St. Anne’s Indian Residential School

The school opened in 1906 under the direction of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Grey Nuns of the Cross (also known as the Sisters of Charity) with the financial and administrative support of the federal government. Originally located at the Fort Albany Mission on Albany Island, Ontario, in the James Bay Treaty region (Treaty 9), the school relocated to the north shore of the banks of Albany River in 1932. The school burned down in 1939 and was subsequently rebuilt.[4]

Students who attended the school were from surrounding First Nations communities including: Fort Albany, Attawapiskat First Nation, Weenusk First Nation, Constance Lake First Nation, Moose Fort and Fort Severn First Nation.

In 2015, the rectory of the school was burnt to the ground.[5]

Many former students of St. Anne's describe experiencing physical, psychological and sexual abuse while at the school. Physical abuse came in many different forms including: poor living conditions, and corporal punishments for speaking your traditional language. St. Anne's survivor Edmund Metatawabin documented the school's use of an electric chair "for punishment and sport" in the book Up Ghost River. The electric chair was used between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s according to documented police testimony. [6] Psychological abuse began with the act of taking the students who were small children away from their families. This abuse allegedly continued within the school. Many residential school survivors also were the victims of sexual abuse in various forms. Many have come forward stating they were sexually assaulted while attending the school.[7]

An Ontario Provincial Police(OPP) investigation, conducted between 1992 and 1998, interviewed 700 victims and witnesses about physical assaults, sexual assaults, suspicious deaths and other abuses alleged to have occurred at the school between 1941 and 1972. From a total of 74 suspects, seven people were charged and five were convicted.[8] 156 former students who were physically or sexually abused at St. Anne’s sued the federal government. A financial settlement was reached in 2004 – two years before the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) was signed to compensate survivors of the schools.[9] St. Anne's residential school survivors sought to have access to the OPP discovery documents for use in substantiating claims in the IRSSA process, however the federal government refused to release the documents and in 2018 survivors lost what may have been their final appeal. [10][11]

The lasting impacts of residential schools also includes post traumatic stress disorder[12] and a heightened rate of disability among Indigenous peoples compared to non-Indigenous peoples.[13] Abuse suffered in residential schools continue to impact the mental health of Indigenous communities.[14] Indigenous peoples also experience a heightened rate of disability due to heightened “rates of injury, accident, violence, self-destructive or suicidal behaviour and illness.”[15] These heightened statistics are a result of the negative health impacts of residential schools for the survivors and the subsequent generations in the family.[16]