Robert Tomah
Lejac Indian Residential School
THE INTERVIEWER: So Robert, tell me what school you went to.
ROBERT TOMAH: Lejac Residential School. It’s in the southern part of BC at Fraser Lake. I don’t know what region that is in BC, but it’s in the Fraser Lake area.
Q. But you live here now, right?
A. Yes, I live in Prince. Well, I haven’t always lived here but I’ve been here for 3 or 4 years.
Q. Are your people from this area?
A. Just sort of north of here, about 300 or 400 miles northwest. Our Nation is the Sikanni Nation. Back in the old days we were nomads. We traveled from one place in our traditional area to the other, just gathering food and moving around.
Q. How old were you when you first went to Residential School?
A. Well, the first time I went there was in 1966. I was about 9 years old then. Prior to that we lived up along the Peace Omenaka Region. There’s a river called the Injinika River (ph.) there, and the headwaters where it is now, Kamesk (ph.) Mines and all that, there’s a big mine going on up there right now.
But in the spring of ’66 I lost my dad. My dad died so up until my dad’s death we lived in the bush. We didn’t speak English. We didn’t know —
Well, our cousins, our relatives came up with river boats and all that older type motors. That’s about all we knew. There were little log cabin stores down at the Injinika Point, we used to call it, and that’s where we got our groceries. We didn’t know what a car looked like. We didn’t know what streets looked like. We were just natural.
But in the spring of 1966 in June when my dad passed away, that really changed my life. Then we had to move by riverboats downriver to where the Peace runs off the Parsnip, where the Peace River begins, known as Findlay Forks.
It was a really big shock to me at that time because as a young boy it was sort of like glamour, but you know everything I saw, all I saw was it was like a beast. I remember telling my mom moving there, everything was done so easy, everything was friendly, the environment was friendly, but underneath there was something hidden that I could detect as a child. It was something I could not comprehend and I kept telling my mom maybe we should just move back up to my dad’s trap line and stay in the cabins there. But that didn’t happen.
So in the fall of 1966 right from the confluence of the Findlay, Parsnip and —
What do they call the other river? I’m trying to remember the other river. There’s another river there. Oh, the Manson River, which made the flow of that Peace River. A plane picked us up there some time in September, early September, me and my brother, and we were flown to Lejac Residential School, which is in Fraser Lake, BC.
In my mind as a child I thought I could trust anybody because I trusted my parents. I loved my parents, my mom and dad. And I was still going through the trauma that I just lost my dad just a few weeks ago. So I thought that the world, the outside world was like the world I just came from.
That was a really big mistake for me. The first thing that we did when we got to Lejac, when we landed at the Residential School there, the Priests and the Nuns met us and we walked up to the school, which was about half a mile, maybe. We got into the school.
I remember we got there when all the other kids were having dinner. So we didn’t know about lining up and things like that. The way our mom fed us we waited for her. We just sat around in circles. My mom gave us the food that we were going to eat.
But right away everything looked different to us. There were so many cars. We didn’t know what to call them. Again, the glamour was there but there was just something hideous hidden under all that glamour.
So I told my brother in my Native Sikanni language, “stick close together”. So after lunch we didn’t know what to say. The supervisors talked to us in the English language. We didn’t understand. We understand a little bit, but not all. Even to say “cup” it was very hard to say “cup” because we would say “cup” in our own language.
They were trying to communicate with us and we were trying to communicate with them, even using our hands and all that to the point where sometimes we argued with these supervisors, because we would get frustrated and get scared. There was a lot of anxiety.
I remember the first time, within about 3 or 4 hours, one of the supervisors, I think his name was Jim Lundy, an Irishman or something like that. He’s got red hair. He asked me something and I remember he just banged me over the head, on my ears. I didn’t know what he wanted. They could have slapped me silly but I wouldn’t know what they want. Right? They were trying to get something out of me, but I wouldn’t know because I didn’t speak their language. So that was frustrating.
My dad always taught me to be honourable in a warrior way. A warrior is not a warrior at all if he just screams his head off. A warrior is a person who is one with himself, one with his spirit and what he does. His word is honour in everything that he does. So finding that, it was very hard for me. I even said a little prayer and asked my dad, “Dad, please, say something to me to try to communicate with these people.”
