The Survivors Speak

Integration into public schools
“The teachers never talked to me,
students never talked to me.”
In the 1950s, the federal government initiated its policy of integrating Aboriginal students
into local public schools (or in the case of many Roman Catholic students, churchrun
schools). In some cases, students would live in a residence but attend a local school.
Many recalled their reception at the schools as being hostile. Dorothy Ross said the students
from the Sioux Lookout residence did not feel welcomed by the non-Aboriginal students
in the local school. “They would call us down. They would call us squaws, a dirty
Indian.” 455
Shirley Leon attended the Kamloops, British Columbia, school in the 1940s. She was
among the first students to be sent to a local public school when the integration policy
was implemented. It was just as unhappy an experience as residential school had been.
“There we had horrific experiences because we were the savages … we were taunted, our
hair was pulled, our clothing torn, and we hid wherever we could, and didn’t want to go to
school. So, those kinds of stories are, are just as traumatic as what happened at residential
school.” 456
Martina Therese Fisher lived in the Assiniboia residence in Winnipeg for three years.
The first year she was there, she attended a Roman Catholic girls’ school, at which she did
well. For the next two, lonely years, she took classes at
two large Winnipeg high schools. “The teachers never
talked to me, students never talked to me. I felt singled
out. I was, I was lonely, I was scared. There was nobody
to help me with my work. I couldn’t wait to be eighteen
years old.” 457
When she was in Grade Eight, Emily Kematch lived
in the Anglican residence in Dauphin, Manitoba, and
attended the local public school, where treatment by
fellow students was isolating and racist.
It wasn’t a good experience. ’Cause this was my first
Martina Therese Fisher.
time too, going to the white system with the white
kids and we weren’t treated very well there. We got
called down quite a bit. They use to call us squaws and neechies, and dirty Indian,
you know. They’d drive by in their cars and say awful things to us. Even the girls
didn’t associate with us, the white girls, they didn’t associate with us.
The following year, she boarded with a local family.