Lynda MacDonald

My name is Lynda Pahpasaoi McDonald and I’m a First Nation’s band member of Grassy Narrows First Nation. I’m from Grassy Narrows First Nation and right now I live in Wabaseemoong First Nation, Whitedog, Ontario. It’s my story that I’ll be telling today. Well, it’s important to share because of all the things that have happened, that has impacted my life and my children’s and my grandchildren. And I want the youth to know in my community, and across Canada, and all First Nation’s people, of what happened during that time.

It’s a story of myself, my survival during the time I ran away, and a story that, I had gone with my friends, like we had run away from the school, and it had affected all the children of that school at that time because all of them ran away during that one day. It happened in 1969, I was thirteen years old at the time, and it happened at St. Margaret’s Residential School in Fort Francis, Ontario… and it happened during the Fall, when school started, it was around October when that happened. It had really started off as a bad year, for everyone at that school. I had been there the year before, and I arrived at that school when I was eleven years old, that was my second year at the school. It was a bad experience from the beginning, when we went to that school. My siblings were there and my, some of my cousins were there too, and it really affected my family – like, my siblings especially – and my older sister Delaney was at that school too, and she was, I believe she was seventeen at that time, and she was very… she would protect us all the time, my siblings and my younger siblings, and every time something happened to us she would always be there to protect us. And, also my friends, she would protect my friends… and this is how it all started, because of my friend, she was attacked by a nun… and my sister, she stepped in to protect my friend. I remember that day so well, just like it happened yesterday. We were in the play room and I noticed the nurse – the nun – she was arguing with my friend, and I didn’t know what she was saying to her, but I was kind of watching them and my sister came around and looked and said ‘Hey… you have no reason to be treating her that way.’ So, they got into a confrontation and they start, you know, their voices were raising and next thing you know they were fighting, physically fighting. I was so surprised. But, my sister defended my friend and they got into an actual physical fight and I followed them and she tried to drag my sister up the stairs, but my sister fought back. And, I tried to go help her but she told me, ‘I think you should go upstairs’ you know, don’t help me. Then they were fighting right on the steps and then I could see the nuns, you know, her veil flying around, you know, because she was fighting my sister. Then I ran upstairs and I told my other sister that they’re fighting downstairs. So we kind of looked from above, you know she was just, they were just going at it, you know, scrapping it out. Then we were all scared, we were like really scared and my sister was… and then they stopped, and then my sister got up and ran away, like she got away from her grip and she ran out.

So, we went upstairs and we were talking, with my sister and she was talking with her friends, and they said, ‘We don’t want to stay here…’ you know, ‘Let’s get out, let’s run away.’ And she didn’t want me to go with her, my older sister, she said ‘You know if you want to go, you should maybe go with your friends.’ So, I went to my friends and we start talking and we made a little plan that we were going to leave that school… that night, and it was night time. And my sister she was so – like she ran out the door, I don’t know where she went – we’re all kind of you know, just scared out of our wits, we don’t know even what happened. And so we were all planning, I was talking with my friends and saying, ‘We’ll run out the door’ and everybody – the nuns I don’t know where they went – so we all, you know just grabbed our coats and our shoes and there was about six of us who ran out the door. My sister had gone earlier… and apparently at that time, when they had heard that the fight had happened, I heard, that on the other side the boys had heard the story that this happened and that the girls were running away from the school… and they start planning to run away too, the boys too – the older boys and the intermediate boys. So, a whole bunch of kids ran away that night. They all went different directions, some ran away to the State-side, some were running towards Thunder Bay, walking on the road, and some stayed downtown, like you know, trying to look for a place to sleep…