It got to the place where I was exasperated. They were exasperated because they couldn’t understand me and I couldn’t understand them. So they brought my cousins over, Vera and Violet Izonee (ph.). Those girls had been there before, so they came over and they talked with us in our language. They tried to explain to us in English. They don’t want you to speak your language. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. I said, “Couldn’t we just learn their language and hang onto our language?” They said, “No.”
Through my cousins what they told us is you guys what they’re telling you, the Priests and Nuns are telling you that you guys are speaking a satanic language. Like in the bible it says speaking in tongues and all that, you get that, get caught speaking in a foreign tongue they say it was satanic.
At that moment something happened to me. I remember there was a change there when my cousin told me that. My trust was gone. I had to wake up to something, but to what? Then I began to ask questions within myself and say, “Why are they saying this?” My dad lived such a good life up there and nobody didn’t bother anybody. All we did is gather and worship in our own way. Our church was out there in the bush on a hill beside a river where we could hear the mountains, the rivers and the trees. We could feel all the energy. That kept us healthy. We didn’t need a doctor. All we needed was to be one with the environment and the Creator who is above us.
Then I realized something in me had to die. Something in me had to die. So that night I went to sleep. We were in the Junior Dormitory, not Intermediates, just Junior. We went up there and they made us take showers and all that. That one, Fitzgerald, I think they call him, he was the Junior supervisor. I remember before we put on our pajamas he made us all bend over and he checked our rear ends, looking around for dirt or shit, he says. Like if anybody didn’t clean themselves right, then they really got a good spanking or a good licking, or they get put away in a room alone, like solitary confinement.
That was the first time I saw that because my mom and dad never did things like that to me. It was strange. It was scary and I wondered why they would do that.
In the morning they would wake us up about 7 o’clock, wash up, and march us all down. Then we have to kneel down before breakfast. We say the same thing. Many Natives do that, they do similar things, they slowly sing in their native tongue to worship the Creator. Some use feathers. Some use smudge. Some use going in the water or just standing under waterfalls in the morning. That was your morning prayer.
But it was strange to me and I keep nudging my cousin, my brother Chuck, “what are they trying to teach us?” And just for me and him talking we get banged over the head. So in our own language we can’t talk. It wasn’t out of rebellion but I just couldn’t figure out why they can’t see if I don’t talk in my language and I don’t do the thinking, like be me, Robert, not somebody else like Art, not being George, but being Robert, being me to express myself, why can’t they see that? In the end I realized I have to have something in me die more.
The first time I went to church they had a whole bunch of these little cups, they call it holy water, all the way down one hall. You have to put your finger in there, bless yourself, say something and kneel down. And you do that all the way into church. I respect that because I know that somehow in some form that they were communicating with the Creator, our Creator for all mankind.
But what I began to realize then was the way the structure that we were under was that it was a dictator, just like Hitler, where I can no longer be free to go down to Fraser Lake, jump in the water in the morning and do my own prayers because it was satanic.
All during this time, just the first year up to Christmas, and after that I noticed we started learning English, we started putting away our Native ways. They shaved our heads. We didn’t have long hair any more, which we were proud of. They dressed us in a different way. It was just like when they took off our bush clothes, when they undressed us, they didn’t realize I guess that they were undressing our dignity and stepping on it. They didn’t have vision enough to see that.
Anyway, it went on to the place where we started learning their language. We were pretty good at it by then. We went to school. We learned to write. The older people who went to Lejac School before me, they had to work in the gardens, they had to work making wood for the school. But at least in my time in 1966 we had a certain time to go to school and to go to church. But they were revising our minds where we were not ourselves any more.
Me and my brother began to see some things, the change in us. It was easy to lie because the system taught us that if you lied you got away with a lot of things. You don’t have to get a spanking or sent to no Detention Room. If you blamed other people and you could prove your point that the other person done it, then you can get off scot free too. This school I realized at that time was teaching us not something that was good. But to give us criminal minds —
Just like they starve you to a certain point where they give you very little food so you had to steal. If you stole an apple you got in trouble for that. If you stole a piece of bread you got in trouble for that.
