Photo Karen Graham.
In Millbrook resident Ron Gosbee’s new book, he describes his own unique experiences at the notorious St. Anne’s residential school in northern Ontario where he spent three years as the only white male student in the facility.
Last month, Ron Gosbee’s memoir about his experience as a student at St. Anne’s Residential School in northern Ontario was finally published, entitled No Escape: Witness to a Canadian Genocide. Writing this book as proved to be a difficult task for the author and took almost ten years to complete. To get the story straight required sifting through 60-year old memories of fears, haunting images and pain from the five years he spent as a young resident of this now notorious residential school. This book provides his account of this troubling period in his childhood.
In 1958 at the age of five, Ron arrived at St. Anne’s residential school in Fort Albany to begin his formal education, joining roughly one hundred Indigenous students who had been forcibly removed from their homes. Ron was the only white student at the school. His family lived beside the Hudson’s Bay Company post where his father was the manager. The school administrators convinced his parents that the facility would provide a superior education. The only alternative for Ron’s family was home schooling: for Indigenous families this was never an option.
The residential school system was developed at the turn of the century to provide a public school education for aboriginal children in the north. Because the population was spread over such vast distances, a residential system was developed. The responsibility for operating these schools was handed over to mainstream religious denominations including the Anglican and Catholic churches. The system was also designed to assimilate the Indigenous children.
Despite the number of students, the buildings at St. Anne’s were eerily quiet. Talking amongst students was only permitted during their free hour of leisure before dinner. This discouraged the development of bonds between students, reinforcing their feelings of isolation. Because boys and girls were segregated at all times except during classes, even the arrival of his two sisters provided little comfort to Ron because there were few opportunities to connect with them. Students lived in fear of the slaps and beatings triggered by trivial infractions. Despite being visibly different from the other students, Ron was never afforded special treatment, nor was he embraced by his peers. As a result, Ron retreated to a place of silence, striving to be invisible to avoid any unwanted attention.
Despite their segregation, Ron got a message through to his sister one afternoon when he was particularly desperate. He was planning to return back home that night. He arrived at the exit to find his sister waiting for him. The pair took off into the frozen night, travelling the five miles home on foot through the wild terrain accompanied by the sound of wolves. Miraculously, they arrived home safely, but their exhilaration was short-lived: the nuns arrived the next morning to take them back to school, advising the family that the children’s route was covered by Polar bear tracks, indicating they had been followed. The children would not make a second attempt.
Other children were not so lucky. Their homes were often many hundreds of miles away, and some disappeared in the night trying to find their way back home. Occasionally their corpses would return to the school on toboggans to be buried on site. All students would then be summoned to witness their return as a stern reminder of the consequences of trying to escape. Most of the runaways were never found.
The memoir describes the demanding daily schedule, the cruelty of nuns and priests, the inedible food and the students’ feelings of despair. Tales of torment, physical, sexual and emotional abuse, including the use of a home-made electric chair and straight-jacket, were finally confirmed in 2018 through an extensive police investigation that culminated in five staff convictions. The nun frequently identified for her cruelty was among them. Like many of the most abusive staff, she is Indigenous.
The Gosbee family returned to southern Ontario in 1963, where the children were educated in the regular public school system and went on to further education.
After a CBC interview about his residential school experience in 2016, Ron was contacted by a fellow student who was at the school at the same time called Tony. Ron was immediately struck by Tony’s vocabulary in describing his experiences at St. Anne’s. Instead of calling it a school, Tony referred to the facility as a prison where the students were inmates. The authenticity of Tony’s descriptions triggered a shift in Ron’s own view and helped him move forward in his writing. Some of Tony’s recollections are scattered throughout this memoir. Ron has concluded that he and his sisters became unwilling witnesses to a cultural genocide where representatives of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Church acted as federal government agents, implementing their intentional policy of assimilation.
Today Ron appears to be unburdened – finally free of the trauma of his early years at St. Anne’s. Writing this book has helped him define his identity and find his voice. Despite those terrible years, Ron has enjoyed a variety of academic and professional successes having earned degrees at the Ontario College of Art, another in Psychology and Biology from Royal Roads University, and founded the first digital printing company in Canada based in Toronto. He has lived in Millbrook for the last eight years.
Ron is not sure how his book will be received, but he is glad to have added his voice to those of other witnesses to this horrible chapter in Canadian history. On a personal level, a CBC producer has approached Ron about another interview, where perhaps he will have the opportunity to meet Tony, which whom he has only had email contact. It would seem like a fitting conclusion to a story about reconciliation where members of both cultures sit down together to share stories about the past and visions for the future. KG