Kay Ebling downtown Hollywood California                  

                                                        

Kay Ebeling

California, U.S.A.

I had a baby when I was forty years old; up till then I had a bizarre and unusual life.  Having a baby gave me a focus and I dedicated myself to being a good mom. I picked up and moved to the country in Northern California. I never married and it was just me and the baby. When the baby was two years old I realized I had not stopped drinking and using drugs. Up till then I did not have a reason to quit but once I was living out in the country it was empty and quiet. I got clean and sober for my daughter. For over two years I was clean. When my daughter turned five I started getting neurotic and over-protective. I was going to A.A. meetings and I was bringing this person up from Los Angeles, who was a Catholic Priest to speak at a speakers’ meeting. Everybody was thrilled to hear this man speak. It was a combination of these things; being clean and sober for two years, my daughter turning five, this priest coming and speaking at an A.A. meeting. I could not go to the meeting and I was making one excuse after another. My body froze in pain, I could not move I was totally crippled and stayed this way for about a week. I was just lying in my bed with all this pain. I started remembering it just as I always known something weird had happened. For some reason I did not remember anything before the age of six, it was blank. I have not remembered everything; there are still things in my head that come up. 

I was five the abuse took place in Bartlett, Illinois, about thirty miles from Chicago. We were living in the city of Chicago where I was born, my family moved out of Chicago onto twenty acres of land. My dad was a successful attorney and the house was a mansion. There was a ballroom and a tower, the tower was my playroom. There were three daughters and it was 1949. At the same time we moved the Catholic Church started the parish of St. Peter Damian. St. Peter Damian, a Cardinal in the 11^th century wrote a piece about pedophilia amongst the priests and how it was scandalous. The priests could go to the confessional to confess their sins of pedophilia. 

Fr. Horne came from Chicago and started the church in 1949. My dad was an usher for the church and my mother was an atheist. My mother never believed in the Church. My dad would travel all week and my two older sisters would be in school. I would be home alone with my mother. She was angry because she had this child. She had wanted to use birth control but her Catholic husband would not let her. So if anyone would take me off her hands she was happy. Fr. Horne started hanging around my family. He first started paying a lot of attention to my older sister; she was six years older than me. When she was nine years old he stopped paying attention to her and started going after me. This created sibling rivalry because she liked the attention and so did I. When he stopped abusing her and started with me this created a dynamic that continues to this day. We do not get along, we both ended up being promiscuous, we had no boundaries and we both had a compulsion to do things on camera.

I remember some kind of smoke, I do not know if it was opium or hash, I do know I was stoned during most of the abuse and I know I liked it. I was very aroused sexually and I was five years old. I knew how to masturbate and I was going around showing all the younger kids in the neighborhood how to masturbate.  

Fr. Horne and my mother had a relationship. I walked in on them. My mother was big busted and she was sitting next to him with her blouse and bra open.  Her breast was out and his hands were on it.  I know he was doing something to her. He stayed at this parish till 1974. The parish was bankrupt, because he had blown the money. He died in the 70’s. 

My sister has come forward regarding her abuse and I’ve tried to find a lawyer but most of them tell me it has been too long. Our family did pick up and left suddenly. I stayed clean and sober for many years, but I started using methadone for pain. I think recovering all the memories is over. I think I know enough and that it happened.  The damage it did to me was that, I was a sexual maniac all my life. I did not think there was anything wrong with what I was doing. If I thought your husband was hot I would get him in bed with me. I would joke that I would never be alone with a man without having sex with him. I seduced every guy who was ever in a room with me, in the elevator, men I would meet on the street, I had to do everybody. Fr. Horne taught me how to talk dirty and fantasize in the confession class, while teaching me how to confess. I think he placed ideas in my head about what I was supposed to do with him.  He did the same to my sister. There was this thing about having sex with everybody.

I never did it for money. If there was someone I was not attracted to but who wanted sex and offered money, I would not do it. This was not what it was all about; it was me going after whomever I wanted. I know my entire life women hated me; I never had a female friend. I did not understand why I did not have friends because did not understand what I was doing was wrong; it was something I felt I had to do. I thought everybody else felt the same way, I did not realize I was different.  I thought they all wanted me to do this because I am better at having sex. I never held a job, I never got promoted, even though I excelled and I did my job well. I should have been winning awards and getting promoted but I would always get fired instead. I spent a lot of time in bars. 

I worked my way through University of Texas in Austin; I had to take five science courses to get a degree. I started taking astronomy, because I was attracted to intelligent, fast moving men.  I already had seduced holy men, bishops, preachers and I was in my mid twenties when this professor said something about N.A.S.A. and space.  With this I had to get to N.A.S.A., I worked hard, I took physics and astronomy courses. I got myself the title science writer. N.A.S.A. in Huston created a job for me, everybody knew who I was and they were watching me. I was in a community of scientists, engineers and I went after them all. I started fucking and this was what I came for. 

During the day I would be turning out incredible work, because I am smart, I could grasp these concepts, I could write about physics and science, and make it understandable. I would then show up at the bar and I would fuck three guys before I went home. I did not see anything wrong with this. I had a visible job, everybody knew who I was because my job was editing. I would show up in different departments with my camera and take photographs. I would interview these guys and then fuck them.  After I was there for three months they realized what made a mistake they made in hiring me. Since I was a civil servant they could not fire me; it took them three years to get rid of me. They made working conditions so bad I eventually quit. It was three years of living in turmoil; I could not understand why I was not getting promoted. It did not dawn on me that somebody might be telling my boss about the stuff I was doing at night. 

One time I crashed a party for the astronauts and I showed up in the hot tub doing this thing to one of the astronauts. He did not want me to, but I was a sexual predator and I did not think there was anything wrong. I thought I had this gift that everybody else wished they had. I did not understand why other women would never make friends with me, or why somebody at a party would turn their backs to me. I could not understand there was anything wrong with who I was. I always said inappropriate things because I did not try to hide it. There were no boundaries.

I tried an acting career, I was talented. I think it had to do with P.T.S.D. (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) I did not just act I would take on the persona of the other person, I was really good.  I screwed this up by making pornographic movies. It was easy money and it helped pay for my acting, singing and dancing lessons. This was in the 60’s and I did not see anything wrong making these movies. I would do this and nobody would find out about it and I would have lots of money. I had to leave Hollywood because I made so many pornographic movies I ruined any chance of being a legitimate actress.

