Doug Happyjack carves out time each day for a two-hour walk that begins from his home in Waswanipi, a Quebec community built in the 1980s. The thickset, 57-year-old tradesman walks down streets named after trees and past stop signs — ARRET and STOP run in smaller lettering than the Cree command of ᒋᐃᐦ. Up on Birch Street, with a view of the prefab bungalows down the hill, Doug sees sixth- and seventh-graders, the Cree Nation Bears select U13s, lugging their hockey bags into All Chiefs Memorial Arena. Then he crosses Highway 113, where logging trucks rumble down to Montreal nine hours away. And finally, he reaches the river, where he used to watch other kids play hockey when it was frozen over back in his teenage years. “I never joined in the games, never played here at all really,” he says.
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For Happyjack, the daily walks began three years ago as exercise, a way to drop some weight after being diagnosed with diabetes. He’s down from around 300 pounds to 225. Over the course of hundreds of days and thousands of miles, the treks evolved into something more. “It gave me a lot of time alone … a lot of time to think about things I hadn’t thought about since I was the same age as the kids at the arena,” he says.
Happyjack had told his family and friends a bit about his years at the Anglican residential school in La Tuque. They knew he had played hockey there for an all-star team of Cree kids. That they had played in tournaments around the province and even on a tour of Europe.
In the hours alone, walking along the river through deep snow and frigid temperatures, through the thaw, summer and fall, the goose-hunting and moose-hunting seasons, his mind raced with memories of La Tuque, to the team and the tour.
On this day, he’s shown an image on an iPhone, one he’s never seen before. The 12-year-olds are wearing broad smiles, blue and gold team jackets and feathered headdresses. The captain, Jimmy, sits in the middle of the front row with the biggest headdress. The script on the photo reads: Merci, Les Indiennes de Quebec. It’s dated March 31, 1978.
Doug Happyjack’s voice doesn’t change. “Seven of us in the team photo, four living,” he says flatly. “The other three didn’t make it out of their 30s or 40s. Two had drug problems and overdoses. Another was murdered. All the years and we never talked about it to each other.”
But on those long walks, Happyjack reflected on truths he had long buried. He was once a hockey player. And he was sexually abused by the priest who was also his coach.
Canada’s residential schools for indigenous youth represent the most shameful page in the history of the country. The mandate for the residential system was laid out in the Indian Act of 1876, written by Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada. Macdonald stated the objective of the residential schools in a few blunt words: “Kill the Indian in the child.” Macdonald laid out the methodology for the forced assimilation: “In order to educate the children properly we must separate them from their families … When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with his parents who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write.”
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Beginning in the 1880s, an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families and shipped to federally established residential schools run by various Christian churches. At one time, there were as many as 130 residential schools operated in eight of Canada’s 10 provinces and each of three northern territories, the last shuttering its doors in 1996.
In the years since, there has been a national reckoning and reassessment. It began when the federal government founded the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2007. The commission convened hearings over seven years across the country and set about to compensate hundreds of survivors of the residential schools and their families.
In 2015, Canadian Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin described the residential school system as an attempt to commit “cultural genocide.” If her words seemed hyperbolic, they rang true in 2021 when mass grave sites were discovered on the grounds of two former church-based schools in western Canada.
Last year, the federal government passed legislation to make Sept. 30 the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation.
Some Cree from Waswanipi attended the Truth and Reconciliation hearings and gave their accounts of their experiences at La Tuque and the lasting impact on their families. Some pursued and received compensation from the class-action suit. Doug Happyjack did not.
“I just wanted to avoid talking about residential school,” he says. “If I didn’t talk about it, then (I thought) it wouldn’t matter. Only all these years after, I realize I can’t just put it behind me. It made me who I am — every day. The school did and, yeah, the hockey team did. The hockey team might have been some of the worst of it.”
Change was happening with the Happyjacks and other Cree families on the reserve back in the 1950s and ’60s. Doug’s father was the first to build a permanent frame home on the banks of the Waswanipi River. Before that, families lived as nomads. “They moved up and down the traplines all year, living off the land,” he says. “Some still do.”
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To the best of his memory, Doug had never been off the reserve in the first six years of his life but then in the fall, a bus pulled up on the highway and some White men stepped off. They spoke to his parents, who told Happyjack that he was going away for a day.
