The Survivors Speak

Contact with parents • 107
And, the food we had the first day was a rabbit, a rabbit, and I couldn’t eat it. I told my
sister, “I can’t eat this. This is Peter Rabbit. I can’t eat Peter Rabbit,” I told her, ’cause
Peter Rabbit was our favourite story in our books there, and I couldn’t eat Peter
Rabbit. All the wildlife we had for about a month, Mom had to buy white man’s food
to feed me ’cause I couldn’t eat our, our way of eating back home. I couldn’t eat soup.
I couldn’t eat fish. I couldn’t eat bannock. Couldn’t eat nothing. I had to, so Mom had
to get extra money to try and buy extra food just for me. 378
Ellen Smith, who was born in Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, found that residential
schooling made it impossible for her to fit back into her home community. “I can’t
sew; I can’t cut up caribou meat; I can’t cut up moose meat; work with fish and speak my
language. So I was starting to become alienated from my parents and my grandparents;
everything.” 379
Raphael Victor Paul spent ten years at the Beauval, Saskatchewan, school.
I thought for a long time that I was better than my
parents. That’s the thought that they gave you, because
my parents didn’t talk English, but I did. My
parents were very Catholic, and I was very Catholic,
but I knew both languages, the catechism and
all that. So, you get, I got the feeling that maybe I
know more than my parents.
His father believed that the residential school education
had prevented his son and his friends from
learning the skills they need to survive.
He said, “You know you guys that went to residential
school are useless, because you don’t know Raphael Victor Paul.
how to survive like they did.” ’Cause they never
taught us that, you know, how to. At that time, there was no welfare, there was, there
was no running waters or lights, so we had to do all those things by ourselves, but we
didn’t know how. So, the people that went back had to relearn how to survive. And
at that time, survival was fishing, hunting, and trapping. To this day, I don’t know
how to hunt. I can trap, I can fish, but I don’t know how to hunt, ’cause I, I was never
taught that. 380
Some people never adjusted. Although she had not enjoyed her time at the Alberni,
British Columbia, school, Frances Tait discovered she could not find a place for herself in
her home community when she returned. “I couldn’t survive in the village. I was different.
I was an outcast. And my brothers weren’t there.” As a result, she asked to be sent back to
Alberni, where she boarded with a Euro-Canadian family. 381