The Survivors Speak

Life before residential school • 9
So, we, we packed water, and we packed, we packed our wood. Sometimes we had to
roll our wood up, up the dike, and then roll it down the other side, and, and we had to
learn how to cut our, our wood, and make kindling for the fire, and that was our way
of life.
And, and my grandfather was busy trying to teach us how to build canoes. Build,
make paddles. Build a bailer, to bail water out of our canoe. And, and then they were
trying to teach us how to, how to race on those old fishing canoes, and we always beat
the boys. And they didn’t like that, because we, we beat them all the time. So, that
meant that we were, that we were strong at that point, before we came to residential
school. And my life has been upside down since I came to residential school. 16
Rosalie Webber, who later attended a boarding school in Newfoundland, spent her
early childhood with her parents in Labrador in the 1940s.
My father was a fisherman and my mother also
worked with him and they worked together. He was
a trapper and my mom trapped with him. Also my
mom made all of our clothes and all of his clothing.
And they knitted and they cooked and my mom
was a midwife.
It was very happy. We were always busy with the
family. Everything was a family thing, you know. I
remember gathering water from the one little brook
that ran through Spotted Islands, where I was born.
I remember, you know, the dogs. I remember my
brothers and I had one sister and, I had another
sister, a step-sister, but she lived in Newfoundland
and I didn’t know her.
Rosalie Webber.
We were quite happy, you know, and my mother was a hunter like my dad. They’d go
out in partridge season and, and always in competition and with a single .22 she’d
come in with about 150 and he’d be lucky to make the 100. [laughter] And then the
community would take it and it would be bottled and canned for winter provisions,
’cause being, being a trapper in the winter time, they all had their own trapping areas.
So they, many of them went in their own traplines and as we did and my father trapped
in Porcupine Bay. And so we would journey there when fishing season was over.
I was just a small child so I remember happy days. 17
Martha Loon was born in 1972 in northwestern Ontario and attended the Poplar Hill,
Ontario, school in the 1980s. Stories were a large part of the education she received from
her parents.
They were stories that, you know, they, they taught us how, how to behave. You know
they taught us our values. We even just, you know how, you know you hear stories