“The White men from the bus came and scooped us up, all the kids, and said they were taking us on a little trip,” he says. “I waved goodbye to my parents. A few hours later, it was getting dark and we kept going and going. Kids crying for their parents. We knew something was wrong.”
That was September. He wouldn’t return home for 10 months.
The driver had been hired by the Anglican Church. Doug and the other kids were destined for the residential school in La Tuque, a town 100 miles north of Trois Rivieres.
The principal of the school when Doug arrived, Father Jean Maurice Bonnard, passed himself off as a progressive in the education of Indigenous youth. He would end corporal punishment, allow students to grow their hair long and speak in their native tongues. The Swiss-born priest would tell people that he’d been criticized for being “too lenient” and would run an even looser ship if he hadn’t been hamstrung by federal guidelines and the church dictates.
Some former students tell a different story. Romeo Saganash started at the school in the late 1960s with three of his older siblings. When Romeo was 7, Bonnard brought the four siblings, three brothers and a sister, into the principal’s office and told them that their father had died. “He just said it like that, and that we couldn’t go home for the funeral because there was no money in the budget … so just suck it up,” says Saganash, who went on to become a lawyer and a member of Parliament. “I didn’t cry. I just decided that day that I wasn’t to let this man … break me.”
Bonnard also coached the school’s peewee hockey team, Les Indiennes de Quebec. The players, fifth-, sixth- and seventh-graders, were the only La Tuque students who were allowed off school grounds. They became the faces of the res school. Bonnard had them wear feathered headdresses when they stepped on the ice at games out in the community, like an Indigenous minstrel show or, as Romeo Saganash describes it, “a freak show.”
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Les Indiennes didn’t compete in a formal league but played exhibitions against other residential schools and in tournaments, including the Quebec City International tournament, the biggest age-group hockey tourney in the world. For the younger kids, like Doug when he first arrived at La Tuque, the team seemed to be a privileged group in an environment otherwise rife with hardship. “The thing that was closest to the adventure they talked about on the bus,” Happyjack says.
Happyjack spent five years at the school, waiting his turn. Through that time, he figured out his best chance to make the team was as a goalie. La Tuque didn’t have a sports program for the younger students, no feeder teams or an organized rec program. Still, when the younger kids were sent outside to play in the winter, the boys would head over to the sheet of ice and grab the sticks and pucks used by Les Indiennes de Quebec.
Doug always grabbed the goalie’s blocker, glove and stick. Said one former La Tuque player who asked not to be named: “When we were in Grade 4 or 5, we didn’t want to be in the NHL. We didn’t watch TV or have a radio. We didn’t know anything about (professional hockey). We wanted to be on the res school team. That’s all we wanted.”
Bonnard was a tough coach. “If you didn’t skate hard enough or made the wrong play, you’d get a puck shot at you or a slash for discipline,” Happyjack says. “The equipment in those days wasn’t like it is today — a puck or a stick (hit you) and you felt it. You couldn’t say anything. Bonnard had all the power to take everything away from any of us, and nobody was watching him — no parents were around and we never had a chance to speak to them for months.
“And what we saw Father Bonnard do to the players on the team (when we were younger) really didn’t seem like anything different than what went on with the other teachers in our class, where you’d get hit or worse. It’s what we knew.”
When Happyjack was in the sixth grade, Bonnard selected him for the team. His memories from games haven’t faded and he lightens when recounting them.
“We played a Mohawk team in Trois Rivieres that was supposed to be much stronger than us, but we beat them in overtime and the crowd went crazy, our best game that winter,” he says. “We won a big tournament in Cap-de-Madeleine with 30 teams in it. And we’d always come out on the ice wearing the (headdress) feathers and everyone in the arena would cheer and laugh.”
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Happyjack’s memories of his time off the ice haven’t faded either. In those years watching the older kids on the Indiennes de Quebec, he and his classmates didn’t know what went on behind the scenes.
“We didn’t know anything about what you’d call abuse,” Happyjack says. “But when we made the team, the only thing we knew is that we saw that the old man came in the shower trying to wash us. Then he’d tell us to wash him too — to scrub his balls and the rest. He would make us touch his penis. He would touch us (sexually). He’d rub his penis against our backs. And then, sometimes at night when we would be asleep, he’d pick one boy (out of the dormitory) — he was the quietest, shiest one of all of us — and take him away somewhere. We never knew where the father took him. Then he’d bring him back at two o’clock, three o’clock in the morning and we didn’t know what happened. Nobody talked about it afterward. We were ashamed.”
