Student Life at the Mission Schools
One of the best sources of information on life in the mission boarding schools is the accounts written by former students. This chapter provides summaries of four such memoirs. It concludes with a summary of the testimony that was presented to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada by one former mission school student.
Alice French (Masak)
When the doors to the school closed behind my father and me, I felt free, free at last. In school I was Alice, an Inuit girl being educated. Now, going down the steps with my father, I felt like one who had been lost, having been so long away from home, going back to a way of life I had almost forgotten.1
In 1937, when the Inuit girl Masak was seven years old, her mother, Sanggiak, was hospitalized with tuberculosis. Her father, Anisalouk, a trapper in the Mackenzie Delta, placed her and her younger brother, Aynounik, in the Anglican All Saints residential school in Aklavik. At the school she ceased to be Masak and became Alice— she would not hear her real name again until she returned home. When, at dinnertime on the first day of school, she saw her brother looking lost and lonesome, she walked over to comfort him, only to be ordered back into line. During the years they spent at the school, they rarely spoke, shouting out to one another only at mealtime in the segregated dining hall or in the schoolyard and playground.2
From the first day, life at the school was strange and invasive: on arrival students had their hair washed with coal oil to remove any vermin.3 The day started at seven o’clock. Breakfast was monotonous: every morning porridge, molasses, bread and jam, tea.4 For their health there were regular doses of cod liver oil.5
Masak enjoyed learning, but was confused by the strange animals that populated the nursery rhymes: what were sheep, cows, and pigs? What was one to make of dishes running away with spoons?6 Students were worked hard at the school. As well as shifts in the kitchen and the student and staff dining rooms, Masak had regular shifts in the laundry, working both the washing machine and the wringer.7
Among her more pleasant memories were sledding down hills on pieces of frozen cardboard, berry-picking expeditions down the Mackenzie River on the school barge, raiding the principal’s garden patch, and listening to other students tell scary stories in the dormitory after lights out. Some of these pleasures were risky—those caught raiding the garden were given a spanking while late-night storytellers had to stand in the corner.8
All the supplies from the South had to be brought in by boat down the Mackenzie River, which was frozen for much of the year. The first boat of the year brought a shipment of long-anticipated fruit and vegetables.9 Given the short shipping season, the school depended on parents to supply the school with meat and fish.10 Masak and the other students were provided muskrat traps. They were allowed to keep the money they raised from selling the furs, and the meat was roasted at the school.11
Shortly after Masak was admitted to the school, her mother died.12 When her father remarried, he took her out of the school. In her opinion she had been well treated, but she still felt that “going down the school steps for the last time was the happiest moment of my life. I wanted to sing as we rounded the corner and lost sight of the school.”13 Missing the closeness of her family, she said her years in the school had been a period of tremendous loneliness.14 The return to her family not only brought years of loneliness to an end, it also restored her privacy. While she had little more than a bed with curtains that could be drawn around it, she took pleasure in the private space that awaited her at her family’s small house: “How good it felt to have my own bedroom after many years of living in a dormitory. I could pull the curtains around me and yet have the comfort of knowing that my family was close by.”15
After taking her out of school, her father bought her new clothes: “No more long woolen underwear, itchy black stockings and baggy peach-coloured bloomers.” Everything that reminded her of school was left behind.16 But just as she was beginning to enjoy her freedom, she was confronted with a question about the legacy of her school experience. While leaving Aklavik, the family encountered a friend of her father’s, who posed a series of troubling questions. “What,” he wanted to know, “has school ever taught you except the English language, even to the point where you cannot even talk in your own tongue. Can you scrape and sew hides for clothing? Do you know how to skin the furs that are brought home? What kind of wife will you be since you must learn all these things which go into homemaking before you get married?”17
Despite the fact that she had been surrounded by other Inuit children, she had lost her ability to speak her own language: “We were not allowed to speak it anywhere, be it inside the school or on the school grounds and if we were caught we were punished. So, we learned to become ashamed of it and that divided us from our families.”18 Loss of language was not the only barrier the schools had created between her and her family: she could not drive a team of dogs, could not cut wood, and was squeamish about trapping. “After the first month at home, my self-confidence suffered a lot. I felt that if I had not been away from home all those things would have been taught to me during the course of growing up.”19
