Summary Of Canada's Shame

In the short documentary film “Canada’s shame: Residential schools, unmarked graves, and the search for justice- people and power” I learned a lot about what Canada did to the indigenous people regarding residential schools and the trauma we left on their community. The lives of the indigenous communities are forever altered because of the way these schools were designed to assimilate and strip the children of their identity. Carl Sam was just one of the Saint Mary’s residential school survivors and he says, “His experience at the residential school has stripped him of his whole life”. He goes on to say one day he was put on a boat and all the children were crying around him because they were taken out of their homes and they didn’t know what was going on,

Carl fell into alcoholism and drug abuse trying to forget what had happened to him in the school, he was deprived of his language, cultural and subjected to hard labour and he used drugs and alcohol to try and drown out what had happened to him when he was younger. Clarence Pennier was another survivor of the Saint Mary’s residential school and he says, “if he was able to grow up in his community he would have learned the language, how to hunt, fish, and learned about their ceremonies and he has regret because he is unable to teach this to his children” He was also sexually abused but he was abused by an older boy who was at the school, as well as a boy his age but just because it wasn’t an adult doesn’t mean it was right. Clarence said he had 5 brothers and 3 sisters and every one of them were alcoholics, he said the toughest thing about being a family was that they were never able to talk about what had happened to them at Saint Mary’s and as a result they never got out of alcoholism and they died and now their stories will never get