Honouring the Truth Reconciling for the Future

The history • 93Bernard Catcheway recalled that in the 1960s at the Pine Creek, Manitoba, school,“we had to eat all our food even though we didn’t like it. There was a lot of times thereI seen other students that threw up and they were forced to eat their own, their ownvomit.” 337 Bernard Sutherland recalled students at the Fort Albany school being forcedto eat food that they had vomited. “I saw in person how the children eat their vomit.When they happened to be sick. And they threw up while eating.” 338 These abuses ledin 1999 to the conviction of Anna Wesley, a former staff member of the Fort Albanyschool, on three charges of administering a noxious substance. 339Some schools did make allowances for traditional foods. Simon Awashish recalledbeing allowed to trap for food while attending the Amos, Québec, school.When we brought in hares, we were asked if … there was some members of ournation that came to work in the kitchen, and we asked them to cook the hare forus in the traditional Atikameg way, in order to keep some sort of contact with ourtraditional food that we had before, before we were separated from our community.340Students who spoke of hunger also spoke of their efforts to improve their dietsecretly. Woodie Elias recalled being hungry all the time at the Anglican school inAklavik. “Once in a while we go raid the cellar and you can’t call that stealing; that wasour food.” 341 When Dorothy Nolie helped out in the Alert Bay school kitchen, she andher co-workers would eat bread as they sliced it. “Kids would come to me and ask mefor bread, and I’d sneak it to them.” 342 At the Moose Factory school in Ontario, NellieTrapper said, students “used to steal food, peanut butter, whatever’s cooking in a pot.There were big pots in there. I remember taking figs from that pot.” 343Complaints about the limited, poorly prepared, monotonous diet were intensifiedby the fact that at many schools, the students knew the staff members were beingserved much better fare than they had. At the school she attended in Saskatchewan,Inez Dieter said, “the staff used to eat like kings, kings and queens.” Like many students,she said, she used the opportunity of working in the staff dining room to helpherself to leftovers. “I’d steal that and I’d eat, and I’d feel real good.” 344 Gladys Princerecalled how, at the Sandy Bay school in Manitoba, the “priests ate the apples, we atethe peelings. That is what they fed us. We never ate bread. They were stingy them, theirown, their own baking.” 345 When Frances Tait was given a position in the staff diningroom, she said, she thought she had “died and gone to heaven ’cause even eating theirleftovers were better than what we got.” 346 Hazel Bitternose, who attended schools inLestock and Qu’Appelle, said she enjoyed working in the priests’ dining room. “Theyhad some good food there and I used to sneak some food and able to feed myself goodthere. So that’s why I liked to work there.” 347The federal government knowingly chose not to provide schools with enoughmoney to ensure that kitchens and dining rooms were properly equipped, that cooks