Stories about the effects of residential schools are different for each Indigenous person who experienced them and for their family afterwards. For Samantha Kinoshameg and her father, it led to a push for generational advocacy and a drive to work hard.
Kinoshameg, who is the executive director for the Barrie Native Friendship Centre (BNFC), has lived in the city for the last 10 years after moving here from Sudbury.
Like many Indigenous people, Kinoshameg has relatives who were in the residential school system, one of whom was her father.
She spoke to her father, Raymond Kinoshameg, on Monday about the grim discovery of 215 children’s bodies at a Kamloops, B.C. residential school.
“We were chatting about it from his perspective, because he went to (a residential) school in the '40s up north,” Kinoshameg told BarrieToday. “He honestly didn’t say much and hasn’t on the issue for most of my life.”
Kinoshameg said her mom didn’t go to a residential school, but rather a day school.
Day schools were where First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were sent during the day, but lived with their parents and remained in their communities.
“My mom would always tell me when I was younger that my dad went to a residential school. So did his brother," she said. "When I was young, I didn't know what that really meant and it wasn’t until my late teens that I started wandering around and checking things out for myself."
Raymond attended the Spanish Residential School, which sat between Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie, and did so for about a decade.
“Whenever the conversation comes up about his time at the school, he just says that it happened and you have to find a way to live and move forward,” Kinoshameg said.
“It's so weird, because even though I have spoken with people who have experiences and talk about it, when I talk to my dad he doesn’t have a whole lot of memories about that time," she added. "He talks about being five or six years old at home in a community and the next thing he knew he was at the residential school.”
Kinoshameg says there are gaps in her father’s memory about his time at the school, which she believes are part him moving past it and part suppression.
Lately, Kinoshameg says she has been thinking a lot about the residential schools and what they did to Indigenous children.
“I think it really hit me hard this time, knowing my dad was five or six when he went to the school and my son will be six (today),” Kinoshameg said. “Here he is living in Barrie, a regular spoiled kid and it's such a different experience. And, really, it's only a couple generations from my dad’s experiences."
Kinoshameg admitted her family’s experiences are different from others who went through similar circusmstances.
Some families from around the late 1930s left the reservations and Kinoshameg’s grandmother became a teacher.
“There were a few Ojibway women and First Nations women from around that time that studied to be nurses or school teachers," she said. "My dad’s family had other jobs and other purposes in the community so there was that stability, where there are a lot of other stories that saw families completely ripped away from each other, didn’t go home and didn’t speak the same language."
Her father says he never spoke Ojibway when he first came home from the school, because there were repercussions there for doing so, but he did go live with an aunt briefly where the family only spoke the language.
“The language for him wasn’t completely gone, but he says nowadays that he can’t speak it fluently because of the fact it was taken from him in his younger years,” Kinoshameg said.
Growing up in northern Ontario, Kinoshameg said she didn’t experience much racism, mainly due to her “very fair skin.”
She said she definitely had different experiences than her family members who have darker skin, and even recalls an eye-opening moment when she was five or six years old visiting a local detention centre.
“At the time, Cecil Facer School was a juvenile detention centre in Sudbury and there was a social or powwow there for the young people in the facility,” Kinoshameg said. “I was standing on a chair and I asked my mom where did all these brown people come from? She told me, ‘Samantha, not all Indians are white like you'.”
Kinoshameg learned nothing about the residential school system during her own education, but because of her family’s activism, she got plenty of knowledge at home.
“My mom was a bit on the activist side and my dad’s mom was involved in the establishment of the native studies programs at the University of Sudbury in the '60’s and '70s,” Kinoshameg said.
“Their life was a lot more about promotion, advocacy and activism at that time, so I was raised in a home where what you learned in school is not necessarily what happened," she added.
Kinoshameg says she does struggle with telling the story of her father’s life because it is his story, but she also says it's very much her story as she learned when she spoke to her father on Monday.
“I asked him what he wants for the future and he said he doesn’t want his grand kids to experience that type of racism and he also wants people to believe the stories that came out of the residential schools,” Kinoshameg said.
“These stories do exist, they did happen and there are files and people’s testimonials being destroyed to erase that for the residential schools settlement process," she added. "Those who lived through it are hesitant to talk about it, not only because of the pain involved, but they also feel like no one will believe them, so we need to make the stories available.”
Kinoshameg said her dad left home shortly after returning from the residential school for what she called “his own adventures,” living in Toronto for a while and working hard.
”One thing he told me that his mother said to him when he returned from the school was if you don’t want to starve and you want to eat, you have to get a job,” she said. “That was like his mantra and he has always had a job, always worked.”
Raymond worked at CHUM in Toronto in the 1950s when he was 19 and eventually found himself at the Inco mining company, a job he retired from 20 years ago.
Now at the age of 83, Raymond continues to work with incarcerated individuals in the federal prison system.
“He was doing that up in Sudbury when he worked at Inco, but still does it now, too,” said Kinoshameg, noting he helps people on 10- to 15-year sentences transition from prison to regular life.
"We tell him he needs to slow down, but it is what fulfills him, so we’re glad he has that.”
