The Survivors Speak

Strange food
“We were very lonely without those berries.”
In their home communities, many students had been raised on food that their parents
had hunted, fished, or harvested. Strange and unfamiliar meals at the schools added to
their sense of disorientation. Daisy Diamond found the food at residential school to be
unfamiliar and unpalatable. “When I was going to Shingwauk, the food didn’t taste very
good, because we didn’t have our traditional food there, our moose meat, our bannock,
and our berries. Those were the things that we had back home, and we were very lonely
without those berries.” 226
Florence Horassi had a strong memory of her first meal at the school at Fort Providence,
Northwest Territories.
And when we ate, it was a hung fish. I recognize some fish, ’cause we have, have hung
fish for our dog food. When I was small, I see that. It was covered so much in pepper.
It was just black. Not cooked good, there’s blood on it, and it was rotten. And I wanted
to throw up. I threw up. And the nun came to me, she stood at the back, she dig in her
pocket, and took a clothespin out, put it on my nose, and told me to eat.
She was not used to the milk that was served at the school: “And the milk, they had
cows. I believe it came from the cows, ’cause it was really, at least for me, it was so thick I
couldn’t drink it. And she pulled my head back, and told me to take the, she put my head
up, like over my hand, and she pour it down, just dripping.” 227
Some schools did make allowances for traditional foods. Simon Awashish recalled
being allowed to trap for food while attending the Amos, Québec, school.
One thing that we were allowed to do, to do, put out some snares. These were one of
the activities we liked to do. We were a group of young children. We were about aged
thirteen or fourteen, and we would go out and set snares. And when we brought in
hares, we were asked if … there was some members of our nation that came to work
in the kitchen, and we asked them to cook the hare for us in the traditional Atikameg
way, in order to keep some sort of contact with our traditional food that we had before,
before we were separated from our community. 228
Dora Fraser, from the eastern Arctic, found it difficult to adjust to the food served in the
hostels. “We were eating canned food, beans, peas, red beans. The food was terrible, but
this, this family was eating well, like, country food comes in and they eat, and we were fed
sometimes leftovers. Sometimes we didn’t eat it all.” 229