Residential Residential

TERRY LUSTY 21
St. Joseph’s School, Cross Lake, MB So St. Joseph’s.
HOW OLD WERE YOU WHEN YOU FIRST WENT IN?
Three. Three years old.
Every morning we went to church service. Every
evening was Benediction. Everyday. And with me it
got to a point where I was just saturated with religion.
I turned my back on it later because it was just
overwhelming. You virtually lived, ate, and breathed
religion.
In school you had catechism. You had the Bible and
the prayers and all the Latin, learning the Latin words.
I can still spiel them off today, even though I haven’t
used it for so many years. But don’t ask me what they
mean. But as if that wasn’t enough, on top of that
because I had a singing voice, I had to be part of the
choir. I had to be an altar boy. I had to be a server, eh.
So I had all this going on.
Just to put a little icing on the cake, one of my duties
every day apart from other things like working in the
kitchen or the fields or laundry room or whatever, was
I was the one who had to dust and sweep and clean
up and mop the chapel every day. I never got away
from that religious element in the system.
One other thing that I always remember so much
too is whenever I was in there, it was like I was in
there forever because I never got to go out of there,
except for the odd time when we were allowed off
the grounds supervised, or if we snuck out on our
own. We would do that also on Halloween night. We
would sneak out of there and challenge other kids to
go to the cemetery next door. It was one of our rare
enjoyments to see other kids get the heebie-geebies
having to visit a cemetery in the middle of the night.
I’ve got to backtrack now. Where was I going with
this? I was going to talk about…
Just before I started talking about going to the cemetery.
Oh, the grounds. Confinement. I was talking
about that. Especially for kids like myself, children like
myself who had nobody out there for us, as a consequence
of that we never had no visitors. By the same
token we never got to get out of there. Kids could go
out maybe at Christmas or at Easter and the summer
holidays and spend time with their families outside
of the residential school. But not kids like myself. We
were always in there. Once a month the children were
allowed a visitor; a relative or guardian, whatever. They
were allowed a visitor. The front of the building where
they would drive up, it had a circular driveway like this
[indicating], and they would come in and stop there
and pick up the kids and drive out. They would come
back and it was the same routine. That would be on
a Sunday. It was always on a Sunday. It would be the
only day of the month when they would allow that.
I used to stand at the front of the playground right parallel
with the front of the building and I used to hang
on that mesh fence where it was spiked at the top. I
remember one time I tried to jump out of the grounds
and I jumped up but I ripped one of my fingers open
on those stupid spikes.
I used to cling to that fence with my fingers curled
around the wire and watch these people come and
pick up other kids and wonder when is someone going
to come for me. Nobody ever did, of course. That
was kind of tough.
I was very much a loner. I became a loner. When I was
growing up during my first few years there, because
my mother was non-Native and my dad was actually
Métis, French, and Cree, I never grew up with our
language. My dad apparently had understood French,
Cree and English. But nothing other than English was
used in those first years when I was born, so I never
grew up with a Native language or the culture because
I was just a baby when they threw me into the
rez school. So I never had any of that. And because I
had nobody, none of my relatives to visit me or anything,
I never had any of that either. That’s why later
on when I got on my own at 16 and began wondering
about myself, who I was and where I came from and
da, da, da, da, da, I couldn’t answer my questions.
I had nobody to answer them for me. I guess I just
didn’t have the presence of mind in those days…
First of all, what happened was I had become a ward
of the Childrens’ Aid Society. And they were bound
by policy to not divulge any information to you. That’s
why I couldn’t know who my mom was or where
she was or how to contact her or anything like that.
So none of this stuff was shared. I eventually had to
investigate on my own and find these things out. They
wouldn’t even open up to us, Childrens’ Aid, they
wouldn’t let us see our own files, you know, which to
me was criminal.
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