My thoughts on the Muffins for Granny documentary

Watching this documentary made me so emotional. It was about residential school survivors telling their stories. One of the survivors talked about seeing a statue of Jesus nailed to the cross, which scared them. They were thinking and wondering how someone could do that to a person and what these new people would do to them. There was another story about two girls who ran away from the residential school. They were found completely naked, tied up, and dead. One of the girls had been decapitated. Two white men had caught the two girls. One survivor’s younger brother and some other boys crawled under the school’s foundation to play. The boys found baby bones, most likely from the aborted children of the girls who got pregnant at the school.

Those children went through some horrible, disgusting things, things I could not even imagine. 

The documentary also talks about the aftermath of residential schools. They talked about intergenerational trauma and how it affects the survivors’ children and grandchildren. One person talked about finally realizing why her dad was abusive. It was because he went to a residential school where he was most likely abused as well. The schools taught children that abuse and torture were okay. They were normalizing these things. It also talked about the high rates of alcoholism amongst Aboriginal people. Some many drank to forget the sadness and the things that happened. They drank to feel happy for a while. One of the survivors had shot himself in the chest because he was ready to die; he had survived the worst a person could endure, the residential school system. He could not stand what was happening to him or around him, so he shot himself. He ended up getting up and walking out of the bush to get help, but he could not tell the story to anyone for a long time. Many were unable to talk about it at first.