Terry Lusty
St. Joseph’s Residential School
THE INTERVIEWER: So St. Joseph’s. How old were you when
you first went in?
TERRY LUSTY: Three. Three years old.
Q. Three? Why so young?
A. Because my dad had died in the War when I was 2 ½. My
mother, well at least that was her story, said it was just too hard on her,
financially and so on. She was a single mom at that stage and just found
it too hard to make a go of it. Whether that in fact was the truth, I don’t
know. I never really did find out because she would have nothing to do
with me. When she gave me up, that was it. All strings were severed.
Q. No way.
A. Yeah. There was nothing after that. That’s why I never got to
know any of my family either. I never did track them down, or nothing. I
didn’t bother. I always thought for many years if they couldn’t bother with
me why should I bother with them. All you do is maybe bring more pain to
yourself doing that. So I just never bothered.
Q. So you never asked her? You never had the opportunity to ask
why?
A. No. She wouldn’t talk to me. I tracked her down when I was
about twenty years old. She was still in the area, but she would have
absolutely nothing to do with me. She didn’t even want to communicate
with me. She just turned her back and walked.
Q. How did that make you feel?
A. I lived with rejection all those years. I had been going through
some traumatic times leading up to that time because I didn’t know
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nothing about my family or relatives or nothing. I used to actually knot up
in pain in my stomach area because I didn’t know nothing and I used to
worry and think, worry and think. All I was doing was doing damage to
myself for something that wasn’t even my fault.
I finally said that this has to stop. I’m going to give it one
opportunity. I’m going to track her down. I’m going to find out. Her name
had changed, of course, because she had married and started a new
family and everything. I didn’t want to impose on the family or anything. I
just wanted to have at least some sharing with her and get some
questions answered, like you say. But that was it. She wouldn’t. She just
wouldn’t. She clammed up.
Q. Is she still alive today?
A. No.
Q. She had other children after you?
A. Yeah, from a different husband.
Q. But you’re fine with it today?
A. Oh yeah. You just learn to accept it. Like I said, it didn’t bother
me after because if they couldn’t bother, if nobody else could bother, why
should I and possibly leave myself open for more wounds. So I just didn’t
bother. I started fresh.
It’s possibly one of the reasons why to me it was well enough just to
leave that back there and start fresh in the West. I like the West. I had
been working in BC, bridge building and dynamiting with the railroad. I
worked in Calgary with cattle companies. I had a lot of that background;
rodeo life.
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Q. Wow. Good for you.
So can you recall a particular time in school that kind of stands out
more than the rest?
A. I remember quite well the first Nun that I encountered when I
was brought to the Residential School despite my young years. That time
that I spent in there, much of it, the larger part of it is all pushed back. I
have just blocked it out. I was even trying to start my autobiography and I
was having trouble because I wanted to start from Day One and walk
through my early childhood, the childhood I never had. I couldn’t do it
because I just blocked out so much. It’s that security blanket we develop
for ourselves.
There is very little I can recall. I don’t recall much in terms of happy
times. Most of it is kind of negative stuff. There’s the odd thing, of course,
like fun times and scary times, too. You don’t forget those things. But I
remember when I first got there, there was a Sister Clarisse. She was one
of the shorter Nuns, but she was the one that first met me. She seemed
to have a genuine warmth towards children. I never got to know her really
well or anything, but she always seemed like a very pleasant and gracious
caring type of individual, not like many of the other Nuns who were very
stringent and hard nosed and brow beating and all that stuff. They were
certainly not like the ones I encountered after her.
That’s all I remember really for those first couple of years. And I
don’t even remember those first few years in there. And then I was
farmed out of there for one year to a foster home, a White foster home in
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the city, up on Mountain Avenue area. I wasn’t there no more than a year
and I was back in the Residential School again.
I went back in. I would go in for 2 or 3 years and then I would be
out to another foster home, then back in again and back out. I wound up
spending about 8 years in Res school and 4 years in 4 different foster
homes.
Some of the things I really recall about it, like I say a lot of them
happen to be negative things but there wasn’t too much enjoyment. I
recall very, very well we never celebrated birthdays. We hardly even
celebrated Christmas. If we got one gift at all for Christmas we were
fortunate. Birthdays, like I said, our birthdays weren’t even acknowledged.
Even to this day birthdays are not a big thing to me, believe it or not.
People can’t believe it, but it’s true. It’s because of that. It’s just a carry
over.
