What Was the First Day of Residential School Like? Part 4

It sounded like as if they were gonna kill him, or is he breathing, I would say

There are also reports of students being forced to eat soap if they were caught speaking an Aboriginal language. Pierrette Benjamin said this happened at the school at La Tuque. “They put a big chunk, and they put it in my mouth, and the principal, she put it in my mouth, and she said, ‘Eat it, eat it,’ and she just showed me what to do. She told me to swallow it. And she put her hand in front of my mouth, so I was chewing and chewing, and I had to swallow it, so I swallowed it, and then I had to open my mouth to show that I had swallowed it. And at the end, I understood, and she told me, ‘That’s a dirty language, that’s the devil that speaks in your mouth, so we had to wash it because it’s dirty.’ So, every day I spent at the residential school, I was treated badly. I was almost slaughtered.”[73]

Alphonsine McNeely attended the Roman Catholic school at Aklavik in the 1940s. On one occasion, she and a friend were overheard by a nun teaching each other their respective languages. “She took me, I don’t know why they always target me. So anyway, she took me to the sink, and she took this, they had this Sunlight soap, it’s kind of a big bar, she took a brush, a floor brush, and she, she, I thought she was gonna tell me to scrub the floor or something. Instead of that she, she grabbed my hair, and she started rubbing my mouth with that.”[74]

Ken A. Littledeer recalled seeing a fellow student at the Sioux Lookout school having his mouth washed out with soap for speaking an Aboriginal language. “I watched that incident, and, and I didn’t like what I seen, bubbles coming out. It sounded like as if they were gonna kill him, or is he breathing, I would say, ’cause I see bubbles coming out of his nose and his mouth, and gagging.”[75]

At the Shubenacadie school, a staff member once caught William Herney speaking Mi’kmaq with his brother. “And she says, ‘What are you two boys doing?’ ‘Nothing, Sister.’ ‘Oh, yes, I heard you. You were talking that language, weren’t you?’ ‘Yes, Sister.’ ‘Come here,’ she said. I went over. She took a stick. She leaned me over to the bathtub, the bathtub, grabbed me by the neck, and I don’t know how many whacks she gave me over my bum, and I was crying like I don’t know what. Then, she took a piece of soap, and she washed my mouth in it. I can still even taste that lye soap. All my life I tasted that taste. And she said, ‘You don’t talk that language here. That’s a no, no, no, you don’t, you understand?’ Looks at me straight in the eye. She said, ‘Do you understand that?’ And I said, ‘Yes, Sister, I understand.’”[76]

In Roman Catholic schools in the West and North, it was most common for many of the staff members to have come originally from Québec or Europe. The fact that these staff members were allowed to speak to one another in French (their first language) bothered many students. Mary Courchene once asked one of the staff of the Fort Alexander, Manitoba, school, “’How come you get to talk your own language and we don’t?’ It was just, you know wanting to know why they could speak French and we couldn’t speak Ojibway inside the, inside the school. We spoke it outside, but we couldn’t speak it inside, inside the house; inside the school. And she looked at me and she was very angry but she didn’t say anything.” Later that evening, she was told to apologize to the nun in the dining room. At first she objected, only to be told that “’No one’s going to eat until you say you’re sorry.’ Of course I had to say I was sorry; I didn’t want all the rest of the students to have to go without supper, and just because I wouldn’t say I was sorry. So I said I was sorry and but it was, I was made to feel humiliated. And there were, there was always humiliations like that, that made you feel small. And of course it was meant for the other, all the other students to laugh at this person that was made to feel ashamed. So it was always you know, that kind of, that kind of thing. So we weren’t, we weren’t encouraged to be ourselves. We weren’t encouraged to, to do what was best for us. It was always what those … anyway.”[77]

Students also objected to the fact that if they were taught an additional language, it was French. Lydia Ross attended the Cross Lake, Manitoba, school. “And in my Grade Eleven essay, I wrote out a French essay of 500 words, with all the verbs and adjectives, I had 90% in there. That’s how, that’s how much French that they taught me, and not my language. I couldn’t speak our language.”[78]

