Michelle Stirling

Transcript:

Hello, my name is Michelle Stirling.

I am very concerned right now about the situation in Canada, regarding the claims of genocide and the search for unmarked graves and missing children. 

I’m very sad that the international media has picked up the story and is calling it a hoax. Because I think a lot of people are really hurting.

I think that a lot of people are missing loved ones. I think a lot of those losses are what’s called ‘ambiguous losses,’ where people left your life, or some traumatic event happened, and your life changed dramatically. 

And I think a lot of the focus of these ambiguous losses have been put under the umbrella of the Indian Residential Schools as the only reason for all the grief and loss. 

So I wanted to tell you a bit of a story, when I was in Calgary in the 1990’s, I was walking down the street and this fellow stopped and asked me something.  And I answered him in Blackfoot. And we both started laughing, probably because my Blackfoot wasn’t very good. But he was surprised.  Anyway, we got a couple of sandwiches, we went and sat in the park, and we talked for a while.

His name was Fred Yellow Old Woman. I got to know him, like, pretty well. We weren’t best of friends, but we ran into each other quite a bit. He told me a very interesting and moving Blackfoot story, which I thought probably should be turned into a play. So he actually took me to the Blackfoot elders and asked their permission if I could turn it into a play and I did that. But unfortunately, that play is in an attic somewhere overseas.

And I’m here.

But let me tell you what it was about.

And I think that it’s okay that I just tell you, because I did have permission to write it.

It’s about the fact that all of us are stones.

We are all like stones. We’re all the same and we’re all different, all at the same time. Some of us are big stones, we are strong. We don’t need anybody. And some of us are small stones and we’re blue and we’re sad. And I think the stones of the people who are missing their loved ones are like this stone… which reminds me of my brother. And I actually keep it by his photo. On the outside it looks black and not very interesting.  On the inside it’s red and like a wound, because he died a few years ago, and I still miss him.

And some people are probably …blue. 

They are like blue stones. They also are hollowed out inside, maybe from depression, loss, fear. 

And other people are stones with healing going on inside.

Where that loss is gradually moving on and growing into some new strength. The wound is still there, but there’s new life. And some people have maybe taken their grief and moved it into something pure, and some sense of purpose, maybe living for the person whose life was lost.

Because, you know, when we lose someone we love, I don’t think any person who has gone to the other side wants you to spend your life in sorrow….over them going on. 

That was their path, not yours. 

Your path is here. 

So, I think many people take that loss and turn it into something constructive for themselves. 

So I see that there’s a lot of anger right now in all of the communities in Canada about this whole issue.

There are some people who feel that it is a hoax, that there are no missing children or unmarked graves. People are demanding, ‘let’s see the body’ which is not the thing. 

Even if you found a body of someone, in a grave, that just means that someone died.

You know, back in the day, when a lot of these graveyards were set up and the ground was sanctified by the church that was running that mission outpost..a lot of people died then from illness. 

You know, if you got a little cut on your finger and it got infected, without antibiotics back then, you could die just from that. Or a broken leg if it wasn’t set properly, you could die from that.

And of course, TB – tuberculosis – was very prevalent back then.

So, thousands of people died of TB.  In fact, in one book I read, the author said that in 1908, in Canada, every hour of the day, one Canadian died of tuberculosis.   And at night, two people died every hour from tuberculosis.

And there was no cure.  Up until about the 1950s when they developed streptomycin, I think it is, and some vaccines, there was no cure.

And it was a very sneaky kind of disease, you could have it for a long time and you wouldn’t know, necessarily, that you had it. Maybe you got more tired, maybe a few body functions didn’t work as well, maybe sometimes when you coughed, blood would come up, and then all of a sudden there could be a catastrophic hemorrhage from your lung. 

And that would be it. 

So, and at other times, it was actually known as ‘consumption’ because it would literally eat a person away from the inside out.  Just made them into a skinny wreck.

So I think, you know, if people haven’t studied Canadian history a lot, then they might have a lot of false impressions about what went on. 

You know, I see online people say “Well, why would a school have a graveyard?”

The main reason is that a school was usually set up beside a Christian Mission first, and the mission outpost always had a graveyard because, like I said, so many people did die in those days. And the whole purpose was to sanctify the body and bury it in sanctified ground and release the spirit back to G-d, the Creator, the Great Beyond, whatever you want to call it. And then after that, the residential school was built nearby. So that’s why there was a graveyard.

And there are some residential schools that were kind of built in the middle of nowhere  – they also had a graveyard, because also people died. And you know it wasn’t only people, children going to residential schools who died from time to time.

As Robert Carney wrote in several of his writings before there were social services and Universal Health Care, these outposts, these residential schools and missions, this was the only place that anyone could go for help. So if you were a traveler going across Canada, a prospector, a trader of some kind, and you needed help, let’s say you got hurt or your wife was going to have a baby, or you were hungry, maybe you were not successful on the hunt…the place that you went was to the mission or the residential school.  And they gave whatever help they could, but sometimes people died.

So there will be people in these graves who aren’t necessarily identified. Because, back in the day, a lot of people didn’t even carry ID. What did you need it for? Out in the middle of the prairie.

So these are some of the things, the facts of history, that we have to look at, that we have to be willing to consider.

We can’t just be demanding bodies, and we can’t be saying that even if there is a body there was something nefarious or evil done, because so many people died back then…just of disease. 

And you know, there probably will be some mass graves found, if people continue looking, and that would be related to things like Spanish Flu. Because when the Spanish Flu epidemic hit, it would wipe out whole groups of people. Whole families. You know, 10-20 people at a time. Because it struck very rapidly. Someone could have a fever in the morning and be dead by evening.

And if that was happening in a community, there was no one to bury bodies one by one.

So, there are instances, and they are documented that the best thing they could do was to dig a grave and put a lot of people there. Usually they tried to document who died.

But again, I’ve read passages in Saskatchewan you know the harvesters would come from Ontario, down east, to come and work the harvest out on the prairies, you’d have 9 or 10 guys in a boxcar coming west for harvest time, and they’d open the boxcar and they’d all be dead. From Spanish Flu.

And that was a strange flu. You know, it hit for a couple of years, I think it was 1918 to 1920 and it came in two waves, and then it went away. That was it. 

But in that time, it also took a lot of parents. It hit young adults hardest. And it left a lot of orphans. And a lot of those orphans ended up going to residential school – that became their home.

So, I hope that gives you some insights.

And… uh.. I probably talked long enough. But, I hope that we can calm the situation down, and talk with each other.

Thank you for listening to my story. 

My name is Michelle Stirling.