Two survivors, one flag, and the long work of not passing it on

Mike Metatawabin and Bob Baxter stood before students and staff at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and spoke about what a child carries out of a residential school, and what he can refuse to hand down. The Survivors' Flag, designed by survivors from across Canada, went up in front of them.

Metatawabin is deputy grand chief of Nishnawbe Aski Nation and a member of Fort Albany First Nation, the fly-in community on the Albany River near James Bay that can be reached overland only by winter road. The school he attended as a child, St. Anne's Indian Residential School, stood in that same community from 1902 until 1976, run by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Grey Nuns. What happened inside it was later documented in some 700 statements gathered by Ontario Provincial Police investigators over four years.

He spoke less about the school than about what came after it: the way trauma moved through families without anyone intending it, parent to child, unnoticed. "It's hard to understand why people would deny this," he said.

Baxter described the part that leaves no mark. "It's not always the physical things," he said. "It's also the unseen psychological force that's there when you're removed from your parents." He remembered burying his memories as a boy of six or seven. Healing, as he described it, was not a moment of peace but a discipline — learning to set down the anger so that you don't pass it on to others.

The flag they raised was created by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba and first flown publicly in 2021. Its design elements were chosen by survivors themselves, among them the forget-me-not, proposed by a Manitoba survivor as a remembrance symbol for the children who did not come home.

Lakehead's Thunder Bay campus sits on the territory of Fort William First Nation. About 14 per cent of its students identify as Indigenous, and since 2016 every undergraduate has been required to complete a course in Indigenous content — one of the first such requirements in the country. Watching the flag go up were president Dr. Gillian Siddall and Vice-Provost Denise Baxter.

Healing meant learning to let go of anger so that you don't pass it on to others.

Neither man asked the crowd for anything. They described what had been done to them, and then they described the harder thing: the decision, made privately and repeatedly over decades, not to let it travel any further down the line.