They had a dog there by the name of Lightning. He was a black
and white dog. He was special to a lot of us kids. He was one of our
buddies. We used to sneak out of the grounds sometimes and he would
come with us of course. We would sneak over about a half mile away or
so. There was a kind of a city park area we used to go to. Oldman’s
Creek it was called. It was down by the river area on the east side of the
Residential School grounds.
Lightning was killed later on by one of those jiggers that went along
the tracks, those little carts for the workmen. He was killed by one of
those and we buried him beside the tree in the playground area. So we
lost a good friend through that.
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I remember one time we were playing hockey there and there were
2 brothers that lived there. One was the artist, the late Donald Lefort. He
was actually in the school. He sat right next to me. Right in front of him,
so kitty-corner from me and in front of Donald was a former MP, Cyril
Keeper. Those are the guys I was in school with.
It never surprised me that Donald later on became an artist,
because he was always doodling and getting in trouble from the Nun for
that, eh. She would come and rap him on the knuckles with the ruler, or
else grab him by the ear and pinch and whatever, just different things they
did to us.
They joke about how in the Army you’ve got to scrub the floor with
a toothbrush. We had to do that. That was one of our punishments. Or
sit over there in the corner with your dunce cap while all the other kids in
there were made to gather round and watch all this going on. So there
was humiliation, a lot of public humiliation of us.
We were penalized somehow or other for anything wrong that we
did. It didn’t matter how minor or how major it was, you were punished for
it. It didn’t matter whether it was innocent or not. So that was the other
thing.
One thing I can always remember so well is how much they used
us as labourers. Cleaning the buildings, doing work in the laundry, the
Laundry room. They had great big metal rollers and they were covered in
canvas. Those would be all heated up and they would press the sheets
through them, eh. We had to work in that room. We also had to of course
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tend to the garden. They had a huge, huge garden that we had to take
care of.
The other thing I remember really well, again a negative
circumstance, there was a fellow we called Jerryman. His name was
Jerry. We didn’t know his last name. We just called him Jerryman. He
was the maintenance man on the grounds. There were 2 main buildings.
He worked in the smaller one, a little further back from the main building.
We would remember how every spring he would gather the kittens and put
them in a canvas bag with a rock and throw them into the river back at the
end of the property. He drowned them every spring dutifully.
At the same time another thing is they heated those buildings with
large coal-fired furnaces. They were fueled with coal. When they got the
cinders from the coal he would shovel them into a wheelbarrow. And then
he would take them out to our playground where we played baseball. He
scattered those cinders all over our playground. That’s why so many of us
kids come out of there with scars all over our arms, our legs and that. You
go sliding on those cinders and they’re very toxic, too, so we would get a
lot of infections from them.
The only thing they ever did for us any time we got infections or
that, they just lay on the mercurochrome, big time.
Every morning we went to church service. Every evening was
Benediction. Every day. And with me it got to a point where I was just
saturated with religion. I turned my back on it later because it was just
overwhelming. You virtually lived ate and breathed religion.
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In school you had Catechism. You had the bible and the prayers
and all the Latin, learning the Latin words. I can still spiel them off today,
even though I haven’t used it for so many years. But don’t ask me what
they mean. But as if that wasn’t enough, on top of that because I had a
singing voice, I had to be part of the choir. I had to be an altar boy. I had
to be a server, eh. So I had all this going on.
Just to put a little icing on the cake, one of my duties every day
apart from other things like working in the Kitchen or the fields or Laundry
Room or whatever, was I was the one who had to dust and sweep and
clean up and mop the chapel every day. I never got away from that
religious element in the system.
One other thing that I always remember so much too is whenever I
was in there, it was like I was in there forever because I never got to go
out of there, except for the odd time when we were allowed off the
grounds supervised, or if we snuck out on our own. We would do that also
on Halloween Night. We would sneak out of there and challenge other
kids to go to the cemetery next door. It was one of our rare enjoyments to
see other kids get the heebie-geebies having to visit a cemetery in the
middle of the night.
I’ve got to backtrack now. Where was I going with this? I was
going to talk about —
Just before I started talking about going to the cemetery.
Oh, the grounds. Confinement. I was talking about that.
Especially for kids like myself, children like myself who had nobody out
there for us, as a consequence of that we never had no visitors. By the
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same token we never got to get out of there. Kids could go out maybe at
Christmas or at Easter and the summer holidays and spend time with their
families outside of the Residential School. But not kids like myself. We
were always in there.
