Indigenous Mental Health: Trauma and Canadian Residential Schools

Trigger Warning: This episode contains accounts from the residential school system and can be triggering to listeners. Please exercise self-care and caution.

The Indian residential school system was a part of Canada's history from the 1600s all the way until the 1990s. Financed and designed by the Canadian government, its far-reaching tentacles of trauma and abuse disrupt the lives of indigenous people and communities even today. The residential school system was designed to break family ties and erase the culture of Indigenous peoples. An estimated 150,000 Indigenous, Inuit and Metis children were subjected to this debilitating system, with a large number of deaths going unrecorded.

Darlene Bodnariuk bore witness to those children and families when she was forcibly sent to a residential school near Onion Lake, SK. An incredibly strong and powerful soul, Darlene has risen above what she was ‘taught’ at the residential institution. Overcoming the shame that they imparted, she raised her own children with only love, she educated herself and achieved her Social Work degree, and currently works as the director of Child Welfare in Onion Lake, SK. She works to reunify families, bringing them together and speaking for them, because she knows the harm that comes from being disconnected. Darlene and her daughter, Tiffaney (campus director of CDI College Edmonton) join us in this episode.

Listen to Darlene's account as she shares publicly for the first time. Let us hold space for indigenous voices and really learn (and unlearn colonial conditioning) from their stories.