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Time runs out for abuse claims

Residential school victims to file today

By: Alexandra Paul

Wednesday, Sep. 19, 2012 at 8:51 AM | Comments: 0

Today is the deadline for thousands of Indian residential school survivors to file abuse claims.

The Indian Residential Schools Adjudication Secretariat still has months of work to process the claims that have already been filed.

In the meantime, the agency's website is peppered with notices to survivors and their lawyers to get their paperwork in on time. After today, no new claims can be made.

The settlement, approved by nine provincial and territorial superior courts in 2006, settled all residential school claims in Canada. Some 80,000 survivors were eligible for a settlement from a $1.9-billion fund.

Today's deadline is for survivors who suffered sexual, physical or psychological abuse.

Aboriginal leaders condemned the federally funded, church-run institutions for the destruction of aboriginal languages and cultures, and social and economic problems. The last of the schools closed its doors in the 1990s.

As of July 2012, $1.5 billion had been paid out and there were another 15,000 claims to process. By September, that number had swelled to nearly 30,000 claims.

Winnipeg lawyer Joan Jack believes the number of claimants may ultimately be dwarfed by the number of survivors who don't file claims.

Despite widespread publicity, many elderly First Nations people who attended the schools and suffered abuse may not have heard about the compensation package beyond the settlement paid to everyone who went to the schools, Jack said.

"As a lawyer, I don't know what I'm going to say to people when they come to me and say, I didn't understand I could make a claim," Jack said.

She also said many day-school students believed they had to be residential students to be eligible.

There were others who found the process too confusing and some who couldn't face emotional flashbacks.

Her own husband is among that number, Jack said.

Dan Ish, the secretariat's chief adjudicator, said a lot of effort was made to have process as sensitive as possible, but said he's talked to survivors who just didn't want to revisit the past.

"The other thing about the emotional toll is... it's had a toll on individuals. It's (also) had a toll on families and it's had a toll on communities."

Compensation can't fix that, he said. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's hearings are picking up where settlement cheques can't. "I've been to several TRC events and it's been transformational for many of the former students,'' Ish said.

In Winnipeg earlier this month, Toronto artist Robert Houle, who was taken from his home in Sandy Bay First Nation when he was five, said he isn't filing for compensation. "The bottom line is there's no price to my suffering," he told the Free Press at the opening of an exhibit of his artwork at the University of Manitoba.

Instead, his artwork drew out the pain for him so he could move on.

He made a series of haunting charcoal sketches about his experiences, including physical and sexual abuse, at the Sandy Bay Indian Residential School.

For more information about the claims deadline, go to the Indian Residential Schools Adjudication Secretariat website at http://www.iap-pei.ca/home-accueil-eng.php

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca

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