The Survivors Speak

Discipline • 151
I never saw him, when he hit me with it, he never, there was no witness, and you’re
supposed to have a witness. 532
Strict discipline bred animosity. Roy Johnson said that at the Carcross school, students
came to hate their supervisors.
But I remember hating. It’s, it’s, it’s really something to behold to hate a person. You
look them right in the eye, and say over and over, you know, you’re going down last
day, which means you can go to hell last day, over and over. Then when you’re getting
strapping, you keep, you try to keep that frame of mind burning, that hatred burning
in, in you, until finally you can’t take it anymore.
On one occasion, Johnson said, the older boys went on a “rampage” in response to the
school discipline.
They were upstairs and downstairs, locked themself in the dormitory, or whatever,
but the supervisor was chasing them, and the principal. And I was looking up from
the playroom, and from the fire door, a tin garbage can came flying down, and got
me here. I think a boy was taking off running. He was, he was hollering back, “Sorry,
Roy.” You know I was holding my head. I had Kleenex. I had to be taken to dispensary.
I guess those, they were dealt with when they were all caught.
And there’s another boy from here, fire hose was used on him. But his older brother
would get in a fight with his, with the supervisor. They would fight up in the, up in the
dormitory, they fight there, and then again in the kitchen. I think then again in the
playroom. The kitchen one was sort of a … whose who, who is tougher, I guess, I don’t
know. But that boy grab a pot of mashed potatoes, and just lift it up and put it over
the supervisor’s head, and they were fighting, wrestling around for a while. That’s
funny, it wasn’t funny to me, but it was, you know it was, that’s how life was there. 533
Mollie Roy recalled fighting when a teacher at the girls’ school in Spanish tried to punish
her.
[The teacher] was tall, and she was mean, and she’d grab us by the cheeks, and just
twist, just turn, and she’d do this every time. Well, I guess one day I was her victim,
and that was the last time. She turned, she put her finger, and I bit on it, and bit it just
about to the bone. There was blood pouring down. She was just freaking out. “Let go.”
And I kept shaking my head … and that was the last time she ever touched anybody’s
cheeks. But we’d have big marks on our cheeks all the time. 534
Larry Beardy recalled how, at the Dauphin school, the students eventually rebelled.
But one of the saddest things that I, I want to share is in the, in the dormitories we
were in, young boys, we started to notice a lot of my colleagues running away, and,
and every time somebody ran away, the whole dorm would get physically strapped
by the principal of that school, and also the supervisors. And this kept continuing,
and it escalated so bad, a eight-year-old, a nine-year-old, ten-year-old, we ransacked
the whole dorm. We went violent. 535