to be head of research for the Commission?
Milloy: Director of Research. Part of the agreement was that the churches and the government would give us copies of all their residential school files; then we would have copies given to the commission, we would digitize those records, and we would build a national research centre with that as the initial foundation collection.
Since the 1920s, or even before that, there’s been a growth of Aboriginal political organizations. Their papers sit in basements across the country and there’s no way they’re going to be giving them to the national archives of Canada. So, we’re thinking about the possibility of building a freestanding, Aboriginally-controlled archive that would have that collection.
Then on top of that we may be able to get the AFN (Assembly of First Nations) papers and other papers and build a fair-sized archive.
It would be an electronic archive so Aboriginal people sitting in Yellowknife with a laptop and internet access could actually read documents in the server in Winnipeg or Trent or wherever the hell the server ends up.
I’ve only got five years to do this job. I’ve got a digitization budget of $3 million – that’s a lot of digitization. There are 40 different sites across the country where church documents and government documents exist. 40 bloody sites. Then, in each of those sites are two or three archives, so it’s really 120-140 archive sites. We have to get people in there to look at every document, which has to be indexed – each document as if you’re building a library – then digitized, and then off you go to the next site. It’s a mundane project.
Arthur: And what’s the purpose of this research?
Milloy: I’m Director of Research and Report Writing, and there are two reports that have to be written: one two years from now and a final report in five years.
The first report is a history of the system, so we’ll do some research to increase the level of knowledge we have about how the system was built and operated. We don’t know how much the system cost or how much the federal government put into the system. We know they never gave the system enough money to provide decent food, housing, clothing, or qualified teachers, but we don’t know the actual number.
We also don’t know the number of children who went to the schools, for a whole series of reasons.
Arthur: Why aren’t these numbers known?
Milloy: If you were the principal of a school, you submitted what was called a Quarterly Report to the government for most of the life of the system. On that Quarterly Report, you listed all the names of the students and you got $X a head as a per-capita payment. You sent the document to Ottawa, they cut you a cheque, and on you went. So, theoretically, we should know every child who was ever in school because we would have all these Quarterly Reports.
But during the [Second World War] the government decided it needed paper and it wanted to recycle government documents. The word went out to various departments saying, “Give us documents you’re not interested in having any longer.” Why keep the Quarterly Reports, right? The cheque had already been cut.
So people who had been in the school, for example, and were applying for the Common Experience Payment would say, “Well, I’ve been in the school for ten years,” and the government would search the Quarterly Reports and say, “We only have records of you being there for five.”
I saw numbers yesterday. There were about 92,000 people who applied for Common Experience Payments and 23,000 of them were rejected. Nearly a third of the people who apply are rejected because, largely, the records aren’t there. So, the person who was already abused in one way now gets to be abused in another. There’s 23,000 liars out there? Give me a break.
Arthur: What other problems have there been in accessing this information?
Milloy: The government is being relatively cooperative; the churches are not being cooperative at all. Even though they signed the agreement saying they’d cough these things up, you go to them and they tell you, “We can’t give you that.”
Arthur: What are their reasons for that?
Milloy: Oh, privacy largely. They’re afraid of lawsuits under the Charter of Rights, for example.
The Catholics are especially wary. They might say, “if we give you the documents, John, and they’re the diary of priest so-and-so and this opens him up to liability” – because he was buggering boys in the basement and that sort of thing – “and he sues us (the church) we’re in all sorts of trouble.”
This is the reason they weren’t giving us the documents in the first place, because the documents prove they were not treating children in the way they should have been treated. They’re just scared shitless.
You go to the big meetings where all of the church reps are and they go on about how important this is; then you go to the archivists and you hear, “it’s private, piss off,” or you hear, “they haven’t given us any money.”
For example, the United Church archives in Winnipeg is only open three days a week, from lunch until the afternoon. So, it’s got a part-time archivist and she’s saying, “how am I going to do this? I have to go through every piece of paper in my archives to determine what’s relevant and then get these papers ready for you guys.” Then we’d go in and index and digitize. It’s a massive project. She said, “I don’t have any money to hire people. What am I supposed to do?”
Arthur: I thought there was money earmarked by the Commission for that?
Milloy: The money is earmarked by the churches. When they signed the agreement they all stuck their hands up and said, “We’ll do all this.” But the churches are dragging their feet.
Why would the guy who’s up on criminal charges provide you with the evidence that will convict him? Survivors are going to look at us and say, “What are you, a fucking fool?”
Arthur: Part of your research is also tracking down kids who didn’t survive the schools?
