The Survivors Speak

12 • Truth & Reconciliation Commission
And then we’d go back to bed and my mom would make the breakfast and we’d go off
to school. My granny taught us to go picking berries and then she would can them for
the winter, and she would give us some at wintertime. 23
Andre Tautu, one of the first students to attend the Chesterfield Inlet school on the
Hudson Bay coast, said,
In 1949, we started being told we had to go to school in Chesterfield Inlet. I came
from a happy home and we had a good life when we were living on the land with my
mother, my father, my grandfather, my grandmother, and my siblings of which I was
the eldest. When I first went to school, I didn’t know one word in English. 24
Some students had very different memories. By the 1940s, decades of poverty, poor
health, and social marginalization had disrupted many Aboriginal communities and families.
Disrupted family life is, in fact, part of the continuing legacy of the residential schools
themselves, and some families were already living with the impacts of the schools on older
siblings or other family members who had gone to school before them. Many of the former
students identify themselves both as “Survivors” of the schools, and as “Intergenerational
Survivors,” the children of parents who were also former student Survivors.
One former student, who attended residential school in the Northwest Territories,
recalled that her home life was violent and frightening.
There was a lot of violence. There was a lot of, we were very afraid of my father. He
was a very angry man. And, and my mother used to run away on him and he used
to come home to us kids and then, just really verbally abuse us and make us really
scared of him. We used to be, I, I used to run to the neighbours and hide behind their
door because I was so scared of him. 25
Another former student said that the Kuper Island, British Columbia, school
was better than being in the chaotic home life that we had. My parents went to residential
school system, and they didn’t know how to parent and suffered alcoholism.
There was physical abuse at home, just the chaos of an alcoholic home. 26