The Survivors Speak

Discipline • 141
Joanne Morrison Methot told the Commission that noisy behaviour was punished
severely at the Shubenacadie school.
I used to count. One girl got strapped forty-five times, I was counting, yeah, and then
it came to my turn, I got a beating, and I wouldn’t cry. I just let her beat me and beat
me, and I wouldn’t cry. I just let her do that because, well, sometimes I would pretend
I’m crying just so she’ll stop, but then other times I just didn’t cry, ’cause I knew
I was talking, maybe it was my fault, so I just let her beat me, and then next one, then
after we’d go to bed. 486
Alfred Nolie said that corporal punishment at the Alert Bay school was strict and painful.
There was one big staff there. He used to lay me over a desk, big square thing there. I
think because I used to work up at the farm up here, there were horses up here, they
had those big leather straps, big leather, heavy ones, about that thick, I guess, I’d lean
over a desk, take my pants down, and hit me in the bum with that strap, and that
hurts really bad. Every time I get caught talking our language that’s when it’s usually
big staff, was 300 pounds, really big guy. 487
Ron Windsor had strong memories of being punished for laughing at the dining-room
table at the Alert Bay school. “I didn’t know what he was gonna do. He grabbed my hair,
put his knee in my back, and held me right on the floor, and I tried to tell him my neck is
sore, and I was crying. And he caught me off guard, I didn’t expect that. Now, why would
you do [that] to a little boy like me at that time?” 488
For crossing into the girls’ playground at the Sioux Lookout school, Ken A. Littledeer
was grabbed by two staff members. One of them then beat him on the hands with branches
from a thorny bush. “I was crying. Never cried hard
before. I never felt this sharp pain before, and anger
build up, and resentment build up, that if I grow bigger
I would get this person back. I knew that I was small,
and I can’t hit him back.” 489
Doug Beardy said that at the Stirland Lake, Ontario,
school, the principal punished him with blows administered
with “a hockey stick, a goalie stick ... that was
cut off like … a paddle.” 490
As a punishment at the Alberni school, Frances Tait
said, she was once dressed in a pair of overalls and
hung on a hook in a closed and darkened cloakroom. 491 Ken A. Littledeer.
For laughing in church at the Roman Catholic school in
Aklavik, Alphonsine McNeely said, she was shut in the school’s cellar. 492
Mervin Mirasty said that at the Beauval, Saskatchewan, school, boys caught throwing
snowballs were punished with blows to their hands from the blade of a hockey stick.
“There was about thirty of us. Every one of us got ten smacks. Every one of us cried except