Milloy: It’s called the Missing Child Project. Families want to know where their kids are. They want to know where they disappeared and where they’re buried.
You have to sit down and you have to go through every piece of paper in every archive looking for indications that X-child died or went missing in a particular place for a particular reason.
And then where are these children buried? Many schools had graveyards, but not every graveyard connected to the school was the site for the burial of these children. I went to Qu’Appelle residential school in Saskatchewan and the school has been destroyed. The church is there, the graveyard was there, but there was not one marker for one Indian.
I said to one of the school survivors, a guy in his fifties, “What’s going on, why didn’t they give you guys markers?”
He said, “Oh they didn’t bury us there. We’re in a field across the lake.” So we’re dealing with an unmarked graveyard with unmarked graves, and that’s common right across the country.
Survivors come to me and say, “Here’s the graveyard John,” and it looks like someone stopped on the side of highway 7 and took a picture of a bush. All you see is brush, but there are Indian kids in there.
We’ll have to find the cemeteries and we’ll have to x-ray the ground to make sure there are bodies there and count them. Then we’re going to have to find collateral documentary evidence to tell us who’s in those graves - but we will never have a complete list.
Arthur: You mentioned that there will be a second report in five years. What will that cover?
Milloy: The second report will be much more contemporary. There’s nothing you can do about the schools because they’re closed. What we need to do is direct people’s attention to the problems Indigenous people face today as a direct result of the residential school system.
We can draw direct lines between students leaving (what they call ‘graduates’ in the file) and things like incarceration rates. Graduates had, on average, a grade three education, even though they’d been there for ten years, and current incarceration rates are just astronomic. More First Nations people are in jail in Manitoba and Saskatchewan than any other ethnic group in those provinces. And the Native percentage of the population is miniscule: the smallest population, the most unemployed, the most drug-addicted, the most alcohol-addicted, the most uneducated, and so forth, naturally produces the largest part of the incarcerated population.
We can actually go down one list after the other – health conditions, social dysfunction, unemployment – and you can draw lines between that and previous residential school participation.
The other thing is that when you sit in Ottawa and read the records, what’s not there in 95 per cent of the cases are the Indian voices. Not the voices of the parents and certainly not the voices of any children. So we expect to take 50,000 statements from survivors over the next five years.
Arthur: What do you think will come out of all this?
Milloy: We’re mandated to do seven national events in seven different places across the country. The first one is in Winnipeg this July.
It will be a four-day event. Commissioners will set up shop, CBC will be there, and thousands of people will come, many of them survivors. There will be a whole process of statement gathering. Some people will speak publicly, as in South Africa, sitting in front of the commissioners and telling their stories. Many, many more will give private sessions.
There will be all sorts of learning opportunities for non-Aboriginal people. We want to not only talk about the crises and the opportunities for reconciliation, but we also want to say, “We’re still here and we’re still determined to be here.”
What we’re trying to say to people is, “Look, if you really want to rebuild the relationship with First Nations people, then we need to talk about fulfilling treaty promises, issues of unemployment, and economic development, and we need to talk about bad water in Northern communities.”
The whole thing will be a disaster if it is only a few people complaining and white guys turning their back on it and saying, “so what?” We really have to work hard to get non-Aboriginal people involved.
Last Updated on Monday, 22 March 2010 15:33
http://www.theglobeandmail.
In Milloy’s book, A National Crime, he describes how students were subjected to physical and sexual abuse and restricted from speaking their traditional languages. They were also severely malnourished. Students came out without the skills to live in either Canadian or Aboriginal society. In a January lecture, Milloy stated that the death rate of students at one such school was 64 per cent. Across Canada, a large number of students died at the schools or within a year of returning home.
As many as 150,000 Aboriginal children attended Canada’s 130 residential schools before the last one closed in 1996.
The Commission will pour over church and government records in order to produce an official historical record of Canada’s residential schools era.
The Missing Children Research Project is only one part of Truth and Reconciliation Canada’s mandate, which is to inform all Canadians about what happened in Indian Residential Schools and to document the survivors’ stories and those affected by the schools’ legacy.
Arthur had the opportunity to talk to Dr Milloy about the Commission and his role as the Commission’s Director of Research.
Arthur: So what is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
Milloy: [The Commission] was set up by the government, the churches and the Assembly of First Nations by way of an agreement that brought all litigation to an end. There were thousands and thousands of cases against the government and the churches.
Paul Martin and Phil Fontaine, who was then head of the Assembly of First Nations, sat down and said, “This is crazy; it’s costing millions of dollars, survivors are dying, and we’re not moving forward at any speed.”
