Inuvik to host truth commission event

Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission will hold a national event for former residential school students in Inuvik, N.W.T.

Officials in Inuvik received noticethat it will host the national event in June 2011.

The Inuvik hearing will allow former residential school students across the North to share their personal stories and feelings with the commission, which will compile an historical account of the Canadian residential school experience.

Organizations representing the Gwich'in andInuvialuitpeoples in the N.W.T. worked together on a motion to have the national meeting in Inuvik, given the high number of students who attended residential schools there and in Aklavik, N.W.T.

It is also believed that the Delta has the highest concentration of former residential school students in the country.

6 schools in Delta

There were six residential schools in the Beaufort Delta, including Grollier Hall and Stringer Hall in Inuvik, as well as the Immaculate Conception residential school in Aklavik.

"This would even lend a lot of emphasis on the legacy, just having it here in Inuvik, and particularly on these grounds," said John Banksland, who had attended the Immaculate Conception residential school in Aklavik.

"It hasn't been easy for me to speak to my children about it, and I have grandchildren coming up now and they certainly are going to hear a lot about this experience I had so many years ago."

The Gwich'in Tribal Council's Mary Ann Ross, who has worked to bring the commission to Inuvik, told CBC News that they have a tentative budget forthe national event.

While organizers have yet to determine the event's costs, Ross said they hopeto help former residential school students with travel costs so they can come to Inuvik.

Inuvik organizers will be going to a similar event in Winnipeg this summer to learn from it, Ross said.

Widespread impact

About 150,000 First Nations, Mtis and Inuit children were placed in more than 130 residential schools across Canada from the late 1870s until the last school closed in 1996.

Many former students werephysically and even sexually abused when they were students at the schools, most of which were operated by churches but funded by the federal government.

Ross said the impact of residential schools on Canada's aboriginal people is much more widespread than one may think.

"It's not only your grandparents and your parents, but your children are impacted, and even your grandchildren," she said. "There is lasting effects of residential school. It doesn't just stop with the last generation."

7 national events

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which consists of Manitoba Justice Murray Sinclair and fellow members Marie Wilson and Wilton Littlechild, will gather former students' experiences to prepare an historical record of the residential school legacy.

The Inuvik event will be one of seven national events the Truth and Reconciliation Commission will hold "to promote awareness and public education" about the Indian residential school system and its impacts, according to the commission's website.

The commission will also support a number of community events across the country.

Inuvik too far: Nunavut survivor

But some former students in neighbouring Nunavut, like Paul Quassa of Igloolik, said many survivors from that territory cannot afford to fly thousands of kilometres to Inuvik for the commission's national event.

"We seemed to be left out again in that process," Quassa said Wednesday.

"This truth and reconciliation process that the federal government created is supposed to be a Canada-wide entity, and yet again we see Nunavummiut being left out."

Canada's national Inuit organization, Inuit Tapririit Kanatami (ITK), approved the Inuvik location at a board meeting last year.

"Anybody could've put an application to say, 'We'd like the event here or there,'" said Nellie Cournoyea, chair of the Inuvialuit Regional Corp. and a board member with Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami.

"So it's not ITK that pushed it. It was a group of us from the Inuvik region generally representing the catchment area that the schools had effect on."