This is yet another degradation that Indigenous people were put through; disrespected even in death. Their lives were never given any worth by anyone, let alone the government. They had no protection, no comfort, no safe space. They were separated and alienated from their families, and were abused and degraded at school. In order to get a better understanding of Indigenous learning, we must remember that this was their first exposure to formal schooling, Western-style education, the type of learning institutions that continue to exist to this day. How do we reconcile this in our own classrooms? How do we incorporate Indigenous ways of learning into a system built to exclude it?

We have a tendency to forget that these atrocities happened so recently in our history, and that many of the victims are alive today. This poses challenges to an inherent belief that things like this could only have happened far in our past, that we are more civilized and would have known better. There are many people today who still do not know much, if anything, about residential schools, or the Indian Act. And then there are others who know someone who was impacted by residential schools. My best friends father is a Residential School Survivor; he also became Chief of Roseau River Reserve. The more I learn the more I look back at different memories of my friend and her father, and am able to see certain behaviours and decisions in a different light. (FYI: He is currently remarried to a women he met at residential school. They are very sweet together).

So much about residential schools reminds me of what happened and is continuing to happen in North Korea . Both peoples are stripped of their identities, separated from family, deprived of individual identities, vilified in public, pitted against one another. It's disgusting to see how one group of people will demoralize, dehumanize and disenfranchise another group.

The last sentence highlighted here is especially poignant: "You learned to obey". The children were in constant fear of being targeted, being the one to be beaten, and shamed. Targeted simply for existing, for being who they are. I can't imagine a child feeling fear in every breath and movement they took. They don't know what they are doing wrong, because everything is wrong.