I have never heard about residential schools until I entered post-secondary. It was in September of 2016 when my Early Childhood Education class at Saskatchewan Polytechnic took part in an orange shirt day event to honour those who were victims of residential schools. Through this I briefly learned about what residential schools were and how they have impacted the lives of several Indigenous peoples. I also learned how recent these events happened as one of my peers’ mothers was actually a victim of one of them — but this is not my personal story to share. My role as a treaty person is to ensure that these stories and legacies are heard from the voices of the victims themselves or their families who also face the inter-generational effects of residential schools. In addition, hearing these legacies from the victims themselves allows us to be more empathetic and just like the MMIW, it puts faces, names, and identities to the stories rather than dehumanizing and only classifying them as another statistic.
Residential schools are one of the main causes of the loss of Indigenous languages and culture and the separation of children and families. In the Indigenous studies class and ECS 110 class that I took in my first year, I learned that several indigenous peoples have lost connections with their families and culture due to residential schools. With that, it is important for us to understand that just because residential schools have shut down, that people are still living through the effects of them. In order to to achieve reconciliation, we must understand the past and how it continues to affect the present. We must also break the silence and incorporate these stories into our teachings. I started this blog post by stating that I have never learned about residential schools until post-secondary and I have been a student in Canadian school systems since I was in kindergarten — this needs to change and as future educators, it is our role to ensure these voices and stories are heard and I believe by hearing these stories be told by the survivors themselves will help them resonate with people even more.