Eddy Charlie lost his hearing after he attempted suicide at the age of seven. During our call for a recent interview to talk about his time at Camosun, his experience at residential school, and his involvement with Orange Shirt Day, my questions are repeated back to him—he can now hear partially, thanks to a cochlear implant—by his friend and fellow Camosun alumnus Kristin Spray.
Charlie and Spray started Orange Shirt Day Victoria while studying at Camosun College in 2015. Charlie is a residential-school survivor. He graduated from the Indigenous Studies diploma program at Camosun in 2016; Spray graduated the next year. Through hearing details of residential-school survivors’ stories, Spray was looking for a way to get involved, but didn’t want to do so without Charlie’s blessing. At first, Charlie was hesitant to join forces with Spray, who wanted to have stories heard, to have the horrors of colonization acknowledged on a deeper and more meaningful societal level. But, driven by an aching in her chest, she kept up the perseverance until Charlie agreed.
Charlie is in line for coffee at the start of our call, and while we wait for him, Spray and I get to talking.
“It was aching in my heart,” she says. “Aching that, every day going by, people at Camosun, people in the City of Victoria, or across Canada, didn’t know about what had happened to these children… Kids were being killed, kids were being tortured, kids were being taught to be cruel to each other. And it’s still going on. There’s intergenerational trauma. I was convinced that if Eddy wasn’t in a place where we could work together, then I would find someone else, eventually, but I knew specifically, you know, to ask Eddy, and that his voice and his story in particular was very important.”
Charlie says his attempted suicide was a “spur of the moment thing,” one that came after witnessing physical abuse and rape in the change rooms of the residential school he was at.
“They were physically abused, verbally abused; they were starved. Many of whom were sexually abused,” says Charlie. “They were transformed into perfect hate machines, and when they brought that hate with them back into their community, they changed the environment that they were released to, and that means their home and their families… We wanted to talk about that.”
Charlie makes a point of thinking about hate and accountability, and the role that those things can play in forgiveness. Indigenous people, he says, played a role, too.
“We were teaching own children how to do the same things that we were doing,” he says. “We were making our own children victims of our own hate… Our children starved because of our alcoholism.”
Charlie vaguely remembers at one of his lowest points beating up a friend, taking his own hate out on someone else. Reshaping that hate into moving forward in a positive way is a big part of reconciliation for him. But now, he’s been sober for some time, and learning to cope with the trauma of his past, his people, and his land without alcohol has been hard. But he feels his emotions, says what’s on his mind, and hopes that through sharing his story, he can help others.
“Now, at elementary schools, they teach children about residential schools, and the work that we do has a huge role in that,” he says. “We hope to continue doing that and encouraging, inspiring people to talk about residential schools, because their stories are important, and their stories matter.”
REBUILDING
In 2015, as part of organizing Orange Shirt Day ceremonies, Charlie and Spray asked Camosun to print out the The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s 94 calls to action. The college did so, says Spray, and they left them up around campus afterwords. (To find out more about Charlie and Spray’s Orange Shirt Day initiative, see victoriaorangeshirtday.com.)
This year, September 30 is being recognized as a federal statutory holiday and a day of learning and reflection in Canada.
Charlie and Spray had been trying for some time to give the matter the time and attention it deserves to little or no avail, and Charlie says it’s sad that it took the discovery of 215 children’s bodies in Kamloops to get closer to where we should be. But is it possible to really properly apologize and move forward from such an incomprehensibly horrific chapter?
“No,” he says. “I think they need to show that ‘sorry’ is real—the word ‘sorry’ has to have an action that follows it. I’m really sorry that I took your language away; I’m really sorry that I took your ability to give your family… I’m really sorry that I took that away from you and placed a different culture among you. They need to work with us and help us to rebuild our lost culture, rebuild our lost identities and rebuild our language. I really think that they need to come to us and stand inside our circle with us… I think it would it benefit the government to come to our circle.”
Spray says there has been almost no accountability among the groups of people most responsible for what Indigenous people have gone through.
