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VOL. 27 NO. 7
www.terracestandard.com
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Time for truth, reconciliation By JOSH MASSEY FOR LOUSIA Gray, the social damage caused by residential schools is something she deals with every day at her job and in the memories of what they did to her family growing up. “I still see in other families a lot of alcohol abuse and family violence,” says Gray, a social worker and counsellor with 17 years experience in the area. “I think it stems from the affects of residential school because many were physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and sexually abused and a lot of them carried on and abused others, including their own children.” And for herself, it’s difficult to speak of the life she had of drinking every day before earning a Bachelor of Arts degree and then to raise a family where drugs and alcohol aren’t abused and there is no violence. Gray reflected on both her professional and personal life last week following the release of the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s summary of six years of testimony into the effects of more than century of aboriginal children being sent to residential schools. The commission travelled the country over six years including a stop in Terrace in 2013 where local First Nations had a chance to contribute to the permanent record of residential school experiences which will be archived at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. A total of almost 7,000 statements were made and will be included in the final comprehensive report yet to be released. Gray, 68, who has witnessed and experienced how the residential schools cut off children from their par-
JOSH MASSEY PHOTO
KERMODE FRIENDSHIP Society’s Louisa Gray with Bachelor of Arts degree certificate from the University of Victoria. ents, destroying family and social networks in the process, is nonetheless skeptical about the commission’s ability to bring about change. Born in Greenville in the Nass Valley, Gray, who is Nisga’a, identifies as a second generation residential school survivor, with several of her brothers and sisters having gone through that system and she herself having spent four years at a domestic boarding school in Surrey starting at age 17 where she says she suffered many of the same abuses. “They were called boarding homes, and that is where the Department of Indian Affairs placed a lot of students that didn’t go to residential schools,” Gray said. She added that she feels the government should have
included those boarding schools in the commission’s work. “When I contacted tuberculosis I was about 3 or 4 years old,” Gray said. “And I had to stay in Miller Bay [near Prince Rupert] for a year.” “It was one of the diseases that Europeans brought over with small pox, some of my brothers and sisters died from smallpox.” Gray said that the federal government’s program to compensate survivors, one that was in the works before and continued after a formal apology by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to aboriginal peoples in Parliament in 2008, lead to even more of them dying from alcoholism-related health problems.
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Power projects opened NEARLY $1 billion of capital expenditure in northwestern B.C. was recognized June 2 with the official opening of three run-of-river power projects along the Iskut River developed by Calgary-based energy company AltaGas. The largest of the three – the Forrest Kerr facility at 195 megawatts and the smallest, Volcano Creek, at 16 megawatts – began producing power last year while the 66-megawatt McLymont Creek facility is to be finished this year. On hand for the opening were members from the Tahltan First Nation, on whose traditional territory the projects are located, Tahltan Central Council president Chad Day, energy and mines minister Bill Bennett, aboriginal relations and reconciliation minister John Rustad and AltaGas chairman and chief executive officer David Cornhill. Power produced by the facilities is be-
ing sold to BC Hydro and feeds into the provincial grid through a substation at Bob Quinn, the end point of BC Hydro’s Northwest Transmission Line which itself was finished last August. Speaking after the opening, energy minister Bill Bennett called the three projects a crucial addition to northwestern B.C. infrastructure. “Without these projects we wouldn’t have a Northwest Transmission Line,” said Bennett. AltaGas paid a lump sum and is making annual payments which together will total $180 million toward the $716 million cost of the Northwest Transmission Line. Its power sales deal with BC Hydro is for 60 years. The 287kv line is also expected to lead to other northwestern developments, chiefly mining projects.
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Leaving roots
Sacred Heart
Next steps
A tree is planted at UNBC to mark its 25th anniversary \COMMUNITY A10
A look back as Terrace’s Catholic church celebrates 100 years \NEWS A5
Volleyball standout Cole Nutma has been recruited by the UFV Cascaes \SPORTS A24