Former classmates of city residential school to hold reunion

AFTER all her suffering at Indian Residential Schools, Jane Glennon is looking forward to her high school reunion next month in Winnipeg.

“I hope I will meet a lot of students at the reunion,” said Glennon, whose surname was McCallum when she was one of the first students to attend the Assiniboia Indian Residential School when it opened on Academy Road in 1958.

“I hope they’ve had good lives so far,” said the retired counsellor with a master’s degree in social work.

“I know at Assiniboia, things were pretty good there, but there was still the social isolation,” she said.

One day, she and another student staged a minor rebellion.

“My friend from the same reserve and I went to the girls bathroom and wouldn’t come out,” Glennon said. “We wanted to go home.”

Home was on Reindeer Lake in northeastern Saskatchewan. The school principal, Rev. Omer Robidoux, handled their protest peacefully and thoughtfully, she said.

“He really talked to us and encouraged us to stay on. So we did,” Glennon said. “Father Robidoux, he was a nice priest.”

He set the tone there, but it was still a residential school.

“The food was better, but there was still the social isolation — and we were right there, in the city of Winnipeg,” Glennon said.

The only time she remembers mingling with Winnipeggers was at Christmas, when students who couldn’t go home were given a little money for a shopping trip to Eaton’s.

“We could get two pieces of clothing,” Glennon said.

The residential schoolkids took the city bus there together and were as much of a sight to behold as the downtown shopping mecca festooned with Christmas lights and decorations, she recalled fondly.

“People used to look at us — this long lineup of ‘Indian’ kids,” Glennon said.

Her memories from two previous residential schools are anything but positive.

“The first one I was sent to burned down a year after I got there. That made me very happy,” Glennon chuckled. “I got to stay home for another year.”

That was Sturgeon Landing Residential School.

“We had to eat porridge with mouse droppings,” she said. “If we got caught talking Cree you’d be punished with the strap, and they took away your privileges.

“I was really lonesome. I didn’t speak any English.”

Glennon’s next school — Guy Hill Indian Reservation School in The Pas — was worse.

“I’m 76 years old, and it still affects me,” she said, stifling a sob. “I was abused sexually by the principal.”

Glennon said she wasn’t the only victim of the priest in charge of the residential school. And she was one of 38,000 victims nationwide who filed claims under the “non-adversarial” process set up by the 2007 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, which established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

“It wasn’t a good experience,” she said.

Glennon travelled to Winnipeg to divulge her trauma, where it was treated as a legal matter, with no psychologists or counsellors offering support.

She was victimized again, financially, by Winnipeg lawyer Howard Tennenhouse. The Law Society of Manitoba charged him with professional misconduct for misappropriating funds from residential school survivors. In 2012, the society disbarred Tennenhouse after he fought Indian Residential Schools Adjudication Secretariat rulings to return $960,000 in extra fees he charged 55 clients, including Glennon. She eventually received $14,000 in compensation, she said.

Glennon said she has not only survived it all — she has thrived. She sought counselling when her first marriage ended.

She’s writing a memoir about her life and is ready to move on to a new chapter. Glennon and her second husband are thinking of moving to Winnipeg so she can pursue her doctorate in social work.

“I’ve done very well,” she said.

— Carol Sanders