60 Minutes tells the stories of the damage from residential schools in Canada

Editor's note: There is definitely language and stories that could be triggering to sufferers of the impact of residential schools in Canada.

60 Minutes and Anderson Cooper came to Canada in October to look into the unmarked graves found at residential schools. Last night, they told the U.S. audience of the atrocities north of the border.

Cooper spoke with Leona Wolf, Chief Wilton Littlechild, and Ed Bitternose. The idea was to speak inside the residential school buildings so they could point to rooms or places where these horrible incidents happened.

Wolf spoke of Father Joyal fondling girls, including her cousin, who was 8. Littlechild came to a residential school in Alberta, where his name was 65 as in "Sixty-five, pick that up stupid." "65, why'd you do that, idiot?" Bitternose said because of his experience, he didn't tell his wife he loved her until they were married about 40 years, "and then I was very careful how I said it."

Cooper covered the basics that have been reported. The exceptions were how the Catholic Church reneged on restitution money as well as how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission said there were thousands of graves long before they were discovered.

“That's where my house was. I would sit here and wonder why I couldn't be home.”

Ed Bitternose was taken to a residential school within view of where his parents lived. He says he was abused by other children and a nun, but began healing when he re-discovered his Cree culture. pic.twitter.com/6Mk8qEZNbZ

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) February 7, 2022

Archeologist Kisha Supernant weighed in on the multi-generational impact of residential schools, "Our communities still feel the impacts of these institutions in our everyday lives. We're way over-represented in child welfare and adoptions and foster care. We're way over-represented in the prisons. You can draw a direct line with that to these places and the pain of that, that has been passed on from generation to generation."

Wolf spoke to that with her mother and how she treated her and how she treated her children.

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The segment was about what happened in Canada. The piece did have a paragraph about what had happened in the United States. "The idea for the schools came in part from the United States. In 1879 the Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in Pennsylvania, where this photo was taken of Native American children when they first arrived. This is them four months later. The school's motto was 'kill the Indian, save the man.'"

There is a trauma in having the interviews inside the buildings where these horrible deeds took place. The cruelty of having their hair cut, being assigned numbers or Christian names, as Littlechild put it, the motto was, "kill the Indian in the child": these are the small but painful traumas deliberately set into a system justified by the government.

Regular readers know we are destined to bring up Lynn Beyak's name in all of this. The former Conservative senator, one of many scandalous appointments by then Prime Minister Stephen Harper, spent a lot of political capital on the idea that residential schools weren't so bad.

Beyak retired just over a year ago from the Senate. She might have watched the 60 Minutes story and not learned a lot from the experience. While some Canadians may agree with Beyak's views, at least they aren't in the position of a senator.

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You can watch the 60 Minutes segment. The CBS News program runs on CBS in the United States and Global in Canada.

photo credit: 60 Minutes
Twitter capture: @60Minutes

Comments

[Tawnie Varnell]

This story was appalling. I am so terribly sorry to those families that suffered the injustice by the Canadian government. My heart aches for what you have endured. I pray for you. Shame on the government and Religious leaders that tried to destroy these people.