So what happens then is human nature, what I see in myself, I began to turn. I began to deny myself. In order for me to survive I had to collaborate to learn and start thinking criminal-wise, learning how to steal, learning to blame other people, learning to let go responsibility and learning to say, “No, I don’t have to own up to it.” But then in the long run there’s a thin line if you went overboard and blamed everything on the world, then you were wrong. Right? Then you can say it’s people’s fault. They brought me up this way and I’m like this.
But the most unique thing about my surviving this school after my dad’s death and after that a lot more death, my mother’s death in the
end —
2003 was pretty hard for me, but up until then what I see in my surviving is what my dad taught me about my Native way of belief, how to go back into the bush, go back. The minute you end up back in the wilds, in the wilderness you can feel it. You don’t have to say nothing. You sit and begin to communicate with the trees, the air, the animals themselves. If I practice to a certain point where I can just balance my natural with my spirit, I begin to hear their languages. I begin to hear what they are telling me. So that’s what kept me.
Suicide at that time was pretty high on my mind because I just could not understand. There was always an enmity there. They were the higher authority; we were down here. They told us when to go to bed, which wasn’t bad. There was some good to that, you know. But at least they could have given you something to eat before you went to bed, but we went to bed hungry. We would hear the younger kids crying and we would try to comfort them, but we would get in trouble for that.
For punishment they used conveyor belts. Sometimes they put holes in the conveyor belts or they let you have a really hot shower and while you’re naked they hit you anywhere on your body with it. And those holes, when they would hit you, it would make round circles. Sometimes when the person was getting punished it sounded like a gunshot in that place because somebody was getting punished.
So I realized when we started learning their language it was really hard not to own up, because now you realize you are living in two worlds and you don’t know how to balance it. No one is there to tell you. Your Elders are not there and as a survivor you’re trying to balance something. It’s very hard as a young person or a young child to try to come to grips with what —
If a punishment goes on for so long, you have to give in because you’re young. You have to give in because you’re young. Revise your mind. Today I do have anger and sometimes resentment, but because of what my dad gave me, in the end when things get folded away, we’re all going to stand in front of the Creator. Every person has got to answer for themselves, not for their parents, not for their kids, but for themselves, the way they conducted themselves here on this planet.
I guess the hardest part is —
I keep going back as a young person to what my dad taught me. In spite of all these things I was going through, I know it was not right, it was inhuman, but in my heart, my heart cries for them. Why can’t they see? Why can’t they see what they are doing to themselves? Because what they’re doing to me, they’re just using me as a mirror. Maybe some of them see that there’s something that’s real there, the Native way. That mirror reflects their life, so the more it reflects their life the more they try to destroy it, what’s real, and try to put in what is superficial there and just a format.
I went there for one year. That first year it was really hard because I couldn’t communicate and I couldn’t understand, but in the end, just before Christmas, I started coming around to where I started learning their language.
Just before Christmas, sometime in November, we were playing Indians and Cowboys. I was a Cowboy because they chose me to be a Cowboy, the rest of the kids and the older kids. Some of these kids sharpened sticks and they would chase each other, chase the Cowboys. I had a stick go through my leg here (indicating). One of the Indians threw it and it stuck through my leg. And because I didn’t know anything about being hurt or anything like that —
My parents taught me, not that my parents were naïve, but I thought the way my dad taught me is if anything happens to you it always will go away. So I broke that stick off and I figured it would go away.
One of the boys called a supervisor out to the field and he came out and checked the stick. He said, “Oh, that will be okay.” “If it starts hurting come in and we’ll try to get it out.” He made it sound so simple. With me, I didn’t figure it was that serious. It was the first time I got hurt. My dad and mom taught us how to be careful and all that, but somebody threw this lance through my leg.
By evening, within 2 hours, my leg was so swollen up I couldn’t run, I couldn’t walk. They brought me up to the Dispensary and they said I was supposed to go to the Vanderhoof Hospital. I don’t know what the doctor done. The doctor just pulled it out and put a band-aid on it. In them days they didn’t do too much for things like that.