So, they negotiated a settlement which meant that anybody who had been in a residential school and could prove this, would receive a payment for the years they’d been there, called a Common Experience Payment (CEP). [For example]: we were all in school, it was a dreadful thing, so put your hand up and say, “I was there for five years...” and we’ll multiply the years times the payment.
Then there’s an individual assessment process where you come forward, having gotten your CEP, and say, “I was sexually abused” or whatever. There’s a separate administrative process by which added amounts of compensation are paid.
Arthur: I remember hearing about that settlement and thinking the amount of compensation was completely inadequate.
Milloy: It is completely inadequate, but you have to ask yourself the question, ‘What is adequate?’ There’s absolutely no way of making up for lost youth, lost language, lost culture.
If you talk to survivors, what was most important to them wasn’t the Common Experience payment- what was most important was the recognition that what they had been saying all along was true.
Arthur: So, you were asked to be head of research for the Commission?
Milloy: Director of Research. Part of the agreement was that the churches and the government would give us copies of all their residential school files; then we would have copies given to the commission, we would digitize those records, and we would build a national research centre with that as the initial foundation collection.
Since the 1920s, or even before that, there’s been a growth of Aboriginal political organizations. Their papers sit in basements across the country and there’s no way they’re going to be giving them to the national archives of Canada. So, we’re thinking about the possibility of building a freestanding, Aboriginally-controlled archive that would have that collection.
Then on top of that we may be able to get the AFN (Assembly of First Nations) papers and other papers and build a fair-sized archive.
It would be an electronic archive so Aboriginal people sitting in Yellowknife with a laptop and internet access could actually read documents in the server in Winnipeg or Trent or wherever the hell the server ends up.
I’ve only got five years to do this job. I’ve got a digitization budget of $3 million – that’s a lot of digitization. There are 40 different sites across the country where church documents and government documents exist. 40 bloody sites. Then, in each of those sites are two or three archives, so it’s really 120-140 archive sites. We have to get people in there to look at every document, which has to be indexed – each document as if you’re building a library – then digitized, and then off you go to the next site. It’s a mundane project.
Arthur: And what’s the purpose of this research?
Milloy: I’m Director of Research and Report Writing, and there are two reports that have to be written: one two years from now and a final report in five years.
The first report is a history of the system, so we’ll do some research to increase the level of knowledge we have about how the system was built and operated. We don’t know how much the system cost or how much the federal government put into the system. We know they never gave the system enough money to provide decent food, housing, clothing, or qualified teachers, but we don’t know the actual number.
We also don’t know the number of children who went to the schools, for a whole series of reasons.
Arthur: Why aren’t these numbers known?
Milloy: If you were the principal of a school, you submitted what was called a Quarterly Report to the government for most of the life of the system. On that Quarterly Report, you listed all the names of the students and you got $X a head as a per-capita payment. You sent the document to Ottawa, they cut you a cheque, and on you went. So, theoretically, we should know every child who was ever in school because we would have all these Quarterly Reports.
But during the [Second World War] the government decided it needed paper and it wanted to recycle government documents. The word went out to various departments saying, “Give us documents you’re not interested in having any longer.” Why keep the Quarterly Reports, right? The cheque had already been cut.
So people who had been in the school, for example, and were applying for the Common Experience Payment would say, “Well, I’ve been in the school for ten years,” and the government would search the Quarterly Reports and say, “We only have records of you being there for five.”
I saw numbers yesterday. There were about 92,000 people who applied for Common Experience Payments and 23,000 of them were rejected. Nearly a third of the people who apply are rejected because, largely, the records aren’t there. So, the person who was already abused in one way now gets to be abused in another. There’s 23,000 liars out there? Give me a break.
Arthur: What other problems have there been in accessing this information?
Milloy: The government is being relatively cooperative; the churches are not being cooperative at all. Even though they signed the agreement saying they’d cough these things up, you go to them and they tell you, “We can’t give you that.”
Arthur: What are their reasons for that?
Milloy: Oh, privacy largely. They’re afraid of lawsuits under the Charter of Rights, for example.
The Catholics are especially wary. They might say, “if we give you the documents, John, and they’re the diary of priest so-and-so and this opens him up to liability” – because he was buggering boys in the basement and that sort of thing – “and he sues us (the church) we’re in all sorts of trouble.”
This is the reason they weren’t giving us the documents in the first place, because the documents prove they were not treating children in the way they should have been treated. They’re just scared shitless.