 

I heard of a commune in Laguna Beach and I thought I have to go. I dumped my stuff, hitchhiked to Laguna Beach and joined the commune. I had a compulsion to combine religion, sex and career. This did not work out and I ended back in Los Angeles with a journalism job. I had sex with the boss; we would go to trade shows and have sex with all kinds of people. I was in my mid thirties; the female body is not made to take a lot of penises of different sizes, shapes and rhythms and I was hurting all the time. It hurt when I had sex but it did not stop me. In my late thirties I was living in a part of Los Angeles where you could go and have sex on the streets, it was wide open and nobody was going to stop you. This is where I ended up pregnant from one of those encounters. I look back now on my life and see how painful and degrading this was. It would have been nice to be a normal person. 

I am convinced there is a God, angels and spirits around. These things happened to me when I was five years old. I believe God saw this girl, knew I was going to have a terrible time and he dispatched some angels to watch over me. I have done things, been in dangerous situations where I should have been killed and got out. When I graduated from high school my parents sent me to Europe. I had a job lined up in a bank in Switzerland, but I left there and took a ride to Paris to go fuck. I was a seventeen year old blond from California walking around in Paris by myself looking for guys. I found two guys who took me in, I asked them for drugs and they took me to this house outside Paris. They kept me drugged; I do not know for how long, they just kept fucking me over and over. I realized I was locked in this room and they were having sex with me even when I said, “No.” I was in trouble and they kept me drugged. One day they were gone and I heard them come back.  I was listening to what they were saying. They were speaking French to these two Arab guys, describing me, they were selling me. This was when I realized I was in trouble. They went back out and I got my suitcase full of clothes. I’m lugging this suitcase around the house and all the windows were nailed shut, the doors were locked and I could not get out. I went to the basement; there was a big wash basin and a tiny window that was open. It was the only way out of this place. I had a huge suitcase and I climbed up. I barely squeezed through the window but the suitcase would not come through. I was not going to leave all my clothes behind. Eventually I pulled the suitcase through the window and got out of there.  I went back to Paris and survived. I never told anybody what happened till twenty years later, and it was my secret.

I’m alive in Los Angeles with my daughter; she has heard most of my story. When she turned five years old I realized what happened to me. When she was sixteen years old I would worry about her doing things like I did. I’m very protective of her. When I talk about my past I still get sexually aroused, there is still a monster in me.  Fr. Horne put a monster in me. 

One of the things that happened to me on the twenty acres of land we lived on when I was child, Fr. Horne would take me into the woods on the property. My dad surprised him by selling the house and our family moved into Barlett. One of the first things I did when we moved was jump on my bike and ride over to the church. I was banging on the rectory door, I wanted more, because I liked it. I was excited and sexually aroused and I remember him opening the door acting like he did not know what I was doing there.

We blew his plan and now we were in town. This is when I started interacting with a lot of other kids, I started taking kids up into the tree house and showing them what Fr. Horne showed me how to do. I remember being in the tree house full of kids masturbating. I remember one kid leaving and telling his parents.  After this there was a lot of turmoil. My dad later drove me into Chicago to the archdiocese and we had a meeting with a man everybody called the Bishop. The Bishop came in, talked to me and said, “You have to stop babbling about what Fr. Horne did to you.” I said, “You mean you want me to lie.” He said, “No, sometimes you have to not tell the truth to protect the greater good.” He was very intimidating, I’m sure it was Cardinal Stritch. I’ve seen a picture of him and he was the cardinal at this time. I never talked about it again. I was still aroused and I think this is one of the reasons my family moved from Barlett to Los Angeles. 

I never had a chance for a normal relationship. I had a son, sixteen years older than my daughter, who will not have anything to do with me. His father and I were hippies traveling around together. I came up pregnant twice; usually I would use birth control. In the hippie era I quit using birth control and ended up having a baby. He was a wonderful child. He has a P.H.D. in physics and was mostly raised by his dad. I think he got old enough to realize how screwed up I was. When he had children he made it clear he did not want me around. 

When I was with his father, the issues of having no boundaries, I was in love but that did not stop me from fucking his brothers. After this he did not want me around. He took the baby. I told him, “I wanted partial custody,” and he said, “Just try it.” I thought maybe he would bring up some of the things I did, I did not apply. He did let me visit. They were not mean, they just did not want me around. 

It is hard going through your life being treated like this and not knowing why. I did not think there was anything wrong with what I was doing; I thought everybody was doing it. At five there was this confusion, I use to think there was something special about having sex with me. If I could get a person to have sex with me, they would be more successful and be able to accomplish more things. I know the priest put this in my head about having sex with everybody because my sister was the same way. I think my dad might have had something to do with it as well. 

My mother was vacant she had some kind of ditsy quality. She had been a flapper. My mom had me in her late thirties. The flappers wore the short skirts and were the first liberated women in America. She would stay out late, pose nude and would show me the pictures. She was proud of them. The marriage survived, you did not get divorced in those days. 

Spiritually I read the Bible and listen to inspirational talks, but I cannot say I am a Christian. I do not believe in the religious fundamentalists but I still think the angels were with me. I started working on a blog regarding the sexual abuse by the clergy in Los Angeles. When I started I had no self confidence or self esteem and I was overweight. I started showing up at different trials and writing about the abuse and putting it on my blog. People started reading it and then I would send emails to different advocates on this issue and I would be answered. Up till then I was person who always got fired from every job I had. 

Most of the people in pornography are victims of sexual abuse. I would have rather not had all these compulsions. I think my sister’s way of dealing with her abuse might have been healthier than mine. She just went on to be a topless and bottomless dancer. We did not talk about Fr. Horne until we were older. None of this made any sense. I was a straight A student, I could have been the one with the P.H.D. in physics.  My father was a lawyer and his daughters were turning into prostitutes. 

I am over sixty years old and now I know how to live, to interact with people, and how to ride an elevator without seducing someone. It is a little too late to suddenly have a life. I know I would still have had this brain and had the ability to do a lot of things but  I would not have had the compulsive behavior and been so screwed up.

To other survivors; just trust that there is not always evil, there is some good and some reason I’m still alive. Some reason I became a journalist, I’m still alive and I’ve got a story to write. It is really good for me to get my story out and then let it go.  Remember not to judge each other and try to understand this abuse affected us all differently. 

When I was homeless I ended up at a Christian place, the only place that would take me in. I started going to Bible studies and it woke something in me, that in spite of all this there is a God, and one that wants vengeance, one that is angry about what happened and we are on the right side of justice. 

