The Survivors Speak

Contact with parents • 101
read it, eh.” The principal tore up the letter. According to Eshkibok, “I got a strap, as usual.
I got the strap for sending that letter out.” 351
Given these restrictions, parents and children lost contact with each other. The problem
was exacerbated if parents were not informed that their children were going to be transferred
from one school to another. This happened to Doris Judy McKay in Manitoba in the
1950s. “I found out that I was transferred to Birtle without them letting my parents know or
anything they just transferred us. Then my mother didn’t find out ’til later on that we were
in Birtle, when we wrote her a letter from there. She was pretty upset about it.” 352
Holidays provided some families with an opportunity to reconnect. However, Geraldine
Shingoose’s home in northern Saskatchewan was too distant from the Lestock school
for her to return at Christmas and Easter. She stayed in the school for ten months out of
the year.
We didn’t go home for Christmas, spring break, like all the other kids did, ’cause
we lived so far. We lived up north in Saskatchewan. And, and then when I’d see my
parents, it was such a, a beautiful feeling, just going back home to them for those two
months. And, and then when September would come, I would, I would dread it. 353
At the end of every summer, Ula Hotonami would try to talk her mother out of sending
her back to school.
And every summer when they’d go home for holidays for a couple of months, then I
didn’t really want to go back, you know, I’d want to stay out, but then, then my mother
asked me why, and I told her, “’Cause I don’t like getting lickings all the time,” I told
her. And I was getting lickings for no reason. Well, well I still, I used to get lickings for
nothing. I don’t know. 354
Some children stayed at the schools year-round. Frances Tait recalled that every June,
the school supervisor at the Alberni school would come with the list of students who were
going home for the summer.
And I remember hoping, crossing my fingers, crossing
my toes that my name would be on that list, but
it never was. And finally, one, one summer, I guess
when I was about ten years old, I guess, in a way, I
bet that I was thinking that maybe if I had a suitcase
I would go home. So I went into the cloakroom,
and I stole a suitcase and didn’t put my name in it
but put my brother’s name in it and waited. And
still, my name was not on that list. But because I
stole the suitcase and because I had gone into the
cloakroom without permission, I got punished. And
it was to scrub the stairs from top to bottom with a
toothbrush. 355
Frances Tait.