Marek Osiecimski presented the stories of Indigenous children in Canada in his report “Children of the Wrong God” (already broadcast on TVN24 and now available on TVN24 GO). Indigenous children were sent to residential schools, and this continued for 115 years. Many of these children never returned home. At the schools, they were beaten, sexually abused and starved. What happened in these institutions, most of which were run by Catholic clergy, has since been called cultural genocide.
The report’s script was inspired by Joanna Gierak-Onoszko’s book “27 Deaths of Toby Obed.” The report is available to watch on TVN24 GO: Czarno na białym: Children of the Wrong God.
Marek Osiecimski, the author of the documentary, was a guest of Krzysztof Gwizdała. Below is the video and the full interview transcript.
Interview with Marek Osiecimski
Krzysztof Gwizdała: – Krzysztof Gwizdała, hello. Marek Osiecimski is our guest. Hi, good morning.
Marek Osiecimski: – Hello, hi.
– You are the author of the moving report that was broadcast on TVN24, Children of the Wrong God. Let’s begin by watching a fragment of this material…
These small children never got to build a home. They never had the chance to show who they were in this world. What they could do for this country and for this world. They never had that chance. They were killed by fucking nuns and priests.
There is something that torments me to this day. Even now. I was so helpless then; there was nothing I could do. I saw them rape a five-year-old girl. I was eight years old myself. I couldn’t stop it.
A fragment of the report “Children of the Wrong God”
– For me, the most moving moment was the story of the man who witnessed a rape but could not help. I imagine the entire project must have been difficult for you to prepare.
– Yes, that’s true. It would be difficult for me to rank the emotions that accompanied me during the successive conversations with my protagonists. Each of those conversations was emotionally demanding and difficult; after each one, I had to somehow recover. Here is an interesting detail that I rarely talk about. Since you asked about the emotions during the interviews, there was one significant situation. During a trip around southern British Columbia, I was accompanied by one of my protagonists, an Indigenous healer. In other words, she is returning to the traditional healing methods she heard about from her mother and grandmother and is trying to put them into practice. This is what she does; her neighbours, acquaintances and friends, who are also Indigenous Canadians, ask her for help. She helped me reach subsequent people I could talk to. After one particularly difficult conversation, she looked at me, took my hand and said: “Come on, we have to go somewhere.” She took me to the riverbank and said that it was a tradition in her nation to wash oneself after taking in other people’s painful stories. She showed me the whole ritual of washing away difficult emotions. Afterwards, we also agreed that I could not fully do this—that I had to carry them inside me all the time, because I still had not only these conversations ahead of me, but also the work of editing the documentary. In any case, it ended with a promise she extracted from me: once I had finished working on this series of reports, I would follow her advice, go to a river somewhere in Poland and wash this burden away. This may be a rather long digression, but I really think that my camera operator and I visibly carried the weight of these emotions after each conversation.
– Exactly. You only listen to these stories, and they make such an enormous impression and affect you so deeply. What about the people who either experienced or witnessed these events? Tell me, because this interests me: when I watched the whole programme, I wondered why—since these people were harmed, first by the state, which agreed to send children to these residential schools, and also by the Church, which ran the schools and was supposed to “care for” them but actually harmed them—they still, for example, believe in God and remain somehow close to their faith. After all, they experienced such evil at the hands of people associated with faith and spreading it.
– There will be a great deal about this in the second episode of the series, specifically about faith. It is not entirely true that all of them are still believers. I think most of them are either struggling with faith now or have already gone through that struggle, wondering what and who God is. This is one of the traumas, one of the manifestations of the trauma they suffered after attending residential schools, mainly Catholic ones. Most of them, if not all, are simply very spiritual people, searching and reflecting on some immaterial world, because this also stems from their centuries-old traditions; it is rooted in them, this need. I have the impression that these macabre experiences did not kill this need in them. It is still there, and they are now developing it in their own way.
– The Prime Minister of Canada has already apologized twice for what happened. People also expect an apology from the head of the Church, from the Pope. They have not received such an apology to this day. Tell me, because this also puzzles me: why do they even still think about apologies? I’ll tell you, everything that happened made me so angry that I would simply, I don’t know, expect this institution to be razed to the ground rather than an apology. I don’t understand it.
