THE INTERVIEWER: Charles, could you please tell us your full name and spell it for us?
CHARLES SCRIBE: My name is Charles Scribe. The spelling is C-h-a-r-l-e-s S-c-r-i-b-e.
Q. Thank you. Where do you come from?
A. I’m originally from Norway House.
Q. Oh. And what school did you go to?
A. In Norway House I attended the Jack River School. It was also known as the Jack River Hostel, or Notre Dame School. It was a Mission School which was operated by the Oblates.
Q. Excellent. Do you remember what years you went there?
A. I started school there when I was six years old. I spent nine years there. I attended as a day student for those nine years that I was there. It was run by —
Our teachers were Nuns and it was run by a Priest. The Principal was a Priest and there were Brothers, I guess, that were the staff. There was the odd lay person there but generally it was run by the Nuns and the Priests.
It was a sort of traumatizing time being there. It was similar to being in a Residential School. We had to abide by all the regulations and whatever religious things that were imposed on us.
One of the things I remember clearly when I was growing up as a young boy was my mother and dad were Residential School survivors but they maintained this concept of family. They concentrated on that. Before we went to school they were very adamant in maintaining a family nucleus. We weren’t Catholics at the time. We were Anglicans when I was a young boy. Although we were Anglicans we attended Sunday School in a church that was evangelistic, or Pentecostal, you know. This was during my pre-school years. We had the opportunity to visit the Sunday School. It was a really good experience for me at that time because the Sunday Schools were run by a Minister and his wife. He had a son and a daughter so he had the type of family that everybody looks for. Most of his teachings were family oriented. He taught us the biblical stories about Jesus and his growing up, things like he was a carpenter’s helper. They covered all the things that were positive.
At that time we felt that we had no problems. Everything was positive. Our lifestyle and everything was positive. Everything was clean and pure, even attending this school.
In our community our traditional ways were almost lost. Everybody had become Christianized. My dad maintained Christianity very strong. He was a war veteran. He was a family man and consequently the stories we were listening to were very positive and related to family. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed going there.
My mother maintained her traditional ways and she provided these teachings to us as well. But she was not from our community. She was from a different Tribe outside the community. Her people were stronger in maintaining their traditional ways so she kept us informed about the way things are for Indian people in a traditional aspect. Nonetheless, we followed the teachings of Jesus, the teachings that were taught by this Minister and his wife. We grew up that way until I attended school.
Q. How did that change everything for you?
A. Well, one of the things that was most traumatic was seeing the way that the Catholic Church depicted Jesus. One of the things that really traumatized me at that age was seeing this man, you know, that we’ve got to respect, hanging on a cross and he was all bloody with thorns on his head and a stab wound in his side and he was nailed to a cross. When I saw that it was really traumatic. The Nuns and the Priests were telling us the reason why this occurred was because Jesus died for your sins.
I said, “What do you mean by sins?” They said that we’re all born with sin, we’re born with original sin. I wondered why because we always believed that we were born into this world pure and everything was positive. So I wondered what they meant by original sin. So I asked the question: What is original sin? It took a while for the Nuns to answer it but their answer was because your mother and your father committed a sin in order for you to be born. The sin that they were talking about is that they had sex together. And we weren’t aware of this at that age, you know.
Q. Because you would have been just six years old.
A. Yeah. It was shocking. It was really traumatic to learn that my mother and father were committing this sin in order for me to be born. So it was very devastating and very shocking. I couldn’t look at my parents again the same way. My feelings toward them changed.
They were Residential School affected too. They were a little bit distant from us. They didn’t put us on their knee and embrace us the way a normal family would do. But nonetheless they showed us that they loved us and when we heard this story it was really traumatic to me to understand or to learn that my mother and my father had committed a sin because of their holy union. It made me feel really dirty. It made me feel bad. It really had an effect.
The other aspect about it that was really puzzling was we asked them why are you Nuns and why do you not have a husband. They said they were married to Jesus and they even showed us their ring. They said that this ring means we are wedded to Jesus. That was puzzling because they all had rings, all of them, you know, and they all said the same thing, all these Nuns. It was really puzzling for me as a child because we were learning that a man and a woman commit themselves to each other for life and only to themselves. Here was a bunch of women married to Jesus. And again that was kind of shocking. It shocked us. It shocked me. Again, it made me feel not too good looking at them. It seemed like it was not real.
We grew up that way. We noticed that in the school a lot of the kids with us were feeling the same way but they probably didn’t know how to express themselves.
Q. Were you allowed to ask questions? Did they respond in a nice way when you asked those kinds of questions?
A. No. It took them a long time to answer and sometimes they refused to answer.
One of the things —
Like I was saying earlier, one of the things that was really puzzling was the fact that I was born with original sin. We eventually became Catholics at a later age.
