It’s an ominous story that goes back more than a century. It is a legacy that shames Canadians today, and its trauma spans generations. The country’s indigenous peoples, many of them of Indian descent, were driven from their homes at a young age, housed in a series of boarding schools, and assimilated into “civilized” society through harsh discipline and often abusive practices. Canada’s Dark Secret unravels this horrific indoctrination system and chronicles several of its victims.
These policies were introduced by the Canadian government as an extension of the Indian Act of 1876, which gave institutions wide latitude to attempt to deprive Aboriginal people of their cultural identity. Internal schools have been established to facilitate this process. Parents face severe penalties and prison terms if they refuse to surrender custody of their children to these government-sanctioned agencies. Meanwhile, the punishments the children receive in their new homes are even more bizarre.
The film conveys his tragic story through very personal testimony. Walking through the now bare, rust-stained classrooms of Mohawk Residential School, survivor Roberta Hill recalled the horror she experienced when she got there when she was six years old. Another survivor spoke of her best friend and classmate, whom she suspects was beaten to death and buried among the six thousand other children believed to have perished on the campus. Bud Whiteye tells the story of how he was kidnapped on a reservation as a young man, revisiting the campus boiler room where he was sodomized by a school worker. For these victims and others like them, any deserted schoolhouse is truly haunted.
The last of these schools closed in the late 1990s, but their ugly vestiges remain. There is no end to the grief of the survivors, and no end to the guilt of those who inadvertently found themselves complicit in these horrific events. Canada’s Dark Secret is a horror film in every sense of the word. But by revealing a long-shrouded story, it achieves a level of catharsis for all involved.
Directed by: Rania El Rafael
