The Survivors Speak

162 • Truth & Reconciliation Commission
school near The Pas in the 1960s. “I couldn’t say anything, I couldn’t tell the priest or the
police ’cause if I did, the priest won’t believe me.” 588
In some cases, students who reported abuse were told that they were to blame.
Josephine Sutherland started attending the Fort Albany, Ontario, school in the late 1950s.
After being attacked by a male staff member on several occasions, she went to speak to one
of the nuns who worked at the school. “I told her something just happened to me, somebody
did something to me, and she said, ‘You must have been bad again.’” 589
Shortly after he was enrolled at the Sturgeon Lake school in Calais, Alberta, Jimmy
Cunningham was sexually assaulted. When he told one of the nuns what had been done to
him, he was strapped for lying.
I told the sister what happened. She didn’t believe me. She strapped me for lying.
So, I went to see the priest, Father Superior … and he says there’s nothing he could
do. Sent me back to the boys’ hall and then the first thing you know the phone rang.
The old crank phones. The sister answered it and it was Father telling her that I had
been there complaining about what happened. She immediately took me again and
strapped me again for doing that without her permission. 590
Others simply felt too ashamed to ever speak of the abuse. One of the supervisors at the
Assiniboia school in Winnipeg attempted to rape Violet Rupp Cook in the school gymnasium.
She was able to beat him back, but the event left her shaken. “I didn’t know what to
do. I was, I was afraid, I was just shaking, I went, I went
back to the dorms. I didn’t tell anybody I was so, I felt
so ashamed. I didn’t tell my supervisor, I didn’t tell
anyone. I didn’t tell any of the girls that were there.”
From then on, she was always afraid and unable to
concentrate on her school work. 591
Elizabeth Good said she was abused during her years
at the Alberni school. “I won’t get into detail about the
abuse, because it was so violent. I had three abusers,
two men and one woman. I was also the youngest one
in the residential school at the time.” She wondered if
that was one of the reasons she was targeted by one of Violet Rupp Cook.
the abusers. “There was a couple of occasions where he
had mentioned that I was the baby in the residential school, and he always told me that I
was gonna be a no good for nothing squaw. All I’ll be good, good for is having babies, and
they’re gonna be worthless, and he is so wrong today.” 592
To the extent that they could, many students tried to protect themselves and others
from abuse. At the Gordon’s school in Saskatchewan, the older children tried to protect
the younger ones from abuse at the hands of the dormitory staff. Hazel Mary Anderson
recalled, “Sometimes you’d get too tired to stay up at night to watch over them so nobody