You go to the big meetings where all of the church reps are and they go on about how important this is; then you go to the archivists and you hear, “it’s private, piss off,” or you hear, “they haven’t given us any money.”
For example, the United Church archives in Winnipeg is only open three days a week, from lunch until the afternoon. So, it’s got a part-time archivist and she’s saying, “how am I going to do this? I have to go through every piece of paper in my archives to determine what’s relevant and then get these papers ready for you guys.” Then we’d go in and index and digitize. It’s a massive project. She said, “I don’t have any money to hire people. What am I supposed to do?”
Arthur: I thought there was money earmarked by the Commission for that?
Milloy: The money is earmarked by the churches. When they signed the agreement they all stuck their hands up and said, “We’ll do all this.” But the churches are dragging their feet.
Why would the guy who’s up on criminal charges provide you with the evidence that will convict him? Survivors are going to look at us and say, “What are you, a fucking fool?”
Arthur: Part of your research is also tracking down kids who didn’t survive the schools?
Milloy: It’s called the Missing Child Project. Families want to know where their kids are. They want to know where they disappeared and where they’re buried.
You have to sit down and you have to go through every piece of paper in every archive looking for indications that X-child died or went missing in a particular place for a particular reason.
And then where are these children buried? Many schools had graveyards, but not every graveyard connected to the school was the site for the burial of these children. I went to Qu’Appelle residential school in Saskatchewan and the school has been destroyed. The church is there, the graveyard was there, but there was not one marker for one Indian.
I said to one of the school survivors, a guy in his fifties, “What’s going on, why didn’t they give you guys markers?”
He said, “Oh they didn’t bury us there. We’re in a field across the lake.” So we’re dealing with an unmarked graveyard with unmarked graves, and that’s common right across the country.
Survivors come to me and say, “Here’s the graveyard John,” and it looks like someone stopped on the side of highway 7 and took a picture of a bush. All you see is brush, but there are Indian kids in there.
We’ll have to find the cemeteries and we’ll have to x-ray the ground to make sure there are bodies there and count them. Then we’re going to have to find collateral documentary evidence to tell us who’s in those graves - but we will never have a complete list.
Arthur: You mentioned that there will be a second report in five years. What will that cover?
Milloy: The second report will be much more contemporary. There’s nothing you can do about the schools because they’re closed. What we need to do is direct people’s attention to the problems Indigenous people face today as a direct result of the residential school system.
We can draw direct lines between students leaving (what they call ‘graduates’ in the file) and things like incarceration rates. Graduates had, on average, a grade three education, even though they’d been there for ten years, and current incarceration rates are just astronomic. More First Nations people are in jail in Manitoba and Saskatchewan than any other ethnic group in those provinces. And the Native percentage of the population is miniscule: the smallest population, the most unemployed, the most drug-addicted, the most alcohol-addicted, the most uneducated, and so forth, naturally produces the largest part of the incarcerated population.
We can actually go down one list after the other – health conditions, social dysfunction, unemployment – and you can draw lines between that and previous residential school participation.
The other thing is that when you sit in Ottawa and read the records, what’s not there in 95 per cent of the cases are the Indian voices. Not the voices of the parents and certainly not the voices of any children. So we expect to take 50,000 statements from survivors over the next five years.
Arthur: What do you think will come out of all this?
Milloy: We’re mandated to do seven national events in seven different places across the country. The first one is in Winnipeg this July.
It will be a four-day event. Commissioners will set up shop, CBC will be there, and thousands of people will come, many of them survivors. There will be a whole process of statement gathering. Some people will speak publicly, as in South Africa, sitting in front of the commissioners and telling their stories. Many, many more will give private sessions.
There will be all sorts of learning opportunities for non-Aboriginal people. We want to not only talk about the crises and the opportunities for reconciliation, but we also want to say, “We’re still here and we’re still determined to be here.”
What we’re trying to say to people is, “Look, if you really want to rebuild the relationship with First Nations people, then we need to talk about fulfilling treaty promises, issues of unemployment, and economic development, and we need to talk about bad water in Northern communities.”
The whole thing will be a disaster if it is only a few people complaining and white guys turning their back on it and saying, “so what?” We really have to work hard to get non-Aboriginal people involved.
Last Updated on Monday, 22 March 2010 15:33
And then he was gone ...
In an interview, Dr. Milloy said his resignation had nothing to do with his remarks [yeah, right!], which included a comment suggesting the Roman Catholic Church was afraid of lawsuits against living priests if diaries reveal details about “buggering boys in the basement and that sort of thing.”
