My home community of Attawapiskat First Nation is celebrating the annual graduations of students from Kattawapiskak Elementary School and Vezina Secondary School. These are proud moments for our community as families get to celebrate their children.
These moments are especially important for our First Nation communities, as education in my parents’ time was a traumatic event that affected the lives of young people. My parents, Marius and Susan Kataquapit, both attended residential school as children and it was terrible for them and their families. Their parents were forced to give up their young ones for the entire year in order to go to school and the children were separated from their families and communities. For the government, it was a form of assimilation that was designed to remove the indigenous culture from a child’s life and force them to integrate into European Canadian society. Unfortunately, that kind of education only produced fear, hopelessness and trauma. It is also a matter of public record now that these residential schools were havens of abuse of all kinds that deeply and negatively traumatized an entire generation of Indigenous people.
…. to read the column, please click on the link below
https://www.wawataynews.ca/blogs-columns/celebrating-graduates-attawapiskat