Ottawa Spent $2.3M on Court Battles with St. Anne's Residential School Survivors

NDP MP Charlie Angus says the money was the price of a 'vendetta'

Jorge Barrera · CBC News 

Historical photograph of a nun and students at St. Anne's Indian Residential School.

(Algoma University/Edmund Metatabwin collection)

The federal government spent $2.3 million over the past five years in court battles with survivors from a notorious residential school in northern Ontario, according to information released by Justice Canada.

"It adds to the question why the government would go to such lengths to deny rights for claimants who suffered some of the most horrific sexual abuse and torture ever documented in Canada," said NDP MP Charlie Angus.

The figure was released by Justice Canada in response to an order paper question submitted by Angus. His Timmins-James Bay riding includes Fort Albany, a community along the James Bay coast that was home to St. Anne's Indian Residential School. 

This school was run by the Catholic orders of Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Grey Sisters of the Cross from 1902 until 1976.

NDP MP Charlie Angus says the legal costs were the price of a 'political vendetta.' (Justin Tang/Canadian Press)

The $2.3 million amount is based on what Justice Canada, between January 2013 and May 2018, billed the federal department in charge of the file — which was Aboriginal Affairs under the Stephen Harper government and Crown-Indigenous Relations under the current Justin Trudeau government.

Angus raised the issue in the House of Commons during question period Thursday, calling it the price for "a political vendetta."

He asked how Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett could meet with survivors and then still fight them in court by using "every brutal legal tactic" and "every procedural weapon" against them.

"How can she look them in the eyes and break her word?" said Angus.

Bennett said more than 90 per cent of residential school survivors had received compensation payouts, but a "few cases were difficult to settle." Bennett said the government "remained committed to justice for all survivors."

Angus also accused Bennett of "targeting" the survivors' pro-bono lawyer by going to court seeking $25,000 in court costs from Fay Brunning.

Bennett, quoting from a judgment by Ontario Justice Paul Perell, said Brunning's "repeated and deliberate attack on the integrity of the court threatens to interfere with the administration of justice."

Perell ruled in Ottawa's favour on that case in July.

Ottawa withheld key documents

The majority of St. Anne's residential school survivors' court battles revolved around Ottawa's failure to disclose key and voluminous documents about abuse at the school during the adjudication process created by the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement to set compensation levels known as the Independent Assessment Process (IAP).

The lack of disclosure resulted in several lost compensation cases.

Widespread evidence of physical and sexual assault at the school

OPP

For about the first six years of the IAP — under the Harper government — Ottawa failed to disclose thousands of documents from a 1990s Ontario Provincial Police investigation which found widespread evidence of physical and sexual assault at the school.

The OPP investigation also gathered witness testimony about the use of a homemade electric chair used by school officials for sport and punishment.

The school history that was used by Ottawa during those first years of the IAP stated there were only four documented cases of physical abuse and no cases of sexual or student-on-student abuse at the school.

In 2014, the Ontario Superior Court ordered Ottawa to turn over the police documents, but the court battles continued after the Trudeau government took over.

Legal battles continue

St. Anne's survivors were also seeking to use examination transcripts from a 2003 civil case about abuse at the school to bolster their cases in the IAP. These transcripts would play a key role in student-on-student abuse cases that have a higher standard of proof and depend on the evidence of similar incidents arising from the same school.

Ottawa argued that transcripts from the civil case were protected by settlement privilege and couldn't be used in IAP cases unless they involved the specific survivor seeking compensation.

That particular court battle ended in May after the Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed an attempt by St. Anne's survivors to overturn a lower court decision siding with Ottawa.

However, the legal struggle continues. In January, the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that new evidence of abuse was not enough to reopen rejected residential school compensation cases. Two of the seven examples used in the case were from St. Anne's.

The matter has now gone to the province's court of appeal. 

Convictions for abuse after OPP investigation and wrist-slapping by courts

The five people convicted following the OPP investigation included:

Ann Wesley, a Cree nun born in Attawapiskat, who attended St. Anne’s as a child, was convicted of three counts of common assault, three counts of administering a noxious substance, and one count of assault causing bodily harm. She received an 11-month conditional sentence.

Jane Kakaychawan, an Ojibway nun born in Ogoki Post, Ont., who as a child attended the McIntosh Indian Residential School north of Vermilion Bay, Ont., was convicted of three counts of assault causing bodily harm. She was given a six-month conditional sentence.

