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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Last week, the US Department of the Interior released a sobering report. It found that at least 500 Indigenous children died while in mandatory boarding schools that were run or supported by the US government. Other estimates by independent researchers have placed that number of deaths well into the thousands. In Canada, the government also ran a vast network of residential schools. Many of these were administered by the Catholic Church. Over the course of more than a century, 150,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families. Many were subjected to physical, mental, and sexual abuse.

The first school opened in the 1880s, and the last one did not close until 1997. In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologized and set up a compensation fund for survivors. As for the Catholic Church, the pope is expected to apologize for the church's role during a visit to Canada in July. Many Indigenous survivors have bravely told their deeply personal stories about the abuse they experienced as children. Just a heads-up that we're going to be discussing some details of these abuses in today's show. For many other survivors, it's simply too painful to talk about the horror they experienced and witnessed.

Aunt 1: My kids don't know what we went through, and they need to be educated. I don't know how they're going to get it. I don't know what's going to be the outcome of this.

Aunt 2: I think that's our error as parents.

Aunt 1: Because that's what we were taught. I never told them anything about residential school. What we suffered, they don't know about. What we had to endure that wasn't ours, they don't know about.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You're hearing there the voices of Ivy and Leona, two Indigenous women who were sent to residential schools in Canada as children. They're also the aunts of our guest today, Connie Walker.

Connie Walker: I'm a Cree journalist and host of the podcast Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's from Gimlet Media and Spotify.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Connie has been investigating residential schools and the legacy of trauma they left for countless families, including her own.

Connie Walker: They were called residential schools but the focus wasn't really education. I think that in a lot of ways it was part of what was a government mission of colonization at the time to quell Indigenous resistance that was happening in Canada and to also further colonize Canada. The actual goal at the start of these schools was to separate Indigenous kids from their parents. To essentially kill the Indian in the child and assimilate them. They thought that if they took kids away when they were really young, and separated them from their families and communities and culture, that it would be easier to assimilate them.

These schools were created by the federal government and funded by the federal government, but they were actually run by the churches, and the majority of them were run by the Catholic Church. It was kind of like a perfect union in Canada between the Catholic Church who wanted to obviously convert as many people as possible, and the federal government that was trying to execute their assimilationist policies for Indigenous people, so they created residential schools. Generations and generations of Indigenous kids went to these schools.

They were separated from their families and communities, told that they were not allowed to speak their language. Couldn't practice their culture. Their hair was cut. They spent their childhoods in these schools, and then came out and then their children were forced to go. This is something that has been ongoing in Canada. The last school closed in Canada in 1997. I could have gone to a residential school, but really, we're really still dealing with the impacts of these schools in every Indigenous community.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What does it mean to say that Indigenous children were forced into these schools?

Connie Walker: Well, they were actually compelled by law to go to residential schools for a period. I think it was in the 1940s or something. Even after it was no longer mandatory by law it was still broadly enforced. We spoke with survivors who said, "The Indian agent came to our house with the RCMP and the priest, and they said, 'We have to take your children.'" They were literally forcing children onto these buses so that they could be taken to these residential schools.

What also happened was such a breakdown of families, not surprisingly. If you have gone to the school from the time you were four, five, six years old, what often happened in these schools was that children were not only subject to this discrimination and cultural genocide, but horrific abuse. Physical and terrible sexual abuse was really prevalent in a lot of these schools. You came out of those institutions as children with incredible difficulties. It's this cycle that has just snowballed and continually is perpetuated. Now in Canada, Indigenous children are overrepresented in the child welfare system. There are more kids in care in Canada today, Indigenous kids, than there were during the height of residential schools.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Did children see their families at all during the time that they were basically incarcerated in these residential schools?

Connie Walker: Well, they were often actually in these schools with their siblings; with their brothers and sisters. This podcast that we're doing is an investigation into one school; the school where my father went with all 15 of his brothers and sisters. They said you weren't actually allowed to talk to your siblings. My aunt tells this story about how-- When she lived at home, she lived with her kokum and mushum and her sister. She slept in the same bed with her sister and she had this close, loving family.

She went to residential school. One of the first nights she got there they cut her hair, they take off your clothes, they give you a number, this kind of prescribed uniform. You're known by your numbers. One of the first nights she was crying in her bed and sleeping in this big dorm with all these other girls. There was a nun that had a bed with a curtain around it in the middle of the room. She said she was so lonely. She was crying for her kokum and her mum and her mushum and her sister. She said she saw the nun coming. She was trying to find the child that was crying, and she got to my aunt's bed.

