IF YOU DRIVE WEST FROM THE TOWN of Vanderhoof along the highway towards Prince Rupert, through the village of Fort Fraser, and continue in a westerly direction for a few miles, you will see a large brick building set on the southern shore of Fraser Lake. Even from the highway you will notice that the building is closed, its doors barred, its windows boarded up. The fields are overgrown with grass and weeds, the outbuildings are tumbling down, the small graveyard is untended.
When I see it now, it is hard to remember the excitement that the people of Stoney Creek village felt in 1921 and 1922 when that brick building was under construction and a section of land was being cleared of trees. We were told that the Mission School in Fort St. James was going to be closed, and that all the students would be attending this new school, Lejac, soon to be completed on the shore of Fraser Lake. Everyone talked about the new school.
“It has two wings, one for the girls and one for the boys. Each wing has four dormitories, and there is a big washroom in each dormitory,” said one.
“You should see the size of the dining room,” said another.
“And, oh, the kitchen—and the sewing room, and the recreation halls, and the little chapel, and there is even a hospital and a visiting room for parents of the pupils!”
“And there will be a big garden so that our children will get nice fresh vegetables—and a barn and piggery, which means milk and good meat. Oh! Oh! Oh!”
Many of the men from my village were helping to build the new school. They kept the excitement alive with their stories of the modern wonders which were going into the building of Lejac—I think some of us expected to see a Buckingham Palace rising on the shore of Fraser Lake!
In February of 1922, the students, like Mary Sutherland and I who were in the Mission School, the teachers and staff, all were transferred to Lejac. That was quite a move! Several teams of horses and sleighs loaded with children made the trip from Fort St. James to Vanderhoof. We waited in the Nechako Hotel for the train that would take us on to Lejac. As we travelled towards Lejac, I told myself that now every-thing would be different.
The first sight of the large brick school brought gasps from us. It’s so big, I thought.
Everyone raced to be the first into the building and once in, we ran from room to room, turning water taps on and off and flushing the toilets. We peeked into the sewing room and the chapel. The hospital—that was a slight disappointment, with its bare walls, its few cots, and large cupboards. We very soon learned to call it the infirmary. But everything else was so new, so big. Shouts of, “Come here! Look at this!” sounded through the building.
I found it hard to go to sleep that first night in Lejac. What wonders, I thought as I drifted off to sleep, would the next day hold?
When a large plate of porridge was served for breakfast the next morning, I had my first warning that despite the modern building, nothing had changed.
The pupils were separated according to sex as rigidly as they had been in the old Mission School. They were segre-gated in the classroom, the play areas, the chapel, the dining room. The nuns and missionaries were determined that the boys and girls—even those related to each other—should be kept apart. On my second day in Lejac, a boy was whipped in front of the whole school because he had wet his bed the night before. Soon after, the first girl was beaten for dropping a note near a boy’s desk. In the first week, three boys ran away. They were brought back by the Mounties and thrashed in front of the whole school. The Indian language was forbidden as it had been in Fort St. James, and any student who broke this rule was punished.
By the end of the first day I was hungry. Within hours of coming to Lejac, I was as homesick as I had been in the Mission School. Except for Sunday, our routine was always the same.
I would tumble out of bed early in the morning and wash in a hurry. When my bed was made, I ran to chapel and attended Mass. It seemed to go on forever, but when it was done, it was time to go to the girls’ side of the dining room for a plate of porridge. I hated porridge more than anything! Oh, I used to think, if I could only have milk and brown sugar with it, like we have for breakfast at home!
After breakfast there were chores—sometimes it was clearing the table or sweeping or dusting. When our chores were done, it was time for class.
The afternoon was just like the morning. Lunch was a plate of boiled barley or beans and a thick slice of bread spread with lard. The only time we had butter on our bread was on a feast day. After lunch, we had chores and class again. The afternoon finished with a sewing or singing lesson.
At seven-thirty in the evening, there was Benediction in the chapel, and at eight-thirty, in total silence, the students went to their dormitories, said their prayers and fell into bed.
I found that I wanted to learn. I liked to read; I even liked arithmetic and spelling. Sometimes I found myself wishing that we did more studying. I said this once to an older girl.
“I wish,” I whispered, “that we were learning more things out of books.”
I remember that she looked at me as if I was crazy.