John Moses Rodrique, a cook and later employed by Indian Affairs, pleaded guilty to five counts of indecent assault. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail.

Claude Lambert, a child-care worker at St. Anne’s, pleaded guilty to one count of indecent assault and was sentenced to eight months in jail.

Marcel Blais, who worked in the kitchen, pleaded guilty to one count of indecent assault on a male. He did not receive jail time.

The Dark Legacy of British Columbia's St George's Indian Residential School

In the 1980s, I managed the little weather station located in Lytton. While I lived a half-hour south of there in Boston Bar, I got to know a few of the people including a missionary living in the area. We often talked about the darkness that held the area in its grip. That darkness was St George's Residential School and the child sex abuse that destroyed several generations and probably still afflicts residents of Lytton, Clinton, Lillooet and many other communities in the British Columbia's Cariboo Region.

Church, school officials must have known of rampant evil, judge says

BY KATHY BLAIR, - October 1, 1999

Besides the somewhat dry legal discussions of vicarious liability and the relative responsibilities of the Anglican Church and the federal government in the victim’s abuse, Justice Janice Dillon’s 106-page decision also documents the horrific details of supervisor Derek Clarke’s eight-year reign of terror.

First, Justice Dillon noted Mr. Clarke had no training in child care. Indeed, he had been employed as a child-care worker at another Anglican institution for less than a year when he was asked to leave because he was unqualified. The supervisor, however, arranged for him to work at St. George’s.

Justice Dillon said the late Ralph Dean, who was bishop of Cariboo at the time, must have known of the abuse. She also believes the principal of St. George’s Indian Residential School, Anthony Harding, also dead, deliberately covered up the abuse because he too abused boys. (Mr. Harding was found not guilty of such charges in a criminal trial about 10 years ago.)

The victim lived at St. George’s in Lytton, B.C., from 1969 to 1976. He was nine years old in 1970 when dormitory supervisor, Mr. Clarke, began to sexually assault him. Dormitory supervisors oversaw all the boys’ activities from the moment they awoke until bedtime, except for school instruction.

Mr. Clarke began his assaults by fondling the child under his blankets under the guise of “looking for things.” All other assaults, including forced oral sex and sodomy, occurred in Mr. Clarke’s room next to the dorm. Five other men testified before the judge that Mr. Clarke had assaulted them as well.

Mr. Clarke would line the boys up outside his room after bath in the evening and inspect each to see if he were clean. One of the boys was then taken to Mr. Clarke’s room for the night.

The assaults began soon after Mr. Clarke came to St. George’s in 1965, the judge found. The victims said they were assaulted two or three times a week each.

“Mr. Clarke told each boy not to tell anyone,” the judge wrote. “He gave his favoured boys chocolates, pop, gum and weekend trips. When he took a boy away from the school for a weekend trip, sexual assault occurred in motel rooms. These trips required the permission of the principal.”

The boys’ behaviour revealed these secrets, however, Justice Dillon said. While the boys did not discuss with each other what happened, it was the known subject of ridicule, jokes, innuendo and nicknames. By this time, St. George’s was no longer a school, just a residence.

A teacher at the school the boys attended, Lytton Elementary, noticed sexually inappropriate incidents in the playground and overheard the ridicule and jokes. She told the court she went to the school’s principal, Joseph Chute, and demanded the boys be questioned. This led to Mr. Chute calling his friend, Mr. Harding, the residence principal, who in turn questioned the boys. The judge concluded Mr. Chute did not inform either the police or the Department of Indian Affairs of the abuse.

Mr. Harding asked Mr. Clarke to resign – which he did – leaving the residence in less than half an hour. Mr. Harding later wrote a letter of recommendation for Mr. Clarke, expressing appreciation for past services and expressing hope that his “personal problems” would be cleared up.

Mr. Harding wrote to the Department of Indian Affairs to inform them of Mr. Clarke’s “resignation” but did not reveal the reason, although serious disciplinary matters with respect to staff were to be mentioned in reports to the department.

Anglicans in Canada: Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective - By Alan L. Hayes

Based on hearsay evidence and testimony from the current bishop of Cariboo, Jim Cruickshank, the judge concluded the bishop of the day was very likely informed of the incidents. She noted that Bishop Cruickshank thought it “unimaginable” the bishop would not have been told, although the church argued in court that the question was unanswered. She also noted the incidents were known to school staff and some local parishioners.