Once a month the children were allowed a visitor; a relative or
guardian whatever. They were allowed a visitor. The front of the building
where they would drive up, it had a circular driveway like this (indicating),
and they would come in and stop there and pick up the kids and drive out.
They would come back and it was the same routine. That would be on a
Sunday. It was always on a Sunday. It would be the only day of the
month when they would allow that.
I used to stand at the front of the playground right parallel with the
front of the building and I used to hang on that mesh fence where it was
spiked at the top. I remember one time I tried to jump out of the grounds
and I jumped up but I ripped one of my fingers open on those stupid
spikes.
I used to cling to that fence with my fingers curled around the wire
and watch these people come and pick up other kids and wonder when is
someone going to come for me. Nobody ever did, of course. That was
kind of tough.
I was very much a loner. I became a loner. When I was growing
up during my first few years there, because my mother was non-Native
and my dad was actually Métis, French and Cree, I never grew up with our
language. My dad apparently had understood French, Cree and English.
But nothing other than English was used in those first years when I was
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born, so I never grew up with a Native language or the culture because I
was just a baby when they threw me into the Res School. So I never had
any of that. And because I had nobody, none of my relatives to visit me or
anything, I never had any of that either. That’s why later on when I got on
my own at sixteen and began wondering about myself, who I was and
where I came from and da, da, da, da, da, I couldn’t answer my questions.
I had nobody to answer them for me. I guess I just didn’t have the
presence of mind in those days —
First of all, what happened was I had become a ward of the
Childrens’ Aid Society. And they were bound by policy to not divulge any
information to you. That’s why I couldn’t know who my mom was or where
she was or how to contact her or anything like that. So none of this stuff
was shared. I eventually had to investigate on my own and find these
things out. They wouldn’t even open up to us, Childrens’ Aid, they
wouldn’t let us see our own files, you know, which to me was criminal.
How dare they take away your own information from you?
I recall well the strappings, especially from one Nun by the name of
Sister Mary Perpetua. She was a big woman. She towered over all us
kids, no matter how big the kids were. She was larger than the average
woman, of course. She was fairly husky, too. Boy, she used to tie into us
with those straps, the ones from the conveyor belts. They were about that
long (indicating). She just put both hands up over her shoulder and came
around, round houses.
But they could never make us cry. We learned never to cry. You
toughened yourself. I started at a very early stage developing that shell
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that nothing could crack, nothing. That was one of the real aftermaths
also when you look at the impact of what those schools did to us, to our
system, to our values and to our emotions and our ability to express or
even just to show love to another individual. All that was subverted.
I remember how hard it was when I first got interested in a woman
and lived with her and how hard it was to relate to her because we had
never been prepared for that kind of thing. I have 3 children. Thank
goodness they are all fine. But those 3 children, I had a very difficult time
relating to them. But I do today. I’m very close with my kids, especially
my oldest son.
Q. What’s his name?
A. It took a long time coming. I practically had to die before that
happened.
Q. Wow.
A. That’s an interesting story in itself too how that came about. I
was in a vehicle accident where I was split open from here, the middle of
my forehead down to here (indicating). My whole nose was all shattered.
I went through a couple of operations. They had to rebuild it. And here
(indicating). I busted 8 ribs. I was alone on the highway at that time. I
wasn’t supposed to live. The doctors thought that was it.
But when I came out of that something had happened to my
chemistry and all of a sudden I was forty-five years old. It took that long
for me to finally be able to laugh, to be able to cry. It took forty-five years.
Well, I shouldn’t say forty-five. I should say forty-two maybe because the
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first 3 years I guess wouldn’t count. But it took that long. It wasn’t until I
was forty-five years old that I was able to do that.
Q. Where are your children now?
A. My oldest one is living on Sarcee just outside of Calgary. He’s a
successful self-operator of his own business. He’s doing really really
good.
My daughter who used to work in a bank down in Calgary and also
in a bank on Sarcee, she’s living up in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories
right now. She has a new man in her life up there. I have 3 grandchildren
through her.
I have a grand daughter from my son and also a great-grand
daughter. So I’m a “Chappa” (ph.), which is great grandparent.
My other son, my youngest son is nineteen. He’s over in
Saskatchewan, still trying to work his way through getting some more
schooling.
