The Survivors Speak

The journey • 27
I didn’t know I was going away to school. I thought I was just going for a train ride
and I was just excited to go. My sisters and my brothers were on the train too and I felt
like, I have family with me, but I didn’t understand why my parents didn’t come on
with us. They were just on the side of the railway there and they were waving at us as
the train was moving away. And I remember asking one of the kids from back home,
“How come our parents aren’t coming?” and then she said, that girl said, “They can’t
come ’cause we’re going to school.” And I was talking to her in Cree and I said, “Well,
I don’t want to go to school, I’d rather stay home and stay with my parents.” And she
said, she told me, “No, we can’t, we have to go and get our education,” and then at
night as we were travelling along, I got really lonesome.
Because her siblings were going to the Anglican school in Dauphin, they got off
there. Emily stayed on the train. “We were on the train, I’d say, like, three days to get to
Saskatchewan and when we got there, three of my cousins were with me, those were the
only ones I knew. Three boys, there’s Billy, Gordon, and Nelson and I was the only girl from
my hometown.” 64
Many students whose parents belonged to the United Church were sent from northern
British Columbia to residential school in Edmonton because there was no United Church
residential school closer to where they lived. Sphenia Jones’s journey to residential school
started from Haida Gwaii (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands), off the coast of
British Columbia.
And I went on a boat first from Haida Gwaii. There
was really lots of Haidas that were going to Edmonton
at that time, and some Skidegate, as well as
Masset, and we got on a really big boat. They used
to have a, they used to call it a steamer. It used to
bring groceries and stuff like that maybe once a
year, twice a year to Haida Gwaii, that’s what they
put us on, and then we got off the boat in Prince
Rupert, and then they started hauling us on a
train there.
The train station building is still there in Rupert,
where we all had to wait. There was really lots of us. Sphenia Jones.
And I don’t remember what month it was, or anything
like that. But we used to have to do stops along the way, and pick up more Native
children. And we were on the train, gee, for about four days, I think, something
like that. And the more people they picked up, the more squished we all became in,
inside the train, and we were packed in like a bunch of sardines. There was kids laying
around on the floor, all along in, in where the walkway was supposed to be. And I
could hear really lots of crying all the time, crying, crying, crying.
She recalled that at one stop, the train picked up an infant.