The Sun Still Rises: A Family's Legacy Through Residential Schools, Loss, and Reconciliation

Today is September 30th — Orange Shirt Day, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Every Child Matters. And today, I want to tell you our family's story.

I married into the Jacko family of Cold Lake First Nations — a family of eleven. My father-in-law and mother-in-law, Jenny, both attended residential school: Blue Quills and Onion Lake. What happened to them there was outrageous. My father-in-law, Ovid, was abused terribly. When he came out, he carried that abuse forward — he became abusive toward his wife and children.

Genevive eventually left and made her way to Calgary. There, in a situation no grandmother should ever face, she was murdered — stabbed to death by a drunk man, in front of her grandchildren.

Of the eleven in that family, many have struggled with addiction — alcohol, drugs — and all have died, several with those struggles still unresolved when they passed.

My sons no longer have aunties, uncles, or grandparents to learn from. That is what this era took from us. Not history in a textbook — people.

Relationships. A whole generation family gone because of all the unresolved pain.

What I Learned From the Jacko Family

Despite everything — the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse my mother-in-law and father-in-law endured — I have to thank them. They taught me what residential schools did to people, and to families, in a way no book ever could. That knowledge is now part of our family's legacy, so that our children never have to live with this behaviour themselves. It stops here.

Truth and Reconciliation in Edmonton

In March 2014, Iveson was inducted as an honourary witness when Edmonton hosted the TRC’s final national event. “That proved to be a transformative experience for our city,” said Iveson. “ (The survivors’) stories were difficult to listen to but it was time for Canada and the world to hear them.”

As a social worker of 36 years, I had the privilege of being part of the Truth and Reconciliation events in Edmonton in 2014, where 6,000 survivors came together to tell their stories. It was one of the most humbling experiences of my life — sitting with the truth that Canada's churches and government institutions carried out heinous acts against Indigenous people to take their land, and calling it something else.

The Legacy That Remains

Canada still has work to do. We have seen treaties broken again and again, and the intergenerational impact of residential schools continues to show up as addiction, broken families, and grief that never fully resolves. Indigenous people remain overrepresented in jails and in the child welfare system — systems that, in many ways, have simply picked up where residential schools left off.

Healing this requires honesty: better relationships between government and Nations, and accountability from the faith organizations that ran these schools and hurt the children in their care. It requires more than apologies. It requires giving back — not just words, but land, resources, and real partnership.

Every Child Matters

Even on the darkest nights, the sun has never left us — sometimes the earth simply needs to turn. That is what I carry from this family: that survival is possible, that love outlasts abuse, and that the next generation does not have to inherit what was done to the last one.

To the Jacko family — thank you for trusting me with your story, and for the strength it took to share it.

Every Child Matters. 🧡