Q. Do you talk to them about what you went through?
A. Very little. I’ve talked a little bit about it. I haven’t been as close
in contact with my daughter because she’s away a lot. Most of my contact
is with my oldest son. Because my youngest son has been raised most of
his life on the Saskatchewan side I don’t see him as often. We’ve never
gotten a lot into it. He knows a little bit, but not too much.
My oldest son would know the most of the 3 kids. But even he
doesn’t know everything yet. I know I’ve been thinking more about that
and I know he should know more about it, too. I am planning actually this
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summer to sit both him and my grand daughter down and run through a lot
of that stuff with them.
Q. Terry, they talk about the abuses in these schools. Did you
witness or were you a part of any of that? Did you see anything?
A. There were certain things, hints of abuse that I was aware of,
knowledgeable about. And there was also, outside of what I myself
personally experienced, most of mine was strappings. If it wasn’t every
day it was kind of every other day you were getting strappings. And like I
say, extra workloads and other things.
I remember too, like I told you about the toothbrush thing and the
dunce cap and extra labour. Sometimes we were —
To go from one floor to another they had a dolly. It was like a little
elevator that went through a dark chimney. I know there were times when
I was put in that dolly —
— Speaker overcome with emotion
Q. That’s all right, Terry. Take your time.
A. They would stop it between levels and just leave us there in the
dark. Other times when something would happen and you know that you
might be the subject of punishment you would try to hide in different
places. A lot of us had our own special places sometimes where we
would hide on the grounds, or within the buildings. Sometimes we would
be in cupboards, sometimes under stairs. If you could get outside of the
building there were a number of places there, of course. They had corn
fields and stuff. You could go hide in there. You could climb up a tree
and hide in the foliage up in the trees, all these different places.
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We even had areas in the ground where we would carve out the
grass and hollow out a spot under there. We could just pull that grass
over ourselves to hide.
In terms of sexual abuse there were indicators of that I was aware
of. I never really saw it for myself but the indications were certainly
present. There were things for example —
We had a dormitory on the top level. Both buildings were 3 storeys
high. The top level at the far back side closer to the river was where our
dorm area was. The front end of the building, more towards Portage
Avenue was where the Nuns and the Brothers had their quarters.
In our dorms there were bunk beds. I had a lower bunk bed. But I
used to see sometimes, because sometimes you don’t always sleep at
night or else something might wake you up, although me normally I’m a
pretty sound sleeper. But I know there were nights sometimes I would see
kids led away from their beds. I also discovered that some kids knew
when they were going to be fetched because under their pillows there
would be something under their pillows for them and they knew that was
their time. It might be fruit.
I know too that a popular one that seemed to always stick in my
mind was the memory of a banana left under a pillow. That was an
indication they were going to come for you and they would take you to
their room. So if the supervisor had —
I’m trying to remember. Their rooms were generally —
There was one in the corner by the back.
— End of Part 1
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Q. So you knew if a banana was left that’s kind of something that
stuck in your head, eh?
A. Yeah. A large part of the punishment we went through, a lot of
it was constant, constant strappings and humiliation. It was not always in
the corner with their dunce cap thing, but they would even put you right in
the middle of your Play area. We had a marble floor there. We had no
radio and no TV, nothing like that. You had to create your own enjoyment
and entertainment.
Well, they made us entertain one another with their kind of stuff.
Q. What do you mean?
A. Well, if one of us had done something wrong they would sit us
on one of those tall stools, like a bar stool, right in the middle of our Play
Room and then they would have all the kids sit around and they would
ridicule us and strip us down. They would take all your garments off and
just ridicule you. They would make you sit there and make everybody else
stare at you. And if they were also going to strap that individual, you
would get strapped there, too, right in front of all the others. They could
watch, eh.
There was lots of that that happened.
Q. Is that one of the reasons why you won’t go back to Winnipeg?
A. Well, I sometimes think it is subconsciously, just too many bad
memories. It’s probably one of the reasons I never really went back to the
church, either, even today. It even made it tough for me later.
I went to university while I was in Calgary. I came out of there with
a B.Ed. Then I went up north and taught in Wabaskadimery (ph.) and also
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in Fort Chip. I didn’t stay at it because even being back in that kind of
environment again would keep bringing back a lot of those memories. It
was almost like a waste of time to go to university to get a degree as an
educator and then, boom, turn around and not really apply it. But there
were other ways that I used it for the good of the community.
I’m very heavily involved and active at the community level.
Q. What do you do now to kind of appease your spirit? Do you go
to ceremony? Do you visit with Elders?
