‘How cold and uncaring can this get?’

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This article was published 18/06/2010 (5618 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The sad memories are still vivid for Lynn Bishop 40 years later — a remote northwestern Ontario lake, two distressed aboriginal children and their grim, heartbroken parents.

Bishop, now a retired Winnipeg businessman but then a university student working as a commercial pilot in the summer, was told to fly to a specific spot on the shoreline to pick up children for return to Kenora.

"I was told that at a point on the shoreline there would be two small children to bring back to the base where they would attend the nearby residential school," Bishop, then 27, recounted in a sharing circle at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

When he landed his six-seat Cessna float plane at the appointed spot, he was struck by the fact that there was "no dwelling of any kind, no structure, no tent and, unless I missed it, no boat." There wasn’t even a dock.

"When I got out, I could sense immediately that there was a high sense of discomfort and stress within this group," Bishop told the sharing circle, which included residential school survivors and Justice Murray Sinclair, chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. "The father was very sombre-faced and grim. The little boy, who I would guess was eight years old, was expressionless but you could tell (was) tense."

"The mother, who it was apparent had been crying… was in a very high state of anxiety. The little girl, who I would guess to be six years old — no more than six — was trembling and sobbing and clutching her mother’s garment with a death grip."

Bishop, who went on to manage Winnipeg’s airport and serve as an executive with Cargojet, said the children’s father told him that the young girl was about to be separated from her mother for the first time. It was late August and the children were not scheduled to see their parents until the following June.

"We took off and I recall thinking… I would do a pass and bank (the plane) so that the kids could wave at the parents… That was a mistake because all it did was heighten the sense of separation and the tenseness. And we now had two very upset (children) — the little girl, I would think, in clinical terms you could call traumatized, at that point," Bishop said.

He said the children both "wailed and sobbed" all the way back to Kenora, a trip that lasted well over an hour.

However, the final indignity was still to come, he said with a sigh. When they landed in Kenora, there was nobody to welcome the children — only a taxi parked on the dock waiting to take them to the residential school.

"I can recall clearly carrying the two small suitcases… to the car. The children climbed into the back seat and the taxi drove up a hill, turned right and was out of sight.

The heartless treatment that the frightened, innocent children received angered and disgusted Bishop, inspiring him to come forward to tell the story four decades later.

"No chaperone, no welcome, no adult, no words of welcome and I remember thinking, ‘How cold and uncaring can this get?’ "

Bishop said the events of that day "had a very disturbing effect" upon him, but over time the memory receded — until he began to read about the horrors that took place in residential schools. He told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the more he read, the more "significant that day became" and the more he wondered about whatever became of those two children.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca Free Press reporter Larry Kusch is taking part in a reporter exchange this month with APTN.