Derek Neary
Northern News Services
Monday, May 21, 2007

GJOA HAVEN - When Prime Minister Stephen Harper awarded Canadian Maher Arar $10.5 million in January for torture suffered while Arar was deported to Syria, Eddie Kikoak saw yet another injustice.

Why was the federal government granting such ample compensation package to someone who suffered as a suspected terrorist while offering only tens or hundreds of thousands to aboriginal people who spent years in residential school, Kikoak wondered.

He said he wrote an e-mail to Harper three-and-a-half months ago expressing his views, but said he has heard nothing in return.

"To me going to residential school and being abused was just like being tortured too," Kikoak said last week.

Although he wants $10.5 million to look after his family, Kikoak, 71, is terminally ill and therefore is reluctantly going to accept the lesser terms offered through the proposed residential school compensation agreement: $10,000 for the first year and $3,000 for each year thereafter. In addition, those who suffered sexual or serious physical abuse may be eligible for an additional $5,000 to $275,000. That amount can climb if a loss of income can be proven, according to a federal government press release.

"It's nickels and dimes to keep your mouth shut," Kikoak said of the proposed sum.

Former residential school students can opt out of the agreement and thereby retain their right to sue the government and the church but Kikoak, who said he doesn't have long to live, doesn't have time for a long court battle.

While growing up near Tuktoyaktuk, he was taken away from his family as an 12-year-old in the mid-1940s. He remembers how quickly he went from feeling eager to distressed as he pulled away in a boat with strange adults.

"I was really excited, I was really happy to leave home," he said, "but about one hour away I started realizing hey, where the heck am I? I started crying but I couldn't do anything any more. It was too late."

Over the next several years at the Immaculate Conception school in Aklavik he said he endured mental, physical and sexual abuse.

"We were gathered in a building like prisoners, we were prisoners. On top of that we were tortured," he said.

All these decades later he said he still braces himself for a beating when he practises Inuit traditions.

"I'm brainwashed let's put it that way," he said. "I've got to look around to see who's around me before I speak (about) my Inuit culture to make sure that nobody's going to hit me or slam me or anything like that...I've got scars to prove it."

Valerie Hache, media relations co-ordinator with Indian Residential Schools Resolutions Canada in Ottawa, declined to discuss Kikoak's stance.

"I cannot comment on that, especially because it's a specific case you're talking about," she said.