The Survivors Speak

114 • Truth & Reconciliation Commission
was always raising her voice at me and she always had this angry look on her face
and it felt really intimidating. And I was homesick. I was, like, crying and she yelled
at me and told me to stop crying and she called me a crybaby in front of the students
and it made me not want to cry anymore. I didn’t like her. Deep inside I hated her for
being so mean to me and when she told me not to cry and she told me not to speak
my language, I felt like I had to keep everything inside me and it made me lonely, that
there’s nothing out here that could make me happy and feel like it was home. 405
For Florence Horassi, loneliness was a constant feature of life at the schools she attended
in the Northwest Territories.
Like, the nuns in there, they’re cold. There was nobody there to give any hugs. There
was nobody there to say goodnight. There was nobody there to even wipe your tears,
or we will hide our tears. We’re not to cry, so we have to hide and cry. But at night,
you could hear a lot of muffling crying, muffling, sometime all night. Late at night you
can hear somebody crying. I don’t know what time it is. There’s no time or nothing
that I know, but I know it’s very late at night. There’s nobody to tell us. Everything
we do in there is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, is what I hear. Couldn’t do anything
right. 406
This lack of compassion affected the way students treated one another. Stephen Kakfwi
attended Grandin College in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, when he was twelve years
old. “And one day, a week after I got to Fort Smith, I had a meltdown ’cause I realized I
wasn’t going to go home for ten months and I was homesick, and my older brother didn’t
know what to do with me.” When another student came into the room and asked what was
wrong, Kakfwi’s brother said, “He’s homesick.”
“He’ll get over it,” [the other student] said, turned around and walked back out. And I
think that’s how we were, you know, every kid that came after that, that’s what we all
said, “He’ll get over it.” No hugs, nothing, no
comfort. Everything that, I think, happened in the
residential schools, we picked it up: we didn’t get
any hugs; you ain’t going to get one out of me I’ll
tell you that. 407
Victoria McIntosh said that life at the Fort Alexander,
Manitoba, school taught her not to trust anyone. “You
learn not to cry anymore. You just get harder. And yeah,
you learn to shut down. And you know those feelings
are there, and but they’re, they’re so deep down inside,
you know, and they come out as some pretty, some
pretty wicked nightmares at times, and then some days
are good.” 408
Victoria McIntosh.