By James Wastasecoot
Former students of Mackay Indian Residential School returned to Dauphin in early September for a gathering built around two words: Moving On.
About 50 survivors registered for the Sept. 5 and 6 gathering at the Dauphin Friendship Centre. Many began arriving Friday evening, Sept. 4, meeting old friends and former classmates before the formal program began. Over the next two days, a large sharing circle brought stories of separation, abuse, loneliness and the difficult lives many survivors faced after returning home. It also brought laughter, affection and the relief of being understood by people who had lived through the same institution.
Lead organizer Clara Kirkness of Tataskweyak said Dauphin was chosen partly because some survivors were attending a Mackay gathering for the first time. Returning could stir happiness, sadness, anger and other emotions, she said, but it could also begin or complete part of a healing journey. The location also allowed survivors to visit the former Mackay school building, which has been purchased by a developer for conversion into apartments.
“There was a lot of tears and laughter,” Kirkness wrote after the gathering. “In the end, the reunion and or gathering of the survivors tells me we are resilient people. We need to refocus our energy towards the next generation who was impacted by residential schools but did not attend.”
Organizers brought out a memory blanket honouring former students who have died. The names of deceased survivors will be written on ribbons and added to it. For Kirkness, the gathering also carried the memory of earlier efforts. She recalled organizing a reunion in 2010 with Alice Bear and Dan Highway at the Southeast Resource College, when there was no funding and organizers paid expenses themselves because, she said, “We felt it had to be done.”
Bear described the Dauphin reunion as a family gathering. The people in the room, she said, were the children who had grown up together while separated from their own homes and families. One of her surprises was meeting Nancy Moore, a friend she had not seen since she was 17.
“To share our stories and how far we have come. We are still here,” Bear wrote. “We survived the living through abuse, alcoholism and abandonment.” Many survivors, now in their late 60s, 70s and 80s, are still working, she added. “Totally amazing people, and strong. I am grateful for their strength, courage and hope.”
Among the people who had travelled to be there was Johnny Clipping of Sayisi Dene First Nation. His long journey to the gathering became part of the story he shared. He had wanted to attend previous reunions but could not make the arrangements. This time he pieced the trip together with help from friends, a medical trip to Winnipeg and a ride from a woman named Belinda. For more than two weeks before the gathering, he said, the approach of September had brought back the old anxiety of another school year beginning far from home.
Johnny Clipping from Tadoule delivered a powerful message of change and recovery. Clipping was born in Churchill and spent part of his childhood in foster care before being sent to Mackay. He recalled arriving as a child and seeing his sister taken in another direction. “Don’t leave me here. Please don’t leave me here. Take me with you,” he remembered crying. She could not.
Clipping was born in Churchill and spent part of his childhood in foster care before being sent to Mackay. He recalled arriving as a child and seeing his sister taken in another direction. “Don’t leave me here. Please don’t leave me here. Take me with you,” he remembered crying. She could not.
He spent four years in Dauphin without seeing his parents, brothers or sisters. In all, he said, he spent five years there as the only Dene student. Every September carried the knowledge that he would disappear from his family for another 10 months.
The years away damaged the ordinary bonds between brothers and sisters. When Clipping was eventually reunited with his family, he did not recognize one of his own older sisters. He thought she was a stranger picking on his younger siblings and fought with her. His father punished him before realizing what lay behind the incident. The deeper hurt, Clipping said, was that he had never been given the chance to know his sister while growing up.
That experience stayed with him. Now the youngest surviving sibling in his family, he said he looks after his sisters and goes out of his way to help them. It is one of the lessons he carried out of a childhood in which family relationships were repeatedly interrupted.
Residential school also affected his ability to show emotion and speak words of affection. He said he had not heard “I love you” at school. What he remembered instead were beatings. Years later, one of his sons taught him to say those words. Now they end their telephone and video conversations by telling each other, “I love you.” Clipping said he has learned to say the same to his other children and to mean it “from the bottom of my heart.”
His wife, whom he first met in Dauphin, also attended residential school. Clipping spoke openly about the alcoholism that damaged their marriage and about the strength she showed when, after he became sober, she welcomed him back. She died in May. He told the gathering that her death devastated him, though he often grieved alone and found it difficult to cry in front of others.
“She showed me that there is love available, and she gave it back to me,” he said. The family she gave him and the years she stayed with him would never be forgotten. The love he received from her, he said, is what he now passes to his children.
Clipping’s return to the North and to the land became another part of rebuilding his life. He chose to live at Tadoule Lake, a fly-in community where caribou pass through. He recalled being out hunting birds near Murdock Lake when a caribou approached until it stood only a short distance away. He told the animal he was not there to hunt it. For Clipping, the encounter carried a message: “Welcome home. You’re home now. This is where you belong. You’re going to speak for us.”
