Brenda Bignell Arnault
Mohawk Institute
INGRID BRENDA ANNE BIGNELL: …my first name is Ingrid and my second name is Brenda. My third name is Anne Bignell. I married a Shoeloose (ph.) and then I married an Arnault (ph.). My last name is
A-r-n-a-u-l-t.
Q. What school did you go to?
A. Dauphin, MacKay Indian Residential School from when I was seven, probably 1959 —
Q. 1959?
A. I was born in ’52, so I’m fifty-nine. So 1959 to 1967. ’66 or ’67.
Q. Okay. What was the name of the school again?
A. Dauphin.
Q. Dauphin?
A. MacKay Indian Residential School.
Q. MacKay… Is that M-c-K-a-y?
A. M-c-K-a-y.
Q. Okay. How old were you when you started?
A. I think I was seven. I did Grade 1 here at The Pas Indian Day School, and then I went to Dauphin and I was there until I passed Grade 9. I was an honour student and exempted from exams, so I came home and started Grade 10 in The Pas, at NBCI here in 1967 I think it was.
Q. Do you remember what life was like before you went to school?
A. Before I went to school I was a really happy little girl. I remember being a tease and always teasing and laughing and chasing after butterflies and people and dogs, you know, just being a happy little girl. Me and my cousin Norma, she was the only cousin that I had that was close to my age, so me and Norma became really really good friends besides being first cousins. We became best friends.
One of the things that I remember about —
The only memory that I have prior to boarding school is chasing after two ladies, two girls that I used to tease because they had really long legs and I was just a little girl. But they looked like their legs just ran forever. Right? I would chase after them; Marg Wilson and Irene Wilson. I chased after them and I would tease them and do things to them.
I guess one day they caught up with me and they tied me to a tree outside my grandpa’s house and they left me tied up to that tree for quite a while, yelling, hollering and ranting and raving because they caught up to me. It was a big joke in our community that they caught up to me and tied me up to a tree and left me there for the community to chuckle at because, you know, here’s Brenda the tease, right, always teasing, and they caught up to her. So that’s my fondest memory. That’s the fondest memory I have of the kind of person that I was prior to boarding school.
Q. Did you have brothers and sisters as well?
A. Yeah.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
A. Yeah, I have. There were nine of us at one time. There are six of us left. My oldest —
I’m third generation Residential School, I have to say. My grandfather, the late Chief Cornelius Bignell, he went to an Industrial School. They called them industrial schools then. So grandpa went and then his children went to Elkhorn and then we went to Dauphin. Some of them went to PA.
What was the question?
Q. Just if you had siblings. Did your grandparents ever talk about their experiences?
A. Never. Not even my mom. My mom says “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Q. What about your first day of school. Do you remember that?
A. My first day I remember getting off the bus and I remember leaving here. I remember leaving here and all lining up at the Indian Agent’s Office, because we weren’t allowed off the Reserve yet. Right. That didn’t happen until 1961.
We weren’t allowed off the Reserve but we were all taken across the river and were lined up outside the Indian Agent’s Office. I remember the little white picket fence and the sterile environment of the Indian Agent’s home and all of that. I’ll never forget it.
And then travelling to Dauphin and my first day there getting off the bus I could see how institutional everything was, this massive four-storey building and there were already people there, people who had gone there before me. But when our bus pulled up I think some people from The Pas were there. I think they might have tried to make us comfortable. I don’t know. I don’t have any recollection of that other than seeing how big the institution was.
Then I remember crying constantly. The bed rails back then on the little tiny Army cots were thin, but my hands were small, eh. I hung onto both of them.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
I wouldn’t leave that bed. I didn’t want to go anywhere for about a month. I just about starved to death. They couldn’t pull me off the bed to go and eat or do anything. I hated that place from that day. I ran away from boarding school. I stole the Minister’s car to get away from there. I hated the food. I hated starving.