Despite such experiences, Inuit families recognized the value of education. In Masak’s recollection, families might send one child to boarding school “because we needed someone to be able to translate what the white man was saying about the price of fur when he was trading with us, or what the doctor said when one of us was ill.”20 When she was sixteen, Masak took a test to see if she could continue her education. She was accepted but before she could leave, her stepmother was diagnosed with tuberculosis and hospitalized. While she was disappointed at not being able to continue her education, she decided to stay with her father to look after her brother and her half-brothers and sisters.21 In the 1950s she had come to believe her children’s future depended on their receiving a good education: “I knew that I would do anything so my children would have the education I so badly wanted and did not have.”22
Anthony Thrasher
Anthony Thrasher was born into an Inuit family in Paulatuk, Northwest Territories, in 1937. His mother died when he was four, and his father remarried and moved to Tuktoyaktuk, where he worked on Our Lady of Lourdes, a boat the Roman Catholics used to transport goods between missions. Anthony’s older brothers had all attended Immaculate Conception, the Roman Catholic boarding school in Aklavik. When Anthony turned six, it was his turn to go.23 “My father packed a few things for me and we walked down to the dock together to wait for the mission schooner to come in and take me to school. I remember waving to him from the railing as The Immaculata pulled out into the bay and headed south towards Aklavik. I was crying. I didn’t want to leave him. My dad wasn’t home that much, but when he was, I was always with him, watching him work, listening to his stories.”24
When he arrived in Aklavik, the crewmen deposited him at the school. He saw the grey-habited nuns, heard their voices mix with the wind, and turned and ran. But he had no place to go. He was caught, grabbed by his hood and dragged into the school, scrubbed, checked for vermin, and put to bed.25
The nuns inspired a variety of emotions. For instance, there was Sister Alice Rae, “who I loved as much as my real mother.” He thought Sister Bessant was nice, but “Sister Soka used a rule on our hands and Sister Gilbert was hell-on-wheels for pulling ears, brushing our mouth with lye soap and whipping us with a watch chain. I never understood how she could be so mean, and yet be so very kind at the same time.”26
Like most of the Inuit students, Thrasher was not used to cooked food. He and the others boys used to sneak into the kitchen to steal frozen meat.27 When the principal, Sister Kristoff, discovered their love of raw frozen meat, she would provide it to the boys on occasion. “They sometimes served us raw whitefish eggs, too. I’d come away from those meals licking my fingers, with my mouth watering for more.”28 Sometimes he was able to get a taste of country food by doing his own hunting. During a school picnic he trapped a whisky-jack. “I made a little fire, and burned the feathers off the big blue bird, then let it freeze, and ate it when it was frozen hard. It tasted like caribou liver.” 29
Even stranger than the cooked food the school served were the strict rules governing the separation of the sexes. “We were told not to play with girls, because that would also be a sin. I thought that was strange, because I had played with girls before I came to school. Now they were telling me I shouldn’t touch them.”30 Once, the male and female students were caught in the school basement—which served as a root cellar— throwing potatoes at one another. They were accused of sinning, and one nun lined the boys up, read out the names of the girls they had been playing with, announced, “This is what I think of them,” and spit on the ground.31
On another occasion, after being accused of sinning with girls in the basement (something he neither owned up to nor denied), Thrasher was strapped to a bed and whipped with a three-foot silver watch chain. “My back was bleeding but something else burned more. Shame. I was branded in my brain. The silver chain has never left my mind. Even to this day you can see the scars on my back.”32 Punishments were often humiliating: two boys caught swearing had their heads shaved and were paraded in front of the other students in dresses.33
There were also conflicts between the Inuit and First Nations students. The First Nations students would call the Inuit ‘Muktuk huskies’ (muktuk being a meal of whale skin and blubber), while the Inuit referred to the First Nations students as ‘tomahawk grabbers.’ “Although we were good friends with the Indians, we fought them at the same time. I think we must have been young versions of the old-timers.”34 Religion was another source of conflict. It was not uncommon for boys from Immaculate Conception to get into fights with boys from the local Anglican boarding school. “They picked on me because I was a Roman Catholic and because I was a damn Eskimo,”35 Thrasher recalled.
Thrasher claimed that, while he was not much of a student, he was a “powerhouse for work,” spending much of his time at school cutting and hauling wood or emptying the toilets, which were in a giant outhouse at the end of the playground.36 He took little pleasure or interest in schooling, saying that while he liked to read, he could never even learn to spell “arithmetic.” What he wanted to be was a trapper. “About all I enjoyed was the chance to tend my trapline with the other boys in the bushes across town after classes in the afternoon. We would go there and make an open fire, cooking our own meals and making strong black tea. Later we would take our catches of muskrats and rabbits down to the basement and skin them.”37 When Thrasher was twelve, his father had a stroke while hauling in the anchor on Our Lady of Lourdes that left him half paralyzed. Thrasher was discharged from school to allow him to help support his family.