He now carries that responsibility through land and wildlife work. He told the gathering about serving with the Indigenous-led Seal River Watershed Alliance and the Beverly and Qamanirjuaq Caribou Management Board. He credited the late Ernie Bussidor and conversations around a kitchen table with helping launch the effort to protect the Seal River watershed, its animals and Sayisi Dene heritage.
His work has also made him outspoken with elected leaders and government officials. Policies made in distant offices, he said, often do not fit life in northern communities. He called those officials “cubicle bosses” and contrasted their approach with knowledge handed down from one generation to the next by people who understood the land and animals.
“We have our own education,” Clipping said. “We have our own means of becoming something that we can become, and we can teach our kids that this is something that we’ve done. Just because we went to residential school doesn’t mean that it’s the end of it.”
For Clipping, recovery from alcoholism taught a lesson that also applies to healing from residential school. When he stopped drinking, he initially expected the world around him to change. In time he realized that he was the one changing. Speaking about pain does not instantly heal the world, he said, but it can release some of the anguish within a survivor and make room for a different life.
“You as an individual can make a difference,” he told the circle. He could see that change in the closer relationship he now has with his children. By the end of his account, the anxiety he had carried into Dauphin had begun to lift. “I am blessed to know that this journey, I did not take alone,” he said. “We all took it together.”
Other speakers described the same struggle to recover love and family after Mackay. Gilbert Beardy spoke of sexual abuse, hunger in a private boarding home and an enduring longing for the bush and his parents. He recalled stealing two slices of frozen bread from a freezer at night because supper had been the only food given to him. In May of his final school year, overwhelmed by homesickness, he boarded a train alone, went home and never returned to the school.
Beardy said the harm followed him into adulthood and made it difficult to say three simple words to his mother, father, wife, brothers and sisters. “I couldn’t say it because of all the shit I went through here,” he told the gathering. “Finally, after struggling with that all these years, I finally learned to love again.” He now tells his wife every day that he loves her.
The stories gave practical meaning to the gathering’s theme. Moving on did not mean forgetting Mackay or asking survivors to put the past behind them. It meant finding one another again, reclaiming relationships, speaking truths that had been carried alone and deciding what should be passed to the next generation.
That work continues while governments debate how much progress has been made on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action. The federal government says more than 85 per cent of the 76 calls under its sole or shared responsibility have been completed or are well underway. Indigenous organizations and independent trackers apply a stricter measure.
The Assembly of First Nations reported in September 2025 that no additional Calls to Action had been completed during the previous year and that overall progress remained too slow. It identified continuing shortcomings in education, Indigenous languages, justice, child welfare and the release of residential-school records. Indigenous Watchdog reported as of Sept. 1, 2026 that 14 of the 94 calls were complete, 41 were in progress, 24 were stalled and 15 had not started.
The difference is partly one of measurement. Ottawa combines calls that are completed with those it considers well underway and counts only those involving federal leadership. Outside organizations generally examine all 94 and require the intended change to be achieved before marking a call complete.
The Yellowhead Institute has raised a deeper concern: governments may point to announcements, legislation and new processes while the underlying conditions in child welfare, justice, health and education remain largely intact. The AFN has made a similar distinction, noting that compensation for discriminatory treatment of First Nations children matters, but compensation alone is not the same as changing the system that caused the harm.
For Mackay survivors, the urgency is plain. Many are now in their late 60s, 70s and 80s. They are doing the difficult work of recording what happened, preserving friendships and helping younger generations understand the continuing effects of the schools. The challenge for governments and institutions is whether reconciliation will move in their lifetime from promises and processes to changes survivors can actually see.
At the gathering, Tataskweyak survivor the Right Reverend Larry Beardy outlined a 2027 residential-school commemoration inspired in part by the late Murray Sinclair’s memoir, Who We Are: Four Questions for a Life and a Nation. Beardy has described the train that carried children from northern communities to Dauphin and other destinations as a “train of tears.” He told the gathering that VIA Rail had agreed in principle to provide free tickets for Mackay survivors from northern and southern Manitoba to travel to Vancouver or Ottawa for the proposed commemoration. He is also leading an effort to identify children from northern Manitoba who were taken to residential schools and never returned home.
Organizers thanked Keewatin Tribal Council, which supported travel for Tataskweyak survivors, as well as Anish Corporation, Canadian Heritage and Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak for contributing to the gathering.
As the circle closed, Clipping returned to the lesson he had learned through sobriety, family, grief and life on the land. The world may not change simply because a survivor tells the truth, he said. But the person who releases the anger and anguish can change, and that person can change what is handed to the next generation.