A Dark Legacy:  A Primer on Indian Residential Schools in Canada

....by Bud Whiteye

About the Author

Bud Whiteye is a member of the Walpole Island First Nation - a Native community found in southwestern Ontario, on the north of Lake St Clair.  A graduate of the University of Western Ontario’s School of Journalism, the Program in Journalism for Native People, he has been writing for more than twenty years.  His early years of writing just to get a by-line and build his portfolio were followed by script writing for CBC Radio’s “Morningside”; hosted by Peter Gzowski.  Bud has authored many editorials and some movie reviews for the London Free Press, and has written for London Magazine.  He later became communications officer for the Heritage Centre at Walpole Island.  Currently, Bud is a columnist for Osprey Media, whose newspapers cover all of Ontario. 

Detailed Book Review by G. Campbell McDonald

G. Campbell McDonald is a Toronto writer.  He was an adjunct professor at The University of Western Ontario Graduate School of Journalism following his career in newspapers, radio, TV, university PR and government communications.

His review:

In this unsettling but instructive booklet, Enos (Bud) Whiteye has written a compelling account of the physical and sexual abuse he suffered as a boy at an Indian residential school in southwestern Ontario.  A graduate of The University of Western Ontario Journalism School’s specialized Program in Journalism for Native People, the author is a columnist with the Osprey Media Group in Ontario and a member of the Walpole Island First Nation.  He brings alive his stolen childhood and loss of innocence at the age of nine with a candor that is both shocking and courageous.

Bud Whiteye’s carefree, simple existence as a youngster growing up with his family close to the forests of southern Ontario, came to bewildering and cruel halt one summer day as he was playing along a dusty back road with his siblings. A black government car with white strangers in it overtook the children and picked them up along with Bud.  In that one fateful moment they became virtual orphans.  Without their parents’ consent and allowed no goodbyes, they were driven with the other children in the car to faraway Brantford and turned over to the malevolent Mohawk Institute, a residential school run by the Anglican Church of Canada for the Department of Indian Affairs.

A nightmare of relentless abuse lay ahead for Bud and his brothers and one sister.  Their meals were never enough and hunger drove them to raid the town dump and scavenge local garbage cans for food.  Discipline was brutal, often sadistic.  Neither the mischievous nor the well-behaved among the boys could escape the merciless beatings on their nude bodies – whipped until bloody – with the full assembly of the Institute’s boys, including toddlers, made to watch in fear and loathing. 

Other loathsome crimes were committed in secret.  The night he was raped, the author was a skinny, scared nine-year-old, smothered in his bed and sodomized by a burly attacker in the blackness of the school dormitory.  That shattering, disgusting, perverted and horrifying experience haunts the victim still, but his graphic re-telling of the assault is accomplished without salaciousness.