“Nothing was done,” after Mr. Mowatt left, the judge noted. “The parents were not informed. None of the boys received counselling or parental or spiritual assistance. Nobody made further inquiry.”

Justice Dillon concluded that Mr. Harding, whose rooms adjoined the residence, also sexually assaulted male students at St. George’s, as several men testified during the trial. “Although Harding denied this and was acquitted of sexual assault following trial, it is not known who testified against Harding at his trial,” she said.

One man said that a few years after he told the principals of the residence and school of being abused by Mr. Clarke, Mr. Harding – who was by now an Anglican deacon, on his way to becoming a priest – sodomized and had oral sex with him in his room.

“The involvement of Harding in sexual misconduct and his failure to do anything for the boys as a result of their disclosures leads to the obvious inference that he did not care about Clarke’s behaviour as long as it was not known,” the judge concluded.

“The fact that he did not tell the department about the reason for the ‘resignation,’ even though he told Chute that he would do so, indicates that Harding did not want an investigation at the school.”

On the question of whether the church as the employer should be held liable for the crimes of an employee, Justice Dillon said the case was similar to the recent Supreme Court decision in Bazley v. Curry. In that case, a non-profit group was found vicariously liable after its child-care worker sexually assaulted a child under his care.

(Vicarious liability involves an innocent employer being held responsible for an employee’s crimes.)

The Supreme Court said the stronger the connection between the type of risk created by the work, the more likely an employer will be found vicariously liable, particularly if the employee is placed in a parental-type relationship.

In this case, supervision of Mr. Clarke was minimal, if at all, the judge found.

“The employer could not possibly have given an employee a greater opportunity to abuse children, except, perhaps, allowing the children to reside away from others in the supervisor’s own home,” she said, noting this was sometimes done when Mr. Clarke would take children away for the weekend.

In its defence, the church said Mr. Clarke was an employee of the federal government during the years he abused the plaintiff from 1970 to 1973. Maybe so, the judge said, but the change in employee status had little immediate effect upon the operation of the school as an Anglican institution. “The church had at least a reasonable degree of control over the hiring and dismissal of Derek Clarke.”

The judge found both the church and the government vicariously liable for the abuse. She also found that they both owed a duty of care to the victim and both breached their duty. The church was also in a position of trust regarding the victim, and the judge found the church breached that as well.

Justice Dillon concluded the church bears greater fault than the government “because of the failure of the Anglican Church to disclose Clarke’s abuse so that adequate investigation and care could follow.”

Justice Dillon upheld the federal government’s claim against the diocese of Cariboo for breaching the advisory service and chaplaincy contracts it held with the government. It should have provided pastoral counselling, moral guidance and personal assistance to Mr. Mowatt after the disclosure, she said. If the government and the church cannot agree on an amount for that particular claim, the matter will be referred back to Justice Dillon.

Anglican Clerics Seek to Heal Wounds of Residential School Abuse

ROBERT MATAS
LYTTON, B.C.
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 31, 2000
UPDATED APRIL 7, 2018

Catherine Morrison came here nine months ago to work as an Anglican priest in communities scarred by physical and sexual abuse at an Anglican-run residential school.

The community's response was brutal. People yelled obscenities at her and her husband, Will Hubbard, also an Anglican priest. They spit at their feet. They slammed doors in their faces. Some men propositioned Rev. Morrison.

Although the abuse was committed more than a generation ago, some spoke to the 29-year-old cleric as if she had committed the crime. You killed my brother, she was told. You abused me when I was a little boy.

St. George's Indian Residential School, which once was five kilometres outside Lytton, was closed 21 years ago and torn down 16 years ago. (Dates are from the year 2000).

But the fallout from sexual and physical abuse at the school continues to reverberate.

The story of St. George's has also turned into a national wake-up call for four of Canada's major churches -- Anglican, Roman Catholic, United and Presbyterian -- and the federal government, all of which have been in talks about compensating victims of residental schools for years.

The Anglican Diocese of the Cariboo, which includes Lytton, has nowhere near enough money to pay reparations. The Lytton Anglican Parishes, one of the poorest in the country, raised a paltry $7,000 last year. After a court judgment on the first claim filed against it, the diocese decided to declare bankruptcy.

If what happens here indicates what will happen nationally, the financial implications for the four churches will be devastating. Nationally, 6,000 lawsuits involving 16,000 former students have been filed against the federal government and the churches.

Deputy Prime Minister Herb Gray met recently with representatives of the churches and officials are to continue meeting even if an election is called.