Despite the usual instruction to conduct school life in English (or in French in some of the Québec schools), many students continued to speak their own language when they could. Monique Papatie said that at the Amos, Québec, school, students “went to a corner to speak our language, even if we weren’t allowed to do that. We kept our language, the Anishinabemowin language, and I speak it very well today, and this is what I want to teach the children, my mother’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”[79]

Arthur Ron McKay said he was able to hang on to his language at the Sandy Bay school. “Or else you’d get your ears pulled, your hair or get hit with a ruler. Well anyway, I just kept going and I couldn’t speak my language but then I was speaking to boys in the, ’cause they came from the reserve and they speak my language. We use to speak lots, like behind, behind our supervisors or whatever you call it. That’s why I didn’t lose my language; we always sneak away when I was smaller.”[80]

Ronalee Lavallee said that at the Grayson, Saskatchewan, school in the 1970s, there were a number of students from northern Saskatchewan who spoke fluent Cree. At night, they would teach the language to the other students. “We wanted to learn this language, and how we used to take turns watching for the nuns so that we wouldn’t get into trouble. And I think, just think, that was 1970 or ’71, that’s not so long ago, and they were still doing that to us?”[81]

From the student perspective, the overall message was to speak English (or French). There were some exceptions. Mary Stoney said that at the school she attended in Alberta, at least one priest made an effort to preserve Aboriginal languages. “We were lucky to have Father Mullen, who helped preserve our Cree language by translating the Bible and hymns. If not, the language would be in worse shape. In school we often spoke Cree to each other, but some Sisters were strict with the rules and some were not.”[82]

Both Catholic and Protestant missionaries had a long history of learning and encouraging the use of Aboriginal languages in religious settings. At the Beauval, Saskatchewan, school, Albert Fiddler recalled, Aboriginal languages were restricted to use in religious classes. “But that’s the only thing they allow is learning how to pray in Cree.  They won’t allow us to talk to each other, and they make sure that we don’t, we don’t talk to each other in Cree either. We only, they only teach us how to pray in Cree in catechisms in the classroom, but not to talk to each other because it’s un-polite for somebody that doesn’t understand Cree.”[83]

Alex Alikashuak said that at the school at Churchill, Manitoba, which operated in the 1960s, there were no restrictions on the use of Aboriginal languages. “We, we almost never spoke English. The only time we spoke English was when we ran across, like, see the thing is in our school, some of our dormitory staff were Inuit people too, so we, we couldn’t speak to them in English, anyway. The only time, real time we spoke English was when we were in the classroom, or we’re talking to one of the administration staff, and or somebody from town that’s not Inuit, but otherwise we, everybody spoke our language.”[84]

The rule in the Aklavik residence, according to Ellen Smith, was “English please, English please.” But, she said, “when we went on the playground in Aklavik we spoke our language; run around. There they even took us out on the land in the springtime. We went muskrat trapping.”[85]

Despite the encouragement that was ordered in some schools, and the students’ efforts to keep their language alive, the overall impact was language loss. Russell Bone felt he lost the ability to speak his language at the Pine Creek school. “I realized that nobody was, never used to talk their language. Some would, some would speak their language as long as the nuns weren’t around, eh. And then, I started losing it. Forgetting how, what to say, about the words; what they meant; and when somebody, let’s say, there’d be two people talking, eh, two young guys talking their language, and I wouldn’t understand. I’d lost it.”[86]

Of her experiences at the Baptist school in Whitehorse and the Anglican school in Carcross, Rose Dorothy Charlie said, “They took my language. They took it right out of my mouth. I never spoke it again. My mother asked me why, why you could hear me, she’s, like, ‘I could teach you.’ I said, ‘No.’ And she said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘I’m tired of getting hit in the mouth, tired of it. I’m just tired of it, that’s all.’ Then I tried it, I went to Yukon College, I tried it, and then my own auntie laugh at me because I didn’t say the, the words right, she laughed at me, so I quit. ‘No more,’ I said. Then people bothered me, and say, ‘How come you don’t speak your language?’ And I said, ‘You wouldn’t want to know why.’ So, I never speak, speak it again.”[87]