A. I have a lot of communication and contact with Elders. A lot of
my mentors have been Elders. I have also been kind of apprenticing
myself for my role. They are encouraging me to do that. They keep telling
me I should. There are a number of Elders who have told me that
accident where I should have been history I was spared from that for a
purpose. That’s why a lot of those things are coming together now.
I do a lot of work talking at schools, colleges, conferences and so
on. I’m just giving back, kind of thing. There’s a lot of that I do at no
charge. Then even for those I do charge, I have a sliding rate. I gear it
accordingly. So for some it might cost $25 and for somebody else it might
cost $250. Those don’t come too often.
It’s not easy. I get approached a lot by people for one-on-one
counseling and I’m not really a counselor. But I’ve learned so much about
it through healers and through counselors and working with them as a
helper and also with them tutoring me, so I know I’m on that path. I’m kind
of borderline at this stage to make that jump to being an Elder.
Q. Wow. So do you forgive your mother?
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A. Well, I have and I haven’t. It’s kind of a difficult question. Inside
I know myself I could never ever be that way with my flesh and blood. My
children, I wouldn’t even raise a hand against them, not a finger. I never
did. I always said my kids would not have to go through what I went
through. So in one way I haven’t.
In another way I have because I can understand some parts. I can
understand where she would want to carry on with her life. She started a
new family; da, da, da, da, da. She didn’t want me in the picture. I don’t
even know myself whether or not her husband knew about me. That I
don’t even know because like I say she wouldn’t talk to me. I didn’t know
that.
I knew she was very angry with my natural dad. I was aware of that
and that was kind of the only thing she imparted to me. She never said
why or anything. But she wouldn’t talk about anything.
Q. Do you have brothers and sisters older than you?
A. No. I was an only child. I was an only child up to that time.
Q. What about her children, her other children?
A. Her children through her later relationship which would be half
brothers and sisters to me, I know she had some. I don’t know how many
or nothing. I’ve never bothered. I’m not really interested. That was a part
of life that she wanted to keep to herself. I don’t see how it’s going to
influence or affect me in any positive way. So I just haven’t bothered. I
never did.
Q. Wow.
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A. I never had no inclination to. But then again too don’t forget
through the Residential School we were never taught things like family
values and what it meant to have other family members.
I basically grew up all those years as a loner, even in the
Residential School. That’s the other thing I was going to talk about was
how I grew up. I was what you call a lone wolf. I really was. I think that’s
one of the reasons I never got —
You know how kids pick on one another. I don’t know why but kids
never picked on me. For some reason they never picked on me. I often
wondered about that, eh. How come? How come some kids are picked
on and others aren’t? I didn’t have nobody there to protect me. I was a
loner. The Nuns, the supervisors, the Brothers that were there, they never
protected me. So I didn’t have those kinds of support lines out there.
That was another thing too, when I did get out of there I was still
that lone wolf. I was that way for so many years. It was kind of surprising
later on in life that I went into such areas as the fields I am in where I’m in
constant communication and have to communicate with people. It’s kind
of surprising in a way, you know. But there’s still part of that in me also,
that lone wolf spirit. I still revert to that, too. Even when I’m out there, I
can be in a crowd of 800 or a thousand people and still feel like I’m there
alone.
Q. Terry, why do you feel it is important to share this story?
A. To me it is because so many people don’t know what so many
of us did go through. One of the things I mentioned earlier about shutting
out so much, I’ve lost all those memories. I was going to write this book,
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my autobiography, and I was going to call it The Boy Who Couldn’t Cry.
But then I thought, oh, you can do the reverse, too, The Boy Who Couldn’t
Laugh, because I could do neither. It was like I had no spirit, I had no
emotions because of that thick shell I developed.
People need to understand that too that some of us in those days
we were not communicators because we always had to suppress our
emotions. We always had to be strong. That’s where the survival of the
fittest really came out, that whole concept. So I was the boy who couldn’t
cry and the boy who couldn’t laugh. At the same time there was the third
element to it —
Oh, the child that had no childhood. To me if you can’t have any
good remembrances from your early years, your formative years when
you’re going through grade school right up to your mid teens, something is
very wrong there. Somewhere you’ve missed the boat. You’ve had no
childhood. If you have had no happy occasions, no happy experiences or
memories, there’s something wrong with that picture, very very wrong.