That’s the worst part, besides the second thing of being there was not having your family, not having anybody to hug you and tell you they loved you. You come from a loving family to a sterile environment —
— Speaker overcome with emotion
I guess they finally took me off the bed somehow. I don’t know how they did that. I think I was really really really sick because I wouldn’t eat. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to go to school. I didn’t want to do anything. I just died on that bed.
There was one little girl that seemed to —
I don’t know. This one girl anyway she just kept fighting with me and fighting with me and I think if it wasn’t for that girl who continued to fight with me on a daily basis for that first year I was there, I don’t think I would have pulled through. I think that girl developed me as a person. I think she did. She fought me. I had to fight for my life. I had to defend my cousin, Norma.
My brothers were there but I never saw my brothers.
And the food. The food, eating macaroni every day and they put maybe one or two tomatoes in there to feed four hundred or five hundred kids. We learned how to steal. We didn’t know how to steal before but the government taught us how to steal.
Q. So you could have food.
A. To eat. They taught us how to lie. They taught us how to steal and they taught us how to be bad people. Thanks to that I have to pray for forgiveness now because I did that as a child, and to be a part of life, I guess. I don’t know. To survive. I don’t know. But I did. I stole. I stole from people to be full, to have food in my stomach.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
It’s not who I am. It’s what they turned us into be. Now the jails are full of our People because the government taught us how to do all this stuff.
There was one lady there by the name of Miss Rasmussen (ph.). Miss Rasmussen was a Laplander. She came from over the ocean. I don’t know if she was first generation Canadian or an immigrant. I have a feeling she was an immigrant. It was shortly after the war that we had a lot of people coming into Canada. We knew she was a Laplander. She let us know that.
My baby sister —
They made cabbage soup. Who the hell eats cabbage soup when you’re a little kid? Most vegetables —
Most kids will not eat vegetables. They forced vegetables down our throat. And my sister Edna, she puked up that bowl of cabbage soup into her bowl and Miss Rasmussen made her eat it twice! Can you believe that? I mean, how ignorant can some people be, torturing little people like that? My sister is not normal today. All we suffered and we are not normal today because of what happened back then. I’m not normal! I suffer. I suffer on a daily basis because of how we were raised and the things that happened to us, the dysfunctions we carry to this very day.
I tried to be normal. I went to school. I went into Social Work. I tried to finish two four-year degree programs in two years. I ended up getting sick.
We have such an intelligent race of people that speak two, three and four languages, eh. I speak two myself; English and Cree and I have a bit of French, thanks to my upgrading. That’s what I have. But then there’s also Plains Cree that I’m familiar with and can speak.
When you go to university the majority of professors will tell you that anybody that speaks a single language and is in university is intelligent. Anybody that goes to university and speaks two languages is super intelligent. They’re brainy. They’re smart.
Our People are there and we are still considered dumb, stupid and ignorant. We are not that. We are not that kind of people, the way society projects us to be. My grandfather spoke six languages. He interacted with Native people from across this country; my grandfather. He was an Industrial School-educated Indian. That man, along with Mr. Loft, (ph.) they formed the very first Indian organization in this country to pull our people together, to start talking about who we are as a Nation. My grandfather started that with Mr. Loft way back after World War I, and we’re still trying to gather as a People to try and make sense of where we’re at in life. It’s impossible because we are projected as a lost race, a people that have nothing. Well, it’s not true.
And Miss Rasmussen, when she did that to my sister, I was only thirteen at the time, I swore I was going to get my family out of there, my sisters and my three younger brothers and sisters. Seven of us went there; seven of us brothers and sisters.
My oldest brother died when he was just a young man. He died on my birthday as a matter of fact. And I know how messed up he was. I know what happened to him in boarding school.
And when I spoke at the World Human Rights Assembly, the 60th Anniversary of the World Human Rights, Phil Fontaine asks, “Do we have to celebrate?” I get up. “No, we don’t.” “No, we don’t, as long as we as a nation of People that are suffering, that is never going to happen.” We have nothing to celebrate, not until this Residential School stuff is over and done with. That’s when we can begin to celebrate. That’s when we can start to tell the whole world this is where we’re at now. This is how far we’ve come in life.
But when Miss Rasmussen did that to my sister, to my baby sister, me and my sister don’t even get along now because I couldn’t come home for forty-three years. The government did that to me. These are my People and I just came home to them seven years ago! Now I’m having a hard time fitting in here. Where do I belong? Who am I? That’s what I ask myself on a daily basis. What do I do with my life? Where do I fit in? Where do I belong?
With my health where I’m at now. Had we been eating our foods all along —
One out of four Canadian Indians have cancer. One in four! What is the Canadian Government going to do about that? Or is it one in six? I’m not too sure of my stats, but it’s pretty dam high anyway.
Every single one of us First Nations People all have a lumber company sitting right next to our Reserve. Every single First Nation community they all have a lumber mill, a promise of jobs and good health and bull shit that happens after that.
Q. When that happened to your sister, did you try to run away then?
A. No. Yeah, I’m not even sure of when that happened. When my sister ran away I had a helluva time because her older sister – I have two younger sisters that I’m completely detached from, completely detached from. But the older one came and found me and she said, “Brenda, you have to get us out of here. Phone mom. Phone mom and tell her to come and get us.” She said, “Edna had to eat her bowl of puke three times.”
Well, I was just reeling from that information so I didn’t go talk to Miss Rasmussen. I didn’t talk to anybody superior in our school. I phoned my mom. I don’t know how I phoned my mom. I phoned my mom.
My mom went to Rick Johnson, the Indian Agent at the time. She sat and she cried in his office for a week and a half until she got everybody out of boarding school.
Q. Wow.
A. They took us without asking. They did things. How dare they do that to a whole flipping Nation of people.
Q. So your mom was able to get all of you out of school?
A. After crying for a while week and a half and not wanting to leave. She would go there at eight o’clock in the morning and she would sit there right until they threw her out of there. That’s what they did to my mom. She wanted her children home so bad. I can imagine that every one of them wanted to have their children at home.
In warfare what’s the strategy: divide and conquer. Right? That’s the strategy. They did that effectively to our communities, to our families, to our brothers and sisters, to my grandparents and all their children. I’m third generation. How functional do you think this community is when we’re so fractured from one another and so detached. We’re all conditioned to be alone. Carry your own shit. Don’t carry it and don’t give it to anybody else. That’s what we’re conditioned to.
Now this Residential School legacy has finally come out and now we can talk about who we are and where we want to go and what we want to do with our lives and how can we make our communities better. That’s what we want. Right? That’s what we want.
But to muddle through all of that needs a lot of help. I need a lot of help yet. I’m conditioned to being alone. I’m conditioned to not sharing my life with anybody. I’ve only come home seven years ago and only because my mom is dying. That’s the only reason why I came home. Otherwise I would not be here with my People at all. It took a lot for me to come. I can’t even take a job with my community because I feel that every single person in this community doesn’t like me. That’s how I feel. Because I’m Bill C-31. I’m a Band transferee. I’m labeled by this Band so I feel like I don’t have a home. I feel like I don’t belong here. I don’t know if I’ll ever belong here. I don’t know if I’ll ever be accepted by my People but I’m here and I’m struggling.
Q. When you were at school would you go home in the summer or would you have to stay?
A. I was with my boarding school friends just the other day, coming back from Winnipeg, and I just started crying. My friends asked me, “What are you crying about now?” I told them. I had another flashback to boarding school. I don’t know how often but I remember being in Dauphin MacKay School during Christmas. I feel like I was the only one there. There were four hundred or five hundred students there and I’m the only one there in this great big massive Play Room and I’m by myself, completely by myself.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
I just think to myself, where’s my family, where’s my family? I’ll never forget that feeling of being alone; ever. It’s so easy for me to go back there all the time. It’s easy when I feel pain from somewhere. It’s nothing for me to go and isolate myself and be alone and push people away. But it hurts. It hurts. I don’t want to be by myself. I don’t want to live my life that way. I really don’t.
You think about boarding school and how painful it was and you don’t want to do that to your children. You don’t want to isolate them. You want to love them. You want to hug them every day.
Q. Do you have children?
A. I have two beautiful daughters and a son that I’m totally disconnected from. I gave him away as a child. That’s another thing that hurts me, but at least it was a decision that I made, not one that somebody else made for me. I made that decision. I can live with it. I can’t live with what other people did to me. I can’t live with that. That’s what I carry.
Q. How is the relationship with your daughters?
A. Relationships with my daughters. I don’t know who you are, but I’m going to say something. Okay?
I was raised without my family. I was raised in White homes. After boarding school when I was eleven or twelve years old, they didn’t even tell my mom and dad that they were going to take me out of the Residential School and make me live with a White family. They didn’t tell my mom and dad nothing. They just took me from there and they placed me in with White people, complete strangers.
I’m sitting there having breakfast with them. Pardon me. They’re not even calling me down for breakfast. After they eat together as a family and they are eating their breakfast and I can hear them telling each other how their day was going to go, what their plans were for the day, I’m upstairs crying. Then they knock on my door, “Brenda, breakfast is ready.” So I go down there and sit at the table and eat my cold cereal, sometimes with a slice of bread, because I’m just sick to my stomach that they didn’t even call me down to eat with them. I’m supposed to be with this family?
Those feelings are just as fresh as yesterday, just as fresh as yesterday. I don’t know what it’s going to take for me to deal with them. But because they were a family, right, I didn’t have a family. I didn’t have a family. I was ostracized from my own. I hadn’t seen my family for seven or eight years.
So I started to have my family. My daughters are about fourteen and fifteen years old. One of my daughters came up to hug me and I flinched. I asked her, “What are you doing?” And she goes, “Holy, mom, I can’t even hug you”. It broke her heart. My daughter had something to tell me but because I was so distant, I was so distant from my own children, that I couldn’t hear them, I couldn’t see them. And that comes from not knowing how to be in a family, in a community. That’s where that comes from.
When you isolate yourself not only do you isolate yourself, you isolate yourself from your whole entire being. So my daughters, they felt that.
What I have to share with you is very very painful. My second husband fathered two of my grandchildren. Because why? I was totally unaware of Indian medicine, totally unaware of culture, totally unaware of tradition, totally unaware of how people interact with one another, how adults and children. I had no idea of how to interact. Me and my friends never interacted with other people. We interacted with one another and we stayed away from adults because we never had adults in our lives. We raised ourselves to be the people that we are. We energized one another. That’s what we did.
Probably because we were all above-average students we energized ourselves. We found a way to keep on living and struggling in that world. In the meantime, we have watched our children become very dysfunctional because of us, because of us, because of me, my girlfriend and how she interacts with her family, her children.
We had no knowledge. No teachers. Right? So we do the best we can in our ignorance and in our blindness. That’s what we did. That’s how we raised our children and my children have been raised without love. Sure, I’ve given them everything that they wanted in life. But am I capable of hugging? Am I capable of giving them a kiss any time I feel like it? It’s more like I’m shunning them. I’m going to be afraid of how they’re going to react to me if I do that. I’m at a loss. I don’t know when I’ll be myself.
Q. Have you participated in any healing at all?
A. When you dislike yourself a lot, when you’ve never been part of anything in your life, it’s hard to partake in anything. First and foremost, if I’m going to be taken to anything where I can get some counseling and some help, somebody has to take me by the hand. They literally have to take me by the hand if I’m going to participate in anything. I have to be taken there because I feel like my People don’t like me. So why should I go? Somebody has to force me and I’m fine. This is just one person. Can you imagine all these people who went to boarding school, 360 of us here from The Pas, 360 of us that are dysfunctional. Three hundred and sixty families that are dysfunctional, and that’s second and third generation Residential School people. The whole entire community of
Opaskwayak, OCN, is dysfunctional because of our Residential School days right from the first generation, right from the late 1800’s.
So I spare no one in my community. I spare no one from that, even though I was chastised by a Minister of this community telling me, “Oh, I’m so sick and tired of hearing about all you Residential School people.” Can you believe that? This is a Minister in our community that said this to me.
Q. That’s awful.
A. That’s awful. And because I felt her pain I didn’t react the way she was reacting to me and I told her, “You know what, you’re one of those people that have been impacted by the Residential School system, even though you never left for Residential School, you were impacted by it. You’re quite right to have your feelings.”
I carried it. I took it. I didn’t react the same way she did, a Minister. She was condemning me in front of everybody. I turned around and had a totally different attitude towards her, a totally different attitude. And I thought to myself, thank God for my upgrading. Thank God for my education, you know, because I didn’t have to react the same way she did. I didn’t retaliate in anger or frustration or anything. I reacted in gentleness.
This is my story. This is my story and this is my pain that I carry.
The dysfunctions of not being able to raise my daughters with my family, with my mom and dad, I have nothing to offer my children. I have nothing to offer them and they know it. I tell them all the time. I feel worthless as a human being. I feel good about the knowledge I have. I feel good about my communications. I feel good about that. They’re mine, you know. That’s what Dauphin MacKay Indian Residential School gave me. That’s all they gave me. That’s all I can acknowledge. That’s all I can recognize.
Other than that, as far as my dysfunctions in my family and where we’re at in life we’ll take that to our graves.
Q. Can you talk to your daughters about your experiences there?
A. I probably could to some degree.
Q. Do you think it would help at all?
A. You know, people that did go to Residential School —
If you’re conditioned to being a loving person then you will feel compassion and love for those of us that went there. But my daughters —
I was married a second time. Their biological father passed away when they were just little girls. I married again a second time. My girls are pretty tough. They are pretty conditioned so I have no idea. I don’t know my daughters well enough for me to say what they are capable of achieving.
I do know that my daughters love me. That I know. I have no question in my mind about how they feel about me. But what they feel about my life as an individual, I’m unsure, totally unsure.
Q. Does it help coming to something like this?
A. Always because I’m always learning off of the other women, and especially off of women who are older than me, like my mom. My mom does not talk about her life. My mom teaches me what not to be like. We have a lot of teachers like that: what not to do. Usually people that teach you what not to do are people who are living a very negative lifestyle. So mom teaches me what not to do and what not to be like. I appreciate that. I understand that her life was hard.
Mom comes from a family of nine brothers. She’s the only daughter. So mom’s life was really tough. She went to Elkhorn Residential School. Mom and I will never be best friends. Mom is here right now. Mom and I will never —
She despises me and I despise her. I love her and she loves me. But there’s nothing in between. Out of honour, out of respect, we were raised that way. Do this. Do that. Whether you like it or not, you do have to comply with your family’s wishes because you have nowhere else to go so you comply. So mom and I have been battling for all my life, all my life, me blaming her for never being there and her probably hating me because I will never conform to her wishes. Once that battle was there when I was seven years old it has never ended, but we’re still together. That’s a good thing.
I know I’ll miss my mom when she goes. I know I’ll miss fighting with her because that’s what we have. I’ll have to put fighting aside once my mom goes and just learn how to love from there on. But in the meantime mom will continue to teach me what not to do and I can’t ask for a better teacher.
Q. Is there anything else you would like to share with us?
A. Well, I would like to say when the Indian Agent came and got my brothers, my two sisters and one brother, and Patrick, John, Clark and I stayed behind. But the three younger ones went. The three younger ones were only there for seven months, I think, something like seven or eight months. That’s when I begged mom to come and get them. She came and got them.
And then from there I was already living in a White home, several White homes as a matter of fact by then.
That’s the one thing that I just want to stress is how painful it was for my brothers and sisters. My one brother died on my birthday after boarding school. And when I went and spoke at the 60th Anniversary of the World Human Rights Assembly that was because of my brother. I said that because of my brother. I miss him so much.
And my dad. My dad was a World War II veteran. His brothers and sisters went to Elkhorn School.
Q. We’re just going to change tape.
— End of Part 1
…like all that stuff. We were raised not to do those things. And then you get to boarding school and you have to do all of them.
Q. Just to survive.
A. Just to survive, yeah. You know how much it hurts me to have to lie? And from that time on to not feel like you’re a good person because you had to lie for yourself. You had to steal for yourself. And the government just raised a whole pile of thieves and liars. That’s what they did to us. That’s just not right. And we’re supposed to tell our children “don’t lie”, “don’t steal”, and in the meantime we’re telling them stories of when we had to lie and when we had to steal so our children tell lies themselves. And now my grandchildren are doing the same thing.
We were raised as a Nation of people to never tell a lie because if you tell a lie it’s only going to come back and hurt you. So now the government has all these people who know how to lie and steal, from good people to negative people. Somehow we as a Nation of people have to pull ourselves back together again so that we can be those good people, prior to European influence.
Q. Do you think that is happening? Are you seeing a change in people?
A. I can’t judge. I isolate myself. I can’t judge my People. I don’t go to funerals. I don’t go to weddings. I don’t go to community functions because they didn’t want me here.
I had to fight for my Treaty Number with this Band. Chief Gordon Lathlin wrote me a letter when I was eighteen years old. “Get off the Reserve”. Well, get off the Reserve. You know how hard it is to leave your people and to be told by one of your leaders to get off the Reserve. This man was the chief after my grandfather was the chief. My grandfather was saying, “Yes, all of you people that are not wanted by your people, I will take you in.” I have documents. I have done my grandfather’s research.
He brought people into this community, people that were destitute, people that were suffering, people that had no place to go. My grandfather brought them in. The next Chief, Gordon Lathlin, he comes in and he’s telling people to get off the Reserve. You don’t belong here. Get off. Get off. Go away. That’s the next chief that did that to me. That man broke my spirit, Chief Gordon Lathlin. And I will say it publicly one of these days that that man fractured and broke me as a human being when that man did that to me, he was not a chief. He was no longer a chief in my opinion. He was just a regular human being that had no respect for his people. One day I will tell that story when I’m old enough and when I’m brave enough I will share that story with my People in this community how much they have hurt me.
So from the time I was eighteen up until 1995, I’m the only person in this community that ever had to get voted in as a Band Member. Everybody else —
There’s Sid Mckay that had his Membership within a month. Within a month he had his Membership. There’s other people that had theirs within a year. I had to wait seven years. I had to get voted in, and I’m the granddaughter of a chief! So when I’m asked how do you get along in this community now, all of that history, I have that history. I look at the people that made those decisions and they are ten and twenty years older than me now, I look at them and I think to myself how can you live inside your skin knowing that you intentionally, intentionally hurt another human being. I could not live with myself if I had to do that to another human being. I could not. I would apologize profusely to that individual. I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry I said this. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I would have done everything to help that person become a whole person again after I hurt them.
That never happened to me. I had to get voted in. I had to talk to sixty-five people, sixty-five homes in this community, in order for me to get voted back in. Do I feel welcome here?—No. Do I feel loved here?—No. Is this my home?—Yes. Are these my people?—Yes. That’s what I do.
I will not work for OCN. I volunteer for OCN. All that garbage that they did to me from the time I was eighteen years old stays with me. I can’t shake it. Individuals I can be nice to, I can be good to. But as a community I began to think collectively you do a lot of damage to individuals. Collectively you can slander one person and the whole community will believe you and that person’s life is up shit creek without a paddle. There’s a lot of things. I can go on and on with the kind of things that go on because of dysfunctions and what Residential School did to us, but we only have an hour.
Q. Do you think your mom would come and talk?
A. My mom is disabled now. Mom had a brain stem stroke. She’s also had heart attacks and all sorts of things happen to her. She wouldn’t tell you anything anyway.
Q. She wouldn’t?
A. No, she wouldn’t. That’s garbage. She doesn’t want to share garbage.
Q. The one thing we don’t get a lot of is people, survivors, who have also sent their children. Those stories are pretty —
A. I would love to have it if you could have a picture of both of us. I would just love that. I think there’s other family members here that went to Elkhorn.
