“All of us children, we all started crying. Our people, way over there, were getting smaller and smaller, and were crying. It was really, really difficult.”

She spent 11 years at residential school and, she said, she saw girls physically beaten and sexually assaulted during those years. Her younger brother was beaten so badly he died.

Her testimony was one of more than 100 given by residential school survivors and their descendants over four days of Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings March 27 to 30. The Edmonton hearings were the last of seven held across Canada over the past five years as the TRC attempts to document the effects of Church-run residential schools.

The commission was established as part of an out-of-court settlement with thousands of residential school survivors who had sued the federal government and the four churches that ran the schools. It expects to issue a final report in about a year.

In many ways, Lamothe’s story was typical of many others. The survivors spoke of blessedly happy childhoods on their reserves until they were taken to residential schools which they almost unanimously spoke of in highly negative terms.

At the schools, their hair was cut off, they were forbidden to speak their language and many suffered abuse. After leaving the schools, they invariably fell into lives of alcohol and drug abuse, a downward spiral that was broken, in most cases, by aboriginal spirituality or, in a few cases, by participation in sports.

Judge Murray Sinclair, chief commissioner of the TRC, said the three commissioners are aware of the difficulties faced by survivors of the schools.

“We know that they themselves are not aware of all the impacts the schools have had on their lives. But I hope they can recognize that their effect on our lives here was enormous, was significant,” Sinclair said. “We are now better people for the fact that they shared this with us, that they have allowed us to hear their stories.”

Sinclair described the schools as “centres of indoctrination with the intention being not only to take children away from their families, but also to take those children away from their cultures, to take them away from their languages and to indoctrinate them into a different culture and a different language in order that they would be assimilated and become like everybody else in this country.”

Reconciliation between aboriginal and non-indigenous people in Canada will take place “if we can just stop people from being so disrespectful to each other,” Sinclair said. Many people talk about aboriginal people in disrespectful ways because they have been educated to be disrespectful, Sinclair said.

“People are not naturally born to be racists. We teach them to be.”

Change will occur, he said, if people not only begin to speak respectfully about indigenous people in public, but also in private — at the dinner table or in conversations with friends.

The mandate of the TRC will conclude a year from now and its offices will close, he said.

“Then, the obligation for all of this work goes back to the people of this country, including you.”

Former Prime Minister Joe Clark told the commission that abuses at residential schools “are only one part of the unfairness and disrespect with which the larger Canadian population has treated our indigenous citizens.” Treaties were violated and aboriginal people suffer from higher incidences of disease, mortality and imprisonment than do other Canadians, he said.

“Canadians as a whole must recognize what deep damage was done in our names by governments, by our churches,” he said.

Edmonton Ar chb i shop Richard Smith said his participation in the TRC made it evident that such a process could be valuable in bringing reconciliation on a wide variety of questions.

“It is only when truth is spoken, when truth is heard, when truth is received that we can move forward in reconciliation,” he said.

The archbishop made “a gesture of reconciliation” on behalf of the bishops of Alberta and the Northwest Territories. Smith read a statement of apology released by the bishops Feb. 28 and placed a copy of the statement into a bentwood box where similar gifts were deposited by a wide variety of groups over the four days.