Michelle Stirling

by Michelle Stirling © 2023

In the early 1980’s, I spent several years working on a series of historical documentaries for CTV Calgary.  My research supervisor was Dr. Hugh Dempsey, then curator of the Glenbow Museum.  The project meant our tiny production crew had to drive all over Southern Alberta to interview hundreds of people – pioneers, historians, and descendants of those who signed Treaty 7.  Many hours were spent in the Glenbow Museum combing through archival images and documents; in my spare time I was reading history books.  I learned things I had never been taught at school, about things that happened in my own ‘backyard’ and I grew to love Canadian history and Canada.

I grew up in Ponoka, Alberta, just south of Maskwacis (then called “Hobbema”).  This is the townsite for the four First Nations bands: Samson Cree Nation, Louis Bull Tribe, Ermineskin Cree Nation, and Montana First Nation.  Years later I worked in Ponoka as a sub-contractor to Alberta Human Resources as a career and employment officer.  About 30% of my clients were aboriginal. At the time, the total population on reserve was about 13,000 people.  Unemployment on the reserve was about 90%. Most of the Indigenous young people I met were bright and eager to find a way into the larger society, and all they wanted was a hand up, not a handout.  I saw great promise and had great hopes for them.  Many found rewarding work; some found opportunities in the skilled trades through the innovative NAIT-in-Motion/First Nations Training-to-Employment program that brought the classroom to reserves across Alberta.

I find the present public obsession with Indigenous graves and genocide destructive to the future of Indigenous youth and the future of Canada.  I do believe that people are missing loved ones, and I believe it is related to the phenomenon of ‘ambiguous losses’ as outlined in the forward.  Based on the research I have done, I don’t think there will be many unmarked graves or unidentified missing persons found because historically, the children at residential schools, hospitals or sanatoriums were well documented, simply because the funding for the child came from the government, and documents had to be in order.  I do believe that there are some cases where names were confused due to being anglicized, or where a child may have been sent from a school to a hospital, then on to a sanitorium for Tuberculosis treatment, and then perhaps on to a different school – and thus the child was ‘lost’ to friends and community – but not to the system.  Certainly, for all the children in that school, when a classmate disappeared, sent away for treatment, it must have been jarring. And for the patient – terrifying!  Some TB treatments took many months or years, so indeed, that person became ‘missing’ in the lives of students, even if they still existed elsewhere.  TB had a tremendous stigma to it then (as it does now in the northern Inuit communities) so that people did not talk about it socially.  It was a frightening, forgotten plague that loomed, like the Grim Reaper, over every family in all of society, up until about the 1950s when vaccines and antibiotics were developed.

I hope this collection of essays might offer some insights on this complex and, for many, painful historical topic of Indian Residential Schools.  Some vignettes are repeated in the essays as they were written at different times.

We are on a dangerous path. Truth commissions are temporary, official, and non-judicial bodies set up by states to examine past violations or crimes, generally to foster lasting peace and/or reconciliation (Freeman, 2006; Hayner, 2011; United Nations Secretary General, 2004).[1] Instead, we’ve had church burnings, threats of violence and now demands to censor those like me who teach history. There are calls to silence people like me who present a broader view of Indian Residential Schools – broader than missing children and claims of genocide. I present the missing historical context. I am a ‘factualist’ – for I am now an elder of my society, carrying on the traditional teachings that I learned from Potai’na – Dr. Hugh Dempsey, and all the other elders from the 1980’s documentary work, who entrusted me with their stories, to carry them forward to the future, so that people would better understand the past.

I choose life.  I press on.  All these things of my life’s experience have driven me to write this down for you, knowing how contentious some issues are, because I must tell the truth and be honest.  That is my sacred responsibility to those who taught me so much. – Michelle Stirling, July 27, 2023

[1] Genocide Against Indigenous Peoples: The Experiences of the Truth Commissions of Canada and Guatemala