Q. And they had to send their own children, as well.
A. Yeah.
Q. Well, thank you very very much for coming.
A. I thank you so much, too.
Q. I hope it helps to get some of that out. It’s really good for us to hear the anger. We need to hear that. We need to hear that voice.
A. I’ll be angry until I get all that pain out. I’ll be screaming and ranting and raving for a long time because as long as our People keep suffering, as long as our People keep ending up in jail, with diabetes, and have cancer now and all of these health problems that our People have, we didn’t get them by ourselves. We got that through interaction with our White brothers and sisters.
Q. It all stems from Residential Schools; all of it. They were a terrible terrible thing.
A. There are a lot of terrible things. I’m hoping with better interview questions that you can really hit on some of the issues that are hurting our people. That’s what I wish for you. You’re lucky you have me because I know what I want to say and what I have to do. But there are others who are not like me.
What I try to do is try to bring in three generations of history. That’s what I try to do. And that’s going to reflect the dysfunction of OCN. And it’s just our community, eh. Can you imagine there are 633 of us like that? There’s a lot of us that are dysfunctional.
Canada will not be whole until we as a Nation of people can really hold hands with our White Treaty brothers and sisters. We’re not the only ones that are Treaty. Those White signatories of Treaty days, those are Treaty people as well. It’s not just our Treaty. It’s those White boy’s Treaty, too, and those White girls. I think more people need to understand that, especially Canada.
Q. Thank you very much for coming.
A. Thank you very much.
— End of Interview
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Lejac Indian Residential School
Ed Marten
Holy Angels Residential School
Terry Lusty
St. Joseph’s Residential School
Kappo Philomene
St. Francis Xavier
Janet Easter
McKay Residential School
Lucille Mattess
Lejac Indian Residential School
Rev. Mary Battaja
Choutla Residential School
Grant Severight
St. Philips Residential School
Velma Page Kuper Island Indian Residential School
Lorna Rope
St. Paul’s in Lebret, SK
Basil Ambers
St. Michael’s Indian Residential School
Mabel Harry Fontaine
Fort Alexander Indian Residential School
Carole Dawson St. Michael’s Indian Residential School
Walter West
Takla First Nation
Elsie Paul
Sechelt Indian Residential School
Joseph Desjarlais
Lapointe Hall, Breyant Hall
Melvin Jack Lower Point Residential School
Aggie George
Lejac Indian Residential School
Dennis George Green
Ermineskin Residential School
Rita Watcheston
Lebret
Ed Bitternose Gordon Indian Residential School
Eunice Gray
St. Andrew’s Anglican Mission
William McLean
Stone Residential School, Poundmakers Residential School
Beverly Albrecht
Mohawk Institute
Harry McGillivray Prince Albert Indian Residential School
Charles Scribe
Jack River School
Roy Nooski
Lejac Indian Residential School
Robert Tomah
Lejac Indian Residential School
Dillan Stonechild Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School
Suamel Ross
All Saints Indian Residential School
Arthur Fourstar
Birtle Indian Residential School
Richard Kistabish
St. Marc’s Indian Residential School
George Francis Shubenacadie Island Indian Residential School
Verna Miller
St. George’s Indian Residential School
Percy Ballantyne
Birtle Indian Residential School
Blanche Hill-Easton
Mohawk Institute
Brenda Bignell Arnault Mohawk Institute
Riley Burns
Gordons Residential School
Patricia Lewis
Shubenacadie Indian Residential School
Shirley Flowers
Yale School
Nazaire Azarie-Bird St. Michael’s Indian Residential School
Julia Marks
Christ King School
Jennifer Wood
Portage Indian Residential School
David Striped Wolf St. Mary’s Indian Residential School
Johnny Brass
Gordons Residential School
William George Lathlin
All Saints Indian Residential School
Mary Caesar
Lower Point Residential School
Alfred Solonas Lejac Indian Residential School
Darlene Laforme
Mohawk Institute
James Leon Sheldon
Lower Point Residential School
Cecil Ketlo
Lejac Indian Residential School