Alice Blondin-Perrin
Alice Blondin-Perrin entered the Roman Catholic residential school at Fort Resolution in the Northwest Territories at the age of four. “I was a little girl who spoke only Slavey, as my parents did. Because of that language barrier, I was hurt many times. I was pushed, slapped, yelled at and more.”38 She had grown up in a family that lived, in her words, in “the traditional Dene way, hunting, trapping, gathering, and fishing, living off the land, surviving the harshest seasons the north had to offer, as Dene have done for thousands of years.”39 Her father was skilled at making snowshoes.40 She had warm memories of time spent on her mother’s lap while she was being carefully groomed.41 All this changed in 1952 when, at the end of a two-day plane journey from Cameron Bay, she arrived at Fort Resolution.
At the mission entrance, there was a parlour with frosted windows all around. Three strangers met us, dressed very strangely. One was a priest. The other two were Grey Nuns. The priest was dressed in a black cassock, the nuns in dark tan habits with a stiff, black, heart-shaped lace around their faces, and black material covering their heads. They looked alien to me. I was scared, even though they smiled. They talked to us in a strange language.42
Alice and her sister Muriel had arrived wearing homemade clothing on which their mother had embroidered floral designs. The girls valued the garments for their warmth and the love that had gone into their creation. They never saw them again.43 The rough washing the girls received on arrival left them in tears.44 She and her sister were the only students at the school who spoke their northern Great Bear dialect of the Dene language, referred to by non-natives as Slavey. And while education was supposed to be in English, most often the nuns issued their orders in French. Alice said she rarely knew what she was being told, but could usually tell from a nun’s tone of voice and body language that she had done something wrong.45
Her brother Joseph was also at the school, but because of the strict sex segregation, she was never able to communicate with him, having to satisfy her desire for a family connection by waving whenever she caught sight of him.46 Like many residential school students, she was taught to be ashamed of her body and received limited education about the changes it would go through. “As girls, we were all to be very modest in the way we washed our bodies. We were not to look at other girls while they washed, and we were under tight scrutiny by the nuns in charge; we did not want to get into trouble.”47 When a supervisor found Alice sleeping on her side with her hands clutched between her legs, she woke the child up, demanded to know what she was doing, and insisted that she get down on her knees and pray.48
Even though many caribou—a traditional and favoured food source for most of the students—came near Fort Resolution, she could not recall ever eating it during all her years at the school. At times there was wood bison in the stews and she recalled enjoying it. “We ate porridge, homemade beans, and toast for breakfast every day.” The only change in the diet came at Easter when they were served boiled eggs. Alice hated eggs, but came to love beans and toast.49 When students were not in class they were usually working—either cleaning or sewing. It was difficult and tedious work. Her mistakes were subject to regular criticism, and it took her years to be able to darn properly.50 While she bridled under the discipline that the supervisors imposed, she enjoyed much of the classroom work. However, “all the books were about white people and I used to wonder why I was brown. Of course I did not dare ask why I was different from the people in the textbooks. The characters in them all had white skin like the Grey Nuns, lived in pretty houses with white picket fences, and had a pet living with them.”51
Other positive memories included Christmas celebrations, winter picnics, and visits to Mission Island. But these were overshadowed by the routine, the harsh discipline, and the lack of love. “There was absolutely no nurturing from the Grey Nun supervisors. There was no loving touch, only fear in my heart when they were around me.”52 In 1958 she was one of the first students to transfer from Fort Resolution to Breynat Hall, the new government-built, church-run residence in Fort Smith. The move, which brought many changes to her life, also marked the end of the mission era in northern Canadian residential schooling.