Q. Your whole family?
A. Yeah. The reason why we became Catholics was my mother and my father felt we would be able to achieve a better education in the Catholic Residential School system. That was their feeling at the time and probably because there was no other way of getting us educated.
Q. You went to day school for all those years?
A. For nine years.
Q. You were allowed to go home in the evening and be with your family?
A. We were able to go home in the evenings. It gave us a break and it gave us a refuge, a place to go, a refuge. It gave us that. So we were able to go home and forget about what was occurring in the school.
There were other students who were residents there from the outlying communities. They were caught there. A lot of them would approach us because they were suffering. They were lonely. They had nobody to turn to.
There was a Brother in the school, one of the Brothers – I don’t really want to name him at this time – but he would go around looking at little boys. He would go around reaching for them and basically trying to find out which one would not respond. That was his way of searching out which little boy he would be able to I guess probably molest. So that was going on.
Q. Did that ever happen to you?
A. It never happened to me because I was able to run home. That was one of the advantages I had going to this day school is that if I felt that things were not right within the school then I was able to run away, run out the door.
Q. Were you able to talk with your parents about what was going on?
A. To some degree, but at that time they were kind of closed in. They felt that we shouldn’t be talking about these kinds of things, especially if it related to a religious type of thing. They themselves were taught to respect Christianity and the stories that existed in the bible.
Q. They probably couldn’t have done anything anyway.
A. Yeah. There was no avenue for recourse. There was nowhere they could have turned. They were looking for a way to best educate their children and there were five of us. I had four sisters. So they were looking for this and they wanted us to grow up to be competitive in the society. We were able to do that to some degree without difficulty.
One of the things they kept telling us in the Residential School system was that we had to become educated so that we could fit into society. Once we were able to fit into society then we would be able to get a fancy home with a two-car garage, a white picket fence and stuff like that. They were teaching us how to mingle into society, how to become part of it.
But it wasn’t working for us because to this day I still don’t have a white picket fence. I was never able to achieve that. So they were giving us a false sense that if we become educated then we would get these things. But in order to get those it was very difficult to achieve and consequently a lot of the students that I went to school with resorted to alcohol because of the frustration they were suffering from. They were thinking they were going to achieve this but they were never able to because of the way society is, you know. So that was one of the things they suffered. It was one of the things they suffered.
Q. Did you feel like you suffered from that experience and from that trauma as well?
A. Well definitely. The experience I described to you in the beginning about the relationship between my mother and father being sinful was really traumatic. I learned later on in life that pre-puberty, our life between the time we’re born and the time we achieve puberty is the most important time in our life. Whatever occurs during that time is going to affect us the rest of our life. This definitely has.
Although I’ve been married for thirty years now, in my younger days I couldn’t establish a good relationship. Every relationship that I tried to get into turned out to be dysfunctional. So it was difficult to establish or build any kind of family because of what you learn at that age, particularly when you learn that the holy union of man and woman is sinful. So that was really traumatic. It was a really traumatic time. I grew up feeling heavy all through my life and I grew up looking at my mom and dad the way I shouldn’t. They gave me a feeling of anxiety, they gave me a feeling of depression and all these things. That was rooted at that time when I was six years old. I was still in my age of childhood. I hadn’t even reached puberty and I wasn’t prepared at that time to hear those kinds of stories.
Q. Was there a time in your life when you felt like you were able to rise above that trauma and make a positive change for yourself?
A. Oh yes, that certainly happened.
Q. You are married now?
A. I’ve been married for thirty years; yes. My wife and I have a very stable relationship.
Q. How were you able to make that transition?
A. Well, in the seventies, in the 1970’s I had an opportunity to listen to Elders. In their teachings they were teaching about the importance of family. They were talking about grandmas and grandpas teachings and their way of life and the way that we should be living as Indian people. They were teaching that. At the same time my grandfather was talking to me. My grandfather on my mother’s side had maintained his traditions. He kept talking to me about the different types of ceremonies that existed.
So gradually over time I became interested, you know. One of the things they were telling us was that in our search for our identities we have to try to be determined. We need determination and we have to be able to become self-sufficient. This is what they kept talking about. One of the things that they were telling us is you have to realize your childhood dream. At that time, at six years old, my father got me interested in airplanes so eventually I became a pilot and I spent ten years flying as a bush pilot.
But during that time I was also in search of my identity. What increased my search was the loss of my father to cancer. I started looking and I started searching even deeper. I found that the teachings in our traditional ways were very positive. I started learning these teachings reflected every stage of our life from the time we’re born until the time we pass on into the spirit world. I began learning that the Great Spirit designs this for us and the way that we live is the way that he designed it. So we started maintaining this and things started becoming positive. We started learning that our whole traditional way of life is based on family. It’s a family way of life from a way back, from our ancestors, from as far back as we can go believed in this way of life. It was family oriented. It was very much unlike the Catholic belief. It was not male oriented. There were no vows to remain celibate and things like that. There was a teaching of respect, respecting the holy union of man and woman, and consequently Indian people were able to develop that respect for themselves.