For Christmas we couldn’t make it back home. We stayed there. It wasn’t so bad because one of those Brothers, his name was Brother Caledon (ph.), and that guy was human like us, the way Natives see humans. He was a true man. He stayed with us over Christmas and he went sliding with us and did a lot of things. He took us up to Fraser Lake and we were playing hockey. We went to Vanderhoof. He just drove us around. It was something like my dad coming back and putting the family back together. That’s the way it felt for a couple of weeks for Christmas.
But after that it was the same old thing. Everybody put on their facades again and it went on.
Like I mentioned, when my leg got hurt there was a middle-aged Nun there from thirty-nine to forty-six, something like that. Well that Nun did some things to me that wasn’t good, like sexually, but I don’t feel like talking about that very much so I’ll just go on.
But for the education of the young people, I’m not saying that our government or our churches are bad. But you gotta think that in order to overcome something there’s either got to be dictation or severe trauma, a traumatic way of bringing this thing forward. So it’s really hard at the moment what I’m trying to say because you see the spiritual part of things with the spiritual you. You balance yourself and realize who you are.
But once you’re over-balanced on one side, if you are too spiritual then you’re getting out of whack, too. If you’re too natural, then you’re getting out of whack and you start over-eating and start over-drinking and start getting into alcohol abuse. But in order to balance this I realized I have to come to grips every day where the most important thing to me is the being for this moment, just the now. Never mind the future and never mind what happened back here. But at the moment where I’m standing and what am I thinking. How do I feel about myself? How do I perceive myself and who I really am.
The more I see that, that’s the hope, one of the key hopes that brings me from day to day.
With my children — I have 5 boys — the oldest is in and out of trouble. He’s been in the Correctional Centre in incarceration so many times, he just makes me cry. A lot of times I say to myself as a father, “Where did I go wrong?” When you duplicate something, you duplicate a paper, it’s not as exact as the original. Or when you mimic something, you’re not the original, you’re a mimic.
I’m talking to my kids today and telling them I began to realize something in my life that I deny myself because I figure or I feel that the format or the formality out there is telling me “you’re not good enough”, “you don’t have education”, “you’re not dressed like this”, “you don’t have a couple of million dollars in the bank”, “you’re not like that”, “you’re not like this”, “you just don’t add up.”
But what I realized is that this natural material is there for us to use. One of these days it’s going to pass away. But in order for me to grasp something I have to realize and look inside myself and say, “Hey, I count.”
Today my children see —
This last time my son ended up in jail just before Christmas, and he would tell me, “Dad, I’m going to revise my life.” “In here I hear every word you told me about what grandpa taught you.” He said that he was beginning to see things. The unique thing about it —
He came to his Hearing and his lawyer looked at it. They brought it in front of the judge, they looked at the witnesses, what they had to say. It was all lies. So what happened there —
— End of Part 1
So your son, after he went to court, he was talking to you.
A. Yeah. In the end they just threw it out of court. So today he is free. All charges are dropped. He’s a free guy.
But what I told him, I says it’s up to him to realize who he is inside and to begin to believe in himself. Never mind about his brothers, never mind about me. What he’s got to nourish is love himself enough to realize who he is and begin to build himself up to give himself what’s his journey on this earth. It’s only him can set himself free.
Just like myself, only I myself set myself free; nobody else. I think about these things, my actions, where they are leading me. Why?
A couple of years ago before my mom died, I was a heavy drinker. I worked for my Band in the winter. For 9 months I stayed sober. I started drinking really heavy in 1987. In ’86 I lost one of my favourite sisters. I loved my sister. She used to invite me to a lot of her cook-outs. She would cook all kinds of nice things, make pies and all that. I was a hunter then, living in the bush, and a trapper, living on the trap lines. It would be a really big treat going to a family cook-out, making pies and all that.
But I lost my sister in 1985 to leukemia and that was really hard on me. For a while I closed up on the family there, my mom. Then with all these things coming to where I lost again —
Going back to Lejac, what you learned there you try to use those tools but they’re not strong enough. So I moved out here to Prince George and I ended up becoming a drunk. I went out with a lot of young friends like me and just party for the weekend. I had money. You go party, dance with the girls in bars. You know, it was a lot of fun. But little by little, what I didn’t realize was that every time I drank it was just like somebody throwing a rope around me and tying me.
