I am embarrassed to say that I was happy on Wednesday because classes were suspended. At that time, I did not feel anything beyond happiness because I was so unaware of the reason why the classes were being suspended. I first thought that the TRC was a some sort of celebration, nothing serious. However, after listening to my teachers and friends talk about the topic, I realized that I was so ignorant about the situation and felt guilty about being happy on Wednesday. So, I decided to do some online readings on the topic of TRC and residential schools in general at least (since I missed the big events that were held in the last few days)…

I was reading online news articles about the residential schools and came across a story of one aboriginal residential school survivor. Her name is Shirley Williams. She was sent off to residential school when she was 7 years old. Although she quit school when she was 16 years old during the “liberation movement”, she says she can still clearly recall all the horrible and cruel things she saw and felt there.

Shirley describes that living in the residential school was “like being in jail in a foreign land”. She says that everyone was hungry all the time and was not allowed to talk to any of the older students there, not even to her own sister. However, beyond the hardship and homesickness was that the residential schools took away their identities — spirituality, beliefs and language of their aboriginal life. Also, she told that the treatment of some of the children were beyond imagination; it is estimated that thousands of them died during their time in residential schools and their parents were not even told where their children were buried…

Although the residential schools closed down in 1996, the TRC is still trying to spread the awareness of what happened in the past. I believe that the goal of TRC is to not only teach us the cruel history of the residential schools and the aboriginal children but also to prevent similar things happening to young children in the present and future. I think it is almost unbelievable that the church and the people running the residential schools thought what they were doing was ‘right’.

Linking the history of aboriginal residential schools to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) we’ve learning in class, it is frustrating to see that almost all of the articles in the UDHR were broken for the aboriginal children who were taken away from their home and family to the residential schools. Although the United Nations has no real authority or power over the articles written in the UDHR, I am sure that the UN published it with the hope that it could at least prevent or make people think twice about issues like the residential school system.

Reflecting back to the TRC week and my small research on the residential school system, I can say that I am glad I became aware of the issue so that I can someday make contributions to preventing similar things from happening. I am also lucky that I am learning about the UDHR in class at the same time so I can link these issues to something more solid and official.