The Survivors Speak

Student victimization of students • 167
quickly hardened by the violent atmosphere of the schools. Victoria McIntosh said the
Fort Alexander school reminded her of a “prison yard.”
If you didn’t have older siblings to protect you, you’re on your own, so you learned
how to, to fight, anger, and not trusting anybody, and just being hard, you know, and
you weren’t gonna cry, and if you cried then that was not a good thing, and it was a
sign of being weak. But I always felt, like, inside that I hated, I hated all of that. I never
wanted to intentionally hurt anybody. 612
To survive at schools in northern Ontario in the 1960s, one former student said she
made herself “tough” and began “picking on those younger than me.” She said she was
“trying to look out for me since nobody else was.” 613
At school in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Leona Bird grew up fearful and angry.
They are girls from Manitoba, girls from different places. They weren’t too friendly
with me. I learned to fight. The hatred that built up in me, I learned to fight my way
out of everything that I can, whether a beating or not, I didn’t care, as long as I fought
back. That’s how hatred was building up so big there inside my whole body. I couldn’t
do nothing. 614
Louise Large described herself as “the leader of the pack” at the Blue Quills school.
Nobody could bother the Crees, or … they would have to deal with me. And so I ended
up, I beat anybody. And it came to the point where the boys would try and, you
know, even when we started playing with the boys slowly, but even the boys would
come fight with us, and I, and I would always beat them all up. 615
Don Willie said that the Alert Bay school had a bully system. “It started out with the
senior boys, and it just worked its way right down.” He said he “used to get punched every
day by one of them.” Eventually, he fought back.
I end up fighting him back, and then he’s saying, “No, the only reason you’re fighting
is the girls are watching.” And so all the girls rushed to the window when we started
fighting. But I said, “Okay, well let’s go upstairs and fight then.” So, we went upstairs,
and he just backed right off, but he didn’t bother me again after that, and I thought
one of the other bullies were gonna come after me, but they didn’t, so. But it was that
system that, I don’t know, kind of really bothered me after, and I know it bothered my
brother. 616
Mary Stoney recalled being bullied in residential school in Alberta. “We were so afraid
of them we didn’t dare report them. Until one day a group of us girls got together, took
them on verbally, we put them in their place in a good way. A group of girls fell apart, the
bullying stopped. This incident made me angry for years.” 617
During her early years at the Lestock school, Geraldine Shingoose and other young girls
were attacked by older girls. “When I got into the senior dormitory, we, we got those girls,