Note: The title of this article comes from the Indigenous WSÀNEĆ greeting, ÁLE E SW Í YOL? — meaning Are you whole? It’s a question that sits heavy in the air when you speak to survivors of residential schools.
I was born in Wales, and for much of my life, colonialism felt like something distant—something that happened elsewhere, long ago. That changed when I moved to Canada to study, and my closest friends began sharing stories about their families—stories that were extremely recent.
I wasn’t taught any of this growing up, and knew very little about the truth of loss, survival, and silence these families had endured. But once I knew, I couldn’t look away. This journey began as a way to understand, to listen, and to help hold space for stories that must be heard—not to speak for anyone, but to stand beside them.
I sat in the Mayflower Park Hotel in downtown Seattle, just blocks from where Indigenous villages once thrived along the shores of Elliott Bay. Outside, the city buzzed with spring tourists. Inside, I was researching a silence.
When I asked Eddy Charlie what healing looks like after centuries of colonisation, he paused. “Healing isn’t a destination. It’s not something we get to be finished with. It’s something we live with, every day. Survival is ongoing.”
Eddy is a survivor of the Kuper Island Residential School, one of the most notorious institutions of its kind in Canada. Alongside co-organiser Kristin Spray, Eddy runs the annual Orange Shirt Day ceremony in Victoria, British Columbia, an event dedicated to truth, education, and remembrance. The truth, however, is hard to stomach.
From the late 19th century until the final school closed in 1996, approximately 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in federally funded, church-run residential schools across Canada. These institutions, operated primarily by Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and United churches, pursued a policy of cultural eradication. Their guiding philosophy echoed the notorious phrase: “to kill the Indian in the child.”
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada concluded that the residential school system constituted cultural genocide.
Children in residential schools were stripped of their Indigenous names, forbidden to speak their languages, and had their braids cut, with their long hair having been a symbol of cultural and spiritual identity. They were often told they were dirty, inferior, or unworthy of love.
Many endured physical and sexual abuse at the hands of staff. Some died of malnutrition, disease, or neglect, and thousands were buried in unmarked graves, with families never notified.
These were not isolated incidents but systemic practices documented across Canada.
“How do you reconcile something like that?” Eddy asked.
Kuper Island: A Scar That Remains Open
At Kuper Island Residential School, children were rarely, if ever, allowed to return home, despite church-made propaganda films that showed happy summers and smiling children. Eddy was four and a half when he was taken. They didn’t ask his name. They assigned him a floor.
The younger you were, the higher the floor. And the higher the floor, the more vulnerable you were to abuse.
Eddy didn’t know the girls were also being sexually assaulted; he only found out later, after the school closed, when they discovered mass graves. Girls who had gotten pregnant. Girls who had tried to abort using hangers. Girls who didn’t survive.
After two and a half years of rape and starvation and silence, Eddy attempted suicide, and only then was he sent home. But what was home? He no longer knew the language his grandparents had once spoken to him in. He could not feel safe. He could not feel at all.
Many survivors, like Eddy, turned to alcohol and drugs. Not for escape, but to drown out the sound of crying that he still hears, even today. When he left the school, he didn’t know how to cope with his anger, he didn’t know how to love—“I still struggle with it.”
This wasn’t a relic of history. This was a weapon sharpened in our lifetime: the last residential school in Canada closed in 1996.
“We didn’t just survive it,” Eddy says, “We are still surviving it.”
And many of the stories still haven’t been told. Eddy didn’t learn that his grandparents had been taken until he was 35, and he didn’t know about his mother until he was 45.
Silence, he says, is how these systems survive.
There are an estimated 2,000+ children still missing from the schools. Their communities are still waiting. Still asking: When are our children coming home?
And today, the Canadian child welfare system holds more Indigenous children than the residential schools ever did.
Naming and Erasure
To understand how deep the roots of this violence go, you have to start before contact—before Cartier kidnapped Chief Donnacona and before the Hudson’s Bay Company commodified beaver pelts.
To the Nehiyawak (Cree), all life is sacred. “All my relations” is not a metaphor; it’s a mandate. A Naming Day is a community event. A name is a spirit-path, not a label. It is chosen with love, memory, and responsibility.
Compare that to residential schools, where children were assigned numbers rather than names.
Eddy remembers once walking from the kitchen to his dormitory, humming a song his grandparents loved. A priest struck him in the head for it. “Never do that again.”
“Now, I don’t remember any songs my family taught me, I don’t remember the words, or the traditions. The only language I know is English.”
Systemic Genocide
The Indian Act of 1876 formalised the erasure.
Women lost their leadership roles. Elders were stripped of influence. Cultural practices like potlatch—where wealth was redistributed and history was preserved orally—were banned. Sacred items were confiscated and sold.
Then came the sterilisation campaigns.
Between 1966 and 1976, over a thousand Indigenous women in Canada were forcibly sterilised. Many were deemed mentally unfit based on biased IQ tests—tests not designed for those educated outside of Western norms.
Kristin told me about one woman who was sterilised after giving birth without her consent. “They just tied her tubes,” she said. “She didn’t even find out until years later.”
And this was not an isolated incident; it was part of a systemic effort to control Indigenous reproduction. A continuation of cultural genocide, now made biological.
May 5th: MMIWG2S+ and the Ongoing Crisis
May 5th is the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2S+). Across Canada and the U.S., red dresses are hung in public spaces, empty and swaying in the wind—a stark, visual reminder of the lives taken, and the ones still missing.
Indigenous women are twelve times more likely to be murdered or go missing than other women in Canada. Two-Spirit people face compounded risks—targeted not only for their Indigenous identity, but for their gender and sexuality.
As the Cheyenne say, “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.”
And yet, the resistance continues through ceremonies, vigils, community watch patrols, and healing circles. The grief is generational.
Seattle and the Coast Salish Peoples
Across the border in Seattle, on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples—including the Duwamish and Suquamish—the legacy of colonisation continues.
The Seattle Art Museum displays masks and totem poles taken under duress. Across the city, museums such as the Burke Museum and the Wing Luke Museum offer glimpses into Indigenous resilience, but are often curated through settler frames.
This land was never ceded.
Even now, the Duwamish Tribe is denied federal recognition, despite meeting all criteria. They maintain a community centre, language preservation programmes, and cultural education initiatives, yet are excluded from critical funding and legal rights afforded to federally recognised tribes. The federal government’s refusal continues to be both a bureaucratic and deeply symbolic erasure.
And still, they persist. Through the Real Rent Duwamish campaign, allies are encouraged to pay monthly rent to the tribe as a recognition of living on unceded land. It is a small, yet meaningful, way to begin answering the question: What does reconciliation look like in practice?
The Answer
I come from a place of privilege. I carry the weight of the witness, the learner. And I write this not because I have the answers, but because someone must keep asking the question:
ÁLE E SW Í YOL? — Are you whole?
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Amy Aed
Amy Aed is a Welsh journalist with over a decade of experience reporting from some of the most remote corners of the world. Her work focuses on telling untold stories that intersect culture, adventure, and social issues