The Survivors Speak

Student victimization of students • 169
When Gordon Keewatin attended the Portage la Prairie and Birtle schools in Manitoba,
he depended on his brother to protect him from school bullies. He said that “the next thing
I knew there were older boys there that used to, used to pick on the younger ones, and I
was starting to get picked on. But I always ran to my brother, always looked for him, especially
if somebody come and start poking me.”
In later years, he looked after his younger brother. He gave him the same advice his
older brother had given him: “not to ask questions, and to just go with the flow, to follow
orders, do what he was told. I told him I’d protect him if he, somebody tried to fight him
or whatever.” 623
Students could not always protect their siblings. In some cases, all they could do was
watch them being bullied and humiliated. Mary Rose Julian remembered seeing her
brother bullied at the Shubenacadie school.
And one time I was working in, in the refectory, I was cleaning up in there, and I saw
my brother cornered. There was about four, four or five boys, you know, that cornered
him in there. There was the chapel and the, the refectory, and he was cornered, and
I went like this, you know, I was gonna see him getting beat, he got, he was getting
beaten up, and he was just cornered, and these guys were going after him. All of a
sudden, I saw somebody grab those boys and throw them off one by one, and they
scattered, and he went and picked up my brother, and when he turned around, I
recognized him, it was Albert Marshall from Eskasoni. He was, like, friends from our
same community, eh. And oh, my God, I was relieved, and I was there screaming,
and I was going like this, you know, you know I was just screaming inside, I couldn’t
do nothing, helpless and everything. I didn’t want my brother in, in that kind of situation.
624
In some situations, students were obliged to punish their siblings. Harvey Behn recalled
how students who ran away from the Lower Post, British Columbia, school were forced to
run the ‘gauntlet.’ He said that
for you people that don’t understand what the gauntlet is, it’s a row of people standing
with weapons in their hands, their fists clenched and the offending students were
made to run through this group of people and get hit and get beat. And if they didn’t
participate, then they were forced to run through this gauntlet. So I, myself, was made
to run through and was hit and beaten and my brother ran through it and I had to hit
him and I had to beat him. 625
In some schools, there were conflicts between students who came from different communities
and First Nations. Roger Cromarty said that at the Sioux Lookout school, students
from one First Nation dominated the others. Those who dominated made other
students bring them extra food. 626 Louise Large recalled how at the Blue Quills school,
“we used to fight, the Chipewyans and the Crees.” 627 Students from the same communities
often stuck together. Of her time at the Moose Factory, Ontario, school in the 1960s,
Nellie Trapper recalled that students at the school came from communities from all over