At first I saw my own kids in the faces of the kids in the photo below, just as I saw my middle one in the face of a little girl who died in U.S. border detention a couple of years ago.
But then I saw my own face, and my kindergarten class, where the worst thing that happened to me was getting the palms of my hands slapped with a ruler for holding hands with another little girl instead of being single file as directed.
I still remember the fear I felt when I realized my mistake, that it wasn't double file time, it was single file time. Then the sting of the ruler and the shame of doing it wrong and the humiliation of being punished for it in front of everybody else.
I remember, too, the shame of feeling relief when it wasn't me being punished for doing "it" wrong, but someone else. I hated it, that feeling of cowardice, helplessness, the lowering of my head, afraid to look up lest the adult in charge think I was asking for it.
No adult I was aware of growing up questioned that there should be corporal punishment in public elementary schools. Or that principals and vice-principals, who were all men and all powerful, should be in charge of meting it out.
For most of my public elementary school years the principal was a former boxer with a temper and he meted out corporal punishment plenty. And in the early 70s, that same principal caught my grade eight teacher, who doubled as vice-principal, sexually assaulting a girl in grade six.
Freddie, our next door neighbour, went to a Catholic school. He told me stories all the time about the priests and the nuns. It sounded shockingly violent to me and I was just glad we weren't Catholic and I could go to a public school where at least it wasn't like THAT.
Everybody knew about the principal catching my grade eight teacher in the act of sexually assaulting a student. And everybody knew the school board dealt with it by transferring him to another school. It wasn't until the late '90s that he would be sentenced to twelve years in a federal penitentiary for the increasingly violent sexual assaults against public elementary school girls he had gone on to perpetrate over his 25-year career. It was all a bit of a miracle, really, that there was any justice at all, but a miracle of over a dozen victims being tracked down and able to testify, while another dozen were not.
That was our culture, the culture I grew up in, a white middle-class kid in a mid-sized city in northern Ontario in the 60s and 70s. It was a better culture than the one our parents experienced as children in Canada, but we were still powerless in it. Adult violence was still our problem. We faced the consequences of it. Parents rarely got involved in what adults in positions of authority did to their own children, never mind someone else's. That would have been seen as interfering in other people's business. It's not very long ago our governments made it an adult's duty, if that adult is in a position of authority, to report child sexual abuse to.... an adult in a position of authority.
So I look at this photo, enveloped in empathy for these children, because I know what our culture was during my childhood, and I wonder if the trouble some Canadians have in acknowledging the pain of residential school survivors, is because they have trouble acknowledging their own.
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