And we went by the shore, me and my friends, and we were running as fast as we could. I remember my two friends were in font of me, they were running, and then I see them like, ducking… ducking down. So I did the same thing, when I seen the line and I ducked. Then I turned around, I looked at my other friend, she didn’t see the line and she goes “pffft,” she goes flying – she got clotheslined – and we were all standing there laughing real loud and I said ‘Don’t laugh so loud! They’re going to hear us you know. Be quiet.’ So, its kind of funny. Then we took off, we started running again, running through the park, then down the road, past this farm. I remember a farm and then one of my friends says, ‘Let’s go to my Auntie’s house. We’ll go there and sleep the night.’ So we all went there. Then one of our friends, she was really afraid and really scared and she says, ‘I don’t want to get caught’ like, ‘I don’t want to get punished’ she was saying, ‘I want to go back’ she goes… and I was like, ‘Yea, okay, go ahead. But be careful, just stay on the trail or on the side of the road. Don’t walk directly on the road…’ we’re telling her, and then she, she left. So there was five of us left in the group, and we slept the night, and the Auntie she told us, ‘I think you guys should leave because I’ll get into to trouble, if I house you here.’ So we told her, ‘Okay, we’ll go, we’ll leave’ and then we all started walking and I was saying to them, ‘We can’t walk on the street, because they’ll see us. The police will see us or whatever that is looking for us…’ So we walked towards the tracks, and we were walking on the tracks for a bit and then we started getting further down, I said, ‘I think we should walk in the bushes because we need to stay away from sight. The train might see us…’ So we climbed over this fence and I remember one of my friends, her pants got stuck on the fence, it had barbed wire on it and she ripped her pants, and we’re kind of standing there laughing, ‘Oh no, you have a big hole in your pants now…’ So, but anyways, we started walking and we were walking and running through bushes, along the tracks. I said, ‘We can’t do the rest, we need to run, and just keep on running…’ So we’re running down the tracks, and stop once in a while and look around, see if you know, hear anything – ‘Okay, let’s keep on going’ we’re all running, and it took all day, for us to get to, near Nemo. It was about maybe… well, about a half-hour when you drive. It took us a long time to get there, when you’re walking on the tracks. I said ‘I think we need to go towards the bushes’ because the highway is close to the community, and we have to avoid the community.

So, we kind of walked through the bushes and towards the side of the highway and we were passing this First Nation, it was called Manitou Rapids, and we’re walking there, we’re all tired, getting tired, hungry. Then we seen some people walking, there’s two men, and they seen us, and they were trying to tell us to come towards them. I said, ‘No, no don’t go there…’ They look like they’ve been drinking, I said, ‘Let’s run. Stay away from these two men…’ And they started chasing down the highway and we’re running, and I said ‘Run!’ So we all started running real fast and they were trying to chase us. Then one of my friends lost her shoe, while she was running, then that guy grabbed it. Grabbed the shoe and said, ‘I got your shoe, come and get it!’ and then I told her, ‘Don’t go, don’t go. He’s going to grab you, then we wont be able to get you away’ you know, ‘Just keep on running, we’ll look for another pair of shoe.’ So we ran really, like for a while, then after that we took off, I told her to stop because her feet were getting sore, so I took off my socks and said ‘Here, use that, we’ll double up the socks’ so you don’t, you know, get sore feet. So we walked on the side of the highway, but in the bush because we didn’t want to be seen. It was hard, like we’re walking over branches, trees, and I said, ‘We have to keep heading because if somebody sees us, for sure we’ll get caught.’

And we walked almost the whole evening and then finally this vehicle stopped and picked us up and told us to get in the car. I looked at him first, you know, to see if he was, you know, looked dangerous. It was a white old man so we all got in. Then we told him, ‘Can you drive us to our community? It’s in Nester Falls’ It wasn’t our community, but he drove us to the reserve and we got there and then, one of my friends says, ‘I have a relative here. We should and check out her house, maybe she’ll let us stay for a night’ And she did let us stay. For the night we were all tired and hungry and we’re just…. We had been sweating all day, like you know, just felt awful… and we stayed the night, that night, then the morning we’re hungry. I said, ‘We got to go now. We can’t stay here’ And we left, and one of the girls grabbed a loaf of bread. She grabbed one, then we all ran out, because we’re hungry. Then some kids, they start chasing us and throwing rocks at us, you know, because I think they knew we stole a loaf of bread and we ran – ‘Just keep on running, don’t stop running up the hill’ – the we finally outran the kids and then we were walking and we opened up a loaf of bread and we gave each other a slice of bread, because we were so hungry. Then we were like tired too at the same time. I said to them ‘We should have a nap’ and I told her, ‘Let’s climb up that big hill,’ the cliff, there was a cliff. We climbed up all the way to the top and I told them I want to avoid the bears, the animals, I don’t want to get, you know attacked. So we climbed on top and we all slept together on the ground, we were holding each other. We were so tired. Then we fall asleep.

