Pemmican shares residential school experience

Gordon Pemmican has found solace in what happened to him at residential school.
The Lac Seul man no longer harbours anger about the abuse he endured at the Pelican Lake Residential School he attended from 1965-1970.
He has come to terms with it after many years of self-destruction.
Pemmican shared his story during the Tapachimoda (Let’s Tell Stories) Truth and Reconciliation Commission gathering in Thunder Bay Nov. 24-26.
“Unlike other kids, I was dropped off (at the school) by my mom,” Pemmican said, recalling the day, when he was five years old. “All I had in this world was my mom.”
He doesn’t blame his mother for the bad things that happened to him. He now understands she was trying to give him a better life.
“She was a widow,” Pemmican said. “My dad died when I was one. My mom had a limited education and she was disabled.
“She did what she thought was best for me. She knew if I was in school, I would have a warm bed to sleep in, food in my stomach and clean clothes. She didn’t know if she would be able to provide those basic needs to me herself.”
But Pemmican admits his life turned for the worst the day she dropped him off at the school.
“The first five years of my life were the healthiest and happiest,” he said. “During those years, I didn’t have a problem with how my mom looked or how she dressed. I was not ashamed of my people, the cabin I lived in or my way of life. I was not ashamed period. I was happy we lived in the bush.”
In many ways, Pemmican felt lost at residential school.
“Before I went to this place, I had no idea what a school was and how it would involved me,” he said.
His arrival at the school sounds like the plot from a movie. His mom took him to the school by taxi.
“She got out of the car and started talking to a group of people that were waiting,” he said. “I thought we were just making a stop so I got out and starting running around the building, looking around being curious. When I came around the other side, my mom was already in the cab pulling away.”
Pemmican said this was the first traumatic experience of his young life.
“I was scared of being left behind, abandoned,” he said. “I thought I was being given up. When no one explains things to you, your mind is your own worst enemy.”
It didn’t take long for the assimilation to begin.
“I was introduced to a new world and it was a world I did not want to be in,” Pemmican said.
That world included having his hair cut, wearing “their clothes”, having to eat processed foods, being spanked, hit and scolded and being racially put down by staff at the school.
“I was always open to new stuff so I didn’t mind the food … but all I really wanted to do was go home. I didn’t want to be there and I didn’t understand why they were doing those things to me.
“If I had known I was only 15-18 miles away from home, I never would have stayed. I could have followed the river back home.”
During his time at residential school, Pemmican was forced into learning a new religion.
“It gave me new spiritual beliefs,” he said of the new things he learned through the church like praying on your knees. “This brought us further away from our people and our spiritual beliefs.”
Around the time of his first Christmas at the school – a time when most of the other kids went home for the holidays but he had to stay behind because no one came for him – Pemmican began to be sexually abused.
“When bad things happen to kids, they black it out,” he said. “What happened to me is too horrific to remember.”
It started with simple altercations where Pemmican was beaten up and soon turned aggressive and sexual.
“I had no place to go and no one to turn to,” he said.
He said it was like a jail and the staff were like jail guards and the older students were the seasoned criminals who had already been through initiation.
Both the staff and his peers remained his tormentors for as long as he was at the school.
When he finally did leave the school, nothing was the same.
“The community was different then,” he said. “Because it seems like everyone had gone through residential school in the community, they had all been through that abuse.”
He said some, like himself, remained a victim of the abuse, while others were bullies in the community.
“The community members brought back violence from the residential school,” he said. “The only difference between the abuse in school and in the community was that in school, there was staff there to stop the beatings.”
He said these beatings continued year after year and eroded away any trust he had in people – Aboriginal or not.
He finally reached a boiling point with all the anger and negativity around him and started to fight back. He became a fighter.
“I was ashamed of the colour of my skin,” he said. “I believed in what they said about me, calling me a primitive savage and that I had no place in the new world.”
Pemmican believed he had no value.
“I’m not white. So who am I? What am I? Where do I belong? I was nothing. I was nobody and I was in great pain. I was confused and lost.”
In his late teens, he tried to return to school and complete his education but he was unable.
“I never lasted in a boarding home,” he said. “I always got kicked out. I rebelled so they sent me home.”
He turned to alcohol to ease his pain.
Pemmican said it was the alcohol and being drunk that helped him forget the past.
He also turned to religion, though he only had a limited understanding of it from his time in residential school.
“I prayed to God,” he said. “I said to him ‘Take me out of here or help me.’”
He asked for a sign and started walking across thin ice to get from Hudson to Frenchmen’s Head.
“I knew there would be nothing anyone could do to help me from either side if I went through the ice,” Pemmican said. “Sure enough, I made it across. That told me it wasn’t my time to go.”
That continued his path to healing.
He spent a few days alone, collecting himself and trying to quit drinking. He hit rock bottom and went to the Sioux Lookout Zone Hospital.
He met a doctor at the hospital who helped him out.
“He asked me how far I was willing to go to get treatment,” Pemmican said.
He went to Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital in Thunder Bay for his treatment.
There were many relapses and halfway houses along the way but Pemmican slowly got his life together.
He eventually entered treatment in Winnipeg where he heard someone else’s story – their confession – and it woke him up.
“I stopped being worried about my drinking and started getting help for my pain,” Pemmican said.
Through a 10-day session at a trauma treatment centre in Fort Frances, Pemmican learned it was not the experiences that caused him pain but how he was dealing with the situations.
“I learned I was my own worst abuser,” Pemmican said. “All those things that happened to me, happened as a kid. I was still dealing with that.”
Pemmican finally came to terms with his abuse when he appeared before a panel in Kenora about four years ago to determine his financial compensation for the abuse.
“It wasn’t until that hearing that I broke my silence. I realize now I was poisoning my soul by keeping all of that bottled up inside. As soon as I got it out, I started to feel better about myself.”
Pemmican said people need to start breaking the cycle of silence.
“Canada has apologized for what happened. It is up to us to do the rest.”
Pemmican has gone on to lead a full life. He is married with three sons and a daughter. They are all in touch with their culture through drumming or dancing.