It reflects in their ceremonial way of life. Taking the clan system, for example, our clan system, a lot of people nowadays are looking for their clan, or their spirit name and things like that. The reason why our people had the clan system was to ensure that our blood remained pure, you know. One of the laws that they followed was that clans shouldn’t marry within the same clan. So that way the blood remained strong and as a result children were born healthy.
Nowadays it’s not like that because people marry just because of beauty and they don’t marry because of the way the person is from within. A long time ago our ancestors were able to tell us who you were going to marry. That was because they recognized compatibility in individuals. They weren’t doing it because one or the other looked beautiful. They were doing it because that individual looked beautiful inside.
We never got this from the Catholic Church. We were told we were sinners. We were told we were pagans and heathens. We were told to worship objects that were man made. We did the way of the cross, we prayed with —
Everything was man made. And we did ask that question: Who made this? And they said, “Man.” So we said: “Why are you condemning us for praying to this stone?”, or using this stone as our object, just like the stone that you gave me. We asked that question: Who made this? And they had no choice but to say it was made by God. So it angers them. It angered them. They singled us out. We became the bad person among the group because we weren’t going along with them.
So it gave us that feeling of isolation as well. They isolated us from the rest because they didn’t allow us to mingle with everybody else because of the way that we were thinking.
You had a question?
Q. Yeah. I was just thinking about how you talked about reconnecting with your traditional values and now you have a wife and you’ve had a wonderful marriage for thirty years. I want to know if you have children.
A. Yes, I do.
Q. How many?
A. I’ve got a really large family.
Q. Oh.
A. I’ve got two daughters and one son. And I have grandchildren. I also have great grandchildren. I’ve got other children from a previous marriage and some of them have children.
Also, in the traditional ways, I have a large adopted family. I have other sons that are adopted and I have many nieces and nephews and many children, grandchildren, moms, dads, aunts and uncles all over the place, all over Turtle Island, you know.
Q. Um-hmm.
A. So in the traditional ways the family concept grows, not only with the biological family, but it expands to include everybody else that treats you like family. So that’s our traditional way. That’s the way it is. We’re not centered on one family nucleus.
But one of the things we must remember is these teachings were included in my pre-school days when the evangelist or Pentecostal-ist taught us about family and how this was related to Jesus’ life. Those stories were positive. I’ve always liked them. Even when he broke bread and was able to feed multitudes. I see similar things happening among this huge family that I’m talking about. Sometimes there are gatherings and there’s representations from families from almost everywhere.
What our ancestors were trying to teach us in the seventies is very true and it was very effective in changing our lives, understanding where we’re truly coming from.
Q. Our tape is about to run out. We’ve got about two minutes left. Did you want to answer one more question?
A. Sure.
Q. What made you want to come and share your story today?
A. Well, I thought that people should get the message that family is very important. We work with many families. My wife and I are both counselors. I’m a Medicine Man and a traditional healer. I’m certified. I feel that it is very important that this message about family comes out because in our work with people there are always misconceptions about our traditional ways. We’re always being taught that there’s someone out there inflicting something on us, you know, and basically all we need to do is look within ourselves and deal with our inner child in order to —
Q. I think our tape just ran out but that’s really important.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: It’s okay. It’s still on.
Q. Oh good.
A. That’s important.
Q. I think it’s important, too. I was going to say that it’s a very important point.
A. That’s why I wanted to do this.
Q. I appreciate it. I have learned so much from listening to you today, so thank you very much.
A. Thank you.
Q. Do you live in Winnipeg now?
A. I do, yeah.
Q. I was hoping you didn’t come all the way down from Norway House because it’s quite a trek!
A. Um-hmm.
Q. We lived for a time up there a few years ago.
A. I’ve lived in Winnipeg since 1965.
Q. Wow.
A. I’ve been back to Norway House on occasion, you know. I ran a business up there, a flying service, for six years.
Q. Wow. Do you fly any more?
A. No. I retired.
Q. My brother is in the Air Force. He is going to graduate next month as a helicopter pilot.
A. Oh yeah.
Q. He thought before he joined the military about doing bush flying.
A. It’s interesting. I started off in the aviation industry as a flying instructor. I spent about two or three years doing that. Some of my former students still fly. Some of them are in the commercial airlines. They are all old. They’re bald!
Q. They’re rich, too.
A. They ask me how I keep myself looking young when I meet them. The stresses and the pressure involved in that field takes a toll on their life and it ages them.
Q. I was going to ask what your secret is, too, because you are thirty years married and all those grandchildren, I don’t even believe it! (Laughter)
A. Well, we had lots of family and maintaining a positive mind. Many of our people can’t do that.
— End of Interview