Residential School Survivor recently appointed to National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation’s (NCTR’s) Survivors’ Circle

** Trigger warning: readers may be triggered by the recount of Residential Schools and events that took place in Residential Schools. A National Indian Residential School Crisis Line has been set up to provide support for former Residential School students. You can access emotional and crisis referral services by calling 24-Hour National Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419

By Colin Graf

SARNIA— Lila Bruyere considers herself “really lucky” despite a childhood filled with trauma from a long list of abuses she suffered at one of Canada’s notorious residential schools. The luck she feels is her ability to speak about her younger years and communicate to her audiences across the country the experiences of other survivors who have confided in her. That ability has landed her the task of helping to guide the work of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation’s (NCTR’s) Survivors’ Circle in Winnipeg, one of only seven First Nations and Inuit members selected for the position.

Working as an addictions counsellor for 15 years, seven of those in Aamjiwnaang First Nation, Bruyere has helped many survivors find healing, and in turn, has passed on what she has learned from them to teach the wider public about what residential schooling has done to generations of First Nations people.

A Residential School Survivor from Couchiching First Nation, Bruyere found her gift for communicating the residential school experience when a workshop facilitator challenged her to speak about her own life.

“She said to me, ‘If you’re not ready to talk about this now, when will you be?’ and I just said to her, ‘Give me that mic!’” the survivor recalls.  ”She was tough on me but I’m glad she was because she showed me a side of myself I didn’t know I had.”

Bruyere found herself speaking publicly, even though sometimes she ended up in the washroom afterwards throwing up. Still, she knew her presentations were helping her.

“I knew I didn’t want to walk around angry for the rest of my life,” she says.

Bruyere’s efforts in educating Canadians about the effects of residential schools came into sharpest focus when she was finishing her Master’s Degree in Social Work while in her 60s at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo.  A class assignment in 2014 to “develop some kind of speech” led Bruyere, her son, and classmate Shawn Johnston, to create a workshop titled, “Intergeneration: A Mother and Son’s Healing Journey”.  After sharing the presentation with the class, word quickly spread about the emotional impact of the pair’s presentation and they were invited to other classrooms at Laurier. Soon after, an invitation came from the neighbouring University of Waterloo, and eventually they found themselves speaking to audiences across Ontario and as far as the Northwest Territories. Mother and son graduated from the same program at the same school in the same year.

Bruyere feels the workshop’s success comes not only from the authenticity of her family’s own lived experience, but also from the way she has become a voice for other survivors.

“I always say the Creator had his hand on me for me to be able to do what I am doing because a lot of survivors can’t talk about it at all,” she notes.

First, she used the raw material from survivors who came to her for addiction counselling, and then survivors with whom she went to St. Margaret’s School at Fort Frances approached her online saying “We need someone like you to speak for us,” Bruyere recounts.

“At first I was intimidated, that’s a big responsibility; but then I looked on it as an honour to be able to do that,” she explains.

Nominated to the Survivors’ Circle by son Shawn, Lila felt honoured to be appointed as the Ontario representative for a three-year term, as the group includes what she modestly calls “some pretty prestigious people.”  Still, meeting her fellow Circle members for the first time, Bruyere found they were no strangers to one another as their shared experiences created a quick bond.

“I really felt like we knew each other. It was like a healing.  It felt so good.”

“These survivors, and their experiences, are at the core of everything we do at the NCTR,” said Ry Moran, director of the NCTR, in announcing the new appointees to the Circle recently. “They provide guidance and advice to the NCTR, the Governing Circle, the University of Manitoba, and partners on anything important to the broader Survivor community.”

While the Circle’s meetings in Winnipeg have only just begun, Bruyere has some clear goals she would like to promote, all centering around providing further help for the survivors. Her own life experience has taught her healing from childhood trauma is not something that most people can look back at as something complete and over with.  Rather, Bruyere says for most survivors, such as herself, it’s a life-long process.  Describing herself as a “recovering alcoholic, 30 years sober,” she’s had to seek out the ways and means of healing herself, a rocky path she would like to smooth out for other survivors.

“I started by working on healing myself.  I’m 66 years old and I’m still in counseling (for trauma and depression). I do whatever I need to take care of myself, and I want to encourage other survivors to do the same. Don’t sit at home and wallow in it, find somebody to talk to, move yourself out of it. I keep reminding myself I‘m not that little girl anymore. A lot of times I can revert back to that real easy because I know what abandonment feels like.”

A traumatic childhood can leave physical as well as psychological pain, Bruyere says.

“Sometimes I can look at my body and still see the trauma; my body feels that trauma.”

She attributes problems with arthritis to a Nun who beat her with a ruler, leaving her with scars on her back.

“She just wouldn’t stop,” the survivor relates. “It’s not a nice picture, and some people say ‘Why don’t they just get over it?’ but there’s no getting over it.”

While Bruyere finds herself looking back sometimes, she’s more interested in looking forward.

“There are always constant reminders, but I don’t want to pass on to the other side carrying this anger, hating these people,” she says.

That purposeful regard to the future is leading Bruyere, in her work with the Circle, to advocate for the creation of a survivors’ healing centre where they can go for treatment, and to seek government money for that task.  She says it’s the group’s responsibility to make sure the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission “doesn’t disappear.” She has seen most survivors using a patchwork of methods to heal themselves, everything from sweat lodges to psychotherapy, but Bruyere says there needs to be more organized help for them.

She often thinks about what she has done in her life to promote her own healing and is still seeking new ways to communicate that to others. After beginning to write a book about her experiences, Bruyere found she had five chapters that dwelled far too much on her negative experiences.  She deleted it and started over.

“That was stuff people have already heard.  I want to talk about resiliency.  I want people to know what I did about it.”