No matter what church say, you cannot just put pedophile priest rape behind you, it's there all the time. When someone dies, you mourn them, and then go on, but what do you do when it's your own life you're mourning? I lost sixty years and counting, as I was never okay, ever, from age five on, after Father Horne got to me. Now my story is the only asset I've have, and my compulsion for truth makes me keep writing about it, whether I want to or not. If the Church wants the survivors to stop criticizing them, they should fess up to all their sins, in public, with great humility, and do something really magnanimous in amends. Until then, I'm blogging on. www.cityofangels15.blogspot.com                            

Anne McLean

(Ann Diamond)

Montreal, Quebec

Anne MacLean on the grounds of the Allen Memorial Institute, Montreal      

In 2002 when I began researching my childhood for the book that would become My Cold War, I had no inkling that I was a kid in the MKULTRA¹ program, but I did have memories of some events that involved my family in around 1962 when my father went into the notorious Allan Memorial Institute.

When I was around my mid twenties I wrote a story about my childhood and a "dream" I had at age four of being in an underground laboratory where children were tied down to conveyer belts being molested with cattle prods. This short story was published in a couple of Canadian anthologies in the 1980s.

In 2002, I started to meet people on the internet and, read stories and accounts of people who described exactly the same scene as part of their childhood as kids in the program called MKULTRA. I wrote to one of these survivors, Carol Rutz², who wrote back saying it sounded like I was in this program.

I was fifty years old, and it took me a year to say well, maybe it’s possible. This was after a year of reading thousands of pages of documents. I began to realize my own family had been closely connected to these institutions where experiments went on and also to some of the doctors. My father was a patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron³ and another psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Roper, who was a colleague and disciple of Cameron's "psychic driving" experiments which devastated so many lives. Unlike some patients Cameron de-patterned, my father was only in the Allan Memorial⁴ for six weeks, and was able to return to work for the next few months, although his memory was affected by the drugs and electroshock treatments and whatever else he received - his records are incomplete. He had turned sixty years old that year and the following year he took early retirement.The same year my mother got ill with severe arthritis and she was constantly going for treatment to the same hospital. Both my parents became guinea pigs that year.

As I found out in 2004, my father had been in military intelligence with the Royal Canadian Air Force. In 1941 he was stationed in Prince Rupert on the northern coast of British Columbia. In 1943, he came to Montreal and was an Air Force intelligence officer during the war when Nazis were said to be operating in Quebec. After the war became a High School teacher. Former military were given preference in hiring after the war, and it appears there were many ex-military teachers in the English Protestant high schools. And being ex-military, he was also expected to volunteer in peacetime projects, like ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA. This also included us: as his children, and also as twins, we were in line to be placed in these secret experiments.

The Air Force was very involved in secret mind control research, and there was a lot of that going on in Montreal during the Cold War era. Dr. Ewen Cameron was in the American Air Force and so were a number of his colleagues who also happened to be 33rd degree Masons. So it was a secretive men's club and many of the psychiatrists who experimented on Canadians were British trained and came to McGill from Edinburgh and the United Kingdom where eugenics⁵ originated. They would get their eugenics training in the UK and many were hired by McGill University in Montreal. McGill has always been famous for attracting military contracts, and some needed human volunteers. One group of potential guinea pigs was children of the military, another was Native Aboriginal children, and another, a large group, was Quebec orphans.

They also seem to have had special programs for what were called “gifted” kids – whose parents were happy to be told their child has tested high on the IQ test, or was musically or artistically talented. There were privileges attached to being "gifted" and also to being a child of the military rather than to be, say, a child from a native reserve or an orphan. Children in Canada were disappearing into experiments designed by the military to produce a new generation of mind-controlled people who would help create a New World Order. If this sounds hard to believe, that's because the British eugenicists created a system designed to hide the evidence of what they were up to after the war in Canada. That’s what I found, when I began trying to look into and write about what happened to my family in the Kafka-esque landscape of the Cold War in North America.

By 2004 I had a whole book written, which I called My Cold War, and I started looking for someone to publish it. I thought, it’s a powerful story, and I had told it pretty well, and with all the information that was coming out on the internet, really vast quantities of documents and testimony and proof, much of it obtained under the American Freedom of Information Act, and at conferences where victims and therapists and people doing research into the history of mind control were coming together and sharing really fascinating new information – I was convinced my story was part of this big puzzle and would find an audience.  All I had to do was send it out to publishers.

What came back was beyond rejection -- it was Absolute Denial. And it was also automatic. Publishers would be interested, and then they would refuse to read it. Or they would not respond at all. It was as if I had handed them a hot potato, or something they were scared of. Almost as if there was a policy somewhere that said “Don’t talk about this” – so they would not even tell me if they had read it or not. My former publisher took me off his mailing list so I would not attend any launches or events. It was as if, by writing this book, I had crossed a line and done something that was secretly forbidden.

Everywhere I went in those days, I seemed to bump into people whose personal experience confirmed my own story. Everyone had a family member, someone close to them who had been harmed or destroyed by Dr. Cameron. Everyone knew a family who had lost a promising child to LSD, and many knew of experiments at McGill involving students, some of whom had suffered life-long mental health issues as a result. It seemed the streets of Montreal were absolutely filled with people who were victims of this program. And yet it was taboo to talk about it, or investigate it. The wife of an Arts Council director remembered several writers who had approached her husband with proposals for books on Nazi doctors operating in Quebec, only to be turned down.

For a while I was obsessed with the "Nazi" side of the story – how Nazi doctors had come to North America through Operation Paperclip.  Now I believe the main mover in setting up this secret eugenics program in Canada was British intelligence. For example, the National Film Board had been turning out pro-British war propaganda in the 1940s.  In the early 1950s it floundered for a while, and there was a power struggle between the military people left over from wartime and a new group that favoured young directors to document social change in Canada.  Some of this “social change” was actually social engineering.  The NFB set up new programs like “Challenge for Change” and produced many social documentaries during those years and quite a few experimental films like The Ernie Game and Goin’ Down the Road and Flowers on a One-Way Street and Angel and Christopher’s Movie Matinee that were about alienated youth and the new drug culture. A filmmaker by the name of Arthur Lipsett made documentary and animated films. When I looked at these films a while back I could see he had to have been aware of the MKULTRA program, which was at its height when he was producing his best films. Lipsett was a schizophrenic employed by the NFB and became almost a cult figure in his own lifetime. He brilliantly used collage and in-camera editing to layer all kinds of information into his films. Back in the 1960s and 70s the NFB seems to have been very interested in experimenting with LSD, and another award-winning animator, Ryan Larkin, was known to take large quantities of it in producing ground-breaking animation films like Walking.⁶

In Montreal when I was young there always were many mental patients walking the streets who were indistinguishable from artists.  There was a small English poetry scene in downtown Montreal that sprang up in the 1950s when Dr. Cameron was electro-shocking and drugging literally thousands of people at the Allan Memorial. Dr. Cameron supported the arts, I suspect because as a psychiatrist he found it gave him access to people's souls. He and his colleagues would approach young artists and offer them a chance to be in his LSD experiments at McGill. He encouraged patients to write poetry. Some, like Leonard Cohen, went on to have careers as poets and writers. Several poets in the Anglo poetry scene that started to blossom in the 1970s, had been in the Allan Memorial as children. Poetry comes naturally to some schizophrenics, and having ex-patients write poetry and read it in public could be way of keeping track of how the experimental subjects were faring, especially when Cameron's program was shut down after 1963. We are talking 10,000 electroshock sessions per year on patients at McGill hospitals alone. Massive amounts of experimental drugs and procedures being tested on unsuspecting people, including children, who ended up in Cameron’s “care.”