I think a lot of people need to know that and a lot of people need to
know why we had so much difficulty, even though we had children and we
loved them dearly we couldn’t show it. We couldn’t express it, not verbally
and not physically. We didn’t know how to express it to our children
because we never grew up with that. The Nuns and the Brothers never
taught us to be that way. It was always the “hands off” thing. It was just
like a serious life all through, a serious phase of your life.
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When I started teaching school my home room was Grade 7. I had
an excellent rapport with those kids. They loved me those kids. For years
after I left the community they were asking me to come back.
One of the things I used to impart to them was how sometimes
some of them would open up and talk about their problems on the home
front. A lot of them were from single parent families and so on. I would sit
them down and say, “Hey, listen, take it from someone who has been
there and done that, I grew up with nobody.” “You guys got it better than
you know sometimes, better than you realize.” Never mind 2 parents. I
didn’t even have one, not one that I could ever turn to. Even if your
parents seem to be kind of harsh and strict with you and have a lot of rules
and regulations and things you have to do, at least you had somebody
there and there was someone there who actually cares about you. That’s
not what we had when we were kids, those of us who went through
Residential School. We didn’t have that. You are very blessed. You
might not realize it at the time, but mark my words, down the road when
you’re a little older you’re going to look back and you will appreciate that.
Q. Do you ever feel the spirit of your dad around you?
A. Yeah. I do sometimes.
Q. What was his name?
A. Peter.
Q. What was his last name?
A. He was a Poronto (ph.)
Q. Peter Poronto.
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A. Yeah. It’s sometimes a calming effect for me. From time to
time I actually think more about him than my mother. I used to wish a lot
of times that he had never left because I felt like I missed out on so much
because he left. I felt there were a lot of things I would have learned and
benefited from if he had stayed around. But it wasn’t up to him.
The Creator went and fetched him for some other reason and for
some other purpose. Maybe part of that was just to give me the strength I
needed in life. I have also looked at the upside of it because everything
happens for a reason.
Q. Where was he from?
A. He was from St. Albert. My mother was actually from Winnipeg.
My dad was from St. Albert.
Q. So the Cree must come from your grandmother’s side?
A. My dad’s mom? Yeah.
Q. I wonder what Reserve she was from?
A. I have never bothered doing any tracing or nothing. Like I say,
family I have just totally wiped out of my life right after I was twenty. I
have never thought. Why bother now at this stage, you know?
Q. But you held onto your —
A. It was the same thing. A lot of times I thought of taking my
dad’s name. And then I would sort of think everybody knows me by the
name I’ve been going with all these years. If I take my dad’s name
nobody is going to be able to connect it. So I just never bothered.
Q. So “Lusty” was your mom’s name?
A. My mom’s surname.
Page 21 of 22
Q. Her maiden name?
A. Yeah.
Q. Before she met your dad?
A. Yeah.
Q. Is there anything else you want to share with us, Terry?
A. I think a lot of that, like I say, a lot of the impact that it had on
our later life was kind of critically important. There again, it’s one of the
reasons why to me it’s important for our stories to be out there too is for
inter-generational purposes so our children and grandchildren know why
we were the way we were. Like I say, even my own kids, but that’s
common. You’ve probably found that out yourself. That is one of the
common characteristics of so many of us that went through that system.
Many of us have not told our stories even to our own immediate family
members, be it spouses or children or grandchildren. A lot of us have not
shared that information with them.
But then again a lot of us, because of different things, were
ashamed to. On my part it’s not so much a shame of that. It’s just that it
was something I never shared as much. It has only been recently that I’ve
been really speaking a lot at schools, conferences and what have you
about my experiences in Residential Schools and foster homes.
Q. It’s important.
A. Yeah.
Q. All right. Thanks.
— A Short Pause
Page 22 of 22
A. …they had rows and rows of shelves and they had not just one
or two or half a dozen or a dozen, they had lined up all around the entire
room rows of shelves. You know what was on those shelves? Spaced
side-by-side-by-side all around it was those things they used medically to
explore between a woman’s pelvis, those spreaders. She said, “How
come so many?” They were just all over. She could understand maybe 5
or 6 around or whatever.
Q. A couple.
A. But just ringed around the entire room and not just one shelf.
Unbelievable.
Q. That’s wild.
A. That was another one, too. There’s stuff like that, eh.
Q. What was your mom’s name?
A. Her name was Bernice.
Q. How long ago did she pass away?
A. Well, I didn’t find out the exact date, but I found out about it. It
would have been about ten or twelve years ago.
Q. Wow. A pretty amazing story, Terry.
— End of Interview
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