The Survivors Speak

140 • Truth & Reconciliation Commission
nothing. She was just looking around. So again I asked her. You know the other girls
changed their water. I said, “Can I change my water?” I guess I asked her too many
times, and she took the pail, and threw it over my head, and just pounding me with,
you know, with a mop on my, you know, while that pail was on my head, you know.
Yeah, I think that’s when Nora came out of the kitchen. I remember the old kitchen
that used to be there. 482
Stella Marie Tookate never forgot being called to the principal’s office at the Fort Albany,
Ontario, school.
There was a priest there, standing, and the sister standing, a nun. And then, they were
two in the office. And at that time, I remember, they were strapping me five times—
five times on my hands and five times the other hand. And that’s where, that’s where I
stopped going to school because I was … I showed my dad my hands at that time, and
then he took me away from school. It was hard for me to continue my school at that
time. It was hard to feel that stripes on my hands.… My hands were red at that time—
painful. Sometimes, I could, I could tell, sometimes how I was feeling. I feel that pain
sometimes. And I stopped going to school after that. 483
Fred Brass said that his years at the Roman Catholic school at Kamsack, Saskatchewan,
were “the hellish years of my life. You know to be degraded by our so-called educators, to
be beat by these people that were supposed to have been there to look after us, to teach us
right from wrong. It makes me wonder now today a lot of times I ask that question, who
was right and who was wrong?”
Brass described a school dominated by a violent regime of punishment.
I saw my brother with his face held to a hot steaming pipe and then getting burned
on the arm by the supervisor. And I took my brother, tried to get him out of there.
And I saw my cousin get beat up to the point where he was getting kicked where he
couldn’t even walk and then it was my turn. I got beat so bad that I wet my pants.
Fears I lived with day and night to the point where at nighttime when you want to
go to the bathroom you can’t because there is someone sitting there with a stick or a
strap ready to beat on you if you try to go to that bathroom. And the only choice we
had was to pee in our beds. That’s not a nice feeling to have to sleep in that kind of a
bed. 484
According to Geraldine Bob, the staff members at the Kamloops school she attended
were not able to control their tempers once they began to punish a student.
And from the beatings, because I didn’t cry, they went berserk; you know the two
nuns. They would just start beating you and lose control and hurl you against the
wall, throw you on the floor, kick you, punch you and just laid you; they couldn’t stop.
You know, they were insane, yeah. And they were not able to control themselves at
all. 485