Elders story of residential school abuse finally told Winnipeg Free Press [Video]

By the time she was eight, Betty Ross had been subjected to more than most children.

She had been abandoned by her mother, was then adopted and cared for by a loving Indigenous family, before being kidnapped by a Catholic priest and taken to a residential school, where she endured years of beating and verbal abuse from the nuns.

Now Ross’s story is the subject of the hourlong docudrama, Return to the Falls, which has its Winnipeg première on Wednesday at the Buhler Hall in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

The film — which intersperses dramatic re-enactments of Ross’s childhood at Pimicikamak Cree Nation, also known as Cross Lake First Nation, with her present-day life — sees her return to the area and to visit Sugar Falls, a place of sacred significance to her, for the first time in 70 years.

It was at Sugar Falls where Ross’s father lit the sacred …