She thought she was going to try to comfort her. She was just looking for some kind of comfort. The nun started hitting her. She said, "I didn't understand English, so I don't even know what she was saying," but I'm sure it was, "Stop crying. That's enough crying." She was six years old. Imagining a single child going through that is devastating and just horrific. When you think about how it was-- My dad and all 15 of his siblings, they were the third generation in their family to go through these schools. I think that gives you a sense of the scale of the impact on families and communities that is still ongoing today.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm sorry. I'm thinking about my eight-year-old when she cries at night.

Connie Walker: I know. I feel like it's so hard to be a journalist in this story, obviously because it's a personal story. It's about my dad and his brothers and sisters, and this single school that they went to. My daughter is 10 years old. She hasn't been apart from us for more than a night or two in her whole life. I literally cannot imagine her in that. I must need to compartmentalize it somehow because I literally cannot think of it. I think the other part of it is that--

I'm 42 years old. The fact that I'm this age and I have been doing this work for as long as I have been doing, and I'm just now learning the full truth about what my dad experienced, it's such a frustrating thing that this history has been so suppressed and has been hidden and has been misrepresented and diminished really. That so many survivors had to go through that experience, and then essentially have this experience of being gaslit for their whole lives that it wasn't that bad, and why can't you just get over it? Now I understand what people were asking them to get over. How is that even possible?

Melissa Harris-Perry: The miraculous aspect is perhaps that your father survived it and that you exist. That you exist, that you are 42, that you have children. That not only did he physically survive but there was some remnant left of love and of possibility and a family. In 2006, the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, what was it, and what did it entail?

Connie Walker: It was the result of what was the largest class action lawsuit in the history of Canada. These schools had been obviously in operation for, at that point, over a hundred years. It really wasn't until the '90s that survivors started coming forward and telling their stories about what they experienced in these schools. Not just telling their stories. They started filing lawsuits and they started winning. They were being awarded large settlements. The government of Canada was found liable, and the churches who ran the schools were being found liable, and they were having to pay these large settlements.

What started as a trickle quickly became this avalanche of lawsuits, and the government realized that we need to manage these on a bigger scale. To manage their liability. Similarly with the churches, they anticipated that they were going to be facing thousands of lawsuits across the country and that it was going to cost upwards of $90 million. They were essentially asking the government to take on their liability; that it was going to bankrupt them. They also had a role in bringing together this residential school settlement.

What it was was an acknowledgment of the harms that were caused by residential school. There was a common experience payment where if you attended a residential school for one day you were eligible to receive $10,000, and then $3,000 for each additional year that you attended. There was also this part of the residential school settlement that was to deal with some of the severe physical and sexual abuse that children experienced in those schools. That was called the Independent Assessment Process.

That process was essentially survivors had to go to a hearing and testify in front of an adjudicator or a lawyer. The government had representatives there. Sometimes the churches had people there. Survivors often had their own lawyer, and they were essentially telling their stories about what happened to them in the residential schools. They were being grilled about those experiences. They had to reveal in very, very graphic detail about the kind of physical and sexual abuse that they experienced in these schools. If they were believed and found to be credible allegations, then they were awarded a sum.

I think the average survivor received about $90,000, which signals that there was-- The average was very serious physical and sexual abuse. The most a survivor could receive through that process was $250,000. I know that for so many survivors it was just this incredibly horrific experience that they had to basically be grilled about the worst thing that maybe ever happened to them, the things that they've been trying to forget their entire lives, in order to be compensated because there's incredible poverty in Indigenous communities in Canada. I know that a lot of people felt like it was something they needed to do, they had to do.

That was part of the residential school settlement. The other part of it was the creation of this truth and reconciliation commission, which was a commission that traveled across the country to hear stories from residential school survivors to try to record the truth about what happened. They found that what happened in residential schools was cultural genocide. Those things were recorded through that Independent Assessment Process. All of those records, all of the survivor testimony about what happened to them in those schools is going to be destroyed in five years unless a survivor asks for it to be archived and kept. So far, I think very, very few of them ever have.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We're going to take a short break. More with Connie Walker in a moment, right here on The Takeaway.