“The work that Eddy and I started to do together is just as important today as it was when we committed to standing together and walking forward,” says Spray. “I think it takes strength and we’re encouraged to see more people hearing the truth, and believing it, and wanting to do something about it, because nobody’s been—barely any priests, nuns, teachers, RCMP who took kids away in handcuffs to residential schools, government—held accountable for the murders of these children. For the loss these children experience. Their languages, their families. Simply to say, ‘I’m sorry’ is not good enough. It doesn’t cut it.”
PERFECT HATE MACHINES
During our conversation, Charlie comes back to the idea of intergenerational trauma many times. Survivors of residential school all across Canada sexually abuse their own children and grandchildren, he says. Seeing that for the first time, and understanding how bad residential school impacts people was hard on him.
“It’s really hard for me,” he says. “I used to cry a lot. We brought that hate to our community, and we changed our community with our hate and our anger. It’s really sad for me to finally acknowledge that, and admit that residential-school survivors also played a role in harming their community.”
Charlie says that the destruction of language, culture, and traditions resulted in people never knowing love and never hearing the words “I love you.” It’s hard to imagine trying to fix that, he says; it’s heartbreaking. He says that in order for people to truly connect with their children again, those words need to be said.
“It’s not just one child not hearing that,” he says. “I still cry for a lot of families.”
While we talk, Charlie doesn’t go into too much detail about his suicide attempt. But he doesn’t shy away from what he saw that led to it: children at the residential school he went to had been physically and sexually abused so much “that we started to see it as normal,” he says. And you couldn’t get away from it.
“For many of us, it was happening in our homes, too,” he says. “When I tried to commit suicide, I woke up in a hospital three months later in Victoria. I was very disappointed to see that I survived, and I never thought about working on suicide prevention. As I said, many of us were physically abused, emotionally abused so many times. Residential schools created perfect hate machines. I was one of those perfect hate machines. I had no respect for anyone around me. I hated everybody—my father, my grandmother, my own family, and so I never really wanted to be a counsellor talking about suicide prevention; I just wanted people to understand that change happened to us when we were taken away from our homes against our own will.”
Charlie says that to create change, we must talk about everything that’s happened.
“We can create change by talking about residential schools. It was never my intention to become a counsellor. All I wanted to do was stop that cycle of violence, alcoholism, and hurt… Be sure that it doesn’t get passed down to my children or my grandchildren, and hope that I will inspire other people to do the same thing in their own family, in their own circle.”
As far as how those aren’t Indigenous can contribute to reconciliation in a positive way, Charlie urges people to listen.
“Listen to survivors,” he says. “Understand that intergenerational survivors are still paying for their experience through their parents and their grandparents. So, I would say take the time to hear their stories and try not to pass judgment. Try to find a little bit of understanding and try to walk in these footsteps. Take all that pain, all that loss, all that anger, all that grief, and try to picture themselves in that same situation and understand that no matter how strong you are, there’s a moment that you’re going to bump into a wall… No answers. But we have had to figure out a way to make answers come to us by sharing. I believe that we started that. More and more survivors are starting to open up and talk about their experience. I think if we take time to listen, they will give us the opportunity to redeem that lost chapter of our lives.”
One of the main steps toward reconciliation that Charlie wants to see is the Vatican acknowledging what happened in residential schools and the role that the Vatican played in colonization.
“I’d like to see the Vatican acknowledge that certain bad things happened in residential schools, because the longer the silence, the more they become complicit in the harms that are still happening among Indigenous people,” he says.
Charlie says there is progress being made, highlighting the fact that books, courses, and entire programs about Canada’s original culture and peoples are starting to be implemented in schools, but he says that much of the material those courses draw from are from books written by non-Indigenous people.
“The spirit of our reconciliation is going to change in the next few generations… It takes time,” he says. “But Orange Shirt Day is going to have a huge impact on that.”
Charlie says that because of the residential-school system 150,000 children had their identities removed and replaced with an identity that was not their own.
“The goal of the grandparent or the ancestor is to have that identity,” he says, “and that identity was given to us through assimilation and genocide.”
Correction: This story originally misspelled Kristin Spray’s first name as Kristen. We apologize for the mistake.