A cyclical repeat of the residential school system.
Brooks Harvey, Special Contributor
Eight-year-old Bob (name changed to remain anonymous) came home from school, made himself a peanut-butter sandwich and sat down to watch an episode of Hercules, his favourite TV show. Hours passed. He began to wonder where his parents were and why they weren’t looking after him.
He tried to focus on his cartoons, the only things he knew, but heard laughter and children's voices coming from the backyard. Bob walked through the house and looked out the window to see his adoptive, white parents playing hide-and-seek with their son and daughter, all smiles. “They never played with me like that,” says Bob, now 46, tears streaming down his withered face. “I remember thinking, ‘why didn’t they ever invite me to play with them?…Why did they adopt me if they didn’t want me?”
The pain he felt as an Aboriginal child growing up in a white adoptive family still resonates in his voice.
“I let people abuse me and walk all over me, just because it gave me a place to fit in.” This is but one of many instances where Aboriginals fall victim to the plight of cultural genocide.
Bob has short black hair and dark brown eyes. He’s of average build and has tattoos scattered across his arms. One of them is a stylized bear standing atop a maple leaf, its head held high and proud. He wears a faded green “St. Patrick’s Day Run” T-shirt and dark blue sweatpants, tattered with stains. When asked about the run, Bob confesses he doesn’t know. The shirt was donated.
For the past six months, he has been staying at the Native Men’s Residence (Na-me-res) on Vaughan Road, a shelter for Aboriginal men over 16. Sitting in a tiny grey room, Bob re-counts his feelings growing up neglected by a family he believes robbed him of his Aboriginal identity, leading to a life of pain and aimlessness.
He was taken from his biological parents at six-months-old by the Children’s Aid Society and adopted by a family in Toronto. “They put me in Catholic school, where I was bullied and alienated because I was ‘different,’” recalls Bob. “They made me go to church, where I had a religion that wasn’t mine crammed down my throat.”
Bob was told his spiritual ancestral beliefs were wrong.
“I hated myself for being Aboriginal,” he remembers. “I was raised white, which led to me not being comfortable in my own skin. I was fucked right from the get-go.” He was also sexually abused by a Catholic priest and physically abused by his adoptive parents, even though, as far as he recalls, they never hit their own two children. He grew up believing he didn’t deserve to be loved and carried that pain into his adult life. “It felt like carrying a piano on my back,” he says.
He later tried to connect with other Aboriginal people who had grown up on reserves, only to find they didn’t accept him either.
He was an “apple,” he explained, red on the outside and white inside.
He didn’t fit in anywhere. “I hated who I was,” he says, “so I did anything I could to cope. I partied a lot, trying to fill that emptiness inside me.” He started drinking heavily at age 15. When alcohol wasn’t enough to drown his pain, he moved on to cocaine, then crack. Before he knew it, 30 years of Bob’s life had passed. Today, Bob is clean and sober.
Bob admits his story is not unusual. Over the years, he’s met many Aboriginal adults, who were taken from their biological families as children and suffered a similar loss of identity. The fall-out has frequently been mental illness, substance abuse or trouble with the law. He ad-mitted to attempting suicide more than once.
Arselia Johnson, a former case manager at Native Child and Family Services, says Bob’s story is all too familiar.
“This level of trauma, at such a young age, changes their view on social interaction with society and their social status in society,” says Johnson. “Whenever they experience that kind of trauma in their early, most vulnerable years, their intellectual and emotional growth gets severely stunted,” she says. “So to cope, it’s common to see them turn to substance abuse… Coming out of this dynamic, many have little hope to better themselves and get ahead.”
Embracing his native spiritualism is what finally saved him.
“An elder told me ‘the Creator doesn’t make garbage,’” he explains. He was worthy of love. The best thing the Creator gave Bob was his feet, he says, so he could get back up.
