on your youtube Chanel, Peri Omesu can often be found dancing.
Samson Cree First Nation The man enters his bright kitchen with a classic rock song as he prepares to demonstrate how to make a delicious-looking dinner dish.
“How are you doing,” he says brightly to the camera, and it’s hard to see short segments without a smile.
Omesu is seen spreading happiness on the camera.
“I have a good life, but I tell people, I’m going to carry this darkness of being a residential school survivor until the day I die,” says a father of three children from his home in Squamish, BC.
“That darkness is going to stay in my heart, it’s never going to go away.”
Residential school survivor, Perry Omesu (second from left) is pictured as a young boy attending the Erminskin Indian Residential School in Alberta.
peri omesu
Omesu was five years old when he was taken by his family to attend Erminskine Indian Residential School in the Maskawasis community of central Alberta.
The institution, run by the Roman Catholic Church, was the largest of its kind in Canada and was open for more than 80 years.
“I had a good spiritual upbringing and then they took me away from that and put me in an Indian residential school and what a change. What a difficult and ugly change,” Omesu recalls.
“I didn’t know any English until I got there, and my cousin said, ‘Don’t get caught speaking Cree or you’re going to get hit.’
“For a year I feel that I hardly spoke to anyone. I was feeling very lonely.”
More than five decades later, Omesu is still trying to recover from the trauma. He works as a mental health counselor for Vancouver Coastal Health and often turns to his coworkers to help him work through what he’s feeling on a day-to-day basis.
“I see people, I pray and I blurt out and I do spiritual work,” he says. “When they found 215 graves in Kamloops, that is where it all started for me.
“It’s been a difficult process for me over the past year and a half, let me tell you. I cried for days.”
Omesu hopes that the Pope’s visit and his planned amnesty on indigenous lands will come as comfort to some and may provide healing for those who believe in the Catholic faith, but says the Pope’s visit is for them. Will bring no consolation.
“It’s not for me if I may say so,” he says. “The whole thing is not for me.”
The priority was to pave the road through Maskawasis in anticipation of the Pope’s visit, but Omesu wonders why this was not done for the community earlier.
He says the papal apology alone cannot correct the inequalities that indigenous people continue to face in Canadian institutions, from health care and child welfare to justice and housing.
“I hope Pope can go and drink a cup of tap water while he’s there,” he says.
The visit will once again bring the truth of Canada’s residential school system into the international spotlight, highlighting not only the suffering of the past but the injustices of the present.
Accepting and publishing these issues is what gives Omesu hope. He wants every child in Canada to learn the truth about the residential school system at school.
“I think when my sons have kids and they’re men, they’ll be in such a better place,” he smiles.
“They will be able to walk with their heads up and say they are indigenous.”
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