In Montreal we had this downtown population of marginal individuals who came together in a cultural scene in the 1980s. These traumatized children needed somewhere to go so many found their way into artistic careers where it was okay to be a little strange. And it’s interesting that the NFB has made documentaries about a few of them, such as Phil Tetrault and Ryan Larkin and Arthur Lipsett, who in my opinion show all the signs of having been in MKULTRA as kids.

This whole process has been quite strange because on one hand the city I grew up in is absolutely littered with relics of that terrible period when Montrealers were being used as guinea pigs for the CIA. And then on the other hand, there is what appears to have been a massive effort to destroy evidence and lie about all this, so you have a population of victims who have amnesia for what happened to them. It’s a real tragedy.

I could give lots of examples of how that worked. McGill hired a law firm to help them hide records of LSD experiments on children. Reportedly many of these files were not destroyed, just hidden in the catacombs under McGill. I met a former male nurse who, along with other orderlies and staff, worked for months in 1978 tossing patient records into the dumpsters behind the Royal Victoria Hospital, after the world found out about McGill's role in secret mind control research on unwitting people. I have a friend who worked with Dr. Jonathan Meakins II (there have been three Dr. Jonathan Meakins in medicine at McGill – they are a sort of dynasty) who was in charge of managing all those records, sanitizing them so that people who were harmed by all these experiments could not take legal action.

When I was trying to get my late father’s records from the Royal Victoria Hospital, I was given an amazing runaround and told I had no right to those records, and it was only by a kind of miraculous accident that I found a Chinese replacement secretary who was very helpful and actually located my father’s file – which had been mostly emptied, but there was one page in it that identified him as a Cameron patient.

Both English newspapers, the Gazette and Montreal Star, were major supporters of Dr. Cameron’s CIA research and going through their files on the Allan Memorial is very enlightening. The Star no longer exists, but its owners made financial donations to these eugenics programs at McGill. The Gazette also shares a law firm with McGill which is convenient when the goal is to conceal decades of criminal research.

So researching this terrible past, finding proof, has not been easy. Once you start finding proof, and collecting stories from survivors, you find people with the power to help, such as publishers, are afraid to talk to you. Some seem to have been put in their positions as gatekeepers, and an astonishing number of Canadian editors and publishers are from military backgrounds. Living in Montreal all my life, I never realized this until I wrote My Cold War. Montreal has a very controlled writing and publishing scene – in part, I believe, to prevent this story from reaching the survivors who need to hear it. That certainly was my experience.

A few years ago, the Montreal law firm of Stein and Stein in Montreal managed to win a large settlement for Cameron patients. This legal victory made front-page news in the UK but in Montreal, where there were so many victims who could qualify for compensation, the Gazette did not bother to print the story at all. After I complained, they finally ran it, ten days late, but they made sure to bury it in the middle of the paper over a single column so no one would see it.

That’s how these very shocking crimes go on being hidden. I found myself marginalized when I started investigating and talking about that whole era of recent Montreal history, because the important people who collaborated operate under a cloak of respectability. The doctors and scientists who were doing these things to children are still considered heroes of medicine and are in the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

As soon as I started researching my past I not only began running into people who had been part of this program, but I also met a group of intuitives who offered to help me locate some “missing children.” At first I was not even aware that I needed to go looking for these missing children. The way this happened was, well, a bit strange. It almost made me believe in angels, because without really looking I just I began running into clairvoyants who told me about souls of children who had been trapped between worlds when they died. Another way to say this is there were children who were in the spiritual world and unable to move on because they had an important message for the living. These psychics and healers I was meeting demonstrated an ability to communicate with these lost children who are no longer alive, but can make their presence felt.

There was a medical intuitive named Doreen Bray who started a centre for alternative healing at Queen Elizabeth Hospital who had communicated with these children who and they were telling her they needed help. For some reason, though, she was reluctant to get involved in their “case.” A short time later, in November of 2003 I met a trance medium called Harley Monte who told me I would write a book about these missing children. He introduced me to a group of about ten of his students who all had powerful intuitive abilities. On the surface these were regular people with jobs, families, etc., and they volunteered to help me by channelling information from the time period when Dr. Cameron was running his top secret “children’s program” which was at its peak in 1960. They started out at our first meeting by traveling back to a children’s party at the Allan that my twin brother and I attended in 1956, at age five. They also gathered information from a hidden laboratory where orphans were kept in a military experiment, similar to the kind of experiment we hear about today, to develop super-soldiers. We collected disturbing details of child experiments involving sensory isolation, extreme temperatures, combat situation, photographic memory, extrasensory perception, sexual abuse, animal abuse - that were happening at McGill in about 1960.

Had I not already been reading and doing research for over a year, reading thousands of pages of testimony on secret mind control projects all over North America and including in Montreal, I would not have believed or understood most of what started coming through these amazing people who were accurately giving me details, including names, dates, places that jived exactly with survivor accounts, and despite the fact they had never even heard of this program. They were blank slates. For example, one of the channellers began describing a "Doctor Lehmann"⁷. She repeated his name, while picking up information about him. Heinz Lehmann was the “father of Largactil” which he used to treat schizophrenia at the Douglas Psychiatric Hospital in Montreal and also at the Allan Memorial during those years. She described him as cold and heartless, treating children like inanimate objects.

