New Denver Survivors Doukhobors want apology
from B.C. government
In the 1950s, Sons of Freedom Doukhobor children were
seized on order of the British Columbia government because their
parents weren’t sending them to public school. Now 49 100 former residents
of the New Denver residential schools are fighting for an apology.
By Kalyeena Makortoff, The Canadian Press, Toronto Star, May
21, 2012
Corrections in red and light grey, by Andrei Conovaloff, 24 July
2023.
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/doukhobors-want-apology-from-b-c-government/article_27f6d570-5cc0-5812-8a25-be3e88fc37eb.html
Visiting families hold a prayer service outside
the New Denver, B.C. residential school in this 1957 photo.
Former residents say they experienced psychological, physical
and sexual abuse in the New Denver school.
Peter Savinkoff / THE CANADIAN PRESS file photo Taken in winter of 1956-57. Credit: Savinkoff
family collection, courtesy Lunya Savinkoff-Foyle
VANCOUVER—It was between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. and Elsie Erickson’s
mother had just begun lighting the stove when four RCMP officers
barged into their tiny wooden home in the village of Krestova, B.C.
“She came to the bedroom and spoke and said ‘the police are here,’ ”
Erickson said. “And from the tone in her voice I jumped out of bed .
. . and I tried to hide.”
The 7-year-old had barely scurried under her bed when she was
dragged back out by her foot. Nearly 60 years later, she remembers
her father asking if the family had time to pray.
Erickson and her brother spent the next four years in what she said
felt like a jail.
They were housed with nearly 170 200 others in a residential
school in New Denver, B.C., all children of a radical sect of
Russian immigrants known as the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors.
Similar to the better-known stories of aboriginals forced into
residential schools, the Sons of Freedom children were seized on
order of the British Columbia government because their parents
weren’t sending them to public school.
Now, Erickson and 100 former residents are fighting for an apology
styled similar to the redress given to native in 2008.
The New Denver Survivors Doukhobors argue the schooling
issue was an excuse to assimilate the Sons of Freedom. They say from
1953 to 1959, the children became victims of a long-standing
cultural battle between their communities and the province.
Like thousands of Indian Residential School survivors, former
residents say they experienced psychological, physical and sexual
abuse in the New Denver school.
Children were punished for speaking their own language, though few
came into the schools knowing any English. Visits from parents were
strictly limited, traditional dress was banned and cultural and
religious ceremonies were left behind.
A group calling itself the New Denver Survivors Collective argued
before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in early February that the
government has unjustly refused to apologize to these adult children of the Sons of Freedom.
They also pointed to hefty compensation packages doled out to other
groups who faced abuse at B.C.-run residential schools as unfair.
Ultimately, the group wants the government to carry out
recommendations put forward by a 1999
BC Ombudsman report, which called for an unconditional, clear
and public apology. In March 2002 A
Progress Report was issued.
The human rights tribunal ruling is expected late this summer. In July 2023
a long awaited "apology"
was announced by the BC Ombudsman.
“I hope that it’ll put an end to this thing that’s been happening
for so many years, this negativity, this horribleness. It affected
so many people for so many years that it’s time to put an end to
this,” Erickson said in a recent interview.
Efforts were initially made to fulfill some of the ombudsman’s
recommendations, but the report overall was flawed, said Geoff Plant,
the province’s attorney general when the government began
implementing the 1999 report’s recommendations.
“In terms of the harm or the pain caused to the innocent children
who were taken from their parents, that was a powerful and real
fact.”
But Plant said more perspective is needed.
He said in the years leading up to the residential school’s
creation, the Sons of Freedom became a concern for the province as a
whole.
“When the government made a decision to seize these children, it did
so in an attempt to respond to what was becoming widespread civil
disorder in the Kootenays,” said Plant, referring to the region they
inhabited in southeastern B.C.
“There was increasing public alarm that this disorder was not being
responded to.”
Authorities were unhappy that the Sons of Freedom were not
registering births, deaths or marriages and refused to send their
children to public school, or to home schools
all taught by local Doukhboors.
They were even more alarmed by nude protests and anti-materialist
demonstrations where members burned their own homes and
out-of-village buildings to the ground. On occasion, homemade bombs
targeted bridges and railways.
In 1953, the populist, conservative Social Credit government made
moves led by Premier Premier W.A.C.
Bennett who was determined to end the disorder.
Students were sent to the schools shortly
after B.C. passed a new law on compulsory education,
despite a 1952 Hawthorne report led by
the University of British Columbia that discouraged the children’s
seizure and recommended several humane
solutions. The government invoked
the "Protection of Children Act", being chapter 47 of the "Revised
Statutes of British Columbia, 1948" to "legally" take the kids.
After a series of police raids that left villages childless, the
community was shaken, Erickson said. Family members suffered fatal
heart attacks and some even took their own lives.
Survivors themselves were deeply affected. Many residents adopted
extremist views after their release. Others became alcoholics, lost
their marriages and died early, she said.
“I think most of us are really badly damaged psychologically,
emotionally. You know, when you take away children from their
parents and you don’t give them the love and the nurturing that they
need, what grows up?” Erickson said.
“What kind of an adult do you become?”
A class action suit was launched by survivors in the late 1990s.
Erickson said they were originally looking for a public inquiry, but
were told it was too late to pursue.
Shortly after the 1999 ombudsman’s report, the government began
formulating its response. It decided to send all legal suits
demanding monetary compensation for abuse straight to the courts.
None were successful.
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More
Janzen, William. "Forced
Doukhobor Schooling in British Columbia", excerpt from Limits
on Liberty, The Experience of Mennonite, Hutterite and Doukhobor
Communities in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1990). reproduced on Doukhobor Heritage. Read
book at Archive.org.
"Through Her Eyes: Daughters of Freedom." 2001. (33.5 minutes,
original: 53 minutes.) CBC Canada documentary: