Some 52 years ago, Mel Buffalo helped stage a rebellion just outside of St. Albert.
He was a student at the Edmonton Indian Residential School – a place of brutal discipline and cultural extermination located where Poundmaker's Lodge stands today. He and others were beaten with leather straps whenever they tried to speak Cree, and forced to clean urinals using toothbrushes – all with the full support of the federal government.
Buffalo, now a court advocate with the Sampson Cree First Nation in Maskwacis, recalls how a few supervisors started to abuse students in the middle of the night around 1963.
"We decided to barricade the doors to the dorms and not let anyone in," he says.
As he told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this lead to a dramatic face-off with supervisors trying to ram the door down, which they had blocked with heavy dressers. The RCMP were called in, and he and his friends tossed out a list demanding better food and that the offending supervisors be fired.
The supervisors were sacked. The school principal soon after called Buffalo and his grandfather, the chief of the Sampson Cree First Nation, down to the office.
"Mr. Buffalo," the principal said, "your son is here ... we can't handle him, we'd appreciate it if you could take him back, and good luck in raising him."
Buffalo was expelled, but his grandfather wouldn't have it.
"A week later I was back in the school!" he says, laughing.
Buffalo, 65, is one of the roughly 6,750 contributors to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's final report on the residential school system, which was released last week.
The roughly 4,700-page report is meant to be the definitive history of the residential school program, which saw thousands of aboriginal children taken from their homes, often by force, and put through an education system explicitly designed to annihilate their culture.
Buffalo is one of the many survivors featured in the report's "The Survivors Speak" section, which relates the residential school experience in the words of those who lived it.
You hear a lot of stories in the media about the bedlam and grief in the schools, and not enough about how some stood up to oppression, Buffalo says.
"We just didn't stand around and get run over by the system. We fought back."
The prison school
The Edmonton residential school ran from 1924 to 1968, the commission reports. The United Church of Canada Archives notes that the school was effectively a dormitory after June 1960, as its students were bused to Jasper Place for lessons.
Knowing what we know now about the schools, it seems unthinkable that Buffalo's mother and grandfather would voluntarily send him to a residential school. The commission reports that attendance was never mandatory for all First Nation students, although the government could, and often did, force students to attend.
"I got into trouble in junior high," Buffalo says, and his family thought residential school would set him straight.
"We looked at it like a reform school."
Buffalo did two stints in the Edmonton school, once from 1958 to 1959 and again from 1963 to 1968.
Survivors of the Edmonton school have described it to the Gazette as prison-like, with barbed-wire fences, strict regulation, and harsh punishments.
Buffalo says school officials forbade him from speaking Cree almost as soon as he arrived in 1958. When he was caught, supervisors struck him five times on each hand with a leather strap. In later years, offenders would be sentenced to 24 or 48 hours of ostracism, where no one was allowed to speak to them – they called it the "ice treatment."
The school was divided by gender, with boys and girls forbidden from interacting with each other.
"My sister was on the other side. I couldn't even say hi to her."
Buffalo says students would have to do many chores around the school such as polishing floors or cleaning urinals.
He even had to bury bodies in the school's graveyard in the middle of the night. He's not sure where the bodies came from, but suspects they may have been from the Charles Camsell Hospital, which housed many aboriginals with tuberculosis.
He was 13 at the time.
"It was pretty scary."
The commission found that many survivors recalled rigid, military discipline at the schools, with lives regulated by bells and students referred to by numbers instead of names.
Buffalo says he had to make his bed in a precise military style or else the supervisor would rip off the sheets and make him do it again. Sometimes this happened three times in a row.
Bedding and underwear was changed exactly once a week. If you wet the bed, you were forced to sleep in it until laundry day as punishment.
"I really didn't like the underwear change (policy)," Buffalo says, so he and a few other students started washing their shorts every night. The staffers were furious, but they couldn't stop them.
The commission found that many students were frequently underfed or fed terrible food, with some forced to eat food they vomited up. Many, like Buffalo, turned to theft just to survive.
"You could skate across the porridge," Buffalo says, and the biscuits were so hard they used them as hockey pucks.
During his first stint at the school, he refused to eat porridge for three days, despite staff forcing it on him at every meal. His parents later pulled him from the school because he wasn't eating, he explains.
Finally, he says he was fed up enough to hurl the mess against the wall and say, "There, it's finished, you happy?"
"The next morning, we got puffed wheat and cornflakes."
Learn from the past
While the Edmonton school closed in 1968, residential schools continued to operate in Canada until 1998.
There were a lot of mixed feelings amongst the students when the school closed, Buffalo says – some had spent their whole lives there, and wouldn't even remember their families if they did go home.
Buffalo later got his degree in Native Law from the University of Saskatchewan and played prominent roles in groups such as the National Aboriginal Housing Association.
Although he says his time at the Edmonton school instilled in him a strong work ethic and made him a better, stronger person, he still had tears in his eyes last week while watching coverage of the release of the commission's final report.
"I always will remember what happened," he says.
"It was a bad time in my life ... I still remember the hurt I was in."
The report includes 94 steps for Canadians to undertake to redress the legacy of residential schools, such as the creation of a federal Aboriginal Languages Act, a national council for reconciliation, and age-appropriate, mandatory course material on residential schools for students in kindergarten up to Grade 12.
Buffalo hopes non-aboriginals will seek to learn about the residential schools and work to improve the relationship between our two peoples.
"This chapter that happened, we can never erase it, we can never forget it, but what we should do is learn from it."
