The children sat on a wooden seat with their arms strapped to a metal chair. A Brother held a wooden box with a crank ready to send the electric charge. “Your feet is flying around in front of you, and that was funny for the missionaries,” Metatawabin says. “So all you hear is that jolt of electricity and your reaction, and laughter (of the Catholic school administrators) at the same time. We all took turns sitting on it.”
An Ontario judge recently ruled the federal government must turn over the documents, meaning adjudicators in the future will have the documents when making decisions in compensation claims under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Act. Survivors will no longer have to prove the level of abuse in each case.
“They are very relieved the justice system has worked,” says Brunning about survivors she spoke to today. “They want to believe the apology meant something.” Brunning says because of the residential schools, survivors are still afraid of authority. For many, they are marginalized individuals and often find themselves on the wrong side of the law. “If law can work in their favour, that is probably a first.”
St. Anne’s is in Fort Albany in northern Ontario. It was open from 1904 to 1976 and had hundreds of aboriginal children from remote James Bay communities walk through its doors. A police probe from the 1990s turned up evidence of horrific abuse, including an electric chair. A government had said Ottawa received the documents from police on an undertaking they would not be passed on to anyone.
Ottawa forced to turn over reports of electric chair use at residential school | RED POWER MEDIA
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