By the time it came to 1992 I realized I couldn’t stay without drinking. I always had a bottle. Sure, I was working, sure I was working. In my mind I figured I was functioning normally, but I always had a bottle, at night, before I would go to sleep.
Then I moved on from one relationship to the other. Just because a girl said she loved me, you’re a nice person and we hit it off, okay. So just from one relationship to another. But it all goes back into that alcohol relationship.
Some alcoholic relationships are genuine. They can both be alcoholic and hang on and stay together. But with me it wasn’t like that. Anyway, it got so bad that alcohol took my life completely to this very building —
The older —
Like there was Mohawk Security here. That’s back about 4 or 5 years ago. If you asked him he would tell you I came in here dirty, grubby, asking for a dollar, anywhere I could get so I could have another drink. Four years ago that changed. I was in a back alley here in Prince George. I was down and out. I had 2 bottles of wine in my hand and my friend invited me over to her place. In the morning I woke up and those 2 full bottles were there. I was so sick I said, “Today’s the day I either have to change or I’m going to die this way.” There again a voice, just like a higher voice that was respectful of us, the higher power, because my ear was open where I could hear enough. He called me back. He said, “It’s either those 2 bottles now and pay the consequences, or you quit now and walk away from it.”
For 3 minutes I didn’t say anything. I was hung over. I was sick. But in the end I thought of my dad, all that my dad taught me. My dad didn’t teach me to be a drunk. My father taught me things that I would help my fellow men, especially my children, and if I die a drunk I’m not helping my children. I’m not helping nobody.
So from that day on I just quit. That was in December, 2001. It’s almost 4 years ago. Ever since then I never went back to drinking. It’s just like the way negative things happen. I’m not saying that it was planted by the Creator, but a year after that, the same day I quit drinking, December 5th, my mom passed away of cancer. That was the hardest part in my life. It was very hard on me. Because I realized that the person that was really close, I came out of her body, my mother, just like Mother Earth, just gone.
Today I still go through problems with that. I still grieve her. I’ve got her pictures. But that day when my mom passed away I had all the options. I had the money to just go back and drink, and drink myself sick back into it and say it’s not worth it. But one thing stopped me that day. I realized that if I did go back, how much of my children, how much of my nieces, how much of my nephew, how much of the young people today, Native people, would I be helping by going back. AA don’t work. Alcoholics Anonymous. Quit drinking don’t work. Like going to Treatment Centres don’t work.
But I came to a point where I had to make a decision and say what do I really want. I know I’m grieving my mom right now. But what my mom would want me to do is to go on, to go on even though I didn’t feel like it. I didn’t know where, I didn’t know how, but that’s when I came to the point again, to the now, just that moment, just for that moment and don’t worry about the next moment. Just for that moment, feel myself.
I tell you something, as a Native warrior, an Indian warrior, I don’t know how many Nations know about this, but a man grieves, a warrior grieves but a warrior doesn’t have to shed tears to do that. It’s not because there’s some kind of misunderstanding about that too, that warriors when they cry they show their weaknesses. I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s just the way that some of us are. We can feel the pain in our heart and the anguish but we just don’t know how to express it. So sometimes we become passive about that. We don’t come out with it. We don’t really bring it out.
Some men out there, warriors out there, do share that with their wives. They share it with their other half. But that’s a part that is really crucial for me. I tell my brothers and my sisters that I don’t know how to really cry. But what I do know is that I love. Sometimes I over love them too much to where at times the world really don’t care what they see, but whether it’s love, they don’t see it. Because we’re all wrapped up in our own natural ways.
Q. You were telling me that you want to build a cabin. Why do you want to build a cabin?
A. Well, actually building a cabin is not only for myself.
I mentioned to various chiefs here in BC that it’s just a vision that I see. They have all these Provincial Parks, big lands of Provincial Parks, and most of the Nations here in BC are fighting for land claims. So I was telling a couple of the chiefs, “How come you don’t have healing camps?” A couple of chiefs could get together and have a big healing camp, or there could be multiple healing camps where all Nations can come and show their culture, how they sew their moccasins or how they do their rice, you know, just different things. The young people would go to these cultural camps and begin to come back to the process of how their ancestors worshipped.