At one session we contacted Sidney Gottlieb,⁸ who was the head of Chemical Services for the CIA MKULTRA project based in Washington D.C. But of course none of the psychics I worked with had ever heard of him. Still, but apparently there are ways of locating people who are in the spirit world, and they found him on one of the “lowers levels of the white light” where he is being re-educated. This level is a little like Purgatory but there is compassion there even for perpetrators. He or one of his guides told us he had other incarnations where he had worked for powerful rulers, and his job had been to poison their enemies. So in his recent lifetime, Sid Gottlieb, – which was not his real name – his real name was Josef Schneider and during the war he had worked as a chemist for the Nazis, and after the war he came to America under Operation Paperclip and was given a new, Jewish identity and speech therapy to alter his accent – had worked for the CIA and was the chemistry genius behind their plan to poison foreign leaders like Patrice Lumumba⁹ and Fidel Castro.

As I said, the psychics were unaware of all this background, but they were able to connect with entities or souls on the astral plane. Gottlieb had been blamed for the MKULTRA program, but when in fact there were many people who did much worse things and escaped prosecution in the 1970s when it began to be exposed. He claimed to have been blackmailed. These secret projects. , like the intelligence organizations that run them, appear to operate by threats and blackmail.

I met these psychics at a time when I was encountering so much denial when I tried to talk about my research in the “real world.” It seemed miraculous that they put themselves at my disposal in the way they did. They said “We will help you because this story is so important; people need to know what happened to these children.”

In the course of the two or three years that I regularly met with "Harley’s Angels" we also spoke with several children who had lived in basement of the Allan Memorial. They told us their names, and Harley even read some of their files. I believe all of them died in those experiments and are buried in unmarked graves behind the hospital which is on Mount Royal in downtown Montreal.  One of them, Isabel Flora Williams, was 16 years old in 1960. We found her strapped in a chair with electrodes attached to her head. She was kept in that chair in the basement literally for years, often in a state of semi-starvation. There is real evidence she actually existed: she appears in a drawing by MKULTRA survivor and author Carol Rutz, who remembers being taken to the Allan as a child in 1960. Later I went down to the City of Montreal Archives and found her a record for an Isabel Flora Williams, born in 1944 and had died in September 1963, which fits exactly with the dates she gave us in our channelling session in 2004 which I taped. So she died around the time Dr. Cameron’s behavioural lab was being shut down. I am guessing she was terminated along with other children who managed to survive. I think in fact much of the project, including some of the psychiatrists, later moved from Montreal to southern Ontario.

There were Nazi doctors involved in this program, but most of the researchers were English and Scottish. A number of these men were trained at Maudsley Hospital and the University of Edinburgh, and many (like Eric Wittkauer, who came to work at the Allan in 1951, about a week before I was born) were involved with the Tavistock Institute. Tavistock had and still has an enormous influence in the English speaking world and was the birthplace of MKULTRA mind control and really needs to be studied and understood because it has been enormously influential. McGill was always friendly to eugenics and Sir William Osler, another founding father at McGill – a library there is named after him – was a eugenicist.  It’s part of the history of English Montreal but very few people are interested in exposing it – that would be like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs and opening Pandora’s Box, in a single stroke.

It’s all about power, powerful men and their scientific and medical careers, the military and McGill University. McGill recently put up a statue to honour George Merck from Merck-Frost who was put in charge of Canada’s enormous and very secretive chemical and biological weapons program, during and after the Second World War. That program needed lots of guinea pigs and Canada had few laws to protect its population from medical experimentation. They tried to get soldiers to volunteer to test lethal chemicals like botulism toxin. They set up laboratories on military bases in places like Kingston, Ontario and also in remote areas of western Canada, and they had ways of acquiring subjects. It was around this time that orphans were targeted for medical experiments, and many of these children disappeared during the MKULTRA years from 1953-1964.

I looked at who attended the Quebec Conference in 1943 and 1944 as the war was ending. Maurice DuPlessis was re-elected as Premier of Quebec and was invited to the conference which was in part about “unconventional weapons” which would be needed against Russia in the post-war period. Churchill, Roosevelt and MacKenzie King were at that conference, already laying out a strategy for the Cold War. Nuclear weapons were about to be used on Japan, but they also were developing chemical and biological weapons – just a little downriver from Quebec City was Grosse Ile, where they were testing anthrax weapons. And Duplessis was in a position to offer the Allies two things; iron ore in the north, and thousands of war orphans, both of which would be very valuable to the continuing war effort.

When you have hindsight into these secret programs – and much of that hindsight comes from victims’ accounts of being in them which are very hard to dismiss – you can literally roll back the tape and watch the plan unfold from its beginnings during and after the Second World War. There is so much research that needs to be done, and I have only scratched the surface, but since very few people seem to know about these programs, there was often a lot of it left lying out where you can find it.

I don’t have real archives that I can pass onto others. I began my writing career in poetry and fiction, and I tend to work intuitively. I am a story teller, not an academic, although my B.A. is in History.

If I was a professional researcher I would devote my life to finding and photocopying the records, but in the meantime, I will just keep telling my story. There should be a hundred of researchers with skills. I know intuitively if you go and look, you will find plenty, even though so many of the records and documents have been hidden. Chances are they are still lying in the catacombs under McGill.

It has been a decade since I wrote My Cold War. In those days I lost quite a few friends to my obsession with this period of our lives. Their line of argument was if this really happened, how come it’s not on TV or in the newspapers? It was truly a strange and exciting time in my life, as I was looking into files and finding all sorts of names shocking things in these files. It was obvious there was a network of powerful people who had known about the experiments on children all along. I had even worked for some of these people, who included the owners and publishers of the Montreal Gazette. But it went beyond these few people, who seemed to be well informed about these secrets, that influential group to include others in what we think of as the independent or alternative publishing scene, who just “followed orders.”  One editor said flat out, “This book can never be published in Canada.” Another small press editor I sent the manuscript to told a friend of mine: “If Anne publishes this book they will swoop down and lock her up.” He actually seemed afraid to speak to me about it. So in the end I decided to self-publish My Cold War on a publishing site called Lulu.com.  In 2005 I brought out the first edition and then I continued revising it.  In 2007, I attempted to enter it in a competition, and the reaction from my writers’ association was bizarre. They set up an “ethics committee” to read my book to see if it was eligible. At the same time they hired someone to watch me and inform on me. It was really hilarious. A strange man in a hat watched me working in the public library and followed me outside and introduced himself. As soon as he took off his hat, I recognized him as someone I knew. That threw him off a bit. He bombarded me with phone calls for a week until I agreed to meet him, and over coffee he started interrogating me and seemed to be memorizing my answers. He was about 60 with tardive dyskinesia¹⁰ from the anti-psychotics he had been taking since his breakdown in 1984. I felt almost sorry for him - he seemed to be some kind of informer but not a very good one so I started asking him about his life. He was a child of the military with all the characteristics of having been traumatized and groomed for a career in intelligence. For a while he had been a diplomat, working in New York for the Quebec delegation there, but in the mid-80s he suffered a psychotic breakdown and had never been able to rebuild his career after that. He mentioned he knew many important people at McGill who happened to be "pedophiles" -- that's how he described these friends of his. He also told me about his childhood, growing up among the Canadian elite, and his abusive military dad who sent him to Eton in England. As a child he often played the Molson mansion in a small village near Riviere du Loup -- just down the road from the Allan family mansion.Without intending to, he confirmed many things I already knew about children in the MKULTRA, and implicated the same people I had been reading about. He seemed to have no clue as to why I was so interested.I have to say, this process of finding out about my own childhood has had many surreal moments.