"It's not the interest or desire of the government to place the churches in bankruptcy," Mr. Gray said. "We do not want to have the churches go bankrupt."

Meanwhile, government lawyers are negotiating with the Diocese of the Cariboo specifically on the lawsuits arising from St. George's.

Their efforts, however, have little impact on the street in Lytton, a village of 300 people, 250 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.

Ms. Morrison, who grew up hearing her part-Cree family's stories about their own experiences at an Anglican school near James Bay, said this week she was under no illusions when she took the job. She realized she was coming to one of the most difficult spots in the country for the Anglican church.

Even so, she underestimated the obstacles. "I found more resentment against the church than I'd ever seen before," she said during an interview at her home.

At the site of St. George's all that remains is a massive stone church, now boarded up, and a cluster of weather-beaten farm sheds. Tales of sexual and physical abuse surfaced a few years after the school was torn down. Derek Clarke, a dormitory supervisor, pleaded guilty in 1988 to sex offences involving several young boys.

Byron Spinks, a former Lytton First Nation chief, said in an interview that just about everyone in the village has been touched by the events at St. George's. The school's legacy is widespread alcohol and drug abuse, debilitating depression and a rash of suicides, he said.

He neglected to mention child sex abuse and incest. Suicides are frequently a consequence of incest or other child sex abuse. This is an area that needs to be studied much more than it is for I believe it is widespread through many remote aboriginal communities, especially those with a legacy of residential schools.

Despite the misery, Rev. Morrison and Rev. Hubbard have begun to transform the image of the church in Lytton. Wearing pink plastic hair clips in her long, dark hair that is pulled back in a ponytail, Rev. Morrison is part of a new generation of young clergy committed to working in areas considered the neediest by the church.

More than that, she is a bridge between the aboriginal heritage of her father and the British roots of her mother.

Rev. Morrison had what she describes as a typical middle-class suburban upbringing in Oshawa, Ont. At the same time, her father's family, which is Cree, came regularly from Moose Factory to visit.

Although animosity against the church is as strong as ever, the community's feelings about its two new clerics have warmed. "When we first arrived, we were symbols of 'the church' and now we are Catherine and Will," Rev. Morrison said. "They are beginning to trust us."

She has forged a bond with the community by looking to its members for direction.

Tales of Neglect, Abuse Haunt Lives Cut Short

There are remarkable similarities between Australia's Aboriginal peoples and North America's indigenous peoples, especially those in Canada where child suicide rates are startlingly high in isolated 1st Nations communities.

I have been saying for some time that child sex abuse, even incest, has a significant part in the suicide of minors in remote communities and this report from Australia would certainly support that as child sex abuse, which often causes suicidal thoughts, appear to have been involved in about half of the child suicides looked at.

The Canadian government seems to be skirting around the issue, but they will be wasting more time and effort and costing more lives if they continue to do so.

The short, shocking stories of 13 Aboriginal children and young people who killed themselves in the Kimberley between November 2012 and March last year were read aloud to Coroner Ros ­Fogliani in a Perth courtroom yesterday.

The Australian

The boy was a toddler when he was found in a park in a remote town in Western Australia’s far-north Kimberley.

He was being looked after by a seven-year-old; his mother was drunk and unconscious nearby.

His was the worst case of “failure to thrive” the local pediatrician had ever seen. That is quite something in the Kimberley where the diagnosis is not uncommon.

The boy moved between ­Aboriginal communities that were far apart. He was near the border with the Northern Territory when, aged 7, he told visiting child welfare officers that older boys there sodomised him. Authorities noted that the boy was ­intimidated by the ­community, but they left him there after a senior relative gave assurances she would keep him safe.

The boy, known to the West Australian Coroner’s Court as Case 2, took his own life, as a ­teenager, in the resort town of Broome.

Lawyer Philip Urquhart, who is counsel assisting the coroner in a sweeping inquiry into indigenous suicides, said the teenager had been living in a carpark where police found his body.

“From the very moment he was born his life was largely one of struggles, pain, sorrow and ­neglect,” Mr Urquhart said in his opening address yesterday.

The short, shocking stories of 13 Aboriginal children and young people who killed themselves in the Kimberley between November 2012 and March last year were read aloud to Coroner Ros ­Fogliani in a Perth courtroom yesterday. In coming weeks Ms Fogliani will hear more details about Case 2 and other boys and girls as young as 10 found dead in remote communities and towns. She has suppressed all of their names.

