Karen Mackenzie
Northern News Services
Published Monday, August 27, 2007
IQALUIT - Former students of residential schools, including an estimated 2,990 Inuit, could receive compensation within a month.
Joe Iyerak travelled to 14 communities as a Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. outreach worker during the opt-out period for the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. He and other outreach workers explained the details of the agreement and ensured former students and their families understood their rights. - Karen Mackenzie/NNSL photo |
The opt-out period for the Indian Residential School Settlement ended on Aug. 20, with only 201 opting out. Forms postmarked before the deadline may still come in, but a total of 5,000 would be needed to stop the nearly $2-billion settlement.
The news is welcome, according to survivor Joe Iyerak, an outreach worker who travelled to 14 communities on behalf of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. (NTI) between April and June.
"This thing has been going on for many years," he said. "We've been waiting for a while."
Iyerak was only four years old when he was first taken to a residential school, from a camp north of Iglulik where he was living with his grandfather.
"They sent me to Chesterfield Inlet in the fall of 1958," he said. "I don't even remember being sent there, but I remember times when we went back. Summertime, the boat went around to the outport camps and started picking up children. They started picking them up in August."
As an outreach worker, he had a chance to share stories with others across Nunavut, while explaining the details of the settlement agreement to former students and their families.
"We explained their basic rights and what's in the agreement. We told them it's not ideal, but it's the best possible one for the settlement," said Jeannie Arreak-Kullualik, an NTI policy analyst who travelled as an outreach worker to Iqaluit, Kimmirut and Sanikiluaq.
Born in 1971, her own experience was "not that bad" compared to the stories she heard from her 13 older siblings, who were born in the 1940s and 1950s, she said.
Some of the survivors she spoke with while travelling were worried that the payments - $10,000 for the first year spent in a residential school and $3,000 for each successive year - were "too small for the price they had to pay for their lives, loss of culture, loss of language," Arreak-Kullualik said. "Some of them were literally taken from their outpost camps. One morning they wake up and they were OK, the next morning a plane or a dog team came and dragged them away."
Others were concerned that parents of residential school students were left out of the settlement, according to Iyerak.
"The feeling was that there was nothing for the parents, but they suffered under the residential schools," he explained.
While survivors prepare now to receive their payments, a number of organizations hope to help communities deal with the influx of cash.
A community impacts working group was formed last year with aboriginal stakeholders, the RCMP, Health Canada and others. The group met Apr. 30 to May 2 to identify potential pitfalls, like frauds and scams, and positive impacts that the money could bring about.
"In some communities you might have 10, 20 survivors, and it's at least $20,000 for each survivor. For some people who are not working it's quite a large sum of money," Iyerak said. "But nobody can tell them what to do with it; they can do with it whatever they want."
A portion of the settlement has been earmarked for healing initiatives, including $125 million to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, $60 million to preserve the experiences of the survivors and $20 million for commemorative projects.
"But for a lot of people, it's not so much the money. It's the opportunity for them to express their stories through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to at least validate their experiences," Arreak-Kullualik said. "They will have an opportunity to laugh and cry about it in front of people, because after that, they'll at least have some closure."
