The Survivors Speak

104 • Truth & Reconciliation Commission
brothers came with a dog team to where the plane had landed on the ice. He took me
and my brothers to the tent and this lady looks at me and tells me to sit beside her.
I’m looking at her, and beside her was a man. She said something to me I could not
understand. So I looked at my older sister, and I asked her, “What is she saying?” And
she picked up a piece of frozen char and had her hand out with the char for me to
have. I looked at her, I looked at her, I looked at my older sister, and I asked her, “Why
does she want me to eat raw fish?” 366
After years of separation, many family connections were broken. When Dorothy Hart
returned to her home in northern Manitoba after six years in residential school, she discovered
that her mother had remarried.
We were so happy to knock on their door; but this man appeared. And I called my
mom, and she saw us, but she couldn’t do anything. That guy said, “They’re not staying
here.” He shut the door. So I took my sisters to my granny’s, that’s in Hart’s Point.
And we just got home after all these years. [audible crying] 367
Going away to residential school in the Northwest Territories brought Frederick Ernest
Koe’s home life to an end.
I said that year had a monumental effect on my life and my relationship with my family
because I came, spent a year here, went back, everything that I thought I owned
was gone and a month or so later my family moved over here because my dad moved
with the armed forces, and you know, we lived here. And from that day on, the day we
moved here, I never, ever went hunting with my dad again. 368
Mollie Roy said that her years at the Spanish, Ontario, girls’ school left her struggling
with a sense of abandonment.
I think the thing about the school more than anything else is the feeling of abandonment.
Why was, why was I there, and why didn’t you come to see me? Because all of
us, with the exception of few, were just, parents were, like, ten miles down the road,
ten miles, and the people wouldn’t even come. You know it’s not that my parents
didn’t have a car. My dad worked at Denison, and made good money, and, like, there
was no, you know, you’d wait and wait, and nobody showed up, and I think that’s the
thing more than anything else that bothered me. It’s not the school, it’s the fact that I
wasn’t wanted. 369
Florence Horassi said that at the residential school she attended in the Northwest
Territories, she was made to feel ashamed of being Aboriginal.
When I was in residential school, then they told me I’m a dirty Indian, I’m a lousy
Indian, I’m a starving Indian, and my mom and dad were drunkards, that I’m to pray
for them, so when they died, they can go to heaven. They don’t even know my mom
had died while I was in there, or do they know that she died when I was in there? I
never saw my mom drink. I never saw my mom drunk. But they tell me that, to pray
for them, so they don’t go to hell. 370