THE INTERVIEWER: I’ll get you to spell your first and your last name, please?
CAROLE DAWSON: Carole Dawson; C-a-r-o-l-e D-a-w-s-o-n.
Q. Okay. And what school did you go to?
A. St. Michael’s Residential School at Alert Bay.
Q. How old were you when you first went in?
A. I was thirteen, I think, going on fourteen.
Q. What was your first day like? Do you remember?
A. It was horrible. My late sister, my late cousin and some other girls from Tlingit Inlet, which is where I’m from, were up for hours. We couldn’t sleep. It was very traumatic for us. It was a really stressful day to be coming from Tlingit Inlet, which is a really beautiful remote isolated area, surrounded by mountains. When we say it’s God’s country, we really believe it and we mean it. When we are there we are protected and we feel protected. We are protected and we were protected.
Taking us out of there was just like taking fish out of water. It was a horrible experience. That’s the best I can describe it.
I tried to be protective of my younger sister and my cousin and to not cry for their sakes, and to try to find things for them to do that might make them feel a little better, but there’s no way you can disguise Residential School. There’s a silly old expression which I don’t like but it always sticks in my mind. “You can’t put lipstick on a pig.” Residential School is really a nightmare institution.
Q. So tell me about an experience that kind of sticks out more in your mind than other things you can remember.
A. Probably the abuse that happened there. It’s not only my own abuse. I saw the abuse of other students. That was very compelling for me to see young girls getting taken out of their dorms at odd hours; eleven in the evening and midnight, and to hear them whimpering and crying and then find them in the bathroom later. I didn’t understand then about sexual abuse. It wasn’t explained to us by our parents or our Elders, or these people that operated the schools. But I knew there was something wrong.
One of the things that stands out for me is I was constantly being punished. I was being either whipped or made to wash toilets because I physically attacked supervisors who beat the children, for instance, with radiator brushes. My cousin, Bob Joseph, who is one of the Residential School guys in BC, his wife is my cousin, her and I were always getting punished because we were always trying to defend the little children. That was just inherent in us to be protective. That’s one of the things I really resented about Residential School was violence begat violence, so I can see the pattern of where sex abuse comes from, but also violence. We felt we were protecting children and we would physically attack a supervisor.
And we were being beaten up by older girls because the supervisors would say to someone from Bella Bella or whatever, “here’s these bad girls from Tlingit Inlet, you can do whatever you like to them”, and stuff like that.
So after a period of time getting sick of the whole thing, the abuse of these children who were wetting their beds and being sexually abused and my own abuse by the staff and by the other girls in the school, my late sister, my cousin and her sister and I ran away. Little did we realize that you can’t escape from an island. That’s how stupid we were. Alert Bay is an island. We were gone for several hours and we foolishly went to the fish docks because my father was a fish packer and my cousins’ dad was a fisherman so he used to have a boat, a little gill netter. So we went down there hoping to find someone that would take us up on a boat and get us away from the Residential School. This was just within weeks of being there.
So the guy who operated the school happened to be a Minister by the name of Reverend John Dalton. He immediately got the RCMP to start looking for us. There was a search for us. My sister and my cousin, the younger ones —
My older cousin and I, she was fifteen and I was fourteen, made sure that my sister and the other girl got away. Then her and I split up and I was the one that the RCMP Officer caught. So he took me. This was probably about midnight by the time they found us, and took me to the back of Alert Bay which is an island and sexually assaulted me. He didn’t bring me back to the school until I think it was about 4 a.m.
The Minister that operated the school was furious. He knew there was something wrong. He could see physical marks on my body when I came in, and right away he said, “Where did you have her?” He started interrogating the Officer who was a younger Officer. So that was very traumatic because the Officer had said that if I said anything about this assault my parents would end up in jail and I would go to jail. When you’re fourteen you don’t know anything about sex to start with and something like this happens, all you’re trying to do is escape the stupid place you’re in, so for that to end up in this nightmare —
It was almost forty or fifty years before I told my mother. I’ll be sixty-three in September and I didn’t tell my mother until about 3 or 4 years ago and she wondered why. I said, “Mom, the Residential School has had such a hideous hold on me.”
I’ve been an alcohol and drug counselor, a sex abuse counselor, but that’s one unfinished piece of business. I want to do something legally with it. That was a lot to happen in a short period of time.
But I say it made me who I am. George Erasmus had over 600 people in Squamish at the beginning of the Residential Schools thing. I told the story there. The doors were locked. People weren’t allowed to go in or out and people must have thought I was insane. I said, “The RCMP did me the biggest favour the day they did that to me, because it has made me who I am.”
