The Survivors Speak

76 • Truth & Reconciliation Commission
it’s good for you,” she kept telling me. And I said, “No, I don’t want it. I don’t want it,”
and so I was, I was scared. 259
Stella Bone also reported her difficulty in eating the nutritional biscuit when she
attended the Sandy Bay school. “They used to be really hard, eh, so you’d have to suck on it
really long to make it soft, you know, just to appease your, your hunger, I guess.” 260
Mel H. Buffalo recalled with distaste the vitamin pills and biscuits that students
were given.
They would ask you to swallow one of these every day. If you had bit into it—oh man,
it was horrible, the taste was in your mouth for days. So you’d try not to bite it because—we
would dare some of the new kids to bite the pills but they’d only do it once
and that was it. And we used to—when we ran out of pucks, we’d use those cookies
for pucks because they were hard. And we didn’t have any of the regular pucks so, we
saved up a bunch of those and used those. 261
Complaints about the limited, poorly prepared, monotonous diet were intensified by
the fact that at many schools, the students knew the staff members were being served
much better fare. When she helped in the kitchen to prepare staff meals at the Sechelt,
British Columbia, school, Daisy Hill could not help
noticing “how well they ate compared to the food that
was given to us, students.” 262
At the Kamloops school, Julianna Alexander was
shocked by the difference between the student and
staff dining room.
On their table they had beautiful food, and our
table, we had slop. I call it slop because we were
made to eat burnt whatever it was, you know, and
compared to what they had in their dining room.
You know they had all these silver plates, and beautiful
glass stuff, and all these beautiful food and Daisy Hill.
fruits and everything on there, and we didn’t even
have that. And so I, I became a thief, if you want. You know I figured a way to get that
food to those hungry kids in intermediates, even the high school girls, the older ones
were being punished as well. 263
At the school she attended in Saskatchewan, Inez Dieter said, “the staff used to eat like
kings, kings and queens.” Like many students, she said she used the opportunity of working
in the staff dining room to help herself to leftovers. “I’d steal that and I’d eat, and I’d
feel real good.” 264
When Frances Tait was given a position in the staff dining room, she said, she thought
she had “died and gone to heaven ’cause even eating their leftovers were better than what