Residential Schools Quotes

“There is no concept of justice in Cree culture. The nearest word is kintohpatatin, which loosely translates to "you've been listened to." But kintohpatatin is richer than justice - really it means you've been listened to by someone compassionate and fair, and your needs will be taken seriously.”
― Edmund Metatawabin, Up Ghost River: A Chief's Journey Through the Turbulent Waters of Native History

“My English teacher told me in high school I would never amount to anything. At least I would never go to university. Just to be spiteful I graduated from U.BC. with a B.G.S. degree in 1992.”
― Robert Kakakaway, Thou Shalt Not Be An Indian

“When I left residential school, I became confused and saw life from a different perspective. I was not aware of society. I was now living in the world, seeing people other than priests and nuns. I was ashamed of who I was. After nine years of having negative messages drilled into my head at residential school, my mind was tattered by the time I was released. I had been taught that to be Native meant I had no value: that I was not human. I felt defective and did not know how to change this. I was overflowing with shame. When my relatives staggered down the streets, I would pretend I did not know them. I felt embarrassed seeing them drunk. When people saw them staggering down the street, they were not just calling them down, they were also including me. I took this so personally. I often wondered why they were like this. I did not realize they had the same pain I had, maybe more, and that was their way of coping.”
― Karen Chaboyer, They Called Me 33: Reclaiming Ingo-Waabigwan

“The bureaucrats were accountable to their political masters, not accountable to the people whom they were overseeing. And putting it as bluntly as possible, no government ever won votes by spending money on Indians.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“I do not think I was capable of understanding, as I was only six. My mother became distant and shut her feelings as she left me. How could she explain to me—a six-year-old—what was going to happen to me? This was a hopeless situation for both of us. A mother giving up her child to strangers is one of the hardest things to do, and I would soon know what alone meant.”
― Karen Chaboyer, They Called Me 33: Reclaiming Ingo-Waabigwan

“I had a lot of resentment against my brothers for what they did to me. I carried this anger around with me, and it was actually making me sick. There is a saying in AA that if you have resentments it keeps you away from the joy of sobriety, and this was true. I was carrying a load on my shoulders. One day we talked about the abuse in counselling, and my counsellor asked me if it was happening today. I said, “No.” She suggested living for today and leaving yesterday in the past. I did not know what she meant until I got thinking about it. If I dwelled on the past it would rob me of today. That made a lot of sense. I was stuck in the past. To get past it, I had to accept that yes I was a victim of sexual abuse and yes, I was a victim of residential school, but that was in the past. This is very hard to do because the result of these events changed my views on everything I do today. I have to learn how to keep myself in the present, instead of the past. It is a continuous battle within me. It is like I have dual personalities, and one wants to overtake the other. One still wants to be Karen the victim, who wants the attention and pity. The other, Karen the Survivor, wants to be independent and strong and wants to help others.”
― Karen Chaboyer, They Called Me 33: Reclaiming Ingo-Waabigwan

“I never set foot inside Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Haskell, Tomah, Kamloops, or Brandon—not as a student and not even as a visitor. But I’ve been fighting the demons they unleashed my whole life. We all have.”
― Anton Treuer, Where Wolves Don't Die

“... the government had spent more than four times the amount on lawyers [fighting a First Nations family's request for medical treatment] than would have been required to actually do the surgery.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“It was further revealed that the government sometimes refuses to pay for certain medications even after a pediatrician has declared their necessity.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“[The federal government memo documents] imply a feeling of bureaucratic effrontery as though this child, who hovered between life and death, was some kind of chiseller to the taxpayer.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“But far too many innocent youngsters have been needlessly ground up in a bureaucratic meat grinder. There isn't anything accidental about such a waste of potential and life.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“In the fight among politicians, the children lost again.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“Right-wing pundits continually framed First Nations issues as a drain on taxpayers when, in fact, Indigenous communities were presenting a major growth opportunity.”
― Charlie Angus, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream

“Those stolen girls are dead now. One killed herself a few years after coming home. The other girl, your maternal grandmother, had Maggie. When you hear the words 'historical trauma' or 'generational trauma,' it's because of places like this. And people in power today who still won't acknowledge the things that happened there.”
― Angeline Boulley, Sisters in the Wind

“Bible is the downfall of Jesus
(Comparative Religion Diaries, 2511-2513)

Bible is the most hypocritical scripture on earth, not because it doesn't contain any good, it contains just as much good as the next scripture, but no other scripture except the bible has an industrial religious complex behind it committing despicable crimes, either proudly in the name of god, or behind closed doors, to a scale unsurpassed by any other religious clergy,

just like no other empire on earth can contest the historic crimespree of the british and american terrorists.

It hardly matters that the bible is the most printed book in the world, because no other religion has systematically burnt mountains upon mountains of human literature, to hawk its scripture as the one true word of god.

No religion is innocent, Islam has its skeletons, Hinduism has its skeletons, Judaism has a countryful, even Buddhism has a few, but compared to all the skeletons of all the organized religions, the Catholic church is built with human bones as framework, and corpses as edifice, and a huge chunk of them belonged to children.

Even if you substitute every bible verse with "love thy neighbor", and fill the pages with a million sermons from the mount, it won't suffice to purify such unholy text -

in fact, if Jesus was alive, he'd have set fire to the Vatican himself, I'd do the same to my canon, if by some freak accident they start harboring traffickers, terrorists and predators.

And the most unfortunate irony of it is, one of the greatest humans in history ended up being the unintended founder of the world's most wanted crime syndicate.

Bible is the downfall of Jesus, catholic church is the original sin, it's the british empire of organized religion, with Uncle Sam as the ideal successor to both cartels.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“And then suddenly a bus or car arrives, full of strangers, usually white strangers, who yank the child out of the arms of those who love it, taking it screaming to the boarding school. The only word I can think of for what is done to these children is kidnapping.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“The kids were taken away from their villages and pueblos, in their blankets and moccasins, kept completely isolated from their families -sometimes for as long as ten years- suddenly coming back, their short hair slick with pomade, their necks raw from stiff, high collars, their thick jackets always short in the sleeves and pinching under the arms, their tight patent leather shoes giving them corns, the girls in starched white blouses and clumsy, highbuttoned boots-caricatures of white people. When they found out-and they found out quickly-that they were neither wanted by whites nor by Indians, they got good and drunk, many of them staying drunk for the rest of their lives.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“Beating was the common punishment for not doing one's homework, or for being late to school. It had such a bad effect upon me that I hated and mistrusted every white person on sight, because I met only one kind. It was not until much later that I met sincere white people I could relate to and be friends with. Racism breeds racism in reverse.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“At night some of the girls would huddle in bed together for comfort and reassurance. Then the nun in charge of the dorm would come in and say, "What are the two of you doing in bed together? I smell evil in this room. You girls are evil incarnate. You are sinning. You are going to hell and burn forever. You can act that way in the devil's frying pan." She would get them out of bed in the middle of the night, making them kneel and pray until morning. We had not the slightest idea what it was all about. At home we slept two and three in a bed for animal warmth and a feeling of security.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“I myself was growing from a kitten into an undersized cat. My claws were getting bigger and were itching for action.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“At one time Charlene and I had to iron all the robes and vestments the priests wore when saying Mass. We had to fold them up and put them into a chest in the back of the church. In a corner, looking over our shoulders, was a statue of the crucified Savior, all bloody and beaten up. Charlene looked up and said, "Look at that poor Indian. The pigs sure worked him over." That was the closest I ever came to seeing Jesus.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman