CHAPTER 7

The students speak

Métis students and students of mixed descent were present in the residential school system throughout its history. In some cases, they were forced to attend. In other cases, these were the only schools open to them. Their parents often made tremendous financial sacrifices to ensure that their children went to these schools. Once Métis children were enrolled, their residential school experiences were characterized by

•a sharp and often tragic break from their family;

•a bewildering immersion in a foreign and highly regimented culture;

•harsh discipline;

•vulnerability to abuse;

•an educational regime that placed more focus on religion and work than on academics; and

•a limited, monotonous, and unappealing diet.

Despite this, not all Métis students give negative accounts of their school years. Some recall kind teachers, and are grateful for the skills that they acquired. For others, the only positive memories are of the friendships and alliances they formed in response to what they perceived as harsh and sometimes abusive discipline and mistreatment at the hands of school bullies.

Métis children might have gone to residential schools for a wide variety of reasons. In some cases, it might be due to the death of a parent. Angie Crerar, who attended the Fort Resolution school for ten years, recalled her childhood as being happy and secure, surrounded by three sisters, four brothers, and two loving parents. “My mother did a lot of gardening, and she did a lot of herbal medicine. My dad worked at the Hudson’s Bay Company and also as an interpreter.” She said that her father “instilled in us the value and the pride of being Métis.” In 1948, her mother became ill with tuberculosis, and Crerar and two of her siblings were sent to residential school. Her mother died two days after she got there. “We only heard about it a week later. A nun took us into a room and told us: ‘You are now orphans. Your mother is dead.’ I remember holding my sisters. I remember crying. I remember feeling so alone and so lost and so very lonely.”1

Theresa Meltenberger went to the Lac La Biche school in Alberta for five years while her parents spent much of their time, according to her, “in the bush.” Her mother placed her in school because “education was her main priority.”²

Elmer Cardinal went to the Catholic school in St. Albert, Alberta, for eight years, leaving when he turned sixteen. He felt that the most positive part of his life was his early childhood when he was raised by his grandparents. That ended when the local priest and the Indian agent arranged for him to be sent to school.³

For most students, the first days at school were very hard. Alphonse Janvier, who spent five years at the Île-à-la-Crosse school in Saskatchewan, described being separated from his parents as “the hardest experience in my life.” He has never forgotten the feeling of being “a seven or eight year old child put on a red plane—taxiing away from your mom standing on shore, crying. It seems like a long time ago, but it’s also very fresh in my memory, and that was my very first experience of the feeling of abandonment.” Neither has he forgotten the anger and hurt he felt on arrival. “I was put on this old barber’s chair. I remember my head being shaved and all my long hair falling on the floor, and the way they dealt with my crying and the hurtful feeling was with a bowl of ice cream.”⁴ Robert Derocher, who called the time he spent at Île-à-la-Crosse “the worst year that I ever lived,” recalled being punished for speaking Cree. “It was so hard, you know, not to be able to communicate with other native children there.”⁵ Theresa Meltenberger travelled to the school first by train, and then by sleigh in the company of an Oblate brother. “It was my first time away from home and this was all very traumatic in a way.”⁶

Even Thérèse Arcand, who reported being “happy” at Île-à-la-Crosse, and went on to become a Grey Nun herself, observed that “at the same time, I was very, very lonesome. I should have come to school the year before, I guess, but, I couldn’t decide to leave my mother.”⁷ She described returning to school after holidays as emotionally wrenching: “We stayed there the best part of two months. At the middle of August we had to come back to school again, and, I just cried! I never found it easy to leave home. Never! I went home for the summers of ’22 and ’23 and then I didn’t go back home again.”⁸

One former Métis student’s story provides a vivid account of arrival at a residential school in Alberta in the mid-twentieth century.

The first day that I arrived at the residential school, my brother was comforting me as was my father and mother. I think at that time, I was more mad than I was sad to see them go because they didn’t tell me I was gonna be staying at the mission when they went home. I remember my brother was standing beside me trying to comfort me because I was crying and then very soon afterwards they called us inside for supper. We were served our food and we were assigned to a table. I really didn’t know what to do so I got up and talked to my older brother. I asked him what to do and he kinda whispered to me to feed myself. Before I reached my table, the nun was screaming at me. I didn’t know what she said, but I knew the tone and it wasn’t nice. I broke her rules. I got up from my place and I was talking Cree.9

James Thomas spent ten years at the Grouard school in Alberta. His mother had died when he was about four. During his time at the school, he worked in the power shop, the blacksmith shop, and the vegetable fields. His family did not have enough money to bring him home during the holidays. In fact, Thomas believed that it took all of his father’s modest earnings to “keep us down there.”¹⁰

Martha Mercredi went into the Holy Angels convent at Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, when she was orphaned at the age of four. She stayed there for eight years. “I was treated very well. I didn’t talk the language that I was supposed to talk (Cree), but I learned it from a friend when I was in the convent. We’d talk Cree because the nuns didn’t understand Cree, we were being naughty, but the Sisters never knew that we were talking about them.” She came to view the nuns as her family. “Sister Superior was my grandmother and the Sister Lucy was the teacher and she was like my momma, she’s the one that’s my guardian. So I have no complaint about the convent. I am very glad that they showed me how to read and write.”¹¹

Many students recalled the food as being inadequate, poorly prepared, and lacking in variety. Magee Shaw said, “The boys used to come across the road with the fish in big black buckets. It looked like they weren’t scaled or anything—they were just black, big black pans. Breakfast was porridge, no milk, no sugar and you were always sitting in silence in a big room.”¹² One Métis woman who attended an Alberta school recalled being fed “the same thing everyday, we never had toast, a girl used to come out with crusts of toast from the priest and the nuns and the kids would be all out there fighting for them or even orange peelings. We were hungry all the time. It seemed like the food was really greasy, soup with vegetables in it and we had to eat everything.” Children who had been judged to be well behaved might be called up for seconds. But even they would go into the garden to “swipe carrots and tomatoes and stuff and try and hide them. If we got caught we would get a good strap.”¹³ The only time there was an improvement in the food, one student recalled, was if there was a visit from an outsider. “They used to put table cloths [sic] on the table and give us bacon and eggs to make it look like it was really good food, you know.”¹⁴ Another Métis student recalled that “every time the Bishop visited the mission, the food was better. It could have included pork chops or chicken or something better than what was the usual fare. The only other time that happened was when the Inspector of Indian Affairs came and also on those occasions you were given better clothing to wear.”¹⁵

Another student said,

At times we went hungry, it was always the same food, mush in the morning no sugar. They would just put a little bit on top to sprinkle it—the big boys got a little bit of milk, a little bit of brown sugar—three or four of the bigger boys they were the ones that got it. You could eat all the bread you want but you got one teaspoon of lard.

Because they always had beans at dinner, the students came to be known as “mission beans.”16

Rita Evans went to the Grouard school for four years. Religious instruction and drudge work, with very little emphasis on classroom education, loom large in her memory of the school. “We were forever praying and not learning anything and when I came out of grade six, my goodness, I didn’t know nothing you know except work, work. Very few made it to grade eight.”¹⁷ Church service often seemed like torture, particularly to the younger students. Of her time at the Grouard school, Evans said, “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the church. I still go every chance I get, but we were tiny little kids. We’re crying, why didn’t they just leave them in bed with one girl looking after them? They don’t know what mass is and that was just horrible.”¹⁸

Life in the schools could quickly turn tragic. Colin Courtoreille told of how rapidly one boy at the Grouard school was taken by pneumonia.

An Indian boy from Whitefish—he was in the next bed to me. He was coughing a lot—that was in February, about 1936. He got wet because he had a bad cold but we all had to play outside. He played in the snow and he got wet. At the time to go to bed—now we are in a dorm like in a hall—he was coughing and wheezing. I talked to the Sister—after I can talk a little bit of English, I always tried to help out—I said, “George is really sick Sister, what’s wrong with him?” She comes there and I can see her make a ginger in a cup. She gave it to him and sent him to bed. That boy died that night about 3 o’clock in the morning.¹⁹

Mike Durocher, a student at Île-à-la-Crosse for nine years, said life was governed by “a regimental time clock dictated by Church functions.”²⁰ Of the regimentation, a student from a different school said, “We were trained like dogs—clap you get up—two claps you go eat—three claps maybe you go outside.”²¹

George Amato recalled that his sister once stole away from the Grouard school to attend a dance in the local town. “The priest went and caught her and brought her back and they tied her to a chair and they shaved her hair off. She hit the nun, or the Sister, and she ended up in Edmonton in a reform school for girls.”²²

One Métis student who attended the Fort Chipewyan school recalled that students who wet their beds were placed in tubs in the centre of the washroom floor and had iced water poured over their head. “That was every morning that happened and we all had to stand there and watch that. Oh my God, it was just terrible.”²³ According to Robert Derocher, at Île-à-la-Crosse, bedwetters were required to “wear a diaper in front of everyone all day long.”²⁴

Magee Shaw recalled being physically punished “if I ever spoke or said something in my language.”25 Yvonne Lariviere, an Île-à-la-Crosse student from 1947 to 1955, recalled, “I didn’t know why I was being hit because I didn’t speak English. I was seven years old and I had never been hit before in my life.”²⁶ For lapsing into the wrong language, Alphonse Janvier was made to stand holding books above his head, to stand in a corner, or to stand at the blackboard, pressing his nose within a chalk circle. He felt that he was also taught to be ashamed of his heritage: “we were taught that all Indians did was raid farmhouses, kidnap women, and burn houses.”²⁷

Allen Morin said that Île-à-la-Crosse was a world run by non-Aboriginal people.

I remember the teachers used to come there from September to June, and then they’d leave, and then a new pack of teachers would come in, and they were all non-Native, and to me, I was thinking how come, how come they’re coming in and leaving? And I thought, well, I guess that’s because we’re Indians and they’re, and they’re non-Native, and then only non-Natives can be teachers, or professionals, or priests, or stuff like that. And they were kind of, I think they were kind of, they separated themselves from the community, we, we didn’t mingle with them.²⁸

The harsh, and at times abusive, discipline was coupled with physical and sexual abuse. According to one former Île-à-la-Crosse student, “Older boys molested younger boys at night in the dormitory and priests and supervisors molested their ‘favorite boys.’”²⁹ Clement Chartier, a student for ten years at Île-à-la-Crosse, said that “many, many of us suffered physical and sexual abuse.”³⁰ Mike Durocher, who had been abused, said he was expelled at age fifteen for putting up posters that identified abusers. The principal called him a liar, and his parents and grandparents refused to believe his story.³¹ Robert Derocher said that some staff preyed on the students’ loneliness: “It seemed that he knew how to pick the, the children that were hurting and to give them any kind of attention that we were all looking for; even if it was not good.”³²

One day, Grouard school student George Amato was told that “you have to go help the Brother downstairs.” According to Amato, the priest took him down “into the boiler rooms where he sat down in a chair and undid his bib overalls, pulled them down and he exposed himself, and forced me to fondle him.”³³

In the face of the hunger, discipline, and abuse, many students ran away. One student recalled, “To me that was a rough life so I proceeded to run away. I did it a few times. They took me back and I ran away again. Finally, my parents took notice that I couldn’t handle it there no more. Same with my sisters there were two girls involved. So we all decided that we were not going back.”³⁴ Colin Courtoreille was shocked by the discipline at the school in Grouard, but he could not convince his father that he was being mistreated.

My dad never saw that. He got mad at us, he said don’t blame the mission because you guys gonna learn something. You’re learning something, respect the Catholic way of living, like the Sisters and Fathers. Now, you’re in the middle. You get a licking here and you’re not gonna tell your parents because they’re not going to believe you, because you’re learning something.35

Donna Roberts, who attended the Fort Vermilion, Alberta, school for ten years, never forgot the discipline at the school.

Those that didn’t follow the rules rebelled, and a few did, they got a spanking, as did the ones that ran away from the mission. I witnessed one run-away. Two boys ran away in January—dead winter, cold—they ran across the river and the priest chased them. They got as far as the middle of the river and got turned around and came back.

We witnessed it, everybody sat around the hall, and there were two of them standing up there. They were told to stand up because they were going to get a spanking right in front of all of us as an example not to run away. They got the spanking. After that, people didn’t run away because they knew what they were going to get. At least a couple more times people ran away, but were always brought back.³⁶

One young girl ran away from the Fort Chipewyan school when she was thirteen. Having already run away and been returned by her father, she quickly ran away again. “Dad brought me back, so I ran away again. I ran all the way from that old mission to my dad’s house. I ran all the way over there with just a sweater on and this was in November.” Her father took her back, asking her to stay for the year, but she ran away again before Easter.³⁷

Rather than run away, some students, as they got older, fought back. Elmer Cardinal claimed that he once beat up a priest. “I beat him up pretty good; he didn’t die. I kicked him in the head, I smashed his glasses and the boys gathered all around me and nobody did anything.”³⁸

There were also positive recollections. One former Métis student said, “I was treated well, I remember it fondly, some of those memories are the happiest of my life.... I was asked to teach some of the classes when I was older, and the teachers were sick or something. Those were happy times for me.”³⁹ Hank Pennier, who went to the Mission, British Columbia, school in the early years of the twentieth century, spoke of how glad he was that he had been admitted to school. “As we were halfbreeds and we could not live on the reservation, we were supposed to be white and we came under the white man’s status. But the priests were very kind and they made an exception in our case. They went out of their way.” In fact, he regretted leaving school. One summer, he was three weeks late returning to school, in large measure because he and his brother had been waiting in their home community to be paid for work they had done for a local mill. By the time he arrived at Mission, the school was full and he could not be admitted. He was thirteen. “Things were never quite so nice again.”40 Archie Larocque, who attended the Fort Resolution school for one year, said, “The nuns were real good, they were real good, done their best.” Larocque was also positive about the education he received. “They were good school teachers. They knew I was only going to be there for that one term because I was over the age limit. So they drove all they could into me. I learned quite a bit in that six or seven months.”⁴¹

In speaking about the life at Île-à-la-Crosse, one former student, Mary Jacobson, said that although she thought the nuns treated the students well, the students were disciplined for poor performance in the classroom. Jacobson said that “we didn’t learn, that is our fault if we get a licking. Because we got to try to learn and they want us to learn something.”⁴²

Theresa Meltenberger was proud of the fact that children at Lac La Biche took responsibility for their own entertainment.

In the winter we built a snow fort, we had snowball fights and we played in the snow always. We had a nice yard—it would put a lot of igloos to shame. Then we had made a whole bunch of snowballs hoping that we could somehow miss somebody and hit one of the ladies there, but it never happened. Then in the summertime, we were by a lake, one of the nicest lakes, you know, before they polluted that nice beach. We’d build a raft, and in retrospect, I wonder how they got away with the lack of safety and that. You know we’d take off on the raft and the raft was a way of getting even with the one Sister we didn’t like that well. It was driftwood, one side we’d had a big log and on the other, the logs got smaller. We built a seat on there for the Sister and we’d pole. Because of that large log on one side, we just moved and it upended our raft and I can still see the Sisters, they had this big starched thing around their glasses hanging on. “Oh, we’re so sorry Sister,” and you know, we weren’t, which taught us not to be truthful all the time, I guess, but we enjoyed it.⁴³

Meltenberger could recall hard work, but she also felt that she learned important skills. Although she did not like the discipline, she said, “I don’t want to judge this by today’s standards because the nuns most likely figured they were doing God’s work you know. So who am I to assess blame to them, you know, but it took me a long time to come to terms with it.”⁴⁴

One Alberta student recalled the first-grade teacher as being “the kindest little nun that they ever had. Her name was Sister Alicia and she was really kind. She was a little old lady, I bet you she was about 70 years old and she wasn’t a very tall person. I think the biggest person in our grade one class was taller than her but she was very kind.” Another teacher was much tougher. “I was day dreaming, looking out the window and all of a sudden I was brought to my senses with a yardstick smashed across my back, just about where my shoulders are.”⁴⁵

Like many students, Donna Roberts developed a close and protective friendship at the St. Bruno mission in Joussard, Alberta. “We just bonded. If somebody was mean to either one of us we were sure that the other one was going to stick up for the other one. It was the mutual understanding that that was going to happen. We survived that way.”46 Angie Crerar said the only good memories she had of the years she spent at the school were the protective bonds she established with her friends. They told each other, “‘You are my strength, you are my friend, you are my trust.’ We tried to look after the little ones and tried to avoid some of the beatings that were not necessary. There was no such thing as respect but we taught ourselves to have respect.”⁴⁷

In other cases, students turned their anger against one another. One student said,

You were always caged around by a big 10-foot-high fence. You’re sort of caged animals, I guess. We were always fighting each other and we never got along that good. I remember three big boys, they were from up north. We had guys come all the way to our mission, it’s funny, they had a residential school over there and they came to Grouard. They were all bigger boys. There was three of us would gang up on one guy. But you sure got it when they got you alone.⁴⁸

One student who attended Saint Martin’s school at Wabasca, Alberta, for eight years recalled how the bigger boys used to make the smaller boys fight. “I know I used to cry when I was fighting one guy, we didn’t get along.”⁴⁹

Métis children also felt discriminated against by First Nations children. One mother said, “My kids, they didn’t like school because they were mistreated. Probably could be because they were halfbreeds. They would laugh at them and things like that.”⁵⁰ One student felt the same hostility from Inuit students. “One was made certain to know how you were not really, truly, an Inuk. In addition to the petty cruelties inflicted upon half-breeds for being born as such, there was the obviousness of illegitimacy.”⁵¹

When attending the Pine Creek residential school in Manitoba, Raphael Ironstand, a boy of mixed descent who had been raised in a First Nations community, was bullied by Cree students.

