The Survivors Speak

A place of refuge
“They’d be in a good place.”
Poverty and the inability to feed and clothe their children forced some parents to send
their children to residential school. When Ivan George was enrolled in the Mission, British
Columbia, school, his father was a single parent with
six children under the age of fourteen. When the time
came to return to the school after his first summer holiday,
Ivan told his father he did not wish to return. “He
says, ‘You have to. I can’t provide for you, or nothing to
feed you, clothes on your back, education.’ So, I went
back, and I said, ‘Oh, I better,’ because you know where,
what, what’s going on, all that. So, I stayed the whole
year without running away.” 45
Cecilia Whitefield-Big George said her mother was
not able to support her family when they lived in Big
Grassy in northwestern Ontario.
Ivan George.
She would go and clean, work for people, eh, like
do their laundry and clean their floors and clean the house for them and that’s how
she fed us. They’d give her food, eh. And then when the priest arrived he told her,
you know they’d be in a good place if they went to school. And so that’s how that
happened. I, my little sister, she was only four years old. So that’s how we first got
picked up. 46
One former student, whose grandparents had also attended residential school, placed
his daughter in residential school when she was thirteen.
I didn’t have a wife at the time and I felt that was a good place for her, so I wasn’t really
fully aware of the, you know, the negative parts of, the parts, negative, negativity
of residential school ’cause really, I guess, when I look at the residential school issue,
you know, I saw, you know, physically, I guess, better than what I experienced at the
reserve. On the reserve I had a very abusive dad, my dad was abusive, physically abusive,
and we lived in a little log cabin and we didn’t have regular meals. 47
Ethel Johnson said she and her siblings were sent to the Shubenacadie school when her
mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
My father couldn’t look after us. I was ten years old, there was another one, there was
five of us, and the youngest was about nine months old, at the time. So the three of