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We're back with Connie Walker, the host of the Gimlet Media podcast Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's. Connie was investigating Canada's compulsory residential school system for Indigenous children when she learned that her own father had been abused by a priest in one of these schools. How did this story and the others that you learned in this process help you to think about, or how did it affect how you think about your dad?

Connie Walker: It changed the way I think about my father, and it changed the way I think about my relationship with him. When I heard that story I just felt sick to my stomach immediately because I thought about my dad as a little boy in residential school. I thought about, for probably the first time in my life, what happened to him there, and just that's why my dad was the way he was. I'm a journalist and I have been almost exclusively focused on reporting on Indigenous stories and communities for the last 10 years.

It might sound silly but I had never thought about my dad or my family and what they experienced. It also then forced me to think of my dad in a new way because we had a very difficult relationship. My father, he was very lost and angry, and when I was a kid he was very violent. I have those memories of him and they have taken up the most space in my head around this image of my father. He passed away in 2013. That has always been unresolved, and I never thought that I would get to know him in the ways that I have in doing this podcast.

This revelation that he had been abused by a priest, and sexually abused by a priest, made me realize that I didn't know how it impacted his life and I didn't know how it impacted mine. That I needed to know in order to get through the pain of that revelation that he experienced that kind of abuse as a child. I wanted to find out who was this priest. What happened to him? How many people did he hurt at residential school? That also became this motivating question for me to try to find out. I know what happened to my dad. I know how this went on to impact all of his relationships and all of his children.

My dad was-- what I've learned about him is just how incredible it was that he was able to keep going forward. He eventually did start healing from some of that trauma from residential schools. He reconnected with his culture, his language, his community, and he became this really respected elder and an amazing father to my younger brothers and sisters. I didn't get to have that relationship with him, but I feel grateful that I've gotten to learn about that. It also just motivated me to want to find out who was this priest.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I think from where I stand in the US, it can seem as though Canada is further along. Has done more to reckon with its history of this. Yet I'm both wondering if that is true about the notion that Canada is further along, but also a little terrified that if this constitutes being further along, just how much there is to uncover in the US context.

Connie Walker: Exactly. I think it's true that Canada is further along in terms of these conversations at least. There have been a lot of Indigenous writers and journalists and storytellers and elders and survivors who have been pushing these stories forward. Who have been saying, "This has happened. This is true. This really happened. This is real. Pay attention to this." The survivors were really, I think, the ones who led that with their lawsuits. With their taking the government to court and saying, "This is our truth. This is what's happened."

I think that that is definitely-- it feels different in some ways. Whether or not the general public has a greater understanding, I feel like that's just beginning. I totally agree that in the United States-- I left my job at the public broadcaster in Canada a couple of years ago to come and work at Gimlet. One of the first stories that we took on was a story about a missing Indigenous woman in Montana. This is an issue, again, that violence against Indigenous women and girls is something that we have been talking more about in Canada for a longer time. There's a greater awareness about the crisis of violence that so many Indigenous women and girls face.

That's starting to happen here. I can see that starting to happen, but I think that what's true in both of our countries is that Indigenous stories are so underrepresented. That we have been here longer than anyone, and in some ways we get the least amount of attention. There's so much of the Indigenous side of that shared history that is misunderstood and underrepresented that needs to be told, that needs to be investigated, that needs to be shared.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is there something specific that we can learn in our process going forward from the successes and failures and shortcomings and openings of the Canadian process?

Connie Walker: I hope so. I really do, because I think that on one hand, of course it is good that there was an apology to survivors. There was a truth and reconciliation commission. On the other hand, I know that the residential school settlement was also an incredibly harmful experience for a lot of survivors because they were not believed. Because they had to go through this process of being interrogated about their abuse. The onus is on us as journalists to collect these stories while we can because the window for getting these stories is shrinking. Survivors are dying.

My uncle, one of my dad's brothers, passed away earlier this year of COVID. Also, the window for accountability is shrinking. We were able to, as I said, uncover allegations of abuse against a number of priests at this school and nuns, and only a handful of them are still alive. This window for accountability is shrinking, this window to hear the truth from survivors is shrinking, and there's an urgency that we can't put this off any longer.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Connie Walker, journalist and host of the Gimlet Media and Spotify podcast Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's. Connie, thank you so much for joining us.

Connie Walker: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you making space for this conversation.

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