Context
The video presents sisters, Marie Slark and Antoinette Charlebois, as people first through their talent, creative artistry, care, teaching, and activism.
Slark and Charlebois introduce us to the violence they survived at Huronia Regional Centre, an Orillia, Ontario “total institution.” The idea of a total institution was defined by sociologist Erving Goffman in 1961 to refer to a place where people are contained, controlled, and cut off from wider society to live, work, and sleep.1(footnote)
Huronia Regional Centre used faulty scientific ideas and practices to segregate people from society and incarcerate people whom professionals in health and welfare labelled with intellectual or developmental disabilities. Health professionals who conducted faulty intelligence testing imposed these labels on children who did not fit white middle class norms. Children’s Aid Society and the Toronto General Hospital Mental Hygiene Clinic were two social welfare institutions involved in removing children deemed to be ‘subnormal’ from their homes and placing them at Huronia.2(footnote) In reality, a family experiencing poverty or the loss of a family member could result in such labelling.3(footnote)
Huronia first opened in Orillia in 1861 as the Convalescent Lunatic Asylum. It was one of the first provincial residential institutions for people labelled with developmental and intellectual disabilities.4(footnote) This institution closed in 1870. It re-opened in 1876 as the Asylum for Idiots and Imbeciles, Orillia.5(footnote) The institution was intended for both children, who were designated Crown wards,6(footnote) and adults. The Convalescent Lunatic Asylum was renamed The Ontario Hospital in 1927 and then subsequently renamed The Ontario Hospital School in 1930. By 1968, the resident population of The Ontario Hospital School was nearly 3,000. In 2009 the Huronia Regional Center closed permanently. Since then, there has been extensive documentation of the extreme physical, sexual, and emotional abuse imposed on residents at Huronia.7(footnote) In 2013, the Ontario government reached a settlement with former Huronia residents, and Premier Kathleen Wynne made a formal apology.8(footnote)
In this video, Slark and Charlebois discuss when they entered Huronia and when they left the institution.9(footnote) Marie Slark entered the institution in 1961 and was discharged in 1970 to live in an "Approved Home," which was still supervised by Huronia, and eventually Community Living. They discuss the role Children’s Aid Society played in separating them from their families and each other by placing them in the institution. They tell how they found each other after 50 years of separation through the Class Action lawsuit against Huronia, led in part by Marie Slark. They explain the importance of family and the importance of telling their story.
This video includes dehumanizing language that health professionals used to justify institutionalizing children. An example of this language is the r-word. We request that people not use dehumanizing language in or beyond the classroom except when reading and referring to language used in the materials themselves because of the damage it has done.
