Truth and Reconciliation Day about letting history be a teacher, says Native Council of P.E.I.

For Lisa Cooper, president and chief of the Native Council of Prince Edward Island, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is about education.

Most people don't realize how far Canada's residential school system went to carry out its founders' philosophy of "killing the Indian in the child," Cooper said Friday during an interview with CBC News: Compass host Louise Martin. 

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"Even those that did survive the residential schools survived, like, scarred — their mental, their physical abuse they suffered," said Cooper. 

Across Canada from the 19th century to the 1990s, about 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were forced to leave their homes and their Indigenous communities to attend government-funded residential schools, many of them run by churches.  

The children often lived in substandard conditions and endured sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. The system amounted to "cultural genocide," the Truth and Reconciliation Commission declared in 2015 after years of research.

Stereotypes perpetuated 

Cooper said many people don't understood that the children were receiving education not so that they could participate as equals in the economy, but instead so that they could fill the need for labourers and domestic workers. 

"Young kids were learning how to use industrial irons — and they had severe burns — and boys were taught how to look after farms," she said.

If [they] were to remove your children from your home, who wouldn't drink? Who wouldn't get depressed?— Chief Lisa Cooper

When they eventually left school, that kind of training made it difficult for them to rise in society the same way as other groups, Cooper said. She said that inequality perpetuated stereotypes of "the drunken Indian and the unfit Indian." 

Cooper's own mother entered the residential school system at the age of six and wasn't able to leave until her teens. 

She pushed Cooper to get an education and attend university, and Cooper went on to do the same for her children. 

"Not everyone had that support that I was able to have," she said, noting that her mother "thankfully didn't fall into the addictions or the mental health" issues that plagued so many traumatized former students.  

Not everyone was able to nurture the next generation and value education like that, she added: "If [they] were to remove your children from your home, who wouldn't drink? Who wouldn't get depressed?" 

Push for more support programs

On its website, the Native Council of P.E.I. refers to itself as "a community of Indigenous people living off-reserve in traditional Mi'kmaq territory." 

Cooper said more work needs to be done to solve challenges affecting the council's members — and Island society as a whole. That includes more support for parents, funding for projects to fight homelessness, and more programs to deal with mental health and addictions issues.

But getting the money to keep these programs going is one of the biggest challenges the council faces, she said. 

"When we are able to get the funding, the work we do is amazing."

Mass blanket exercise planned

Now in its third year as a Sept. 30 holiday, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is dedicated to remembering both the children who died at residential schools and the survivors who made it home, as well as acknowledging the families and communities still affected by lasting intergenerational trauma.

To commemorate it, the council is partnering with UPEI's new Indigenous knowledge faculty, known by the acronym IKERAS, to host a mass blanket exercise in Charlottetown on Saturday.

The exercise shows Canadian history through an Indigenous lens, using a number of blankets to represent lands they inhabited before colonization. The event will begin at 1 p.m. AT in the UPEI quadrangle.