Mr Urquhart was on his feet for two hours yesterday, recounting the miserable circumstances leading up to each suicide. He said there were common threads in most but not all of the cases.

“Those common threads include numerous health issues as they grew up (particularly a diagnosis of failing to thrive), home environments prone to alcohol abuse and domestic violence, frequent moves between households of various family members and guardians with varying degrees of success, poor attendance at school, below average academic results and a reluctance to seek the assistance of mental health services,” he said.

“With respect to six of the ­deceased, there was evidence, of varying degrees, that they had been the victims of sexual abuse, though no charges were ever laid against anyone arising from this evidence.”

In one case, a 15-year-old boy confided to child protection ­officers that he was sexually ­assaulted by three men who came into his bedroom and, “though he reported the incident to his parents, he stated that they were too drunk to understand what he was saying”.

An assessment confirmed the boy had suffered “sexual harm” but he refused to tell police because he was worried about reprisals against his family. That boy became a regular user of alcohol and cannabis and took his life the following year, the court heard.

A 12-year-old girl who took her life in 2013 had not disclosed sexual abuse, but her older sister had told authorities that both of them were victims of the same relative. In the year before she died, the 12-year-old girl became a regular user of cannabis and alcohol, barely went to school and was assessed by a youth justice agency as being at “serious risk”.

She told the youth justice officers she walked around the streets of her hometown with other children late at night because of noise and drinking at home. “This was no exaggeration … her home … was known to regularly have drunk occupants in the house into the early hours of the morning.,” Mr Urquhart told the coroner yesterday.

He said only one of the ­deceased, a 13-year-old girl, left a note. It was a short expression of love for her siblings, including a younger sister who took her own life less than four years later.

Ms Fogliani’s inquiry comes a decade after her predecessor, Alastair Hope, travelled to the then alcohol-ravaged Kimberley town of Fitzroy Crossing to examine the suicides of 22 Aborigines, including one child. Mr Hope heard evidence of children so hungry they were seen suckling a dog, and his report described the plight of the region’s children as “especially pathetic”.

Yesterday, Mr Urquhart said Aboriginal youth suicide and its causes remained, despite dozens of reports and hundreds of recommendations over the past 15 years.

And until the inter-generational cycle of child sex abuse is ended the suicide rate will continue to be extreme.

If you are depressed or contemplating suicide, help is available at Lifeline on 131 114

Committee on Indigenous Suicide Misses Big Part of the Picture

It's annoying when you spend hours and hours putting a puzzle together only to find one piece is missing. Canada's parliamentary committee looking into high suicide rates of indigenous children are missing a very large piece of the puzzle, but seem to be happy with the picture anyway.

CBC News

Indigenous people need resources 24/7 to cut suicide rates, committee recommends

Parliamentary committee makes 28 recommendations after more than a year of consultations, research

A Canadian parliamentary committee examined the issue of Indigenous people taking their own lives and released its report Monday. The committee held public consultations and heard stories of how suicide affects First Nations. This picture shows Rebecca Hookimaw, 16, of Attawapiskat in April 2016. Her sister, Sheridan Hookimaw, took her own life at 13. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)

Canada's Indigenous people need resources round the clock, and culturally appropriate programs and services that are community led and controlled as part of a suicide prevention plan to reverse "decades of unjust policies," a parliamentary committee says. 

These are among 28 recommendations in a report released Monday by the House of Commons standing committee on Indigenous and northern affairs, which had been collecting research and holding public consultations since May 2016. 

'We need to send a message to Indigenous Canadians,

and especially to young Indigenous people,

that their lives have value, that they matter.'

- MaryAnn Mihychuk, Liberal MP

"We need to send a message to Indigenous Canadians, and especially to young Indigenous people, that their lives have value, that they matter, and to hold on to hope," said Liberal MP MaryAnn Mihychuk, chair of the committee.

"We recognize that they are losing hope because they have difficult lives and are suffering from intergenerational trauma as the result of decades of unjust policies, and that we must act together to restore hope.''

Suicide is a leading cause of death among Indigenous people, according to the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, which submitted a brief to the committee. Rates of death by suicide among First Nations are two times higher than the national average, CAMH said, citing Statistics Canada data.

As part of its work, the committee heard from 99 witnesses, including over 50 indigenous youth representatives, First Nations, Inuit and Métis leaders, academics and health organizations.