Robert Joseph went to residential school at the age of six as a fluent speaker of Kwak’wala. “By the time I left that school, eleven years later, of course nobody in the school spoke that language. There are only 100 of us now in the entire Kwakiutl Nation who speak the language.”[88]

Prior to the expansion of the residential school system in Québec in the 1960s, some Aboriginal students from that province were sent to schools in Ontario. Paul Dixon was one of these students. His younger brother, however, was educated at a residential school in Québec. “So, I couldn’t talk to my brother in French ’cause I didn’t know French, and he couldn’t talk to me in English.” His mother had insisted that they learn their Aboriginal language, which meant that they did have a language in common.[89]

When John Kistabish left the Amos school, he could no longer speak Algonquin, while his parents could not speak French, the language that he had been taught in the school. As a result, he found it almost impossible to communicate with them about the abuse he experienced at the school. “I had tried to talk with my parents, and, no, it didn’t work. It’s that we lived with them like if it was… We were well anyway because I knew that they were my parents, when I left the residential school, but the communication wasn’t there.”[90]

In some cases, the residential school experience led parents to decide not to teach their children anything but English. Both of Joline Huskey’s parents attended residential school in the Northwest Territories. As a result of their experience in the schools, they raised their daughter to speak English. When Bruce R. Dumont was sent to residential school in Onion Lake, Saskatchewan, his mother warned him not to speak Cree. She told him that, “you got to learn the English language and, you know, so we, you know, we were instructed at home, and spoke freely, spoke Cree at home, but at school we, we weren’t allowed to speak, speak our language.”[91]

Andrew Bull Calf recalled that at the residential school in Cardston, students were not only punished for speaking their own languages, but they also were discouraged from participating in traditional cultural activities.[92]

Evelyn Kelman attended the Brocket, Alberta school. She recalled that the principal warned the students that if they attended a Sun Dance that was to be held during the summer, they would be strapped on their return to school. “Today I still know one or two people who didn’t go because they were afraid of that.”[93]

Marilyn Buffalo recalled being told by Hobbema school staff that the Sun Dance was devil worship. “We were told by untrained, unprofessional teachers who took great joy in beating the heck out of the boys and the girls, that we were never going to amount to anything. And called savage.”[94]

Sarah McLeod attended the Kamloops school. When she went home for the summer, her grandmother would teach her about traditional ways of healing. “My grandmother would saddle a horse for me, telling me, ‘Go get this medicine for me up on the hill.’ She’d name the medicine, and I was, like, eight years old, I’d get on a horse, and I’d go all by myself, and I’d get the medicines. I know which medicines she’s talking about. I’d get on my horse, and I’d put some in the sack, and I’d have to go look around for a big rock, so I can get back on my horse again. One year, she returned to school with a miniature totem pole that a family member had given her for her birthday. When she proudly showed it to one of the nuns, it was taken from her and thrown out. I looked at her. I said, ‘But that’s my birthday present.’ ‘No, that’s no good. That’s all devil you see in that totem pole. It’s all devil, can’t you see all the devil in there? You throw it away right now.’ And she made me throw it in the garbage, and it was, I didn’t know, I said to myself, ‘Oh, my gosh. All this time I was, I was hugging this devil?’ You know I didn’t know that.”[95]

At Akaitcho Hall, the residence in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Mary Olibuk Tatty roomed with students from a variety of backgrounds. “Three years of my life, I lost my Inuit values, even though I, I’m very strong. My mom was very strong at throat singing, and drum dancing, or whatever. But being a female Inuk, very proud Inuk I am, doesn’t matter if my grandpa’s a Newfe, what hit me was I couldn’t say the Lord’s Prayer in my room unless I whispered it, because I grew up so Anglican, because my roommate was Dogrib [Dene], or Kabluunak [a white person], ’cause they would ask me why are you, why are you saying this?” The common language of the residence and school was English. “The thing is I notice I spoke a lot of English to them, because back in my head, we had no choice but to speak English, ’cause our supervisors were all Kabluunak, nothing against Kabluunak, my grandpa’s white, but I wish we had more support at residential schools with our Inuit values.”[96]

