Totem of a painful legacy rises in Montreal’s Golden Square Mile – The Globe and Mail

May 05, 2017

Charles Joseph danced barefoot on the pavement of Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street, where a 21-metre totem pole he carved had just been installed outside the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He wore Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) regalia made by himself and his family, and as he danced with others from his West Coast nation, he shook handfuls of eagle down that gradually drifted away on the wind.

“I’m floating like an eagle right now,” he told me after the hour-long series of speeches, ceremonial dances and gift exchanges that inaugurated his Residential School Totem Pole on Wednesday. “I am so excited, I feel light. I could dance all day.”

Much of Joseph’s early life was miserable beyond imagining. At the age of 5, he was taken from his family and forced to attend St. Andrew’s Indian Residential School in Alert Bay, B.C. For eight years, the Anglican Church of Canada staff abused him and stripped him of his culture while somehow failing to teach him to read and write. When he returned to his village at 13, he said, “there was nobody there.”

Read More: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/totem-of-a-painful-legacy-rises-in-montreals-golden-square-mile/article34906335/