MPs on the committee say the witnesses shared difficult personal stories of suicide.

Health Minister Jane Philpott, in her testimony, called the high rates of suicide in Indigenous communities a "public health crisis" that has its roots in "long-standing social inequity ... in colonialism, racism, assimilation, residential schools, intergenerational trauma, poverty and so many other issues."

Philpott said programs in Indigenous communities have been "under-resourced" for a long time — there hasn't been enough money to build new facilities and repair old ones, or to hire and train enough professionals.

'We need to send a message to Indigenous Canadians, and especially to young Indigenous people, that their lives have value,' MaryAnn Mihychuk, chair of the House standing committee on Indigenous and northern affairs, said in releasing a report Monday that examined the problem of suicides in Indigenous communities. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

She said the $270 million pledged in the 2016 budget to help with health facilities for First Nations was "only a drop in the bucket in terms of what the need is."

The report found that intergenerational trauma was one of the key factors in the prevalence of suicide and mental health issues in Indigenous communities.

On this the report is right on. Intergenerational trauma is probably the key factor in suicide and mental health issues in indigenous peoples. But to argue that the main cause of intergenerational trauma is racism is off the mark. Yes, racism has been and still is a serious issue with regard to how unfairly indigenous peoples have been and are treated. But, with regard to child suicides and mental illness, the dominant issue, I believe, is child sex abuse!

Abuse, especially child sex abuse, was perpetrated upon indigenous children in residential schools. Those children, many of them, returned to their villages bringing the evil with them and inflicting it upon many of their own children, who, in turn, inflict it upon theirs. 

I believe a serious investigation into each indigenous child who committed suicide would reveal sexual abuse in almost every one. 

Racism is evil and it is certainly a big part of the picture. Industrial scale indigenous child sex abuse appears to have started in residential schools; that's our fault. That we did nothing to remedy the abuse even through several generations - that's our fault, too. If we ignore this gaping hole in the picture for another generation or two - that will be our fault also.

But let's not make racism a scapegoat for all of indigenous peoples' ills. There is no excuse for child sex abuse regardless of how you were treated. At some point those who perpetrated sexual assaults on children knew they were doing wrong. As long as we gloss over this reality, those perpetrators will never have to deal with their guilt in sexual assaults or their contribution to the suicides of children. That will make healing impossible!

Limited access to mental health services "across a continuum of care" was another. 

This is a problem for all sexually abused children. Children don't heal from devastating trauma according to a schedule of 12 visits to a psychologist per year or whatever it happens to be. Children need help until they are whole again regardless of the cost.

Inuk artist Susan Aglukark says Sex Abuse is at the Root of Indigenous Suicide Crisis

I couldn't agree with her more that Child Sex Abuse is at the root 

of the suicide crisis in indigenous communities across Canada,

and residential schools are largely at fault

Since enduring sexual abuse as a child,

Aglukark gave herself space to heal —

with music, but in other ways, too

It's been 42 years since acclaimed Inuk singer Susan Aglukark endured sexual abuse, including

being photographed naked, as an eight-year-old girl living in remote Rankin Inlet.  

(NATHAN DENETTE / THE CANADIAN PRESS)  

By KRISTY KIRKUP The Canadian Press

OTTAWA—Some nights, Susan Aglukark still wakes up drenched in sweat.

It’s been 42 years since the acclaimed Inuk singer endured sexual abuse, including being photographed naked, as an eight-year-old girl living in remote Rankin Inlet — a trauma from which she now considers herself about 80 per cent healed.

The rest, she knows, will never be completely gone.

“I’ll always have triggers,” Aglukark, 50, said in an interview. “Being photographed is a trigger.”

Read more: Canada’s Susan Aglukark first Inuk to win Governor General’s Performing Arts Award

She also knows that as a sexual abuse survivor in the indigenous community, she is far from alone.

Such abuse is a “dehumanizing and demoralizing” root cause of the youth suicide crisis that has been ravaging remote northern outposts in recent years, such as the Attawapiskat and Wapekeka First Nations in northern Ontario.

“There is a very vicious cycle in our communities right now, all from the residential school era,” Aglukark said. “My abuser himself was abused in residential school.”

That abuser, whose identity she didn’t want to disclose, was convicted in 1990 after Aglukark and a group of other victims decided to pursue charges.

Not all of them do. Victims who spoke to The Canadian Press for a series of stories about the links between generational abuse and residential schools described being wary of coming forward for fear of isolation, family shame and reprisals.