Albert Canadien
In 1952, the rcmp came to Albert Canadien’s father’s camp in the Northwest Territories and told him that Albert, who was born in 1945, would have to attend the Fort Providence school that fall.53 Albert was determined to be brave when he was dropped off at school, but when his mother let go of his hand and a nun guided him into the parlour, the reality of his situation sank in. “I started crying and tried to hang onto the door frame as the Sisters pulled me away. Trying her best to soothe me, my mother kept promising she would come back and visit us soon.” He spent the day with the other new boys; some were silent, others tearful, others sobbed. They were taken upstairs to the dormitory where an older boy helped them to their beds. They were told to prepare for a bath and put their clothes under their beds. Their home clothing was replaced with denim overalls.54
Communication was a problem from the outset because most of the new students spoke only their Dene language.55 Once students had learned a little English, they were forbidden to speak Dene. “The Sisters who supervised us at that time spoke only French; they didn’t speak English that well. As a consequence, we learned broken English from them.”56 While there were prayers in Slavey, Albert said that the priests did not pronounce the language well and “some words and phrases used in various prayers didn’t make too much sense.”57
School was strictly regimented: far different from his home life where children learned by watching and listening.58 “The Sister’s way of teaching was to pound it into you until you learned it.”59 Like young Masak in Aklavik, Albert was mystified by nursery rhymes such as “Old MacDonald,” “Little Bo Peep,” and “Three Blind Mice.”60 Religion was given a predominant place in the classroom, to the point that in his memoir, Canadien concluded, “I think actual education came second.”61 In particular, he realized that he had never been encouraged to question or challenge anything.62 The boys would be asked to donate a portion of the money that their parents left with them to fund missionary work: “You never said no to a priest or to a Sister.”63
Discipline was strict and at times humiliating: bed-wetters were stripped and made to stand in the bathtub with their wet clothes draped around their shoulders.64 Albert recalled that when one boy acted up while playing a game similar to Simon Says, a sister grabbed him, dragged him across the floor, and kicked him. It looked as if she might kick him again, but the father superior walked in. After being told what had happened, he shook his head and left the room.65 The boys would shine the floors with mitts on their feet, pretending they were skating. Once, while doing this, he bumped into another boy. For this misdemeanour one of the sisters hit him on the top of his hand with her keys, opening up a small cut.66 Albert was just one of the former students who could recall being punished for whistling, which, he was told, might summon up the devil.67
Loneliness and lack of affection were endemic. “Sometimes I would put my head under the blankets and cry softly. I didn’t want the other boys to hear me, and I especially did not want the Sisters to hear me, for fear they would think I was crying for nothing.”68 Albert was at school when his mother died of tuberculosis. A sister took him into the chapel. “Gently, she put her arm around me and held me. I looked up at her and saw tears in her eyes and I began to cry. It was the first and only time that a nun had shown any kind of sympathy to me.”69
There was plenty of work for the students to do: Albert remembered hauling wood and working in the mission fields. “The planting took place just before we went home for the summer holidays, and the harvesting took place after we returned to the residential school in the fall. I guess you could say we were cheap labour for the mission.”70
There were a few happy memories from Fort Providence: using donated skis on an improvised ski run by the barn, playing hockey with homemade sticks according to rules that one nun remembered from her childhood, and the movies and records that arrived at the school once it began to employ lay teachers.71 The lay teachers also introduced Scouting at the school, purchasing uniforms for the boys with their own money. “We made bone rings for the scarves we wore with uniforms. Our Boy Scout activities were a lot of fun, and a big change from the usual routine of the residential school.”72
The boys were also allowed to set snares and traps for rabbits. “Once Tom, Fred and I skinned a rabbit that wasn’t completely frozen and cooked it over a fire we had made along the riverbank on the other side of the Mission Island. That way, no one from the residential school or the mission could see the smoke from our fire. Cooking a rabbit over the fire was nothing new to us. It sure tasted good and it was just like being back home in the bush.”73
Angus Lennie
Angus Lennie is the son of Ernistine and Johnnie Lennie, a Métis man who worked as a trapper, carpenter, and riverboat pilot on the Mackenzie River. He recalled his childhood as happy and felt he and his siblings were well taken care of. However, for reasons he did not understand, he and his brothers and sisters were placed in the Aklavik Roman Catholic school. “From a child’s eyes this was a strange environment. A huge sister met us at the door and this began my journey into Residential Schools. Walking through those doors began the split of our once happy connected family.”
The boys and girls were separated, and then “our clothes were taken from us. What little money we had was taken away from us. The first thing after taking our clothes, they all gave us brush cuts and put white powder on us for lice. They gave me coveralls and a number.” Then he was taken to a dormitory full of children he did not know, all crying for their homes and parents.
Failing to eat the strange food, making too much noise, or not listening could lead to a student being required to stand on a bench in the corner—a punishment that students found humiliating. Angus felt that he and his fellow students were under constant surveillance. “I learned to live in fear. Fear! To be quiet, listen and follow direction. Soon I was taught ‘not to think for myself’ just ‘listen + do’ and things would be fine.” All the children longed to go home; some tried to make their way back to their families, only to be returned by the rcmp. Parental visits were eagerly anticipated—all too infrequent and short.74