The Survivors Speak

Truancy • 137
right away and the police would just surround us as we were young Natives walking
around town, they already knew, they would just bring us back to the school. 476
When Beverley Anne Machelle and her friends ran away from the Lytton, British
Columbia, school, they had to contend with the school’s isolated and mountainous
location.
It’s a plateau region, and the residence was here, and then we walked up onto the
road, and then the road goes along, and then it goes a little bit up, and then, and
then there’s a great big hill going down, and it was halfway down this big hill, and
then from there you could see town. And we got halfway down there, and we were all
feeling, like, woo-hoo, you know, and we got out of there, and, and we’re gonna go do
something fun, and, and then we got halfway down, and then we realized, well, we
have no money, and we have no place to go. There was no place to go. There was no
safe place to go. And that was really weird to me because, because where the residential
school was and where I lived just before I went into the residential school, I lived
on the reserve just, like, it was, like, less than a mile away, and yet I had no place to
go. Yeah, so we were very sad, and we all agreed that we had to go back because we
had no place to go, so we went back. 477
One student even flew away from school. Doug Beardy left the Stirland Lake, Ontario,
school for good, shortly before his two years at the school were completed.
There was a plane that, that used to come there
with, I think, with fish, tubs of fish that they, they
would drop them off there, and they were thrown
off to a truck, a semi-truck. And so this plane landed,
and I went down to the plane and stood around
until the pilot was ready to go, and, you know, he
was right about ready to close the door, and when
he was ready to close door, I jumped into the plane.
This, this pilot was in Round Lake for many years,
and he has since passed away. He didn’t ask me
anything. He didn’t ask me why I jumped into the
plane. He just looked at me when I jumped into,
into the plane, he just looked at me and didn’t say
anything, and he just took off. And, and that’s how I
left the school. 478
Doug Beardy.