UnTwisted – Chapter One (Pg 14-17)

That evening, when I was by myself eating supper, I thought about what we were going to do and I knew I didn’t want to do it. I knew if we were caught, it would hurt my mother terribly. I decided I would tell the boy the next day that I would not go.

At noon on Friday, the boy said, “We’re going. Are you coming?” I said, “Yes.” In making that choice, I launched myself on a destructive path
that would result in years of untold pain and damage to myself and thousands of others.

We jumped on the streetcar and rode Uptown for some shoplifting. I was the lookout. The next thing I knew, the police were there and everybody was running. Being the youngest, with the shortest legs, I got caught. Everyone else got away.

I was arrested for truancy and taken to 311 Jarvis Street, the secure custody unit of the Juvenile Detention Centre.

I was eight years old, and I was terrified. And with good reason. This was the early 1950s, and under the Canadian Juvenile Delinquency Act, there were a number of punishable status offenses. They included having sex under sixteen, drinking under twenty-one, hanging around pool halls under eighteen, playing hookey from school, and being incorrigible, though I’m not exactly sure what ‘being incorrigible’ entailed.

It also needs to be said that in this era of the early Fifties, it was generally accepted that First Nations people were little more than savages and definitely inferior to the white population. It was during this time that Native children were ripped out of their cultures and placed in residential schools in an effort to assimilate them into ‘civilized’ society. In my case, the idea that a child had been created from the union of a First Nations woman and a Caucasian man was disgusting to many.

There was another strike against me. In the opinion of the courts, the politicians, and the social engineers of the day, if a male child from a single mother got into trouble, the child was obviously being improperly parented and must be taken away. If the single mother was poor, or of First Nations blood, there was an even greater stigma. If she was poor, she must be lazy. If she was single, it meant she was a tramp, a drinker, and definitely incapable of properly caring for a child. Therefore, it was the responsibility of the state and the government to intervene and protect the child from this incompetent parent.

The practice of the courts was to place the delinquent boy in a training or reform school for an undetermined length of time. Prior to the revamping of the Young Offenders Act, any young offender charged with a status offense was given an indefinite sentence, meaning the child could be kept in reform school from age seven until he was twenty-one. Only the chief jailer or director of the training school had the authority to make the decision regarding when the young person would be released. He could not appeal; he had no advocate. No lawyer spoke on his behalf. Basically, the law gave the jailer unlimited and unmitigated power over the child.

Since my mother was single, Aboriginal, and illiterate, we were placed in another category altogether.

Upon being arrested and taken to 311 Jarvis, I was locked in a secure room in the detention centre. My memories of the place are as clear and as painful as if it were yesterday.

The room had a concrete floor. Its furnishings were a steel bed, a table, and a concrete seat with a slab of wood on the top. The big steel doors were locked tight. There was a window with safety glass looking out on an inner courtyard where the kids were allowed to exercise. I saw some boys playing with a basketball, but I was not allowed outside because I had to appear in court on Monday.

I remember pounding, punching, smashing, kicking the door, screaming to be let out, but nobody came. Eventually, exhausted, terrified, and cried out, I fell asleep on the cold cement floor.

On Monday, they took me to court. For a little eight-year-old, the courtroom was an extremely frightening place. People in long, flowing black robes were running in every direction, and above everyone was the judge, also dressed in black, seated on a raised dais. He looked like a big black raven, and he scared the life out of me.

The only other person in the courtroom was my mother. She sat on the opposite side, but I was not allowed to go near her. She had a baseball bat, a ball, and a glove on her lap. I don’t know why; maybe she wanted to demonstrate to the court that she was a good parent. I kept looking at her and wondering what the heck she was doing with all that stuff.

I don’t remember much that was said that day, but several things will never leave my mind. One was hearing the authorities call my mother an ‘unfit mother.’ They called me a bastard and inferred that my 16 race and my mixed blood were somehow big factors in my delinquent behavior.

I remember being very angry at my mother because she didn’t speak up and defend herself. I was also angry that she didn’t tell them she was not an unfit mother. In retrospect, I realize she probably felt as powerless and as disadvantaged as I did, and thoroughly intimidated by the black-robed judge sitting on the pedestal.

The judge asked my mother if we were Protestant or Catholic. “Catholic,” she said. It was a simple and honest response, but a tragic one for me.

Being Catholic meant I was destined for St. John’s Training School for Boys.

Had my mother said we were Protestant, I would have been sent to Bowmanville Training School. Bowmanville was a tough and brutal place, but brutality and corporal punishment were what you could expect if you were deemed a juvenile delinquent. Obviously, you were a bad kid who needed a hard, firm hand.

St. John’s Training School was located near Uxbridge, Ontario, about an hour’s drive from Toronto. It was operated and staffed by the Toronto Christian Brothers, a branch of the Irish Province of Christian Brothers who had a long-standing tradition of administering harsh corporal punishment.

In the history of Ontario, St. John’s Training School became synonymous with violence, brutality, sexual abuse, rape, aggravated physical beatings, and assaults. It was probably the most violent training school in the entire country. Children were physically crippled at the hands of the Christian Brothers, and there are claims that some were killed. Incarceration there as a youth inevitably led to unrestrained drug abuse and suicide as young men grew into adulthood. I don’t know anyone who survived St. John’s Training School and was not horribly scarred for life by the experience.

Later on in my life, I would meet many former St. John’s students in prisons, penitentiaries, and drug circles where we sat around together and got high on heroin and crystal meth.

Allegations of widespread sexual abuse at St. John’s Training School during the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties surfaced in the 1980s. In 1990, the Ontario Provincial Police conducted a full-scale investigation and laid two hundred charges against thirty Christian Brothers. There
would have been more, but some of the Brothers had already died. Seven hundred former students came forward with claims of abuse, saying they were punched, kicked, clubbed, denigrated, groped, and sodomized during the years they spent at the school. Ninety-eight percent of the claims were determined to be legitimate.

One witness was sentenced to St. John’s for stealing four dollars worth of food from a grocery store because his father was gone and his mother was an alcoholic.

“I got four years in St. John’s for my crime,” he told the inquiry. “I ran after I was sexually molested by one of the priests. With hands tied to the front of the bed and my feet to the back and a pillow underneath to prevent damage to the spine, they beat me. We bear these scars on our hearts and will take them to our graves.”

Another testified, “I ran away eleven times. After the third time, I was beaten so badly they brought me to the infirmary and the Brother in charge there cried… I showed the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) the scars left by the blisters and cuts that took six weeks to heal from the infected wounds and they cried… But they wouldn’t charge him.

“I gave confession and told the priest about a Brother who sexually assaulted me and he came out of the confessional and took my hand and took me directly to the Brother and told him what I had confessed…. Then the priest sexually assaulted me.”

“I saw many young children beaten up and strapped,” reported yet another. “I saw Brother ——— wake up young children and take them to a room to sexually assault them. I saw children handcuffed to a pillar in the basement. They would be pushed and kicked. I saw Brother — —— use a pool table stick to hit children if they would not have anal sex with him. Children were given cold showers, then strapped. If I told any Brothers that another Brother tried to have sex with me, I would be strapped.”

This was St. John’s. This was where I was headed at the tender age of eight.