ONE DAY IN LATE AUGUST IN THE YEAR 1920, when I was two months past my seventh birthday, my mother called me into our cabin on the reserve.
“Mary,” she said, “tomorrow you are going to school.”
School? What was school? I didn’t know.
It didn’t occur to me to ask my mother what this thing called school might be. Native children were raised to accept the statements of their parents and elders, and to ask no questions. When I was young and decisions were made for me by my parents or the elders—attending school, going to work, getting married—I obeyed them as I had been taught to do.
So I went to bed that night in August, 1920, with the question, still unanswered, going through my head . . . what is school?
The next day, Mary Sutherland and I—she was just my age and in years to come, we became each other’s aunt, as she married my uncle and I married hers—climbed into Mr. Bloomfield’s wagon with two other children from Stoney Creek. I waved goodbye to my mother and Johnny and Bella and Mark. I waved to my Grandmother Ann and I saw that she was crying. Why was she crying? I didn’t know. I didn’t know where this wagon was taking us, or who Mr. Bloom-field was, or how long I would be away from the village.
Aunt Mary knew no more than I did. Nobody had told us anything.
I was confused as the wagon rolled out of the village to-wards Vanderhoof, but I was excited too. My mother had given me twenty-five cents just before I climbed into the wagon and told me that I could buy some candy. We went first to the railway station in Vanderhoof where we picked up two nuns and some boys who had come in on the morning train. Mr. Bloomfield stopped just long enough in the town to let me buy a large bag of mixed candy and then we were off again. I did not know where we were going but I could tell from our direction that we were not going back to my village. We were moving north.
When the novelty of the bag of candy had worn off, I found myself listening to the older girls in the wagon who spoke my language. They talked about the Mission School and Fort St. James. I understood from what they said that this Mission School was a big building, where many children learned to read and write and to speak English.
I finally found the courage to ask, “How many days will it take to learn to speak English and to read and write?” I was told that to learn such things took many years.
From that moment, I was homesick. I was frightened too. Many years . . . did that mean I would not see my family or my village for years and years? I knew that Fort St. James was many miles from my home. I had relatives there and I had heard them say that they could not come to Stoney Creek often because of the distance. Suddenly this going to school was a very terrible thing that was happening to me.
That night we camped in a field about half way between Vanderhoof and Fort St. James. The boys put up a tent and Aunt Mary and I and the two nuns slept in it. Although I was sleeping with one of the nuns, I was very cold in the night. Towards dawn I thought about the boys and Mr. Bloomfield. They were sleeping in the wagon. Are they very cold? I wondered.
Late the next day, we crossed the river on a ferry, passed through the village of Fort St. James, and there, on the edge of Stuart Lake, was the church and the Mission School.
Many years passed before I learned the history of the Mission School. It was started by missionaries, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, years before I went there in 1920, although the dormitories which allowed the school to take in boarders were built just three years before my first year in the school. The work of the school, the teaching, cooking, laundry and cleaning, all of this was done by the pupils and four nuns. These nuns belonged to the Sisters of Child Jesus, an order which was started in rural France. The sisters were trained for menial duties only and, I’m sure, had never expected to end up as teachers in the wilds of British Columbia!
The first problem the sisters and missionaries had to face was that the new pupils spoke only their Native language. I had hardly heard English spoken before I went to the Mission School. The problem was solved by putting the new pupils, no matter what their ages, into the first grade on their arrival at the school in order to teach them English.
When I went there with Mary Sutherland, I had no idea that rny village was opposed to this school. The Native parents missed their children and knew that their children were unhappy away from home. They did not like the strict discipline practised by the nuns and missionaries, and they felt that their children were not fed and looked after as they would have been at home.
I did not know that three years before I went to the Mission School, the Stoney Creek Council, pressed by the mothers of the village, had sent a telegram to the government in Ottawa which said that the people wanted a school on their own reserve. “This Indian village has ninety-five school age children … we can feed our children at home then,” said the telegram. Nor did I know that later, the Native people were forced to apologize for sending that telegram.
