The Survivors Speak

Gender relations
“You’re boy crazy.”
The policy of separating brothers and sisters was part of a larger policy of separating
boys from girls. Lena McKay stayed at Breynat Hall, one of the two Roman Catholic–run
residences in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. She recalled the expectations for girls and
boys there:
And we’re not allowed to talk to the boys. We, you know, we go for meals and that,
’cause they used to meet us in the stairway, like, you know, we’d turn our heads, she’d
tell us we’re pants crazy. Can’t even leave our shirt, like this open, you know, button
shirts. Boy, she, one time she came to me, she just about choked me, ’cause, you
know, my shirt was, one button was open. Here she was just fiddling around, trying
to, you know, she just about choked me buttoning my shirt, because she said, “You
want to show yourself to, to the men?” you know. “You’re boy crazy. You’re pants
crazy,” things like that. 331
Andy Norwegian said he found the separation of the sexes to be unnatural at Lapointe
Hall, the Roman Catholic hostel in Fort Simpson.
When I was still living at home we had the freedom to move around the community
and interact with our female cousins. In just the first two months that I arrived
here there were three boys that went to talk to some girls on the girls’ side and what
happened as a result of that was that evening we were called into the gymnasium like
this, and the three boys were sent to the mechanical room and they were stripped
down to their undershorts. They were forced to come out, one at a time, and lay
down, face down on a table in the middle of the gymnasium. The boys that came out
laid down on a table like this, face down, and the supervisor pulled down their undershorts
and strapped them with a leather strap, about three inches wide and a halfinch
thick. It had a wooden handle and he put both hands on it and strapped them
across the buttocks and you could hear the impact throughout the whole gymnasium
and also the boys that were on the table, every time they were hit, they would cringe
and put their arms around the table very hard, and you could hear that too. 332
Students often circumvented these restrictions. At the Blue Quills school, Ilene Nepoose
said, boys and girls would meet in the boiler room. “I would be her lookout. I had to look
out for anybody in authority. I don’t know what the heck she did in there but she was
in there with boys. She would say they would be necking. She made it sound like such a
romantic moment.” 333