The Survivors Speak

Separating siblings
“I think at that particular moment,
my spirit left.”
Inez Dieter said the only time she got to spend with her brother was when she was
in class. “I used to turn around and smile at him and if I got caught, of course I’d go to
the front again to be punished.” Sometimes, she said, they would communicate with each
other in sign language. 315
Daniel Nanooch recalled how he and his sister were separated at the Wabasca, Alberta,
school.
So even though I was there with my sister and I only
seen her about four times in that year and we’re in
the same building in the same mission. They had a
fence in the playground. Nobody was allowed near
the fence. The boys played on this side, the girls
played on the other side. Nobody was allowed to go
to that fence there and talk to the girls through the
fence or whatever, you can’t. When I look at these
old army movies, I see these jails, these prisoners
standing there with rifles and there was a fence.
It felt the same way, “Don’t approach that fence”
when I think back. 316
Daniel Nanooch.
Madeleine Dion Stout, who attended the Blue
Quills school, thought the school deliberately discouraged the development of family
connections.
There was a sense of separation and the sense of, of not connecting to your own, you
know, the people who would mean the most to you, your family members, and your
community members, a complete separation. And if it wasn’t that we were taught
by my mother to always love one another no matter how big the transgressions we
committed against each other, that we would always, always love one another, and
I think that’s, that’s what we carry today, not what residential school taught us, but
there’s still a deep conflict there, you know, that separation, but be together, separate
but be together. So, there’s this, there’s this, these conflicting messages I think that I
still carry. 317
Wilbur Abrahams had a strong memory of being separated from his sisters on their
arrival at the Alert Bay school.