In 2008 McGill University set up a committee to study its own Cold War history, headed by a woman who works for McGill and writes books for pharmaceutical companies. So McGill is investigating its own secret history -- that’s also surreal. The simple, shocking fact is in the 1950’s Montreal was a "medical mecca" because Quebec and Canada permitted secret human experimentation enabling unscrupulous people to build fantastic careers on child abuse and murder.

These secrets absolutely must reach the public. When this change comes about, it will be beautiful, but as things stand our world is in a lot of danger because of these secret programs that have really succeeded in erasing our collective memory. Canadians exist in a state of amnesia about crimes against humanity that have happened right here and in our lifetime.

1 Project MKULTRA is the code name of a U.S. government human research operation experimenting in the behavioral engineering of humans through the CIA's Scientific Intelligence Division. The CIA project was coordinated with the Special Operations Division of the Army's Chemical Corps. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and officially halted in 1973. The program engaged in many illegal activities; in particular it used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy. MKULTRA used numerous methodologies to manipulate people's mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.

The scope of Project MKULTRA was broad, with research undertaken at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, as well as hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA operated through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes top officials at these institutions were aware of the CIA's involvement. As the Supreme Court later noted, MKULTRA was: concerned with "the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior." The program consisted of some 149 subprojects which the Agency contracted out to various universities, research foundations, and similar institutions. At least 80 institutions and 185 private researchers participated. Because the Agency funded MKULTRA indirectly, many of the participating individuals were unaware that they were dealing with the Agency.

Project MKULTRA was first brought to public attention in 1975 by the Church Committee of the U.S. Congress, and a Gerald Ford commission to investigate CIA activities within the United States. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKULTRA files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms' destruction order.

In 1977, a Freedom of Information Act request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents relating to project MKUltra, which led to Senate hearings later that same year. In July 2001 some surviving information regarding MKULTRA was officially declassified.

2 Carol Rutz - A survivor of SRA and Government Mind Control experimentation is the author of A Nation Betrayed which tells the true story of secret Cold War experiments performed on children. With extensive research and testimony from survivors, she documents experiments by the CIA to create a Manchurian Candidate.

3 Donald Ewen Cameron (24 December 1901 – 8 September 1967), was a 20th-century Scottish-born psychiatrist involved in the United States Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) MKULTRA mind control program. Cameron served as President of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, the American Psychopathological Association and the Society of Biological Psychiatry during the 1950s. He has been heavily criticized for his administration without patient consent of disproportionately-intense electroshock therapy and experimental drugs, including LSD, which caused some patients to become permanently comatose.

4 The Allan Memorial Institute is located on the slope of Mount Royal by McGill University's campus in what was then the Golden Square Mile in Montreal, Quebec. The Institute houses the Psychiatry Department of the Royal Victoria Hospital, part of the McGill University Health Centre. Although currently a respected psychiatric hospital, the Institute is also known for its darker role in the CIA's Project MKUltra, an initiative to develop drug-induced mind control. MKUltra experimentation was undertaken in the Institute between 1957 and 1964 by its founding director Donald Ewen Cameron.

5 Eugenics is the belief and practice of improving the genetic quality of the human population. It is a social philosophy advocating the improvement of human genetic traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of people with desired traits (positive eugenics), and reduced reproduction of people with less-desired or undesired traits (negative eugenics).

6 https://www.nfb.ca/film/walking/

7 Heinz Lehmann came to Canada from Germany in 1937 and introduced Chlorpromazine or Thorazine. He was chiefly responsible for propagating the use of psychiatric drugs in Canada. Lehmann and other psychiatrists are partly responsible for all the brain damage caused by psychiatric drugs. Lehmann admitted in 1954 that Thorazine was a “pharmacological substitute for lobotomy.” In Montreal’s Douglas Hospital, Lehmann continued using it on schizophrenic patients. Layman persuaded psychiatrist Ewen Cameron into using massive amounts of electroshock, Chlorpromazine, and other psychiatric drugs. Chlorpromazine was used by Ewen Cameron on many patients during his brainwashing experiments in 1950’s and 1960’s, at the Allan Memorial Institute.

8 Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 – March 7, 1999) was an American chemist best known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency’s mind control program MKUltra. Gottlieb became known as the "Black Sorcerer" and the "Dirty Trickster." He supervised preparations of lethal poisons and experiments in mind control.

Patricia Fontaine

Windsor, Ontario

Abuse takes away everything. 

The Indian Agent came into our home and told my mom and dad,  ”She is old enough to go."  I remember my dad putting up a fight and saying, “These are my children. They don’t have to go anywhere I don’t want them to go.”  My dad was then threatened with going to jail and having the rest of his children taken away. 

Mom and Dad had no voice.  This was the first time I realized fear; I did not know what was happening or where I was going.  I was five years old.  Those first few days are burned into my memory.  I can remember almost everything to that point.  I remember thinking why me? crying, asking my parents, “Why do I have to go?”

The Indian Agent came and accompanied my dad and me to school.  I remember when I got into the boat I turned around to look at my mom and she was standing in the doorway with a baby in her arms.   She was crying.  This is the first thing that pops into my mind when I hear residential school: crying.  What my parents were witnessing was a part of them disappearing little by little.

I think I was there for three years however I’m not sure of the actual length of time.  Whether it was a few months or a couple of years, when you are five years old and separated from your parents and siblings,  time is forever.  It is never-ending. 

On our way to the school I remember checking out the river shores. The minute I got a chance, I was going to run away. I had big plans as to what I was going to do.  Once we arrived at the school we went upstairs and into the parlour. There was a sister waiting there. The Indian Agent left and my dad stayed to answer questions. I just remember being so scared. I felt my stomach tighten; I did not know what was happening.  I was scared to death.  I did not want my dad to go, but I didn’t dare cry. 