Aglukark recalled how uncomfortable she felt telling a police officer what happened.

“That was probably the greatest trauma for me, having to sit there with this emotional fear in my head and in my heart and repaint this incident with this completely strange man I didn’t know,” she said.

“That scared me more than going to court.”

Once her attacker was convicted, she found little relief beyond knowing he’d be unable to victimize anyone else while behind bars. She also felt humiliated, she said: “The whole town knows this was done to you.”

Aglukark’s own healing came through music — specifically, with the release of her 1992 album Arctic Rose, in which she lets listeners in on her pain.

The response to the album was overwhelming, she said; nightly performances turned into a form of therapy where she sang about her own trauma onstage, and heard stories from other victims after the show.

At times, the emotional burden became too much.

“That was the thing that scared me the most . . . we started and opened this can of worms,” she said. “‘Now what?’ That’s the thing that kept me up at night.”

It’s also what ultimately kept her going in October 1998 after she spent three hours crying in a van outside a recording studio — a moment she described as a very dark place in her life, despite her success and critical acclaim.

“In that moment I realized I love my life,” Aglukark said.

“It was more or less loving the journey I am on . . . glimpse of that life was me as whole and healed enough as I can be . . . that meant going back to that following, that can of worms . . . opened up with ‘Arctic Rose.’”

Since then, Aglukark has given herself space to heal in small stages.

She’s currently working on a new venture working with indigenous children, the Arctic Rose Project, and is in the midst of recording a new album.

Aglukark said she hopes indigenous people will have the courage to allow all victims — as well as those who became perpetrators — to be part of a recovery process moving forward.

“The longer we wait, the more we are going to have suicides,” she said. “The cycle of abuse is not going to change if we don’t act now.”

B.C. Report Finds Indigenous Girls in Care Far More Likely to Face Sex Abuse

Gladys Radek, a prominent advocate, was sexually abused in her B.C. foster home as a child. (J.P. Moczulsk for The Globe and Mail)

KATHRYN BLAZE BAUM, MARK HUME AND GLORIA GALLOWAY
TORONTO and VANCOUVER and OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail

Indigenous girls in the B.C. child-welfare system are as much as four times more likely to be victims of sexual violence than non-indigenous girls, according to a watchdog report that describes a failing, ad hoc approach to preventing and responding to the sexual victimization of children in care.

B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth said in the review there were 145 incidents of sexual violence against 121 children and youth in care disclosed between 2011 and 2014. Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett said she was sickened by the report, telling The Globe and Mail on Tuesday that she is committed to exploring the need for national standards regarding the treatment of children in care.

The report’s findings are damning: children who were apprehended amid sexual abuse at home, only to be sexually abused in care; social workers who did not report abuse to police; provincial guidelines that are not audited for compliance; foster children abusing foster children, including a case in which the teenaged perpetrator was simply shuffled to another placement; instances in which there was no evidence that social workers or health-care staff offered supports of any kind to children who had just disclosed sexual abuse; and foster fathers being the perpetrators in one-quarter of the 28 incidents that occurred in the home.

“We can’t just keep removing all these children [from their homes] and then placing them in an environment where, because they don’t have any other natural support, they might be revictimized,” Representative Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond said in an interview. “In essence, by being involved in the system, they may, in fact, be groomed for a lifetime of victimization.”

Dr. Bennett said federal, provincial and territorial social-services ministers, as well as those responsible for children and youth, have chosen indigenous child welfare as the focus of their next meeting, slated for January. “We are committed,” she said, “to overhauling the system.”

Indigenous leaders and child-welfare advocates reacted with dismay to the report – the first in Canada to delve into advocacy cases and illuminate the prevalence and nature of sexual violence against children in government care.

B.C. Grand Chief Stewart Phillip deemed the revelations “beyond frustrating” and said the child-welfare system is so broken that it is time for the Liberal provincial minister responsible for the file to resign.

Cindy Blackstock, the advocate at the centre of a landmark ruling that found Ottawa failed to provide equitable funding for child-welfare services on reserves, said the report is further proof that the “state makes for a terrible parent.”

Indigenous NDP MLA Melanie Mark, the opposition spokeswoman on the issue, said the government must act quickly to address the violence if it is serious about seeking reconciliation with indigenous peoples.

And Wally Oppal, who led a provincial inquiry into police failures in investigating the disappearances of women slain by B.C. serial killer Robert Pickton, said there is a “strong correlation” between childhood sexual abuse and the wider tragedy of Canada’s missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.