– Once again, you are raising a topic I will address in the second episode, because we talk there about healing, the feeling process. They talk about it a great deal. They know that they will not escape the trap in which they have been stuck since their experiences at residential schools unless they also cast off their anger, evil and desire for retaliation and revenge. These bad feelings poison their souls. They do not want that. They do not want to live that way. They want reconciliation with themselves and with others. In a certain sense, they also want reconciliation with those who harmed them. But they demand—and they have the right to demand—that the process of reconciliation with those who harmed them begin with expiation, with the words “I’m sorry.” This is an absolute prerequisite for beginning the process. They know it; they feel it. They want it far more than the sea of money discussed in connection with compensation. Because, in addition to apologizing twice, the Canadian government did in fact arrange for substantial sums of money to be paid to survivors of the residential schools. The figure is said to be three billion dollars.
– The apology is the beginning of the entire process, which…
– They need these words to complete the process of reconciling with themselves.
– Tell me, are the perpetrators—the priests and nuns—still alive? Is there anyone who could say “I’m sorry” on behalf of the head of the Church?
– Most of the people named in the report and in the documents as the most brutal perpetrators, both priests and nuns, are dead. They were active as adults as late as the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes already at a fairly advanced age. According to my information, some people—and here there are no personal details, at least none that are officially known—are in Europe. They may be, as my interviewees put it, hidden by the Church in religious orders, in places where clergy and representatives of the Catholic Church spend their old age. Certainly, if we can speak of a continuation of this story, the matter of holding such people accountable and searching for specific perpetrators who could answer for their specific actions will be the next chapter of this story, perhaps also thanks to the activity of the media.
– Where can viewers watch the report?
– The report can be watched at any time on the TVN24 GO portal.
– So you can simply go there and watch it regardless, since it has already been broadcast on TVN24. You are preparing more episodes. You have already mentioned one, and I think there will be one more?
– Yes, all in all, the series “Canada Smelling of Suffering” is to consist of three episodes. In principle, they are already finished in certain respects. I am now working on refining them, putting the final touches on them. Three parts. Viewers had the opportunity to see the first one, and they can still watch it online. The second will deal with the issue at which the first part ends. An attentive viewer will have noticed that I show a street in Vancouver, which may be a rather surprising image of such hopelessness for many people. It is Hastings Street in the eastern part of the city, where at least tens of thousands of homeless people live. People suffering from alcoholism and struggling with drugs. It is an absolutely harrowing, hopeless picture. I have never seen such an accumulation—not poverty, because this is not only about a material dimension, although that is certainly part of it, but this kind of hopelessness, people on the brink of life and death.
– Yes, that long shot at the very end. You also say there that a very large proportion of these people are descendants, or people directly affected by what the entire report was about.
– Both people directly affected and their descendants. In the case of the history of residential schools in Canada, we are talking about something that has been called intergenerational trauma. It is not as if people are able to cast off this burden immediately after crossing the school threshold and leaving it in one way or another. No. They carried this trauma with them and passed it on, among other things through inadequate parenting. Certain deficits arose because they were not taught to love, these children. Rather, they were taught to hate and fear. They could not hug their own children; they could not express love for them. As a result, these children also began, in some way, to lose their way in life. Some survivors of the residential schools, in turn, were overprotective toward their children. After what they had gone through, they saw danger everywhere. So their children rebelled hyperactively against this, which could also lead them to various problems that ended on the streets of many Canadian cities. Intergenerational trauma will be one of the subjects of the second episode. It will also address the possibility of reconciliation—how possible reconciliation is within Canadian society is an issue that interests me greatly. And the third part may be very surprising, I think, because it concerns Polish and Polish-Canadian aspects of this entire history. I do not want to reveal too much, but…
– But it sounds interesting…
– We also have a tendency in our historical debates to deny certain historical facts and our participation in various historical events in Poland. I think this also affected the attitude of some members of our nation living there toward the history of the residential schools. It translated into a very unpleasant situation for us. That will be one subject of the third part. But it will also be about many wonderful Polish people who live there and are fascinated, for example, by the culture of Indigenous Canadians. They are even becoming a source of knowledge about their own traditions and history for Indigenous Canadians. I have such interviewees, and I hope that at least by the end of this series I will be able to talk about something that offers some hope.
– Tell me, because that sounded rather mysterious. These Polish themes—are we, as Poles, also viewed less favourably because of certain events? Did I understand you correctly?
– In a way, yes. Specific statements by representatives of our country led to a conflict between the Polish diaspora and representatives of Indigenous communities.
We invite everyone to watch the report on TVN24 GO. Thank you very much for the interview, Marek.
– Thank you very much.