'... a long, long time' (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Last updated at 9:05 AM on 20/09/07

'... a long, long time'

Ripples through time Following the residential school aftermath Residential
school payback process begins

JESSICA KIUNGA
Herald Staff
Prince Albert, SK
http://www.paherald.sk.ca/index.cfm?sid=64005&sc=4

[Gavin Ermine, 22, looks through his Common Experience Payment forms at the
Senator Allan Bird Centre Wednesday. Herald photo by Jessica Kiunga]

Wednesday was the beginning of what many Prince Albert residents have been
waiting on for decades.

Hundreds of First Nations people gathered at the Senator Allan Bird Memorial
Centre to make their official claim for a Common Experience Payment.

Residential school survivors - some as young as 20, but most much older -
filled the gym, waiting in their seats to have federal workers help them
fill in their applications.

When Gavin Ermine, 22, went to residential school in Prince Albert in 1994,
things were a lot different than when his grandmother went to residential
school, he said.

By the tail end of the residential school era, students had a choice whether
to board at school or stay with their parents while receiving an education.

The experience for Ermine was much tamer than some others gathered at the
centre, who suffered abuse at the hands of school workers, who were ripped
from their parents' arms and plunked down with strange teachers, in a
strange town, forced to speak a strange language.

Ermine isn't sure what he'll do with his payment, and isn't sure he'll get
one at all. If money comes his way, he thought more schooling or buying a
vehicle might be a good way to spend it.

He only spent about a year at residential school, but still sees the
long-term effect it had on his people.

"There's two parts to it," he said. On one hand, he's glad for knowing a
mixture of languages - he was one of the lucky First Nations youths able to
hang on to his traditional language and he knows English, too.

But largely, European influences changed the shape of his people's culture.

One payment applicant who attended residential school in Prince Albert,
where the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation urban reserve now stands, said there
were "very few" good things that ever came of the system.

The woman preferred not to identify herself, except to say she was near 60,
and came from the Little Red River reserve north of Prince Albert.

"No monetary fund is going to fix the damage that has been done," she said,
but conceded that the payment process would at least provide some form of
closure for those who suffered because of residential school.

"It's been in the works for a long, long time," she said.

jkiunga at paherald.sk.ca