So in the evening we got up because you know we had been really tired, and climbed down. ‘Well let’s start walking then,’ you know, ‘Try to make our way to Kenora’ Then we start walking then this red truck stopped, and then there was a man and looks like a young boy, and he goes ‘You guys can climb in the back’ So we all climbed in the back. He told us ‘Where are you going?’ we said, ‘Kenora’ and he drove us all the way to Kenora. We were still hungry though, because we had eaten that loaf of bread then there before. Then I said, ‘Well, I know this person…’ I was saying, when we got to Kenora, ‘He’s my Dad’s friend, maybe he will feed us I go.’ And so we went to that mans place and he fed us, and he was like ‘What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in school?’ ‘Oh no, I left the school.’ Then he gave us a hot dogs – oh I remember that, I was so hungry I just ate that hotdog real fast. But, thinking about it, it was so dangerous, you know, we could’ve been grabbed by some dangerous people or attacked by an animal and I didn’t think of it about it at that time, I just think about survival and surviving. And, when we got to Kenora, then he says ‘You guys can’t stay here but I’ll take you somewhere where you can stay…’ and he took us to this Fellowship Centre. He took us there and he says ‘You guys can sleep there for the night’ and that lady told us to come in. It’s a big house, and I guess they allow people to sleep there so that’s where we slept. And then during the evening, we were just sitting there, talking, what are we going to do now? Like, you live over here, you guys live in Red Lake, one lives in Air Falls and you passed your home like that… and, these people kept on coming and just looking at us, and their going… ‘No, that’s not ours, they’re not our kids’ Then another group of people came in, looked at us – and when I think about now, I think they were people from St. Mary’s School and Cecil Jeffrey School because they were north – and so, anyways, we said, ‘I think there’s going to be people looking for us, so we’re going to have to come up with a story, how did we get here’ and so we said, ‘Well, lets say we all met together in Kenora, our parents abandoned us so we got in as group and hung around together,’ you know, just for protection, you know protecting one another. So that was our story, ‘Okay we’ll stick to that story’

And we’re just like, thirteen years old, twelve years old and eleven years old. All of us were you know, just kids. And so anyways, this person comes in… it was a CAS worker, we didn’t know at the time though eh, it was a CAS worker, when he came in and started asking questions. So we stuck to our story – ‘Oh, oh okay.’ – Then he looks at me and says, ‘I think that I know you.’ He goes to me… and I said, ‘Yea?’- ‘Is your Mom and your Dad Marcel and Rosie Pahpasay?’ I was like ‘yea… well they left me in town’ I was going, you know. ‘Oh okay. Hmm. Okay, I’ll give you a ride home,’ he goes to me. So I said ‘Okay, sounds good’ I just said that and the other ones, he’s talking to the other girls and, ‘Where you from?’ – ‘I’m from Red Lake’ one was saying, and the other one said she was from Ear Falls. ‘Oh okay, I’ll get you a bus ticket. I’ll send you guys home’ So he sent the girls home and the other two girls lived in Kenora and then they went to home. So then there was just me and my other friend who were left. Then he says ‘Oh I gotta go to Indian Affairs you want to go with me, go for a ride?’ We said ‘Okay’ so we went with him.

And I went upstairs and sat on a chair reading then all of a sudden I hear this man coming around the corner, then all of a sudden ‘What are you doing here!?’ He goes, this guy eh. Then I just looked, I recognised him. He was an Indian Affairs Agent, and he was the one who… that transported us to the Residential School in Fort Francis. And I got caught right there and I just looked at him, I was like, ‘Ummm… nothing.’ And then the CAS worker was there and he was just laughing, ‘Oh my god. I just fell for your story!’ he goes. So anyways, I was kind of disappointed that I got caught but I just went with it. The he says to me, ‘I’m going to take you home anyway. We’ll go see your parents, see if they’ll let you stay home’ so he took me and they, my other friend stayed behind with the worker, that Indian Affairs worker. So, anyways, they drove me to Jones and that’s where my parents were – it was maybe about an hour drive – and we got there, and my mom and dad were real surprised to see me, ‘What are you doing here?’ In all surpriseness. I said ‘I ran away from school, I didn’t want to stay there. And then, my Dad, you know he was just surprised, ‘That’s a long ways!’ he goes, you know, ‘That’s really far’ he was saying. He was just shaking his head, surprised that we made it all the way and I was only thirteen years old. And my mom, she was happy to see me, you know. Then the worker was talking to them, the CAS worker, ‘Do you want her to stay, or what would you like me to do?’ And my parents, my Dad says, ‘I want her to go back to school. I don’t want her to miss school.’ Right away, I was so… I was devastated. And my mom, she explained to me why I had to go back to school and she was just holding me… It was an awful feeling. I know I had to go back though, because I really love my Dad and my Mom…. And I left. I said, ‘okay, I’ll go back… to school.’ My Mom cried, she cried… and, it was heartbreaking, like my, like I stood there and cried and my Grandpa came over, and he hugged me, he says, he said to me ‘You be strong. You will learn a lot of things if you go back to school.’ So I love my Grandpa a lot too, he hugged me and he was saying, ‘Don’t worry’ he says.  And my Dad came along, course you know, he’s trying to be happy, and he says to me, he says, Daanis, he goes, ‘You have to go back. Here. I’ll give you five dollars,’ he gives me five dollars. In those days that was a lot.

And, I guess being separated from my parents was the worst that you can feel as a child. Even today, I still think about my parents. They’re gone now, but you know, I think about them a lot, and they went through so much. Losing all their children. That day was hard, but when I think about it, it kind of… it made me respect my parents, I wanted to listen to them. Even though I didn’t see them that much, I still love my parents. But anyways, I went back, and the CAS worker came back and picked me up. And I took my five dollars and – I was mad at my Mom for a while, when she said ‘You have to go back’ and I said, ‘I know. I have to go back.’ I left my other, my little sister behind, I told her, I said ‘I’ll go back and watch over her too.’

So, I was taken back and they put us on a bus and I was sent back to school – but before that all happened, we had talked along the way, me and the CAS worker, and I told him, ‘You know, I don’t like going to that school because they’re so mean, they’re abusive…’ They beat up my little sister one time on the stairs and they dragged her. They dragged her upstairs and I seen that and I tried to help her, and I was physically abused too, by trying to help her. They grabbed our hair and our ears… it was really, I don’t know, it was really like, that had never happened to me before, like being beaten up in school. They strapped us real hard, with that big strap. If one of the girls got into trouble they would get a strap. Then after I told him, like, ‘They’re mean, they fight us and sometimes they don’t feed us that much and we’re always hungry’ and I told him that, and I said, ‘I don’t want to go back, but I know I have to go back.’ Then he says to me, ‘Well if anything happens to you, you give me a call’ and he gave me a phone number, ‘You call me here and ill come and get you’ he says to me, I says ‘okay’ so, ‘but I’ll go back to school I told him.’ He was a nice CAS worker… Then we was put on the bus, went back with my friend, and she wanted to get off half-way to Fort Francis, I said ‘No, I promised my Mom I would go back. So I’m going back.’ And so, she stayed on the bus too.

We made it all the way and then we were taken to the principal and the priest and he took her in and then she left. Then I went in, and he says ‘You’re going to be punished, he told me. You’re going to get the strap’ And I said to him, ‘Well if you do that to me,’ I said, ‘I have to call the CAS worker and I have to call him if you touch me.’ Then he was real, you know, he kind of looked shocked and angry at the same time. And he says, ‘Well you’re still going to get punishment. It doesn’t matter. I wont hit you but you will have to do other stuff’ he said. So, I agreed, like, to do writing and more work – like washing the floors, walls, stuff like that. He told me, ‘But you can go upstairs, with the nun, and you have to see what you would have got’ he told me, ‘Your friends are going to get this because of you’ he told me. So I went upstairs and I seen all my friends laying on their beds… they had their pajamas down and they were given a big strap, on their bums, and I remember watching them… you know they were just so black and blue, on their bums, my friends… and my other friends that run away, and that, left an image in my mind, all these years I can still see it. And it was so, like, I guess like traumatizing, to have that image. But, I kind of expected that at that time, because I got the strap too, when I was younger, maybe when I was about five, six years old , I had been strapped in the same areas, because I had tried running away too, when I was a young little girl, and I got caught, me and my sister got caught. You know, we were just little tiny kids and we got the strap… and they hit me so hard on my hand, that it broke open and it started to bleed. That’s how hard she hit me. And I remember that, just watching the blood coming out, like almost went in shock or something. And at that time, the nun just stood there you know, just surprised at what she had done. And when I was in St. Margaret’s watching my friends getting the strap by that, to see them hurt, like you know, and crying. It made me cry too. I was just standing there crying, thinking it was all my fault…

But that experience, you know it just made me realize that, that in the system, like Residential School where they abused us, they were allowed to do it and we couldn’t fight back. I know my sister fought back but you know, she paid a price for that too, and they sent her to reform school, and she was sent away… and that happened to my other sister too, she was sent to reform school, because we had all run away at that time. She got sent to a reform school in southern Ontario somewhere and she told me what happened to her, she said that she was – I think that they put some kind of…. you know when they electrocute kids or something? – They did that to her. They put it on her head, she said, and her and her friend… and she says she doesn’t remember after that, what had happened. She doesn’t remember that whole year she said, and just lost all her memory she said… and then, I remember not being there, at this school, and the following year I didn’t want to go back. I told the Indian Agent that I didn’t want to go back, because we were physically abused, and after all that physical abuse, like you know, it made me, I guess, an angry young woman. I used to get into fights also, I used to start to fight back. It was really… Before we went to Residential School, like my life with my parents and my grandparents, they never hit us, never. We used to be on the trap line, like we lived on the trap line, and there was always love with my parents, my grandparents, just our family, having fun in the bushes, you know, running around and helping my parents, go there picking and stuff like that… I remember those days, they were just, wonderful, you know, good memories.