We said our goodbyes and my dad left. I have lived with that fear all my life.  To this day I fear the unknown. 

The first thing we did was put my things away.  I had my clothes in a suitcase and I never saw my clothes again.  They took me upstairs to the dormitories and I remember seeing all these toilets, sinks, soap dishes, and toothbrushes.  They stripped me naked, ran a bathtub full of water, put me in the tub and scrubbed me hard.  Years later I was thinking, what were they trying to do, scrub the Indian out of me? Then they dried me off.  I was so embarrassed and ashamed. I was five and did not even know these words.  I was totally naked in front of this sister and she was wiping me off. 

Then the sister put these ugly bloomers on me. I hated those things!  I had to put on a blue cotton uniform, stockings and brown shoes.  Then the sister took me to another room where they proceeded to cut off my hair.  I was devastated because I loved my long hair and my mom always had it in ringlets.  I remember sitting on this high stool and having them chop away; it was an ugly haircut and looking down at my hair on the floor, I started to sob and she slapped me hard.  I was terrified of that sister every time I saw her.  The only sister I liked was Sister St. James.

They were French sisters.  Our music teacher taught us how to sew, and by five years of age I was doing embroidery work.  I still love doing embroidery work.

After they cut my hair, I don’t remember much.  The first night I remember crying.  There might have been eight of us in this one room in these little white beds.  There were several little ones crying, and this sister came in and told us to be quiet and to stop our crying, we were not babies.  But we were our momma’s babies.  I remember being so terrified. 

As a parent, in your mind you can hear your child crying, you can feel it in your heart.  You know when something is wrong when you are connected to your kids.

I remember being in the classroom and I felt so lonely, I missed my family. I just wanted to go home, and that longing was painful.  There was this red plastic car that belonged to one of my brothers and I brought it with me. It was the last thing I grabbed before I went out the door. This became the thing that connected me to my family and the life I had known before.  I carried it in my pocket; it carried my tears and my loneliness.

One day I wasn’t paying attention to what the teacher was saying. I was playing with the car.  I didn’t realize I was making the car sounds until Miss Brooke, the teacher, said “Who’s making that noise?”  Everybody said, “It’s Patricia!” I got the strapping of my life and she took my little red car.  I tried to grab it and she slapped me again.  She put it into her drawer.  I watched where she put the car because I planned on getting it back, but I never did.  It was the one thing I hung onto from home. Mrs. Brooke kept me after class that day and I got it again.  She hit me and by that night I was black and blue, and all puffy.  I was never hit like this before.  At home as a child I got a couple of spankings but not like this.  This was a beating. 

I remember her pulling my hair and telling me to get back in the classroom.  “You are here to learn something. You are here to learn how to read, write and to spell;. You are not here to play with that toy.” I remember just sitting there frozen, scared.  After that day, it was like going through the motions.  I remember not feeling anything, just a void, for the rest of the year I was there.  I hated school, being in that environment, those teachers were mean.  

I was a good reader and speller.

I remember being in the dormitory one night, sitting up wondering what we were being processed for.  We each got a number. That’s when I lost my name, I was no longer Patsy.  My Mom and Dad always called me Patsy, but now I was number 100.  When my name was gone that had quite the impact on me.  When the teachers would come to the play room and they wanted to talk to you they would call your number, clapping their hands.

“Number 100!”  I would get up and go see what she wanted.  Then I would be taken upstairs because I wet my bed again from being scared.  The sister would say, “What’s this again?” and I would get slapped hard.  I had never experienced this from my Mom and Dad.  This was when the new feeling of humiliation came in.

I was made to carry my wet sheets downstairs to show everybody what I did.  This was done to anybody who wet the bed.  How embarrassing!  This is about shame.  This experience impacted my life.  I’m just starting to talk about this and these feelings. 

I got frozen in time.  I always thought there was something wrong with me.  Sometimes I cry but my emotions are still twisted.  I’ll ask myself what is wrong with me.  When something happened to me in my life, I didn’t care, and that scared me. I couldn’t feel compassion because they did not have compassion for us.

We were not allowed to look at the boys at the school or speak our language.  I remember this little girl and I were sitting in a corner. I could speak English a little better than her.  She was talking to me in Indian. She was scared and there were big tears on her face. She wanted to run away.  Then Mrs. Odess caught us.  We were put in a room and had to sit there all day. This was my first experience of isolation.  I’m not sure how long they kept us in there but I never spoke my language again. 

My Dad spoke to us in English at home, but Mom always spoke the language.  Today I can understand what they are talking about, but I have problems answering in the language.  I’m trying to get the language back.  I like going back to M’Chigeeng to visit my cousins; they all speak in Indian.  When they are laughing if I can catch one word, I’ll know what they are talking about.  I miss the language, I miss it everyday, and it brings back the feeling of my Mom and Dad.  At home I’d lie in bed and I could hear them in the kitchen talking and laughing.  I miss that.  This is a longing I cannot describe.  When I hear the language it brings back a flood of memories and feelings.

I got to go home when school was over; I do not remember going home for Christmas or Easter.  Your parents could come and see you.  My parents came twice during that year, my Dad once by himself and then again with my Mom.  My parents seemed like strangers.  I was broken.  When I did go home it did not seem like I was at home.  I felt like a stranger.  I was the oddball. I had other brothers, there were new babies.  I did not even know them. I just felt very different and nothing was the same.  Going back  never felt like home again. 

When I went to school I experienced and witnessed mental, physical, emotional, sexual and cultural abuse by teachers and religious sisters. They stole my language, my name, my hair, my parents, my childhood and my identity.

Before the age of 5, I remember a lot of laughter, we were happy, carefree, and I was quite adventurous.  My Dad worked in the lumber camps.  He would build boats and sell them.  My Mom stayed home and took care of us.  Mom tried to live a traditional life but Dad would not allow her to. 

It had to do with the church.  The church was very involved at Sagamok; this had quite an impact on my parents and caused a lot of discontent between them.  My Mom was from Manitoulin Island, M’Chigeeng First Nation (West Bay) and Dad was born at Wikwemikong.  When I was a year old they transferred over to Sagamok First Nation.

My father was a good man, but what got in his way was alcohol abuse.  He cared about his children.  What tore my Dad apart was the day the Indian Agent came and told him and my Mother tbat I had to go the next day to residential school.  Nobody spoke that day, Mom and Dad were real quiet and I heard them mentioning Shingwauk.  I asked my Mom, “What is Shingwauk?” She said, “Oh, it’s a school, you have to go to school, but I think they are going to be sending you to Spanish.”  Spanish was close to home, but to me it might as well have been a thousand miles away.  We always traveled by boat. We lived across the river in Sagamok.

