David Ashdown was nineteen years old, an undergraduate student at the University of Saskatchewan, when the study Beyond Traplines was published in 1969. “It talked about a whole new approach to the church’s relationship with Native people,” he recalls. “I read it and was quite excited by it. People were just beginning to talk about advocacy work and self-determination, and I felt called to be part of all that.”
So when he heard, a little while later, that there was a vacancy for the position of Senior Boys Supervisor at Stringer Hall in Inuvik, it seemed natural to interrupt his studies and head north. Stringer Hall, the Anglican residence, and Grolier Hall, the mirror image Roman Catholic residence, sat side by side, and the students who lived in the two residences attended what by 1970 had become a public school named after Sir Alexander Mackenzie–“Sam’s school,” after the initials, for short.
“I’d say I was well-intentioned but naive,” said Ashdown in a recent interview. “I wanted to be involved in establishing this new relationship, and working in a residential school was probably the worst possible way of doing that.”
Ashdown remembers his introduction to the school vividly. “My plane landed about noon. The first boys were due to arrive about 4. I was given three keys, told to record each boy’s disc number [the federal government identification number], issue them each a set of clothes and assign them a bed. That was the extent of my training.
“By midnight, with the boys still arriving, if I’d had any money I think I would have quit and gone home.” Instead, he stayed four years. “The students were very good, very bright. I was proud to be part of it. I had a sense that these young people would be the future leadership of the Northwest Territories.” And they were. One became premier; another, a deputy minister; several became chiefs, mayors, or business leaders. Ashdown stays in touch with some of them still.
After four years it was time to resume his studies, then continue on to theology and ordination. He has served as a parish priest and diocesan staff member in Qu’Appelle and Athabasca. Last February he became executive archdeacon of the diocese of Keewatin.
Along the way, the work that he had been proud to be part of has become instead an object of revulsion. Ashdown has spent a lot of hours thinking, talking and praying in order to gain some perspective. One turning point came when a close friend, an OjiCree survivor of a residential school, found out that Ashdown had been a dorm supervisor.
“It was a major struggle for us over a period of weeks,” Ashdown says. “Ultimately, we were able to pray together, accept each other, and come to see that in different ways, both of us were survivors.”
Another turning point came when another OjiCree talked about a conversation he’d had with a former school administrator. In response to complaints about the school, the administrator said, “But look at all the good that came out of it. Look at yourself, for example.” Ashdown’s friend commented: “Yeah, I learned to survive there. But why is it that when one of us succeeds, you assume it’s because of you; and when we fail, it’s in spite of you.”
The comment rocked Ashdown. “It shook me because I recognized myself in it. I recognized that that had unconsciously been part of my thinking.
“There are a lot of former residential school staff out there who are really hurting now–not the ones who deliberately perpetrated abuse, but the caring ones who were caught up in that system, and who now feel that everything they did, everything they stood for, has all come to naught.
“Some of them are simply denying that part of their lives and trying to pretend it never happened. Some are saying, ‘Oh, but there were so many good people involved’–which is true, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t change the fact that the system was wrong.
“What I’ve come to understand is that it wasn’t a good system, but it had a few bad people in it; it was a bad system, but it had some good people. There was systemic evil present in the residential schools.”
Ashdown accepts that each person will have to find his or her own path to healing. “For me, the shift over the last few years has been made possible by being able to sit down with survivors of the schools and struggle together; people talking to each other, not trying to make what happened worse than what it was on the one hand, or denying the evil on the other, just talking honestly about what happened.”
Wherever the path of healing leads, he says, the church must be ready to play its part.