Supreme Court to decide if IAP survivor stories to be destroyed
- Katie Doke Sawatzky | June 01, 2017
For residential school survivor Ted Quewezance, compensating residential school survivors through the Independent Assessment Process wasn’t just supposed to be about settlement with money. It was also about reconciliation.
“It was about education, it was about healing and full engagement in inclusion of survivors on the ground and that hasn’t happened,” he said.
The fate of confidential records of abuse survivors gave during their IAP settlements came before the Supreme Court of Canada on May 25. IAP representation argued the court should uphold the decision that the records should be destroyed after a 15-year wait period during which survivors can choose to archive their stories or not.
The IAP’s decision was upheld by Ontario courts in 2014 and 2016. The Government of Canada and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation have appealed to the SCC, saying the documents should be preserved.
Quewezance is the chair of the Senate for the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations and a former chief of Keeseekoose First Nation. He said destroying the records would erase history.
“Destroying our records has one objective and that’s to sanitize the evil of these churches, the evil they done to First Nations people, Métis and Inuit, sanitize the evil of the federal government,” he said.
Quewezance went to Gordon’s Residential School and St. Philip’s Indian Residential School as a child. He also attended the Supreme Court hearing last week in Ottawa and said the experience was awful.
“It’s so frustrating and you can’t say nothing, you know,” he said. “And those lawyers, that lawyer that was doing the lead there, he was my family lawyer … and he wouldn’t even come and shake hands with me. It’s sad.”
Blair Stonechild, professor of Indigenous Studies at First Nations University of Canada, said that, while survivors’ signatures on forms that outlined the destruction of the documents need to be considered, the records are valuable for future generations.
“[The Supreme Court is] going to have to weigh their legal principles,” he said, “but my feeling is because of the extremeness of the residential school solution there’s a real important lesson there … about the attempt on the part of government and on the part of Western civilization to attempt to eradicate the entire memory of a generation of kids.”
Quewezance said that during his settlement no one told him his records would be destroyed. He was only asked if he wanted a copy of them. For him, the solution to this case is to ask survivors what they want. He said a national survivors’ conference in a central location, where consent from each survivor over the future of their documents could be sought, would be a good start.
“But at the end of the day us survivors will be still together, that’s the reality,” said Quewezance. “We’ll go to our graves with our stories and we’ll live in society with our stories and my story is there for public consumption.”