I remember my Mom and I would go for a walk, and she would tell me about her experiences at the residential school, Spanish.  She told me she felt luckier than my Dad because she was only there for a short time, after she became ill.  They did not want to take care of sick children so they sent them home.  She developed scarlet fever and it damaged her heart.  My Dad went to Spanish to the boys’ school; he was there till grade 8.  He was there for 8 years, a long time.

I remember my Dad telling me a few things about his time at Spanish. It broke my heart. One particular time he answered someone in his language and the Jesuit Brother pulled him aside and slapped him as hard as he could along the side of his face by his ear.  He remembered his ear popping and afterwards he was deaf, on that side of his head.  He remembered something about his wrists being bound, and now I wonder about my dad being sexually abused.  Why would they bind his wrists?  My Dad would not go into that, so it’s just something I suspect.  Eight years, what went on in that school?   I’m just hearing the stories about it in these last few years.  It’s devastating.

Both my parents understood how I felt. We shared a common experience but they felt powerless and they could not help me.  I had no sense of belonging anywhere.  When my Dad found out he had no power over how his children were going to be educated, he disenfranchised from the reserve.  He gave up all rights in order to keep his children and moved off the reserve.  Going to residential schools was like being kidnapped and the ransom was surrendering our native rights. 

After the residential school my Dad moved us off the reserve.  My first school was in Walford, Ontario.  Our first house was by the cemetery. Moving into that house was the happiest day of my life. How excited I was! I did not have to go back to residential school, as long as we lived off the reserve.  They could not come and pick us up or send us off.    My dad could be violent when he was drinking, but I will always remember what he did to keep us together.  His own family turned against him because he gave up the family farm on the reserve.

Later on, I was molested by two teachers and raped when I was 13.  The sexual abuse happened mostly to the native women.  My mother would tell me don’t go near those white men, they will do bad things to you.  An incident happened at school and I could not tell anybody.  I felt so utterly ashamed, I never told anyone. This teacher took me behind an old fashioned furnace that looked like a spider, and did what he wanted to do.  I just stood there crying, ashamed.  I could not tell anyone, I felt so dirty, I never felt like that before.   I use to wish I was one of those white girls, so this would not happen to me.  This was happening to me because I was native. 

The teacher humiliated me.  It seemed like it did something to my learning because I was not able to learn anything after that.  Nothing would stay in my brain. I could read and write, but not do math.  I had to stay behind after school and the teacher took advantage of me.  It is just starting to wear off now.  When I’m working with numbers that memory comes back.

I’m so happy that the government is recognizing the damages and our elders are working with us.  A lot of us, I believe, are still stuck there.  I just do not want to stay stuck so I go to these retreats; where we can talk about the past and not feel silenced.  You can talk, cry, scream and understand each other’s pain.  It is beyond me how the perpetrators could look at themselves in the mirror or sleep at night doing what they did to us.  It has damaged whole generations.

My kids are affected because of the way I was.  My husband drank a lot when we were young. I use to think, “Oh yeah, it’s party time.” I use to look forward to that.  We did not have any parental skills. I raised my kids the way I thought was right.  Instead of talking with them I would hit first and call them names. No one is calling my grandchildren names. 

You are so busy raising your children you do not get a chance to pay attention to what they are doing.  I never had interest in what they were doing, I just raised them.  As long as they were fed, clean and went outside to play.   Not being with my parents for only one year broke me.  One day of residential school could break a child’s spirit. 

After residential school I was very timid and shy.  It’s been my experience that timid children are the ones being taken advantage of because they have been groomed.  With my children I saw the shyness in them. They had no self esteem.  That is what happens when you call them names instead of building them up.  This is what I was doing to my children.  This is what I had learned.   My dad had learned the same thing; we lived in a real violent time.  Children were never thought of as human beings or as a little person with feelings and emotions.  Children were not allowed to speak. 

I still struggle with being raised Catholic as I try to learn my own culture.  I struggle with who I want to be or what I was meant to be.  It is hard to break this mind control, the fear of going to hell. 

I told a member of my family that I’m going to go back to my cultural ways and I am going to pray the way my people prayed.  She said, “Pat, what about Jesus Christ, don’t you believe in him?” I told her, “No, I pray to the Creator now.”  

She got quiet and I said, “What’s wrong?”  Her response was, “I feel like someone in the family just died.” 

After that, I could not sleep for weeks. I was wrestling with the same unworthiness that I felt at the residential school.  I thought oh my God, what did I do, denying Jesus Christ.  Now I am going to go to hell.

One of the elders said to me, “Pat, Jesus Christ -- God created him, he’s the same thing.”  It is trying to connect those things.  Jesus was a tribal man, maybe he was Anishnabe.  

I look at the traditional elders and when they are praying, they are so deep into it.  I have never seen a Christian that deep into prayer.  The elders are totally absorbed, one with the Creator. I want that feeling, but something is blocked.    When you are in nature you see it, you just have to look around and you see the Creator and all his Creation in constant communication.  I feel it every time I come here, (Wharncliffe Farm)² and I dread going back to the city. 

This is reality; I feel so loved and connected to the earth mother. My spirit whispers, “I am here and here is home.”  Surrounded by the support by all the other Grandmothers, I have never felt that kind of love in my entire life.  But I have longed for it: the hope and the memory of love before I went to residential school. 

Loneliness, fear, anger, abandonment were buried in my heart. I was silent and forgotten.  You can park those feelings somewhere but you know those feelings are going to come back and you have to deal with them.  That is what I am finding out talking with our elders and these other Grandmothers; you have to open up those feelings.  Letting out the bad things. Lots of bad things happened to a lot of us.  I was ashamed of being an Indian, I did not want to be an Indian, and I wished I was not born an Indian.  Meeting the other Grandmothers I found comfort in discovering I was not alone in my shame.
 

I’m going to be 70 soon and I’m getting involved with my people, the elders.  The future is coming and there is hope.   I’m getting old now and I don’t mind.  The healing is coming.  My daughter is a social worker, my youngest son is an operation manager and paramedic on a reserve and my other daughter Connie has her own business.  The kids are successful.  The next generation is talking about college and university.  My grandchildren are in high school and one of them is going to University.  My life wasn’t such a failure.  Life is good!  

¹ - For further information on Spanish Residential School contact the Shingwauk Project           htp://www.shingwauk.auc.ca/welcome_index.html

^{2 – Wharncliffe Farm – http://www.grandmotherslodge.com}