It’s not that I’m saying bring back the old ways. What I’m saying is we learn to balance both sides and begin to know where this road is leading us. So that’s one vision that I have.
I do a lot of self help. I phone Vancouver a lot, that crisis line in Vancouver and I talk. I mentioned that to a couple of the counselors there, too.
Today the worst stuff you see right now is that crystal meth. It’s really doing in a lot of young Native people. If we do have these camps, that will strengthen them and bring them back and make them see there is hope out there, not to just exclude the world, but to bring it back and to enlighten to realize where they come from and realize who they are, making them deal with themselves.
So their problem is always not somebody else’s problem, or shove it off and say, “well, this person made me drunk.” I mean, like my kids always come to me with excuses like that. They are in denial. They say, “Oh, dad, I wasn’t going to drink, but this friend of mine came over and we started having a bottle and the next thing it turned into 2 bottles.” I said, “It’s up to you, you have a mouth to say no.” Have 2 or 3 shots and say, “No, that’s it.” “I’m leaving it.”
I still suffer from Lejac syndrome, Residential syndrome, the things that I went through, especially with females. Female relationships. I can’t really talk to females, even though I want to. Like what I’m saying in my relationships. I would give them money so they wouldn’t bother me. Right? Anything they want so they wouldn’t bother me. But because of Lejac, because of what transpired between that Nun, it’s very complicated because as old as I am, I get scared of females. When I get scared I don’t know how to handle it. When you get scared and you don’t know how to handle a situation; two things happen. You either get angry or you just walk away and you don’t say nothing.
So that’s one of the barriers right now that I’m dealing with, that where I learn to draw myself out as a bachelor. I live alone now for the last 3 or 4 years. I don’t communicate, hardly communicate even with my family. They phone and I tell them I don’t have time. I gotta go do this.
But it has been said somewhere that a person has to take care of his own house first in order to get out there to be a help to anybody. So because it was lots of years of my alcoholic ways and those chemicals are still going to be in me, today and tomorrow it’s still there, it’s gotta work itself out, so every day I’m careful of where the triggers are. I don’t hang out.
I guess that’s one of the reasons it is hard for me to hang out with relatives, go out, and even Christmas time. Christmas, holidays, birthday parties, anniversaries, I don’t go for that because they are the biggest trigger. Everybody is having so much fun and enthusiastic and the first thing you know you had too much wine or too many martinis or something like that and you know you’re doing something stupid. You end up with a charge for impaired driving.
Q. Good. I have to stop because I have another interview, but that was an amazing story. You’re such a great speaker.
A. Are you familiar with auras around people, people having auras?
Q. Yeah.
A. That is the Native way of seeing things. But I guess the thing I’m trying to tell you is what I’m struggling with right now is why are there so many books being sold. These churches, why do they sell bibles for $35 bucks? If religion is so true —
I don’t have to sell the environment out there because I know the Creator is out there. I don’t have to make money off it. It’s there. If the Creator wanted me to be a millionaire, he’ll give it to me. Right?
Like I said before, I’m really afraid of writing things because if we’re just writing things without the hand of the Creator in it, it’s going to come to nothing.
Q. I agree.
A. That’s the guideline I try to walk in my life every day. To be productive —
But I’m surprised at my passiveness. Before you wouldn’t have got me. I would have got mad at you. I would have swore at you. If you asked me a question about Lejac I just would have been so pissed off I wouldn’t say nothing to you.
But there are changes, and that’s what makes me happy is the change in me, my nature that I put on from that Residential School, how to be deceitful, how to lie, that’s why there are so many young people today that go into criminal thinking because of the way I brought up my child. I was talking about my son there.
In Lejac they made us stand against the wall and that’s the way I tried to raise my kids. If they say, “well, my dad” —
But I realized in the middle of what I’m doing I believe the most important thing is to try to carry my dad’s way of governing.
Q. That’s a good story.
A. Just for your information, the Sikannis they went as nomads. They had head men, just like the Norse people from Norway, they had head men. They never went under clans. They went under totems; like the eagle and grizzly totem, or eagle and wolf totem, otter and wolverine totem, just going on each family.
Q. That’s good.
A. Okay, is that it?
— End of Interview
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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