Original aritcle available here: Sunday, Dec. 08, 2002 December 6, 2002 Native man leads class-action quest for residential school compensation OTTAWA(CP) -- Charlie Baxter was nine years old when a bush plane landed near his family's remote trap line to take him off to a native residential school.  It was 1959.  Baxter spoke Ojibway and didn't understand a word of English.  He and nine siblings were plucked from their Ontario home, about 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay, by federal government agents and the RCMP.   Any resistance by their parents could have meant jail time.  The children wound up at the now-closed Pelican Falls Indian Residential School near Sioux Lookout, Ont. Each was assigned a number.  Baxter was No. 11. He remembers being slapped until he understood what his number meant and how to respond when he heard it called.  "Or if anybody different got up, they got slapped."  Now 52, Baxter is named as the lead plaintiff on a countrywide, class-action lawsuit. If certified to proceed, it seeks at least $12 billion in compensation for former residential school students and their families.   A judge is expected to rule next year on whether about 91,000 people who attended the schools between 1920 and 1996 shared a similar enough experience to sue as a group.  The lawsuit, led by Toronto law firm Thomson Rogers, claims damages not just for sexual and physical abuse. It also seeks compensation for how the forced removal of native children from their homes caused "profound and permanent cultural, psychological and emotional injury."   No Canadian judge has awarded damages for language or cultural losses, which federal officials say are unquantifiable.  And since there's no legal precedent, Ottawa has refused to consider awarding compensation for such effects. Instead, it's developing a multimillion-dollar foundation to help preserve native languages.   The initiative, touted as being a better response than cash payouts, is to be announced in the new year alongside a major plan to get residential school lawsuits out of the courts and into adjudication, sources say.  Ottawa is seeking a faster way to resolve mounting lawsuits that already involve more than 12,000 plaintiffs. Otherwise, the snail's pace of litigation could tie up cases in court for decades.   Baxter thinks the government, which first set up residential schools in the 19th century to "christianize and civilize" native kids, should be legally held to account.  "They beat the hell out of us when we talked . . . our native tongue."  But nights were the worst part of more than two years at Pelican Falls, Baxter said.  Staff and older bullies would enter the dormitories looking for sex, he said.  "The children that were there saw it, and there was nothing we could do. We were helpless."   He recalled being forced to perform oral sex on an older male student.  Baxter and his siblings were moved to another residential school in Sault Ste. Marie where he stayed until high school.  When he turned 18 and was free of the school system, Indian Affairs offered no help getting back to his remote community, he said.  Cut off from his roots, Baxter would not return to his home at Makokabaton Lake until he was 32.  "When I got there, my parents, my dad, didn't want me. They thought I had abandoned them."  Shunned by the community, Baxter started drinking. His marriage broke up, he got in fights and wound up in jail for 18 months for assault.  It took years to repair relations with his parents that never fully healed, Baxter said, fighting tears.   Today, the father of seven is a band councillor on the Constance Lake First Nation, about 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay.  Baxter has been sober for eight years, and works with Ontario government officials to solve band complaints about forestry and other issues.  No amount of compensation can bring back a lost childhood, he says.  His support of the class-action effort "is for all survivors who are still out there."  Many are in remote areas without access to legal advice and most haven't come forward, Baxter said.  "Someone has to start the process."