Another thing I didn’t know was that the Oblates were equally dissatisfied with the school. The missionaries felt that the school was too close to Fort St. James village and to the Necoslie Reserve. How could they teach the children to speak English, they asked, how could the children be trained properly, if the parents were constantly interfering? Besides, the aim of the Oblates was to teach the Native children to become farmers and farmers’ wives, and there was not enough land around the school to provide that training. No, the missionaries were not happy about the Mission School. . . .
I knew none of these things. I only knew that I was always homesick.
Mary Sutherland and I used to look across the lake and think that on the other side, many miles away, our families were netting, cleaning and drying fish in the village, travelling to the hunting grounds, or walking along their traplines. I could picture so clearly the drying rack at Cluculz Lake and the cabin at Wedgewood. At night I would try to remember how the trains sounded in the darkness as they rushed past the little Wedgewood station.
Just once, my mother and Johnny phoned me. I couldn’t believe that I was hearing their voices, that they actually stood at the other end of miles and miles of telephone wire. Oh, I cried silently, if I could only see them! I believe that I thought I would never never be with them again.
Christmas was the worst. Many of the pupils who lived on the Necoslie Reserve in Fort St. James were able to spend the Christmas holidays with their parents, but Mary’s and mine lived too far away—there was no money to have us brought home, so we stayed in the school. I thought about all the people who would be coming back to Stoney Creek. I couldn’t stop thinking about the dances and the visiting and the walk through frosty darkness to the little church on Christmas Eve. I thought I would die, I was so lonesome for my parents and my village.
Mary and I cried all through the Christmas holidays. Nothing the nuns or the missionaries did could make us feel any better.
“I’m always hungry,” said Mary.
“So am I,” I said.
We did not say this in our own language, but in the halting English which we were slowly learning. The nuns and the priest who was the principal had warned all of us that it was forbidden to speak the Indian language, and that if we broke this rule, we would be punished. I suppose they believed that without such a rule, we little savages would never learn a civilized language! We were deathly afraid of being whipped. Even when we were alone, Mary and I tried to remember to speak in the new language.
We saw so many pupils whipped for speaking their Native language or running away or stealing food. The boys were thrashed for speaking to the girls, and the girls were thrashed for writing notes to the boys.
Mary and I were terrified when we saw someone being whipped. We said to each other—in English—“This is not a thing our parents do to us.” So even when we talked of our hunger, we did not use our Native language.
I was always hungry. I missed the roast moose, the dried beaver meat, the fish fresh from a frying pan, the warm bread and bannock and berries. Oh, how I missed the food I used to have in my own home!
At school, it was porridge, porridge, porridge, and if it wasn’t that, it was boiled barley or beans, and thick slices of bread spread with lard. Weeks went by without a taste of meat or fish. Such things as sugar or butter or jam only appeared on our tables on feast days, and sometimes not even then. A few times, I would catch the smell of roasting meat coming from the nuns’ dining room, and I couldn’t help myself—I would follow that smell to the very door.
Apart from the summers, I believe I was hungry for all seven of the years I was at school. Only later did I learn that the government gave the missionaries $125 each year for every pupil in the school. This had to cover our food and clothing for ten months of the year, in addition to running and maintaining the school. No wonder we were on rations more suited to a concentration camp!
I had dreamed of going home so often that when, early in July of 1921, Mary and I tumbled into Mr. Bloomfield’s wagon, I couldn’t believe it was really happening. We hugged each other.
“We’re going home!” we said to each other in our own language. “We’re going home to Stoney Creek!”
Everyone cried when the wagon stopped and we were on Stoney Creek land once more. My mother and grandmother, Bella and Mark—everyone cried at the sight of us, two little girls, now eight years old, who had been away so long.
And yes, there were the log cabins and the smoke shacks and the creek and the little church, and Johnny standing behind my mother with a big grin on his face, just as I had remembered them. Nothing had changed! The loudest wails came from Mary Sutherland and me. I think that was the happiest day of my life.
In September, when Mr. Bloomfield came with his wagon to take us back to the Mission School, we all cried again. And the loudest cries . . . they came from Mary and me.