It made me a very defiant person. I became very angry. For many, many years I was a fighter for rights, but not in a good way. That all came later. I managed to survive that abuse and I managed to survive my own abuse because that experience taught me that you cannot trust anyone. People in authority are not to be trusted. You have to defend yourself from them at all costs, whatever it takes to escape them, you have to do that.
Even though I went to college and I became educated, I was involved in the sixties with many friends who are now dead, unfortunately, many of us were part of what is known as AIM, the American Indian Movement. I’m a real survivor. I survived Residential School. I survived the sixties. I’ve survived my own self-destructive ways and I’ve gone on to do other things, but always lurking around is this unfinished piece of business.
So I think it was 1995 or 1996. I was working for fourteen Indian Bands as a Health Planner on Vancouver Island. I used to travel back and forth from Port Hardy to Vancouver. I thought this would be a good time to find a lawyer to deal with my sexual assault. That was really hard to do. When you’ve ran around over half your lifetime with that type of a filthy little secret and it’s not just some schmuck that worked in the Residential School, it’s an RCMP Officer, it’s really hard to face up to it.
I’ve been an alcohol and drug counselor. I’ve been a sex abuse counselor. And one of the things I learned is a good counselor has a counselor, has counselors. I had an excellent one when I was doing my work. She said to me, “Carole, there’s one thing I want you to do for yourself.” “I want you to go back to Alert Bay by yourself, go into that Residential School alone.” “Don’t go in there with anyone.” “Don’t go with a tour group.” “Don’t go visiting anyone or bringing people with you.” “I want you to go there on your own and go through that school and relive what you lived there.” “I want you to come back and talk to me about it.”
Unfortunately she was a Cree woman and she left BC because her family had some urgent matters back east and I didn’t get another counselor after that.
But when I was working on the Island it came to me that I needed to do something legally about the matter. It took a lot of courage to find a lawyer that I could even say that this happened to me and I want to charge the RCMP. So I found a lawyer, Tom Berger’s daughter, Erin Berger. Unfortunately she got pregnant 2 or 3 months after I talked to her and she had started taking information and starting to look at putting the pieces together. So she said I would have to find another lawyer because she had gotten pregnant.
I said, “Erin, it’s hard to find another lawyer.” “I had just screwed up all the courage I had to come and see you and tell you this story and now you’re saying I need to go find someone else to tell it to.” And not only that, because I lived on the Island I can’t find a good lawyer in Vancouver while I’m there. When I’m in Vancouver I’m there on business. I represent these chiefs from fourteen different Indian Bands and I can’t be there conducting my own affairs. That’s a luxury that if I can get to it, I will.
That got left and abandoned about 1995 when I saw her. In 1998 Bob Joseph recommended this other lawyer, Karim to me, and I went to meet with him. Unfortunately another thing struck and I was going on chemo and he said, “Carole, do you think you’re really ready to take the RCMP on?” “They will fight back, they will drag out every dirty little piece they can find about you, they’ll attack you from every angle that they can, if you’re on chemo are you going to be able to live up to that?”
I said that I was a really tough person to have survived all that crap, surely to God I can survive this other crap. But when I thought about it then I started to think, no, as I was on my chemotherapy I began to realize it’s really heavy duty stuff. It lays you out. And not only that, chemotherapy is a drug so like all drugs it affects you. I was horrified at how it affected me mentally. It was not just physical. I went through all the nausea and stuff they tell you, but I also went through severe depression and all these other things because chemotherapy just lays waste to you. Literally it’s supposed to kill something bad in you, but what happens is it kills what’s good in you, too. So you end up being exhausted all the time. You can’t think properly. You become very emotional so it would have been really unwise to proceed with a court case against the RCMP.
I’m very glad you’re able to talk to me today Lisa, because I think every time I talk about the story of mine, it unburdens me. It makes me stronger, I believe.
Unfortunately I don’t remember the name of the abuser, and of course Alert Bay being a small place, I’m sure the RCMP’s records if they really wanted to find this person who sexually assaulted me they would. Because we now know —
One of the things I learned as a counselor was for every individual who has been assaulted, you can say there’s ten more. But as a counselor I would say there’s probably up to a hundred more victims. I would say ten is very conservative. So I can be sure I was not the only victim of this RCMP Officer.
Although one of the lawyer’s said to me, “Do you know of any others?” And I said, “No, I don’t.” Maybe fear —
I consider myself a strong person, but it took me over half a lifetime to even tell anyone about this, to relive it.
Q. Do you even know what he looks like?
A. Very, very little of that. I think that’s part of the self-protective mechanism of your mind to obliterate that experience.
Q. Wow.
A. But there are probably others and lawyers have said to me that they’re not trying to drum up other business, but can you find any others. I don’t think that’s my role to find other women or men that were possibly sexually assaulted by this individual. But certainly if I knew of them I would say to them that I would be willing to support them if they want to go forward with their story.
