The Survivors Speak

102 • Truth & Reconciliation Commission
Don Willie recalled how hard it was on students at the Alert Bay school as they waited
at the end of the school year to see if their parents would come to take them home. “Kids
would take turns sitting by the window, waiting for somebody to pick them up, pressing
their faces against the window, and they were all happy if somebody came to pick them up,
but pretty sad when nobody came.” 356
For students whose families had fallen apart, life at the school was particularly lonely.
One former student recalled that at the Chapleau, Ontario, school, he never got letters
from home.
Other kids on holidays, going home, everybody’s supposed to be good. I knew I
wasn’t going home; and my mom was drunk . ’Cause one brother said, “Your, your
mother’s drunk right now drinking.” They phoned the store that’s in Mobert, “She’s
incapable of accepting,” taking his call or something. There was no phone to the
house, but I mean there was phone that goes down to the store. And, he said, I guess
the brother said, “No, your mother’s not in the condition right now.” I knew right
away what was happening, I’m not going home man. 357
Wilbur Abrahams and his sisters were not sent home from the Alert Bay school for the
summer holiday.
I remember the first year that, summertime, just
before the summer holidays they had, they had
a list of names, and the students that were going
home for the summer. My name never came up.
Must have been hard on my sisters, too, because
they, they had the same list up on that side. I don’t
know, maybe there was about a handful of us that
never went home. And it, it was a little, a little more
freedom. 358
Victoria Boucher-Grant attended the Fort William,
Ontario, school. She was one of the children who did
not get to go home in the summer.
Wilbur Abrahams.
But in those times that I, when my uncle wasn’t
there, there was three of us that our, our families never came to get us in the, in the
summer. One, the other was a boy, and two girls. And everybody used to think we
were orphans, but we weren’t orphans. It’s just that our big family never came to
get us. 359
Ben Sylliboy, a student at the Shubenacadie school, was not able to go home for the
summer holidays. “Some people were lucky, they went home in June; June 30th was
known as Freedom Day for all the boys that were fortunate enough to go home a couple of
months of the summer. But there was quite a few of us that didn’t go home. We stayed at
the residential school all summer. It was hard.” 360