The Survivors Speak

Forced departure
“I didn’t want my dad to go to jail.”
For many students, the trip to residential school began with the arrival of an official letter.
When Josephine Eshkibok was eight years old, a priest came to her home in northern
Ontario and presented her mother with a letter. “My mother opened the letter and I could
see her face; I could see her face, it was kind of sad but mad too. She said to me, ‘I have to
let you go,’ she told us. So we had to, go to, go to school at Spanish Residential School.” 27
Isaac Daniels recalled one dramatic evening in 1945, when the Indian agent came to his
father’s home on the James Smith Reserve in Saskatchewan.
I didn’t understand a word, ’cause I spoke Cree. Cree was the main language in our
family. So, so my dad was kind of angry. I kept seeing him pointing to that Indian
agent.
So that night we were going to bed, it was just a one-room shack we all lived in, and I
heard my dad talking to my mom there, and he was kind of crying, but he was talking
in Cree now. He said that, “It’s either residential school for my boys, or I go to jail.” He
said that in Cree. So, I overheard him. So I said the next morning, we all got up, and I
said, “Well, I’m going to residential school,” ’cause I didn’t want my dad to go to jail. 28
Donna Antoine was enrolled in a British Columbia residential school after a visit from a
government official to her family.
It must have been in the summer, the, the Indian
agent came to, to see my father. I imagine it must
have been the Indian agent because it looked pretty
serious. He was talking to him for some time, and
because we couldn’t understand, we, we couldn’t
even eavesdrop what they were talking about. So
after some time spent there, Father sat, sat us down,
and told us that this Indian agent came to tell us,
tell him that we had to go to school, to a boarding
school, one that is not close to our home, but
far away.
The official had told her father that he would be sent Donna Antoine.
to jail if he did not send Antoine to residential school.
“We were sort of caught in, in wanting to stay home, and seeing our parents go to jail, and
we thought, we must have thought who’s gonna look after us if our parents go to jail?” 29