The Survivors Speak

School meals • 77
we got. And anybody who got a job in there, their responsibility was to try and steal food
and get it out to the other people.” 265
Hazel Bitternose, who attended schools in Lestock and Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, said
she enjoyed working in the priests’ dining room. “They had some good food there and I
used to sneak some food and able to feed myself good there. So that’s why I liked to work
there.” 266
Gladys Prince recalled how at the Sandy Bay, Manitoba, school, the “priests ate the
apples, we ate the peelings. That is what they fed us. We never ate bread. They were stingy
them, their own, their own baking.” 267
Doris Judy McKay said that at the Brandon, Manitoba, school, cleaning up the staff dining
room was a prized chore. “There’d be about three or four of us working, we’d race for
the supervisors’ dining area because, why we raced was because they left a, like platter of
their meal there. Like say if they had steak, chicken or, pork chops, and we’d race for that
eh, ’cause what we got wasn’t very much.” 268
Betty Smith-Titus said that her father paid extra to the Baptist-run school in Whitehorse,
Yukon Territory, to ensure that she was given the same food as the staff. “I didn’t get that. I
ate like the rest of the kids. I ate the runny rolled oats in the morning, with a glass of milk.
And my father paid for, I don’t know how, how many years, and finally I told him I ate like
the other kids, they didn’t give me what the staff ate, so my dad didn’t pay him anymore.” 269
Some students, however, spoke favourably of residential school food. One student, who
attended the Gordon’s, Saskatchewan, school in the 1950s, said, “You know, I’ve heard a
lot of people say that, you know, their experience in residential school, their meals were
terrible. That wasn’t so in Gordon’s. Gordon’s provided really good meals, a lot of times
they were hot, good meals.” 270
Some students also reported improvements in the food, over time. Mary Rose Julian
thought the food at the Shubenacadie school in the 1950s was not “too bad.”
I did like the porridge that we got every morning, ’cause I was, I was brought up on
porridge. So, the porridge was pretty good, because they put sugar in it while they
were, they mixed it with sugar, and they never put sugar on the table, they mixed it,
mixed the porridge with the sugar, and that was really good. Sometimes it was lumpy,
you just bust the lumps in your mouth, you know, no big deal.
But there were limits to her praise. She recalled that fish was served on Wednesday
and Friday.
It wasn’t, it wasn’t like my, the way my father and mother prepared it. It was horrible.
And then they put this sauce over it. It was white sauce, well, it was white, anyway,
you know, and it was horrible. So, anyways, you had to eat that, and some kids didn’t
like it so much, you know, they got sick on it, but I didn’t get sick on it. I managed to
swallow it and everything. I forced myself to eat it. So, I start getting used to it after a
while. So, the, the food and everything was fine. 271