Amid the media coverage of Pope Francis' pilgrimage of penitence last July through the pain of Canada's residential schools, I kept thinking there was another part of the story yet to be told. Nothing could or should diminish the attention to the horrors that First Nation, Inuit and Métis children suffered in a cruel policy to forcibly assimilate them into the dominant culture — efforts that they still suffer from decades later as adults and which haunt their children and grandchildren in an intergenerational, cultural genocide.
Still, I also knew that Catholic sisters, often cited in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimonies and media reports for instances of cruelty or seeming indifference to the suffering of children, were also suffering. There had to be efforts at healing, at making amends. Yet how to tell that story, to have sisters share their efforts to reach out to those affected, and for congregations who are part of this shameful history, to make amends and face this painful past?
I called Sandrine Rastello, an award-winning, talented journalist I'd worked with at Bloomberg News in Washington, D.C. Now a freelance writer living in Montreal, I knew Sandrine had the sensitivity and dedication to take on this project. Sandrine admits she was at first overwhelmed. She listened to testimonies, read hundreds of pages of reports and spoke with survivors. More challenging was to have sisters "open their hearts," as Sandrine said. With each hours-long interview, which led to suggestions of others to talk with, Sandrine knew that "trust had been established," as she said in a video that explains about how she approached the project.
Between her many other assignments and responsibilities, Sandrine carved out time on what became a "passion project." She long ago stopped counting the hours invested. Instead of one story to be delivered in a few months, it became three stories plus photos and graphics that, as we worked on it, clearly became an important way to mark the one-year anniversary of Pope Francis' pilgrimage to Canada.
The result is an enormous effort that we hope is enlightening as well as cathartic. The final edits on the first main story took us until Saturday before it was published, choosing words carefully, examining even the meaning of "legacy" and checking and rechecking facts. Managing editor Stephanie Yeagle and copy editor Mick Forgey played key roles in pulling together photos, final fact checks and poring over the stories with meticulous, painstaking details. The second and third stories will publish tomorrow.
As always, there are points you wish you could have found a way to include. For me, it was a passage Sandrine shared from another report, not part of the official Truth and Reconciliation Commission documents, which recounts how one First Nation man, when asked, remembered a particular sister who was kind, who gave him and his classmates apples to ward off scurvy, who taught them softball and gave her joy to them. If only, he said, there had been more sisters like her, how different the memories and the legacy would have been.
Gail DeGeorgeGlobal Sisters Report editor
gdegeorge@ncronline.org
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