One former student said that her time at the Catholic school in The Pas, Manitoba, left her feeling ashamed to be Aboriginal. “Even our own language was considered ugly; we weren’t allowed to speak Cree language. I wasn’t allowed to be myself as a Cree woman. Everything was filthy, even our monthlies and that’s how I learned it at home and what I learned from the residential school, everything was ugly. And that’s where I learned a lot of ugliness also, I became a compulsive liar, learned to live in the world of denial. When I was younger, I learned how to hate, I hated my own mother, I blamed her for allowing us to be taken away even though at that time I didn’t realize she didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t until 1990 that she told us that ‘I didn’t have a choice. It was either that, or me going to jail. I had to let you kids go to school,’ ’cause that’s when I disclosed to them both my mom and dad what I went through in residential school in 1990, August of 1990.”[97]

Gordon James Pemmican recalled how at the Sioux Lookout school, the students used to watch western movies. “The ones they made us watch, Indians never won. I don’t recall any show where Indians ever won. When we went out to play cowboys and Indians, none of us wanted to be the Indian.”[98]

On occasion, some of the staff at the Blue Quills school had the students put on what one anonymous former student called “little powwows.” “’Okay, everyone, want to see you guys dance like Indians,’” like, you know, like you pagans, or you people, you know, to go in the circle, and then she says, ‘Here’s your drum, and here is your stick,’ and of course he sang though. I remember he’s still a good singer, but they would laugh when he would bang that dust, that tin, steel dustpan, eh. But they had laughed at some of this, you know, make us do some of the things that was culturally done, eh, but to turn it around and make it look like it was more of a joke than anything else. It was pretty quiet when we would do those little dances. There was no pride. It’s just like we were all ashamed, and we were to dance like little puppets.”[99]

It was during a confirmation class at the Sept-Îles, Québec, school that Jeanette Basile Laloche rebelled against the suppression of Aboriginal language and culture. “They gave us a lesson on the Pentecost, and then the principal Father came with the inspector. You had to be good in your person, and you had to have good posture. Then, they explained to us the Pentecost. Then he said: ‘The Apostles had tongues of fire on the top of the head, then they started speaking all languages.’ Then there I said: ‘No, no, they didn’t speak my language.’ Then there, he insisted, he said: ‘Yes, Jeanette, they spoke your language.’ I said: ‘No, it is impossible that they could have spoken my language.’ Because, I began to be a rebel then: the God that my grandmother taught me about, my grandparents taught me, he was nothing like theirs. Then there, I said: ‘No, they didn’t speak my language.’ I shouldn’t have, we didn’t have a word to say, and I remember what he said: ‘Put your hand on the desk.’ You couldn’t contradict them, I placed my hand on the desk, and with the ruler, I had to repeat, repeat that the apostles spoke my language. Me, it took time before I said it, but you know that’s it, I was marked: I was hit with the ruler, with … there was a blade on the end of the ruler. I wrote a poem about it, my writing, and it was: ‘I was a little flower that was uprooted and transplanted into another world.’ My values were disrespected, my beliefs humiliated, I suffered infanticide. After all those horrors, my body, my mind had to adhere.”[100]

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[1] TRC, Statement, 2011-0305.

[2] TRC, Statement, SP038.

[3] TRC, Statement, 2011-6103.

[4] TRC, Statement, 01-AB-06JA11-012.

[5] TRC, Statement, 2011-4442.

[6] TRC, Statement, 2011-6001.

[7] TRC, Statement, 2011-2515.

[8] TRC, Statement, 2011-2678.

[9] TRC, Statement, 2011-2678.

[10] TRC, Statement, SP029.

[11] TRC, Statement, 01-ON-24NOV10-002.

[12] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-16JU10-131.