The Crees surrounded me, staring at me with hatred in their eyes, as again they called me ‘Monias,’ while telling me the school was for Indians only. I tried to tell them I was not a Monias, which I now knew meant white man, but a real Indian. That triggered their attack, in unison. I was kicked, punched, bitten, and my hair was pulled out by the roots. My clothes were also shredded, but the Crees suddenly disappeared, leaving me lying on the ground, bleeding and bruised.⁵²

Although the sisters had showed little sympathy at the time, Ironstand had a very specific memory of a nun who showed him kindness.

I poured out my story to this understanding nun about my confused feelings, being a non-person with white skin, even though I was an Indian. At that she put her arm around me and assured me that I was a very important person to her, which immediately raised my self-esteem. It was the first time since I came to the school that anyone had touched me without punishing or beating me. As she ushered me out of the door, she stopped and gave me a hug, which made me feel warm all over.53

Such shows of affection were rare. Even if they developed close friendships, most students felt unloved. Alphonse Janvier had grown up in a household where love was present and demonstrated. “My mom hugged us a lot and my dad hugged us a lot, they spent all their time with us. After I left home, I don’t ever, ever recalled [sic] ever being hugged or ever being told that I was loved. I was told that God loved me.”⁵⁴ Another former Métis student from the Alberta schools spoke of how the residential schools had not taught her parents how to love, and how she had received the same joyless upbringing during the years she attended school. “There was no loving at home, no hugging, no words like ‘I love you’ because they were dirty words. They were taught not to show affection. The priest and nuns took that out of you. I know I was in the mission, I couldn’t even talk to my brother.”⁵⁵

Because boys and girls were kept separate, families were broken up. This was a practice that continued into the 1950s. Alphonse Janvier recalled that at Île-à-la-Crosse, “you were not allowed to talk to them because this playground had an imaginary boundary that we could not cross. We talk about it now and we wonder why we had to put up with that. We used to eat in the same dormitory with a wall dividing us and two doors and we used to wave at each other and that was the only way of communication with my nieces.”⁵⁶

Children were given little preparation for the changes that their bodies would be undergoing while they were at school. One young woman, shocked when she began menstruating, went to a staff person, saying that she was bleeding to death. “She hit me so hard, she knocked me out. When I came to, she threw a rag at me and she explained what was wrong with me.”⁵⁷ Magee Shaw, who attended the Grouard, Alberta, school, recalled being accused of “‘fooling around with the Brothers’” when she began menstruating. She did not understand the allegation and burst into tears. Then one of the sisters “got the scissors and just chopped all one side of my hair off in front of all the kids.”⁵⁸

The government and churches sought to control the lives of former students in a variety of ways. In some cases, the schools kept female students on as paid or unpaid help after they finished their schooling. That way, they could prevent them from returning to what were perceived to be the ‘corrupting’ influences of their home communities, and could also arrange marriages for them. George Amato, who attended the Grouard school for nine years, said that his mother was one of the young girls who had been kept in the school. One day, the sister told her and several other girls to make themselves presentable. His mother thought that this might be because her father was coming to take her home. Instead, the girls were told to line up against a wall. “The door opened and the priest and a short white guy walked in.” The man inspected the girls. “He stopped in front of my mother and put his hand on her shoulder and said, ‘I’ll take this one.’”59 Similarly, the priests and nuns at Fort Chipewyan arranged a marriage for the orphan girl Martha Mercredi. Being forced into this marriage constituted her principal criticism of the school, although, in the end, she said, she was not unhappy with her marriage.⁶⁰

Over time, there was an increase in the number of Métis people who worked at the schools. Thérèse Arcand, who became the first Métis graduate from Île-à-la-Crosse to enter the order of the Sisters of Charity, returned as the result of a bittersweet inspiration. As she prepared to leave the school in March 1929, she came across a girl who had just arrived. “She was crying. I then said to myself. ‘I will go in training and come back to help my people.’ That was my last thought while in Ile-à-la-Crosse.”⁶¹