Victim blaming for enduring legacy of intergenerational residential school trauma: Evans

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(file photo by Lela Evans)

The Torngat Mountains MPP says one of the lasting legacies of residential schools was to blame the victim for intergenerational trauma.

Lela Evans says the damage caused by removing children from their homes, families and communities must be recognized.

Evans told the House of Assembly that after the discovery of 215 anonymous graves connected to a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, about the impact that residential schools have had on generations of people.

“Not everyone was able to get over this,” she told her colleagues in the legislature. “And a lot of people had problems, you know and they didn’t do well in life, and their kids didn’t do well in life, and now we just sit there and blame them. We blame them for being alcoholics, we blame them for domestic violence, we blame them for the abuse, we blame them for their inability to become parents. “

Evans says her mother, who attended residential school, rarely spoke about her experiences, but opened up as her children grew older. Her mother remembered being so thirsty and unable to drink that she licked the frost off the windows.

Her mother told them that she and her siblings would tell their parents about the kinds of things they endure when they get home late in the spring, only to send them back to the same school in the fall.

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