The Survivors Speak

88 • Truth & Reconciliation Commission
trouble, and he said, “I was teaching you. What did I tell you, anyway?” he said. And
I said, “Something about forty days, forty nights Jesus fasted, right.” He said, “Oh, see,
you weren’t listening,” he said. “So, for your punishment,” he said, “this is what you’re
gonna do. You’re gonna,” he took headpins out of his, on his desk, there was a little
container full of headpins, he took it out of his desk, and he said, “Spread your hand
out.” So, I spread my hand out like this, both hands, and he started jabbing me in
front of the students, jabbing me in the hand, and he said, “You’re, you’re gonna feel
what Jesus felt on the cross. You’re, you’re gonna feel the same pain.” So, he was just
jabbing me and jabbing me and jabbing me, and my tears were just streaming down
my eyes, and looking at all the, the students that were all looking at me, right. They
were shocked, like. And then after that, he stopped, finally he stopped, anyway, and
so he stuck me underneath his, underneath, they used to have a great big desk, he
stuck me underneath his desk. He said, “This is where you’re gonna stay now ’til the
lesson is over. You’re gonna hear it from where you are now.” So, oh, my goodness, so
I sat there, and I was just crying, but I cried quietly. 307
Students were confused by the requirement that they regularly confess their sins. At the
Grouard, Alberta, school, Frank Tomkins said, he never
really learned anything except to pray and catechism
and confessions. And I used to lie like hell
and go to confession. The priest would ask you
all kinds of questions that had nothing to do with
religion. They just wanna know all about you—what
your thoughts and everything else. And I’d lie like
hell because they used to say that God knew everything
anyway! You know, God knew everything. 308
Fred Brass said that at the Roman Catholic school
in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, he was taught to lie. “I
had to lie to keep from being beat and it is not a very
nice feeling. When we went to confession, what they Frank Tomkins.
called confession, we had to lie, make up lies just to get
through our confession.” 309
Although much of the initial religious training was done by rote, students internalized
the lessons they were taught. In his later years at the Sandy Bay school, Arthur Ron McKay
decided, in his words, “to try their way.” He said he took to reading the Bible and became
an altar boy.
That’s how I lost all my … beliefs, traditional things that I knew from my grandfather,
the songs that he tried to show me because I knew some songs before I left for school
and I forgot all about those songs, traditional songs, Sun Dance songs, even when
I was younger, that young I knew and I knew how to do all the little things that the