The priest always entered the team in the international peewee tournament in Quebec City, the largest age-group hockey event in the world. Throughout its early history, the Quebec tournament featured teams from residential schools across the country — in the 1960s, they played in the serie indienne, a category separated from “White” teams, and Les Indiens du Quebec took several titles or lost out in the championship game. Officials dropped the serie indienne in 1974, and four years later La Tuque skated in the main section of the tournament.
Here Happyjack’s memories grow hazy. “I think we won a game or two,” he says of the 1978 tournament. “I don’t remember who we played. The one thing I remember about that week was they had me and another kid stay at the home of this single woman who seemed to drink a lot. She left us on our own and we didn’t have anything to eat. Then one night, she came home and got us drunk and did stuff to us, touching us — I don’t remember everything because I passed out.”
A couple of weeks later, Bonnard took the Indiennes de Quebec on a tour of Europe. He had done this twice before, in 1974 and 1977.
His stated intentions were spelled out in a document that was later filed in the Anglican Church of Canada’s archive: “Any father, who left in his native land overseas bright memories of a happy childhood in a country of beauty and charm, will, (I believe) dream of some day (sic) taking his children back to his homeland; he will look forward to reliving through them and with them some of the experiences he has known, rediscovering with them the towns and villages, the landscape where he lived as a child, and so, introduce them to the customs and values with which he grew up.”
The La Tuque team arrived in England and then made stops in France and Holland. “It was in Amsterdam that he really went for me one day in the showers with the team,” Happyjack says. “He was touching up against me and the other boys were so scared by it, (they) ran out of the showers without their towels.”
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The team then traveled to Bonnard’s hometown in Switzerland for a longer stay. The notes that Bonnard kept from the 1978 tour mostly cataloged the usual sightseeing stops (the Tower of London, the Eiffel Tower and Versailles), as well as trips to ski hills once they reached Bonnard’s native Switzerland. Mentions of their accommodations are scant, but his notes from the previous year’s trip explain in detail why he placed each individual player with a billet family, arguing that a hostel or dormitory “would have deprived (the boys) of valuable human contacts.”
“He’d tell us, ‘You live here and you, you live there.’ We were all scattered out,” Happyjack says. “Nobody lived together.”
Happyjack remembers that Bonnard seemed emboldened in his abuse of players as the tour of Europe progressed. The priest knew the clock was winding down at La Tuque. In a letter of thanks that he wrote to Anglican officials upon the return from Europe: “I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all those who made the trip possible. … The narration of the 1977 trip ended with the vow that yet another trip take place in the future. Logic and the forthcoming closing of the Residence makes it very unlikely (next year).”
Weeks after Happyjack and his teammates returned from Europe, the Quebec government shuttered all residential schools in the province.
While Happyjack had been away at La Tuque all those years, the Cree had been locked in a dispute with the Quebec government — the provincial government hadn’t recognized their claim to their home territory when it tapped into mining, forestry and energy resources in the region. The Cree and Inuit believed Quebec was violating existing treaties and would cause irreparable damage to their lands.
The federal Department of Indian Affairs sided with the Cree and the Inuit and the Quebec government took its lumps in court — an injunction in 1973 put a hold on a massive hydro project in James Bay and left provincial authorities in a disadvantageous position in negotiations. The settlement, the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, would in time improve the quality of life for the Indigenous people of the province, including autonomy in the education of its young people.
Happyjack returned home for good in the summer of 1978, reconnecting with his family and his little brother, Marcel. “He had been so far away for so long, not even coming home at Christmas, it felt like he was a stranger I was meeting for the first time,” says Marcel, who is five years younger. “There was so much of his life that I could never know about — that he never talked about.
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“That’s how it was for a lot of families like ours. There was a bunch of kids like me who were going to grow up in a way different from our parents, different than even our older brothers and sisters.”
Happyjack never played hockey after the team returned from Europe. “When I came back to Waswanipi, there was no organized game or league,” he says. “There were kids who played on the river in the winter, and in those types of games you don’t have goalies. I didn’t have skates or equipment anyway.”
