The Survivors Speak

38 • Truth & Reconciliation Commission
my dad over there. But they stopped me and I was crying and I was telling my dad to
come and he didn’t hear me and I was wondering what is happening, I don’t even
know. 89
The rest of a new student’s first day is often remembered as being invasive, humiliating,
and dehumanizing. Her first day at the Catholic school in Kenora left Lynda Pahpasay
McDonald frightened and distressed.
And I had, I must have had long hair, like long, long hair, like, and my brothers, even
my brother had long hair, and he looked like a little girl. Then they took us into this,
it was like a greeting area, we went in there, and they kind of counted us, me and
my siblings. And I was hanging onto my sister, and she told me not to cry, so don’t
cry, you know, you just, you listen. She was trying to tell me, and I was crying, and of
course me and my sister were crying, there’s three of us, we’re just a year apart. Me,
Barbara, and Sandy were standing there, crying. She was telling us not to cry, and,
and just do what we had to do.
And, and I remember having, watching my brother being, like, taken away, my older
brother, Marcel. They took him, and he had long hair also.
And we were taken upstairs, and they gave us some clothing, and they put numbers
on our clothes. I remember there’s little tags in the back, they put numbers, and they
told us that was your number. Well, I can’t remember my number.
And, and we seen the nuns. They had these big black outfits, and they were scary
looking, I remember. And of course they weren’t really, they looked really, I don’t
know, mean, I guess.
And, and we, they took us upstairs, I remember that, and they gave us these clothes,
different clothes, and they took us to another room, then they kind of, like, and they
took our old clothes, they took that, and they made us take a bath or a shower. I think
it was a bath at that time.
After we came out, and they washed our hair, and I don’t know, they kind of put some
kind of thing on our hair, like, you know, our heads, and they’re checking our hair
and stuff like that. And then they took us to this chair, and they put a white cloth over
our shoulders, and they started cutting our hair. And you know they cut real straight
bangs, and real short hair, like, it was real straight haircuts. I didn’t like the fact that
they cut off all our hair. And same with my brother, they had, they cut off all of, most
of his hair. They had a, he had a brush cut, like. 90
When Emily Kematch arrived at the Gordon’s, Saskatchewan, school from York Landing
in northern Manitoba, her hair was treated with a white powder and then cut. “And we had
our clothes that we went there with even though we didn’t have much. We had our own
clothes but they took those away from us and we had to wear the clothes that they gave us,
same sort of clothes that we had to wear.” 91