Who speaks? Who tells? Who listens? – Part 1

By Victoria Freeman

In 1960, my twenty-month-old sister Martha was admitted to the Rideau Regional Centre, an institution for people with developmental disabilities located on the outskirts of Smiths Falls, Ontario. For the next thirteen years she would live in this isolated and overcrowded complex of 50 buildings that at its peak housed 2,600 inmates.

I use the word ‘inmate’ deliberately to highlight the forms of incarceration and unfreedom that this form of institutionalization represented, though at the time my entire family believed it was the best available care for my sister. Only two years older than Martha, I was deeply traumatized by the stigma associated with her Down Syndrome as well as by her removal from our family and our infrequent visits to the frightening alternate reality we referred to as the “hospital-school.”

These experiences profoundly shaped my life as well as hers, including my ability to live confidently with my own difference, as a bisexual and gender-queer person.  As philosopher of science Ian Hacking has said, the word “normal” was “one of the most powerful ideological tools of the twentieth century.”[i]

Attitudes to disability and difference began to shift in the mid 1960s and early 1970s. My sister was discharged from the institution to live in an Approved Boarding Home in another city, and then in the caregiver’s family home, when the Boarding Home closed. Martha would flourish in the care of this loving woman for 29 years. Meanwhile, I lived with unacknowledged survivor’s guilt. Only through therapy and new connections forged decades later with people with intellectual disabilities did I begin to understand the ways I had been haunted by the injustices experienced by my sister.

The last three institutions of this type, one of them Rideau, closed in 2009 (the first, the Hospital for Idiots and Imbeciles, later the Huronia Regional Centre, had opened in 1876).

In 2010, incredibly brave Huronia survivors Marie Slark and Pat Seth, with support from litigation guardians Marilyn and Jim Dolmage, launched a class action lawsuit against the Ontario government, alleging systemic abuse and neglect.  A similar class action by Rideau Regional Centre survivor David McKillop,  supported by litigation guardian Vici Clarke, followed. Out of court settlements led to very modest financial compensation for survivors and a public apology by then premier Kathleen Wynne and Ontario opposition party leaders in 2013.  The class actions also led to my first contact with institutional survivors who were willing and able to speak about their experiences – in heartbreaking detail.

This personal and social history from the 1950s to the present is the subject of my book: A World Without Martha: A Memoir of Sisters, Disability, and Difference, published by Purich Books/UBC Press in 2019.

Writing about my sister, who died in 2002, was an ethical challenge. In many ways, I had barely known her and she had a limited ability to speak for herself and be heard by others, including me.

I gained access to her institutional file, which consisted mainly of medical tests, records of quarantine for various communicable diseases, and cryptic observations by summer  students assigned to her ward:  “She doesn’t have the trust in adults that most children seem to have…” A year of my sister’s life would be reduced to a miserly sentence or two, but the two photographs in her file said more than any entry: the first, the bewildered baby she was at her admittance; the second, after living there for ten years, all desperation and defiance. Other than that, I had family photos from our visits, scattered family memories, and my own psychic pain.

Martha Freeman after leaving the Rideau Regional Centre

I struggled to write about this past without reinscribing the ableist attitudes that had shaped me as a child and that I will be unlearning for the rest of my life. I could draw on the increasingly available testimony of other survivors –published, videotaped, or in person[ii] —  on Madeline Burghardt’s groundbreaking scholarly study[iii], and on what I had learned from residential school survivors, whose experiences bore some similarities.

Two films, the NFB’s Danny and Nicky (1969), and the Ontario government-commissioned One on Every Street (c 1960), brought back the attitudes of my childhood with gut-wrenching clarity. I also discovered the long history of parent activism, and a key article about Huronia written by Pierre Berton the year my sister went to Rideau. Peer reviewers helped me delve further into scholarly and activist literatures on the historical construction of disability and difference; studies of mother blame helped me judge my mother less and reconsider my father’s role in their joint decisions.

I also struggled with my own right to speak about the truth of my life as I experienced it. What happened to my sister affected me so deeply and intimately that I couldn’t discuss it without  disclosing quite personal things about my parents, my siblings, my partner, and our family dynamics. I am the one with the pen – and questions of privacy and authorial privilege abound. My parents had dementia when I began the book, have since died, and now live on in memory through my words, as does my sister. Luckily, my siblings supported my efforts to tell the truth lovingly, and contributed their own memories and perspectives.

