Former Residential School Nun arrested in Canada
Trigger warning: 97 year old nun arrested in a sexual assault case related to allegations going back to the 60's. & multiple US states brace to confront the dark histories of Indian Boarding Schools.
MOOSONEE, Ont. — Police say they have arrested and charged a 97-year-old nun in a sexual-assault case involving allegations dating back decades to residential and day schools in northern Ontario.
Ontario Provincial Police say they arrested Francoise Seguin of Ottawa on Wednesday after an individual contacted them in late 2022 about the alleged incidents.
OPP spokesperson Bill Dickson says the incidents are alleged to have taken place in the 1960s and '70s at St. Anne's residential school in Fort Albany First Nation and Bishop Belleau school in Moosonee, Ont., as well as a detention facility in Sudbury, Ont.
Dickson says the case involves a single victim who was a young person at the time, and the force is not aware of any others at this time.
Seguin has been charged with three counts of gross indecency, a repealed Criminal Code offence used today in some historical sexual-assault cases.
She is scheduled to appear in court in Moosonee on Dec. 5
OPP spokesperson Bill Dickson told CTV News in an email the facilities where the incidents reportedly occurred were "St. Anne's and Bishop Belleau School."
St. Anne's residential school(opens in a new tab) operated in Fort Albany from 1906 to 1976.
"Four former staff members have been convicted on charges that include indecent assault, assault causing bodily harm, assault and administering a noxious substance," the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation said about St. Anne's.
The most recent allegations have not been proven in court.
Torture and starvation: Inside the hidden history of the Indian boarding school at Fort Simcoe
From 1860 to 1922, hundreds of Yakama children and others from across the state were ripped from their homes and forced into an Indian boarding school at Fort Simcoe — the first on-reservation boarding school in the nation — where children as young as four years old could be starved and isolated in a jail cell for speaking their own language.
Shellenberger said when parents tried to stop their children from being taken away, they suffered dire consequences. He recalled how one of his ancestors lost five of his children to boarding schools.
“He tried to fight them off with an ax and so they sent him to prison for about 12 years,” Shellenberger said.
Shellenberger said other families camped in teepees outside of the boarding school grounds, desperate to see even a glimpse of their children. They often looked nothing like the kids they had once been after months or years of hard labor, forced to abandon their culture and given new clothes, new hairstyles and even new names.
“They took great efforts to change us by putting us in these boarding schools to make us not Indians, make us white, Christian, landowning citizens," Shellenberger said. "But by doing that, they were breaking them.”
Shellenberger said one of the tactics used by boarding schools was to divide and conquer, separating not just kids from their parents, but brothers from sisters and children from the only method of communication they'd ever known.
“They did awful things, torturous things to them in order for them not to speak their own language," Shellenberger said. "Somebody didn't comply, then they would just starve them until they gave up, until they broke them. They could be shackled or kept away from folks in detention for unknown periods of time, starving.”
Washington State Confronts Indian Boarding School Past with New Committee
Washington State’s Attorney General’s office has formed a Truth & Reconciliation Tribal Advisory Committee to collect oral testimonies and recommend how the state can address present-day harms caused by Indian boarding school policies.
Washington, a state home to 29 federally recognized tribes, hosted 17 of the nation’s more than 500 Indian Boarding Schools, according to an up-to-date list from the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. The institutions operated from the 1800s through 1970 with the aim to forcibly assimilate Native children into white society.
On Oct. 3, Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced the five-person committee, which includes representatives from Yakama Nation, Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana, Quinault Indian Nation, Tlingit and Cowichan First Nations, and Lummi Nation.
“These schools are not just a shameful part of our history — the trauma they caused reverberates through generations of Indigenous families,” Ferguson said in a statement. “With this new committee, we start a long but essential journey toward healing.”
The committee will hold public listening sessions across the state over the next year to hear accounts from boarding school attendees and their descendants in an effort to “[uncover] the full history of Indian boarding schools in Washington,” according to a press release from Ferguson’s office. The listening sessions will begin in January 2024.
Additionally, the Tribal Advisory Committee will utilize the Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report, in addition to the Native American Boarding School healing coalition’s work—to research the history of the 17 schools identified in Washington.
Deborah Parker (Tulalip), CEO of The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and a tribal member based in the state, said that her organization is grateful for Washington state’s leadership in not only seeking truth but promoting healing.
“We need other states to follow suit and work with Tribes and Native communities to bring the truth about this dark history to light,” Parker said.
The committee will submit a report to the state in 2025 with recommendations on how the state can address the harm caused by Indian boarding schools and other cultural and linguistic termination practices.
Upcoming Road to Healing stops:
Haaland and Newland will travel to Alaska on October 22 to listen to survivors of the federal Indian Boarding School system and their descendants share their experiences. The tour was scheduled to stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on October 1, but was rescheduled to this date due to the threat of the federal government shutdown after the 2023 fiscal year ended September 30th.
Since July 2022, Haaland and Newland made stops in Anadako, Oklahome; Pellston, Michigan;Rosebud, South Dakota; Gila River Indian Community, Arizona; Many Farms, Arizona; Tulalip Indian Reservation, near Seattle, Washington; Onamia, Minnesota; and Riverside and Rohnert Park, California.
Secretary Haaland launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in June 2021 to shed light on the troubled history of Federal Indian boarding school policies and their legacy for Indigenous Peoples. In May 2022, the Department released Volume 1 of an investigative report as part of the Initiative, which calls for connecting communities with trauma-informed support and facilitating the collection of a permanent oral history.
As I covered here, legislation is in the works to give the Federal Truth and Healing Commission more tools to investigate deeper. The petition to support it is here; please sign and share it with everyone!
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