[13] TRC, Statement, 2011-3285.

[14] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-18JU10-051.

[15] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-16JU10-130.

[16] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-18JU10-063.

[17] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-18JU10-033.

[18] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-18JU10-049.

[19] TRC, Statement, 2011-3285.

[20] TRC, Statement, 2011-3203.

[21] TRC, Statement, 2011-4200.

[22] TRC, Statement, 2011-3971.

[23] TRC, Statement, 01-ON-05FE11-004.

[24] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-16JU10-059.

[25] TRC, Statement, 2011-4198.

[26] TRC, Statement, 2011-3286.

[27] TRC, Statement, 2011-0306.

[28] TRC, Statement, 2011-3301.

[29] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-19JU10-057.

[30] TRC, Statement, 2011-3363.

[31] TRC, Statement, SP111.

[32] Lamb-Yorski,” Orange shirt day”, Williams Lake Tribune.

[33] TRC, Statement, SP082.

[34] TRC, Statement, 2011-2380.

[35] TRC, Statement, NNE202.

[36] TRC, Statement, SP104.

[37] TRC, Statement, 07-MB-24FB10-001.

[38] TRC, Statement, 2011-3974.

[39] TRC, Statement, 01-ON-24NOV10-014.

[40] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-16JU10-041.

[41] TRC, Statement, 2011-2685.

[42] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-16JU10-005.

[43] TRC, Statement, 2011-2923.

[44] TRC, Statement, 2011-0387.

[45] TRC, Statement, 2011-2875.

[46] TRC, Statement, 2011-0089.

[47] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-18JU10-044.

[48] TRC, Statement, SP100.

[49] TRC, Statement, 2011-2002.

[50] TRC, Statement, 01-ON-4-6NOV10-023.

[51] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-19JU10-034.

[52] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-16JU10-122.

[53] TRC, Statement, 2011-3285.

[54] TRC, Statement, 2011-0273.

[55] TRC, Statement, SP125.

[56] TRC, Statement, 07-NWT-02MR10-002.

[57] TRC, Statement, 2011-3293.

[58] TRC, Statement, 07-MB-24FB10-001.

[59] TRC, Statement, SP045.

[60] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-18JU10-063.

[61] TRC, Statement, 2011-1752.

[62] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-16JU10-090.

[63] TRC, Statement, SP100.

[64] TRC, Statement, SP105.

[65] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-19JU10-033.

[66] TRC, Statement, 2011-3294.

[67] TRC, Statement, 2011-0244.

[68] TRC, Statement, SP029.

[69] TRC, Statement, SP029.

[70] TRC, Statement, SC090.

[71] TRC, Statement, SC091.

[72] TRC, Statement, SP044.

[73] TRC, Statement, SP105.

[74] TRC, Statement, 01-NWT-JY10-002.

[75] TRC, Statement, 01-ON-24-NOV10-028.

[76] TRC, Statement, 2011-2923.

[77] TRC, Statement, 2011-2515.

[78] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-16JU10-029.

[79] TRC, Statement, SP101.

[80] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-18Ju10-044.

[81] TRC, Statement, 2011-1776.

[82] TRC, Statement, SP124.

[83] TRC, Statement, 2011-1760.

[84] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-16JU10-137.

[85] TRC, Statement, 2011-0346.

[86] TRC, Statement, S-KFN-MB-01-001.

[87] TRC, Statement, 2011-1134.

[88] TRC, Statement, SC093.

[89] TRC, Statement, SP101.

[90] TRC, Statement, 2011-6135

[91] TRC, Statement, 01-SK-18-25JY10-013.

[92] TRC, Statement, 2011-0273.

[93] TRC, Statement, SP128.

[94] TRC, Statement, SP125.

[95] TRC, Statement, 2011-5009.

[96] TRC, Statement, 2011-0156.

[97] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-18JU10-055.

[98] TRC, Statement, 02-MB-18JU10-069.

[99] TRC, Statement, 2011-3279.

[100] TRC, Statement. 2011-6136.

Darren Grimes