By Sarah Rae

Residential school survivor shares story on Orange Shirt Day

Sep 30, 2016 | 2:04 PM

A Red Pheasant First Nation elder feels fortunate to have overcome the trauma he experienced at a residential school.

Reg Bugler said traditional practices and ceremonies, as well as his wife, helped him forgive and overcome the damage caused during a year he spent at St. Michael’s Residential School in Duck Lake.

“The more you talk about your experiences, the more enlightened you become, the more you share your experiences in a controlled safe way you feel better about it,” he said. “If you don’t let it out it’s going to eat you away and kill you.”

Bugler, a cultural advisor and grief counselor, compared the damage caused by holding in emotions to a blood blister. If you allow it to build up, it just becomes more and more painful, but if you release the pressure you immediately feel the pain start to lessen.

Orange Shirt Day on Friday, Sept. 30 is a day recognized across Canada to reflect on the experiences of children in residential schools. The idea for the event was inspired by a girl in B.C. who picked out a new orange shirt to wear on her first day of school in 1973, but was stripped and her clothes stolen when she arrived to school.

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Bugler and his siblings, his parents and grandparents were all sent to residential schools. His grandmother was taken when she was only three or four years old and eventually separated from her siblings and lost contact with her parents.

Bugler, his brothers and sisters were taken to St. Michael’s when his parents went to work temporarily in Alberta and left them in the care of neighbours. The neighbours abandoned them and social services was called to take them away.

The siblings expected their parents to come rescue them, but didn’t know they were blocked from doing so by the “Indian Agent” controlling the reserve.

“Once you break the bond with the parents that’s never reparable to the way it originally was,” he said. “It can be rebuilt, repaired in some fashion but it’ll never be as strong as it was before, so that anger persisted and when we came home we weren’t the same, we were different, we were traumatized so much that it affected the rest of our development in school and personally.”

Before the siblings were sent to St. Michaels, Bugler’s older sister wanted to be a teacher and taught her brothers and sisters to read and write. He said they all excelled in school, but that stopped with the abuse they experienced in residential school.

Bugler said although thousands of children suffered in residential schools, they suffered alone because nobody shared their stories.

“Each one of them had a story of their own and each one of them suffered in isolation,” he said. “I never shared with my siblings after we came home about what happened, my siblings never shared with me what happened, that’s just how it was and you’re embarrassed, you are confused and a lot of them turn to alcohol and drugs and other forms of dysfunction.”

He said he’s looking forward to more openness and awareness that comes from events like Orange Shirt Day. A video he shares where he tells his story and his family’s story of residential schools has been viewed in seven different countries. He said this in a way validates his name Misiwe Ka Pehtakosit, meaning He Who is Heard Everywhere.

Sarah Rae is battlefordsNOW’s court and crime reporter. She can be reached at Sarah.Rae@jpbg.ca or tweet her @sarahjeanrae.