He never traveled again either, save for one trip to Peterborough, Ontario, a few years back. He hasn’t been outside the province of Quebec since the La Tuque team’s trip to Europe. In one letter in the Anglican archive, Bonnard wrote about his hope that the tour would instill in the boys a desire to return to Europe and see more of the world: “Be careful of your dreams. They just may become reality.”
Happyjack bristles when it’s read back to him. “I don’t know that the trip to Europe was ‘a dream,’” he says. “My reality is here.”
Happyjack also didn’t return to school. At 14, he worked as a laborer as the Cree band built the community of Waswanipi from the ground up with the proceeds of the settlement with the province. One of his first jobs was working on a hockey arena, which has since been converted into a warehouse.
“When it opened up, they had teams of guys in their 20s there and it had been a few years since I played (at La Tuque), so I never got on the ice with them,” he says.
And Happyjack stayed silent about the abuse he suffered at the school — in this way he was like many who attended residential schools.
“I know elders who went to residential school and don’t talk about (their experiences) and can’t even speak when you ask them about watching their sons and daughters get on the bus, being taken away (to the res schools),” he said.
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Physical and sexual abuse at La Tuque became common knowledge in Waswanipi. “The boy who was in the bed next to me in the dormitory was taken away by a priest (not Bonnard) at about 11 o’clock every night for seven years,” Romeo Saganash says. “I would stay awake until the priest took him. I remember I’d count the 19 steps he’d take walking from the door to the boy’s bed. I wasn’t the only one who knew about the boy.”
“I was at the res school before (Bonnard), but I heard stories for years about how the priest beat them and made the boys shower with him,” says Paul Dixon, a trapper who organizes support for former La Tuque students. “I’ve seen how they are struggling with anger and shame as adults. We all knew it was there even if no one else did.”
And yet red flags had gone up at the time. In 1969, a cook at La Tuque was fired after he was seen in a bathroom with a 10-year-old who later told a social worker that he had been sexually assaulted. The following year, police investigated a child-care worker at La Tuque who was suspected of abusing four boys. Searches haven’t turned up any documented charges or convictions for criminal abuse at the La Tuque school, but reportedly many complaints were registered during its years of operation and, according to an investigation by CBC and Journal de Montreal, some reached the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa, including at least two filed by Bonnard in the early ’70s.
Doug didn’t tell his story at the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, but he was angered to find out that Bonnard tried to shape his own legacy during that time. In April 2013, the then-84-year-old retired priest spoke to a reporter from a church periodical covering the hearings and portrayed himself as a Good Samaritan. The reporter took it all on faith.
For Happyjack and other former La Tuque students who spoke to The Athletic, the most galling of Bonnard’s claims was that he was beloved as a principal and remembered with affection.
Bonnard died in 2016.
Happyjack retraces his steps on the walk home from the river and along the way he passes the Waswanipi Band offices, where his brother Marcel sits as the chief.
Marcel didn’t have to go to La Tuque because by the time he was eligible, Quebec’s residential-school program was eliminated. But he believes the impact has been felt throughout the community. “With the discovery of the bodies on those reserves last summer, a lot of us had to have tough conversations with young people,” he says. “My 7-year-old grandson asked me, ‘Are they going to come for me someday?’ What we can do best for young people is showing them that we have something for them here.”
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Marcel keeps a copy of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement on his desk. “Like a Bible,” he says. Because of the deal that the Indigenous in Quebec struck with the government, La Tuque was shuttered, Doug came home and Marcel and others his age and all others after can go to school without leaving home. As band chief, Marcel and the council oversee the grade school and high school in Waswanipi, where Cree language is spoken and where Cree history and culture are large parts of the curriculum. Marcel and the council also oversee the recreation program, including the age-group hockey teams that play at the All Chiefs Memorial Arena and against non-Indigenous teams in leagues in northern Quebec.
“Doug and his team played in tournaments and went to Europe, but was it a positive experience for them?” Marcel says. “No, the game has an important place here in Waswanipi. We just want the kids at that arena to play a game that gives them joy (and) is good for their development. We want them to come away with good memories that will last a lifetime.”
— Gare Joyce, based in Kingston, Ontario, is formerly of ESPN The Mag & Sportsnet, and is author of a new book, “How to Succeed in Sportswriting (Without Really Trying)” on Audible.
(Top photo of La Tuque residential school rink from the early 1970s / Anglican Church of Canada’s archive)