The author in front of the shuttered Rideau Regional Centre in 2013.

I now recognize that my own subject-position as a sibling of a person institutionalized for intellectual disability — and especially as a sister (for there does seem to be a gendered dimension to this) — involved a silencing over decades. I have since talked with other siblings; we experienced the collateral damage of institutionalization,  our pain and loss often unrecognized in our families and in society at large. We had to be the good child, the smart child, the consolation or replacement, unable to discuss or question what had happened, for fear of also being exiled. Our siblings endured more profound injustices, but we also have stories to tell and a need for healing. We are also part of this history.

Victoria Freeman is a writer, multidisciplinary artist, educator, and public historian. She co-wrote the film By These Presents: “Purchasing” Toronto, which was accepted at the now postponed 2020 Glasgow Short Film Festival, and has co-written two plays, The Talking Treaties Spectacle, performed at Fort York at the 2017 Indigenous Arts Festival, and Birds Make Me Think About Freedom, which premiered at the 2018 Toronto Fringe Festival. A World Without Martha: A Memoir of Sisters, Disability, and Difference was published by UBC Press in 2019.


[i] Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Harvard: Boston University Press, 2000).

[ii] See, for example, Rideau survivor Gordon Ferguson’s Never Going Back: The Gordon Ferguson Story: Lessons from a Life of Courage, Strength and Love (Brockville: Brockville and District Association for Community Involvement, 2016),  survivor videos on Remember Every Name’s YouTube channel, and the 2011 CBC radio documentary The Gristle and the Stew: Revisiting the Horrors of Huronia .

[iii] Madeline Burghardt, Broken: Institutions, Families, and the Construction of Intellectual Disability (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2018).

Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Blog posts published before October  28, 2018 are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.

7 thoughts on “Who speaks? Who tells? Who listens? – Part 1

  1. Athina

    Victoria,
    The inclusion of Ian Hacking’s ideas on the damaging concept of ‘normal’ is so key. We are so deeply affected by this as we look at ‘the other’, as well as ‘the other’ within ourselves. Having already read your book, I know the combination of personal and social history is beautifully explored!

  2. Claudette Amyot

    My mother was placed in Rideau when she was around 7 years old she didn’t have any disabilities. Back then it was an easy way for parents to get rid of their children. She came out of Rideau at the age of 16 when her brother was old enough to sigh her out. She spoke about the abuse she went through. She came out a broken person.

  3. Bob Fitzsimons

    Thank you for your article, Victoria. I did my Paediatric training in Kingston from 1973 to 1976 and we went to Smith Falls as part of our rotation. I wrote a poem in Feb 1974.
    ————————————
    A corridor too long for my feet
    must surely be too small for you
    who spend a lifetime in its shadows.
    And yet you all give smiles,
    greeting the protective white coat.
    Your challenge cannot go ignored but
    your search for friendship is a burden
    I sadly reject, along with those
    who see themselves different from you.
    Like many I criticise your home
    feeling a clinical pity for you
    until your smiles penetrate
    the skin of my guilt.
    —————————-
    As you can see I felt distinctly uncomfortable. In my evaluation of the visit I said this rotation should be scrapped.

  4. Krista

    My brother was in Rideau from about age 6 until 12 when he died of pneumonia. My mother felt she had no other choice once he was school aged. At that time (early 70s), there was very little community supports available, especially outside urban centres. Honestly, I think that agreeing to send him was her biggest regret in life…broke her heart in a way that never healed.

  5. Roseanne Amyot

    My mother passed away and now I’m looking for her record. She was there from age 10 to 18 when her brother signed her out. Just looking for a contact number?

  6. G Reid

    I realized recently that I was probably born at the Rideau Regional Center. I always wondered why I was born in Smith Falls. I have so many questions revolving around her time in the center.

  7. Beatrice Crites

    I have often wondered about a cousin who spent her life there and what happened to her once the institution closed. Is there any way to find out about her?

Please note: ActiveHistory.ca encourages comment and constructive discussion of our articles. We reserve the right to delete comments submitted under aliases, or that contain spam, harassment, or attacks on an individual.