The Survivors Speak

Classroom experience • 123
open your mouth. You’ll be able to read.’ Poor guy wasn’t able to read. And today that guy
still stutters.” 426
Clara Munroe felt she received a very limited education at the Roman Catholic school at
Kamsack, Saskatchewan, with the biggest focus on religion. “It was always prayer, praying,
singing hymns in Latin, something we didn’t even understand. That’s how that school was
operated.” 427
Mary Courchene described a similar education at the Fort Alexander school in the 1940s.
The first few years we were there I never had a teacher, a real teacher. The nuns that
taught us weren’t teachers; they weren’t qualified. They had no qualifications whatsoever
to, to, to be able to teach. Their only mandate was to Christianize and civilize;
and it’s written in black and white. And every single day we were reminded. 428
At the Hobbema school in Alberta in the 1950s, Flora Northwest said, students were
provided with a minimal education. The language training was compromised by the fact
that neither teacher was a fluent English speaker. “And the English that I learned from
there was … it was really hard for me to speak the English language because of the teaching
that was passed on to us through the teachers with their French accent, so I had difficult—
difficulties with my English language.” 429
Some students said that the limits of the education they had received in residential
school became apparent when they were integrated into the public school system. Victoria
McIntosh, who had attended the Fort Alexander school, said that when she entered public
school, she discovered that “I could hardly read and write. And I knew that I wasn’t, you
know, like, stupid, or, or dumb, or anything like that, it just, I didn’t know how to read and
write, and I didn’t get a lot of these things. And I remember the teacher asking me where
did you go to school? And I didn’t know how to answer her.” 430
Tina Duguay had always done well academically at residential school in British
Columbia, but when she went to a public school for Grade Seven, “I was lucky just to be
able to pass. So that told me something right there that they weren’t teaching us, the best
academics possible.” 431
Many students said there was no expectation that they would succeed. Walter Jones
never forgot the answer that a fellow student at the Alberni, British Columbia, school was
given when he asked if he would be able to go to Grade Twelve.
That supervisor said, “You don’t need to go that far,” he says. He says, “Your people
are never going to get education to be a professional worker, and it doesn’t matter
what lawyer, or doctor, or electrician, or anything, that a person has to go to school
for.” He says, “You’re going to be working jobs that the white man don’t want to do,
that they figure it’s too lowly only for them. And you will do the menial jobs, the jobs
that doesn’t require schooling.” I became a logger. I was a fisherman to start with, and
I, most of our people do that. That had a lot of, I guess, a lot of things they did, like,
teaching us our, like, to not speak our language, getting strapped for it, and telling
us that we’re never going to be able to take the good jobs and stuff like that, and it