We spent a lot of time changing clothes. We had clothes for chapel, clothes for work, clothes for play, clothes for class. I felt that my life was a continual round of getting out of one set of clothing and into another—and heaven help the student who was wearing play clothes in chapel or work clothes in class!
I knew that my life in Lejac was plain sailing compared with many of the other students. I was shy and naturally submissive. The older students sometimes called me Teacher’s Pet, and although I did not like this name, I knew that it was true. I was teacher’s pet.
I was scared of breaking a rule and being punished for it. I never used my Native language except very privately and in a whisper, I never spoke to a boy, and the only thing I had ever stolen was the sugar at the bottom of tea cups when I was cleaning up the nuns’ dining room table. I would run my fingers around the bottom of the cups and then suck the sugar off them. Oh, that sugar, brown with the tea and hardened slightly, was good!
And another thing—the teachers thought that I had one of the best singing voices in the school, and very often, when other girls were out pulling up roots from the land that was being cleared, I was inside having a singing lesson. I didn’t miss all of the outside work, but unlike some of the other girls, at least I missed some of it.
So much of the work in Lejac was hard, especially for the boys. The bigger ones spent almost no time in class. Instead, they were cutting down trees and pulling up stumps, or else they were up before daylight feeding the horses and milking the cows. Long after he left Lejac one boy said, “I’m just a human bulldozer!” and that described exactly the work they did. There was no machinery of any kind, especially in the very early years; everything had to be done by brute physical force.
The boys often rebelled and I didn’t blame them. They were supposed to be in Lejac to get educated, but instead they were unpaid labourers, living on poor food and with no more freedom than if they were prisoners in a jail. When the principal explained to them that they were being trained to be agricultural workers, the boys laughed.
“Imagine trying to turn an Indian into a farmer!” they said.
Time after time, the boys ran away. Some were successful and managed to reach their parents’ traplines, but more often, they were caught by the Mounties, brought back and whipped. Some years after I was in the school, four boys ran away from Lejac in the dead of winter. They died of exposure before they could reach their reserves.
The girls did less hard physical labour than the boys, but in many ways, our time in Lejac was just as hard. Except when we were outside pulling up roots which lay on the surface of the ground after the land was cleared, we were always inside, under the watchful eye of a teacher. It seemed to bother them to see us idle—every time we finished a task, a piece of rough cloth and a needle were put in our hands with the order “Sew!” We made all of the dresses and uniforms worn in the school, and socks, drawers, chemises, and aprons.
When the boys worked outside in groups, the teachers did not find it easy to watch them. With the girls it was different. We had no privacy in our lives except when we went the bathroom, and sometimes, not even there!
I feel sad now when I remember how excited we all were to go to Lejac in 1922, when I remember the hopes we had that it would be a happier place than the Mission School, and especially when I remember how fast our hopes died. Nothing was changed except that we were in a bigger building with more modern conveniences, and that there was more work expected of us, sometimes very hard work.
The food was no better than it had been in the Mission School. We were always hungry. The braver or more desperate ones who stole food out of the pantry were continually caught and punished, just as they had been in Fort St. James. Driven by hunger, despite brutal thrashings, many of the pupils continued to steal food. I didn’t blame them—many times, I was tempted to steal a piece of meat or a cookie from the staff dining room myself.
We had hoped that with the parlor set aside for visitors, we would see more of our families. This was not to be. The room itself was small, and very soon became known as the Indian Parlor. My parents could not afford to come for a visit, but even if they had had the money for such a trip, they would have been allowed to stay for only two and one-half hours.
I did not realize until I was an adult and away from Lejac that the school must have been as big a disappointment to the missionaries and nuns as it was to us. The school was still getting only $125 a year for each student from the federal government in Ottawa, and in the bigger school, expenses were higher. I know now that the Oblates were always trying to make one dollar do the work of two.
Added to that, the parents were no more supportive of Lejac than they had been of the Mission School in Fort St. James. They complained of the food, the work, the punishments. They wanted schools on their own reserves, and nothing less would satisfy them. They wanted their children at home with them.
And within the school itself, the missionaries and the nuns had to deal with one hundred and eighty Native children who were always hungry, always homesick. The boys were openly rebellious, many of them stealing or running away or getting the girls off in some corner alone with them. Unlike the boys, the female students were seldom openly rebellious. Instead, they were sullen and depressed.
Lejac was not a happy place.