To the Editor,
Re: Was letter fact or fiction, Letters, Aug. 30.
My statement that “as many as 50 per cent of Canadian Indian residential school children never made it home from school” because “they died” is not merely my opinion but a fact gleaned (if memory serves correct) from the fabulously educational CBC documentary series called 8th Fire: Aboriginal Peoples, Canada, and The way Forward.
But the best education about what a frightening, degrading, and humiliating experience Indian residential school was, I received from attending the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings here in Port Alberni last March and listening to the truth directly from those who experienced it.
Further, I read the 2012 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada Interim Report—particularly the section entitled “What People Told the Commission” —wherein it states “The Commission was told of children who died of disease, of children who killed themselves, of mysterious and unexplained deaths.”
Not exactly your elite private English boarding school.
Liz Stonard,
Port Alberni