Sixty years ago, when he was four years old, Eddy Charlie went on a long walk with his grandfather, Alby. The forest was bright and green, teeming with life and the sounds of animals, birds, creeks.
They were in the traditional territory of the Cowichan People, also known as Duncan, and spoke the Hul’q’umi’num language.
They walked until they arrived at a tree with branches that scraped the sky. Charlie’s grandfather spoke to him of the importance of the tree; of the bugs and soil and air around it, of how everything was interwoven – even into themselves – and that this affected what it meant to be human: to respect those around you, and to be kind.
“Ours is a culture to be proud of,” his grandfather said. “If you ever forget that, come back here.”
In hindsight, Charlie realizes his grandfather was preparing him for something. Six months later, his grandfather died and Charlie was forcibly taken to the Kuper Island Residential School.
Even now, Charlie remembers it all.
“How can you forget?” he says with a deep breath. “It’s branded into my brain. It’s a scar I will carry for the rest of my life.”
On the first day, the nuns cut his hair and took his clothes. After two weeks, physical abuse began when the children spoke their own languages, or acted how the school deemed inappropriate.
After about a month, a priest at the school raped Charlie. It started to happen once a month, then twice a month, then every day. The abuse continued for years.
One day, when Charlie was seven years old, the children and nuns were out on a walk in the forest when a couple of kids began to roll a large log down a steep hill.
“I’ve never said this to any of them, they all thought it was an accident. But I was so sick of the abuse, I jumped in front of the log,” he says, lifting his cap to show a thin white line carved through his black hair, as if a child had drawn a crude line in the sand with a stick.
Charlie was brutally injured; his skull was crushed, his bones were shattered. He lost hearing in one ear. It changed the shape of his face, how he smiled and spoke. He was hospitalized for six months, and after that discharged from residential school and instead sent to day school.
After the injuries, people made fun of how he looked, spoke and struggled to hear.
“It made me twice as violent,” he says.
He began to secretly work out. Then he began to fight back.
Teachers at the school reported him as more and more dysfunctional, until he was removed from his home and placed into foster homes. Charlie ran away each time until social services wrote him off as a lost cause.
“To be honest, some of the foster homes I ran away from were nicer to me than my family,” he says.
Charlie’s parents and siblings suffered from their experiences at residential school. Alcoholism and violence were predominant in his home, and the homes in the wider Cowichan community.
One of the biggest acts of violence, however, was silence. No one spoke about what had happened to them or why they were so violent.
“I live with regret that I was silent,” Charlie says. “My younger sister didn’t know I’d gone to a residential school. She didn’t find out for decades.”
By nine years old, Charlie relied on alcohol. He remembers stealing beer and sneaking off into the bushes, drinking until he passed out.
“I drank to black out what I could see inside my head,” he says. “The priest’s face… his smile. Right behind my eyes.”
At 14, he moved to Vancouver and lived on the street.
“Being homeless and drunk was preferable to being beat up,” he recalls.
He was in and out of high school, and in various living situations, but alcohol was his one constant – until years later, he says, when he hit rock bottom.
While on the street, he met a friend who came from the most opposite of situations: an affluent, Caucasian Vancouver family. But, with demons of his own, he preferred to drink with Charlie. They were friends for years, even when they grew up and both got married. Charlie had two daughters.
But one day, while drunk, they got into an argument. Charlie beat his friend so badly he was hospitalized, while Charlie went to jail.
“In there I thought, ‘He was my only true friend… that’s just so messed up.’”
After that he stopped drinking.
“To be honest, alcohol is one of the reasons there are so many residential school survivors,” he says. “Even now in alcohol, I feel like, ‘This is a place I can belong’. A huge part of me still cries out for it. But then, I remember the violence.”
He worked in construction for 15 years, until he fell 15 feet and broke a bone in his lumbar spine. So, he had to find something else to do.
He enrolled in Camosun College’s Indigenous Family Support Program. He wanted to help Indigenous people understand they don’t need alcohol in their communities to be strong.
But, he experienced racism on campus which made him so uncomfortable he spoke with the dean about leaving the school. Two Indigenous elders were a part of the conversation, and implored Charlie to stay.
“’We are old now,’ they told me. ‘We aren’t going to be here forever. But you have a voice. We need someone to take our place.’”
So, he returned to the program and met someone named Kristin Spray, a woman with whom he quickly became friends. Together, they decided that stories of residential school survivors needed to be shared.
“I don’t want children to grow up in a world of alcohol and violence,” he says. “I want them to be the true human my grandfather wanted us to be.”
With her encouragement, he began to go into Indigenous communities and speak of his experiences. Together, Charlie and Spray launched Orange Shirt Day in Victoria, after seeing it take place in other locations across Canada.
Orange Shirt Day is tied with the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation on Sept. 30, and was launched by a woman named Phyllis Webstad, who had her orange shirt taken from her when she was entered into the Mission Residential School. It is a day to honour residential school survivors and their families, and to remember those that never made it.
However, Eddy Charlie’s outspokenness was not initially welcomed in Indigenous communities. Survivors didn’t want to talk, and their families didn’t know why they were getting upset. Plus, his violent past didn’t leave him with a good reputation.
“People beat me up, spat on me,” Charlie recalls. “I felt like this is something that needed to happen… I felt that it’s time to stop being scared.”
Charlie and Spray have been encouraging others to share their stories for nine years, and with each year more and more people are opening up, like a clenched fist slowly releasing.
“People who despised us and told us we shouldn’t do this now are going to their grandchildren’s schools and sharing their stories,” Charlie says. “I recently heard an elder speak at the B.C. Legislature, and share their experience for the first time. I got choked up, I was very moved.”
Charlie’s biggest hope is to end the intergenerational trauma caused by residential schools.
“I want the children to know the way we are is not meant for them. That we are ashamed that all we gave them was the gift of hate, instead of knowledge and tradition.”
This, he adds, is not only for Indigenous children, but all people. He wants everyone to listen to survivors, and use their words like medicine.
Since Orange Shirt Day was launched in Victoria, many people have come forward with their stories, while thousands of shirts have sold with proceeds going towards continued efforts to share the effects of residential schools.
“We are cleaning out all the ashes from an old fireplace,” he says. “It’s time we build a new fire and feel the warmth of community again.”