Nearly two-thirds of the 121 victims included in the report were indigenous girls, even though they only make up, on average, a quarter of all children in care in British Columbia. Indigenous girls under 12 were four times more likely to be victimized than non-indigenous girls, while teenaged indigenous girls were twice as likely. The report, which is based on incidents that took place between 2004 and 2014, notes that children who experience sexual abuse are at an increased risk of victimization later in life.

Violence against indigenous women and girls is the subject of a recently launched national inquiry, which is expected to examine myriad factors, including child welfare, sex trafficking, systemic racism and the legacy of the Indian Residential School system, where abuse of all kinds was rampant. On Tuesday, an annual day of vigil was held across the country to honour missing and murdered indigenous women.

Gladys Radek, a prominent advocate, said she could have been one of them. Ms. Radek, 61, was sexually abused by several members of her indigenous foster family while in care in Terrace, B.C. She was just 11 years old when she first thought about hitchhiking to Vancouver along what is today known as the Highway of Tears – a stretch of road notorious for the alarming number of indigenous women who have disappeared or died violently along it in recent decades.

“What was more dangerous for me: staying at home and being raped, or hitchhiking?” Ms. Radek said. “Enough talking about it, let’s do something about it.”

Ms. Turpel-Lafond is recommending that the B.C. government roll out a broad strategy to tackle sexual violence against children and youth in care, including improved standards, resources and training. She is suggesting that Premier Christy Clark identify a lead minister responsible for implementing a five-year plan, and is urging the province to create a network of child and youth advocacy centres that have stable funding and bring together police, social workers and cultural supports.

Advocacy centres with police, social workers and prosecution services are needed for all sexually abused children with the added cultural support for indigenous children as well as children from other strong ethnic communities.

B.C. Minister of Children and Family Development Stephanie Cadieux said it was “too early to say” whether the government would act on any of the recommendations. “The work in the report is important,” she told reporters. “We’ll review it and we’ll consider it very critically to see what we could do to strengthen the system as it is.”

Indigenous Child Sexual Abuse Detailed in Queensland in Shocking Report

A formerly secret report delivered to the Newman 

government revealing sexual abuse and prostitution of 

Indigenous children in far north Queensland is now public

 Queensland’s minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander partnerships, Curtis Pitt, 

said the decision to release a shocking report on child sexual abuse was difficult. 

Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP Australian Associated Press

Shocking claims of sexual abuse and prostitution involving Indigenous children in far north Queensland are merely the tip of the iceberg, researchers say.

The state government on Saturday released a redacted version of a document, commissioned by the Bligh government and compiled by Griffith University’s Prof Stephen Smallbone.

It examined three West Cairns suburbs and the Indigenous community of Aurukun, on the Queensland Cape, and found a disturbing prevalence of sexual abuse involving underage youth.

The rate of sexual offences in Aurukun was 6.6 times the Queensland average, and 2.2 times in West Cairns, over a 12-year period to 2012, according to police data.

One-quarter of the offences in West Cairns involved an offender who was under 18, and in Aurukun the offenders were aged between 10 and 53.

“These official data undoubtedly represent the proverbial tip of the iceberg,” the report said.

Researchers identified violence, substance abuse, a “disturbing frequency” of rape and sexual assault, street prostitution and a high rate of sexually-transmitted diseases (STI) as key problems in West Cairns.

Interviews in Aurukun “painted a perhaps even more disturbing picture”, than in West Cairns, the report said.

There, the STI prevalence was an “alarming” 56 times the Queensland rate, and 7% of cases involved children under 16.

Peer pressure, coercion, sexual teasing, violence, alcohol-related problems and the “nocturnal” nature of youth were all troubling, researchers noted.

Sound a bit familiar?

The report was delivered to the Newman government but was kept secret because the authors requested its release be delayed so as not to compromise the implementation of prevention efforts.

Its authors suggested various ways to tackle the complex problems, including school-based ethics programs, family-based interventions and cultural instruction.

The state’s minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander partnerships, Curtis Pitt, said the decision to release it publicly was difficult.

“Shying away from these challenges is clearly not an option and we want to have this conversation out in the open,” he said.

But Aurukun and West Cairns were not the only communities where such “deeply shocking” problems occurred, he added.

Pitt announced a specialist steering committee headed by Stanley Jones QC to examine the issue. It will report by the end of the year.