The Survivors Speak

36 • Truth & Reconciliation Commission
The only building that I knew up to that time, that moment in my life was the one-storey
house that we had. And when I got to the residential school, I seen this big monster
of a building, and I’ve never seen any buildings that, that large, that high. And I
was, I’ve always called it a monster, I still do today, because of not the size of it, but
because of the things that happened there. 83
Archie Hyacinthe said he was unprepared for life in the Catholic school in Kenora.
It was almost like we were, you know, captured, or taken to another form of home.
Like I said, nobody really explained to us, as if we were just being taken away from
our home, and our parents. We were detached I guess from our home and our parents,
and it’s scary when you, when you first think, think about it as a child, because
you never had that separation in your lifetime before that.
So that was the, I think that’s when the trauma started for me, being separated from
my sister, from my parents, and from our, our home. We were no longer free. It was
like being, you know, taken to a strange land, even though it was our, our, our land, as
I understood later on. 84
Dorene Bernard was only four and a half years old when she was enrolled in the
Shubenacadie residential school. She had thought that the family was simply taking her
older siblings back to the school after a holiday.
I remember that day. We went down there to take my sister and brother back. My
father and mom went in to talk to the priest, but they were making plans to leave me
behind. But I didn’t know that, so I went on the girls’ side with my sister and she told
me after couple hours went by that they had already left. I would say it was pretty difficult
to feel that abandoned at four and a half years old. But I had my sister, my older
sister Karen, she took care of me the best way she could. 85
When parents brought their children to the school themselves, the moment of departure
was often heartbreaking. Ida Ralph Quisess could recall her father “crying in the
chapel” when she and her siblings were sent to residential school.
He was crying, and that, one of the, these women in black dresses, I later learned they
were sisters, they called them, nuns, the Oblate nuns, later, many years after I learned
what their title was, and the one that spoke our language told him, “We’ll keep your
little girls, we’ll raise them,” and then my father started to cry. 86
Vitaline Elsie Jenner resisted being sent to school.
And I didn’t want to go to the residential school. I didn’t realize what I was going to
come up against upon being there. I resisted. I cried and I fought with my mom. My
mom was the one that took us there and dragged, actually just about dragged me
there, because of my resistance, not wanting, I hung onto everything that was in the
way, resisting.
The separation at the Fort Chipewyan school in northern Alberta was traumatic.