Q. Now you’re at a place where you’re able to talk about things more, do you think you have come to terms with a lot of it?
A. I think I have in many, many ways. One of the good things I think I’ve learned is that out of everything bad that has ever happened to me, I have learned to find the positive. I think that’s another survival mechanism. In order to be able to survive, people have to be able to find ways of doing that and ways of coping. I’m not talking about denial. There was a part of me for many years that was in denial about this assault. That has all changed. I don’t feel the fear that this person had over me at that time.
Although the lawyers have kind of scared me, because 2 different lawyers have said to me that if I do pursue these charges against the RCMP, you know that they will probably start harassing you. And I thought, “Oh God, that’s all I need.” “I’m sixty-two and I don’t need them eavesdropping on my telephone or going through my mail, or whatever it is they’ll do.” So there’s that little part of me that feels I’ve unburdened myself and unleashed all of this garbage and it is unfinished, but there is still a little part of me that fears what are the repercussions for me speaking out about it. Because the RCMP are a powerful agency. They are the government.
Q. So if you were to see this guy, this cop today, what would you say to him?
A. I’ve thought of that. I think I would ask, first of all, if he remembered me. I think I would want to know, I would ask him how many other children he sexually molested, and don’t you feel that there should be any consequences for your behaviour. What a farce for someone to take an oath to protect the public and yet to go around and sexually molest young students. I don’t believe I’m alone. To me it is very repugnant and not just irresponsible; it’s reprehensible for someone with that much power.
Q. So when you were in school back then did you have any classmates that you stayed in touch with?
A. Yes, some of them, I did. Like I say, unfortunately many of the people I was in school with have died. Many of them have died tragic deaths. A lot of them have been murdered. Some of them through alcohol and drugs have killed themselves. There aren’t too many people that I went to school with that survive.
Q. Wow.
A. There just aren’t. And the interesting thing about the Residential School was when I told Erin Berger about my sexual assault with the RCMP Officer, I described what the Principal who happened to be the Minister, his reaction, and she said to me, “Carole, do you really want to sue the Residential School and this Minister?” Unfortunately, he has died. But she said her gut feeling was that maybe I shouldn’t be suing them because the Principal, the Minister, was very irate with this RCMP Officer and was very protective of me. But I know what that is. The students in the school were more his little possessions. His wards, I think. I think that’s my concept. I could be wrong because maybe he genuinely cared about us. But it didn’t seem to me —
I know he was really angry with the RCMP Officer and kept asking him repeatedly “what did you do with her?”, “where did you have her?”, “we know you picked her up at midnight”, “you’ve had her for over 4 hours, where did you bring her?” After a few minutes the RCMP Officer ran off.
As I didn’t talk to my parents about that and the Minister had the matter in his hands, I had no idea what Residential School records would show about the events of that day, that morning, and the hours after that. But I’m sure the Principal tried to take some action against the RCMP.
Q. Wow. Was your late sister one of the people who ran away with you?
A. Yes.
Q. She was sent back to school?
A. Yes. We were all brought back and punished for running away. But then we tried running away again. We were just absolutely defiant of that system and hated it.
Q. So if there was anything that you would want people to know about Residential School, and in particular the one that you went to, what would it be?
A. I think probably I would hope, it would be hope —
There’s a lot of tragedy that happened there. Through it all and maybe I’m a bit of a foolish optimist, through it all I think you can attain survival and you can do it in a healthy way. You don’t need to die or try to kill yourself or let others kill you. You can take control. You can’t change what happened. I can’t undo the Residential School. That is just part of history.
What I can redo is myself. Of course I’m not going to turn my back on those memories and what that experience was. That wouldn’t be a wise thing to do and it would not be a healthy thing to do. I think what my message and concern would be that people recognize that you can have optimism, you can have hope, you can have the power of your recovery. You can reclaim your soul. You can own that soul.
Hopefully you can ensure that those types of experiences that were in those Residential Schools are not happening anywhere else. Because we now know that because of the abuse in these schools, many of us went on leaving them and we continue those offences that happened there. We become perpetrators, and that’s a thing that concerns me. People don’t need to be victims and they don’t need to be perpetrators. There is a place in between where they can be safe and they can be sane. They don’t have to go to the extreme and go over the edge.
It’s a little too late for many people. Unfortunately we have paid a high price for these schools.
Q. Are you connected to your culture and traditions?
A. Not so much when I’m in the city. But where I come from, we’re very strong traditional people. I think that was the other thing that ensured we survived the school and the experiences there. Because our community was so remote and so isolated we could get out of the school for 2 months of the year and escape that hell. Those are things that stay with you for a life. They are not things you lose.
Q. Thank you. That was a wonderful story.
A. Thank you.
— End of Interview