Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - September 30, 2021, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE B1 385-550 Century St. | (204) 949-2300 > homequip.ca TRILLIUM THE MOST COMFORTABLE WALKER ON THE MARKET Available Today!CITY●BUSINESS ASSOCIATE EDITOR NEWS: STACEY THIDRICKSON 204-697-7292 ● CITY.DESK@FREEPRESS.MB.CA ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM B1 THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 30, 2021 SECTION BNATIONAL DAY FOR TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION▼ First Nation’s heart remains broken Eight optimistic young lives on their way home to Bunibonibee Cree Nation were lost in a 1972 plane crash; they wouldn’t have been on the flight if Canada had provided high school education in their own community T HE cloudless blue sky above Bunibonibee Cree Nation is what Sarah McKay remem- bers most vividly about June 24, 1972. McKay, who was 13 at the time, was too excited to keep her eyes off it. After cleaning up the house so it felt welcoming, she spent much of the day tilting her chin up to the blue, in antici- pation of her big sister’s return. The start of the summer holidays marked a special reunion for the loved ones of students from Bunibonibee, formerly known as Oxford House, who were sent to residential schools and parallel learning institutions in south- ern Manitoba during the academic year. Families arrived at the airport in the remote, fly-in community that day for the long-awaited homecoming of Mar- garet Robinson, Mary Rita Canada, Ethel Grieves, Rosalie Balfour, Wilkie Muskego, Iona Weenusk and siblings Roy and Deborah Sinclair. The Robinsons lived so close to the airstrip that McKay had planned to walk over to meet Margaret on the runway once she heard the Beech- craft-18 overhead. “That day was so beautiful. When I did my house chores, I said to my mom, ‘I want to go swimming.’ I went swimming and I kept looking towards the southern area of the sky to see if I could see a plane coming, but no sign — no sign at all,” recalls McKay, one of the family’s eight children, born third in line after Margaret. “I would go home and wait, thinking, ‘She should’ve been home already.’” Community members heard on the radio later that night that there had been a plane crash in Winnipeg. It would take days before they got the confirmed names of the passengers aboard when it plummeted to the ground shortly after takeoff because of an engine malfunction. Eight students, all of whom lived in Bunibonibee — although one teen was a member of Norway House Cree Na- tion — and Wilbur Scott Coughlin, the 47-year-old pilot from B.C., were killed. ● ● ● TREATY No. 5 states that Her Maj- esty, The Queen “agrees to maintain schools for instruction in such reserves (in what is now known as northern Manitoba)... whenever the Indians of the reserve shall desire it.” Despite a history of advocacy for ad- equate schooling in northern communi- ties across the country, Bunibonibee’s children had access only to a Grade 8 education at the local day school in 1972. A high school diploma required a flight of nearly 600 kilometres south to Winnipeg and, likely, a bus trip to another community. All but two of the group on the plane had been living with host families while attending Stonewall Collegiate Institute — not a residential school, strictly speaking — where anti-Indige- nous racism was rife. Ethel and Iona were students at Portage la Prairie Residential School, infamous for severe abuse, emotional neglect and harsh labour, as well as punishment for pupils who spoke their own languages instead of English. Iona, who was 21 when she died and just months away from starting her training as a nurse, wrote about her harrowing experience as a northern student in the south in an award-win- ning essay published in the Free Press on Dec. 16, 1971. In the essay entitled Two Different Worlds, she wrote, “On that first sepa- ration from my home in the north at the age of 14, I left with great expecta- tions. I knew I was about to enter into a world that was completely different from mine but I never realized it would be so complicated and harsh.” From 2008 to 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada documented the physical, verbal, emo- tional and sexual abuse experienced by students who were taken to residential schools — which were designed to “kill the Indian in the child” — and detailed the ongoing intergenerational trauma as a result of the assimilative system’s brutality. The commission confirmed 3,200 residential school deaths, but the true number is estimated to be more than seven times that number. Countless others died travelling to or from school on planes, trains, buses, cattle cars and boats. “(The 1972 crash) is a horrible tragic accident for everybody who was involved, there’s just no question about that,” says Celia Haig-Brown, an edu- cation professor at York University in Toronto, who studies decolonization. “But it also stands as an example of the real complexities of the residen- tial schools and their involvement in separating kids from their parents and from their communities.” ● ● ● FOR a reason that remains unknown to Eleanor Brockington nearly 50 years later, the bus that took her Bunibonibee peers at Stonewall to the airport that Saturday afternoon didn’t pick her up. The then-18-year-old had made a last-minute decision to go home for the summer on the charter flight instead of travelling to Saskatchewan with her “second family,” the people she lived with in Stonewall. She was told she would be picked up between 1 and 2 o’clock to get to the airport in time to board the 4 p.m. flight. When the bus didn’t show, she sobbed. There weren’t any adults around to take her to the airport, so she would have to take a flight the fol- lowing week. MAGGIE MACINTOSH MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A memorial for the eight students who died in a 1972 plane crash in Winnipeg was unveiled earlier this year in Long Plain First Nation, near the former Portage la Prairie residential school. JACK ABLETT / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES A plane crashed on Linwood Street in Winnipeg, killing eight students from Bunibonibee (formerly Oxford House) on June 24, 1972. ● CONTINUED ON B2 LOCAL JOURNALISM INITIATIVE REPORTER Margaret Robinson Wilkie Muskego Mary Rita Canada Rosalie Balfour Roy SinclairIona Weenusk Deborah Sinclair B_01_Sep-30-21_FP_01.indd B1 2021-09-29 10:40 PM ;