But when they had come and picked us up on a plane – you know, they took us together on the plane, they told us ‘There’s some candy at the back of the plane, go get it.’ So we went. Me and my sisters, all curious, you know. Then I remember just looking outside before we were taken to the plane, looking at the water, the still and all shiny. I remember that day so well. And we got into the plane and then we flew away in the plane and the tricked us to get into the plane, and I said ‘Where are we going?’ And, I remember looking out and seeing my Mom, she was standing by the gates and the water, and she was holding her hands up in the air –  you could see my Dad, I think he was trying to calm her down… and that, stayed in my memory. And I must have only been about five or six years old, I must have been that age and it devastated my parents… It totally destroyed my parents, they lost their way after that, they became alcoholics, while we were gone, they kind of gave up. They didn’t trap anymore, they were told to go back to the main community and they got a house and it was never the same. We lost our parents – they were there, physically – but they lost their spirit. And it affected all my siblings, because there was thirteen of us in my family, thirteen siblings, and we were all severely affected. Most of my siblings were alcoholics, some of them committed suicide. I know two of them committed suicide. And others lost and died from alcoholism.

But when I met my partner he was in Residential School too, and we were just kids, we start hanging out together and we were just kids. I was fifteen and he was fourteen, we started off with that age. It was a rough life though, you know, because we were alone we didn’t know nothing, we had no… They didn’t teach us anything about parenting, you know how to raise a child, nothing. It was, we just had to learn from scratch… but his Dad, my husband’s Dad, was, he turned to traditional practices, ceremonies, stuff like that, he starts following the traditional way of life… and I got to know them, and he start telling me how we were living, was not great – ‘You need to follow your traditional ways’ – I didn’t know nothing about it. I didn’t know nothing about the feather, the eagle feather, ceremonies, nothing, because we had lost everything in Residential School, you know. I lost my language, I lost my connection with my parents, my grandparents… and he showed me, like, this is how we used to live long time ago, our culture. He told me you have to relearn your language, how to speak back to anishinaabemowin, he told me. He taught us everything, me and my husband we learned everything back, and then from there we stop drinking… and we had three sons and we start doing the traditional ceremonies and participating in dancing and stuff and I’ve been sober ever since then – once I followed my traditional way of life. But in the community where we are, there a lot of kids that were in Residential School, and the intergenerational impacts… its devastating to watch. Like some of them follow back to their traditional way of life – we did, and we stopped drinking – and we tried to raise our boys the same way but they were caught in that web of the community where they drank and stuff like that. I did my best to teach my boys, but I lost my one son… just three years ago, from alcoholism. He passed away. He was my oldest son. It was devastating because I lost my parents, my grandparents and my siblings, and finally my son. It was all from intergenerational impacts of Residential School and trauma.

His Dad had gone to Residential School too, my husband’s Dad, and he knew how they had work to take us away and how they destroyed our family. And my Mom and my Dad they died from heart failure because they couldn’t have their kids. They lost us through Residential School and my younger siblings they all got taken to foster care, Sixties Scoop, they were all put into care. It totally devastated my Mom, she just kind of lost her way… and she gave up. She was a broken woman. I had only one chance to hug her once… when I was twenty-seven, only one time I hugged her and I told her I loved her. That was the only time. After that, she just drank and gave up… and she passed away in 1993. She passed away in Winnipeg, she was a street person, she wandered around the streets. But we still loved her, every time I saw her I would go and see her and give her a hug. She was lost and my Dad too, same thing, he was lost he couldn’t do anything he couldn’t trap, he couldn’t fish, everything was taken away… and he passed away in Kenora. He was older, but he was a lost man too, he never worked after he lost all the children. There’s only just a few of us left now, my older sister and four of my other sisters we’re still… but we all went through a hard life through alcoholism and now as we are getting older getting sickly so…

But the reason I wanted to tell my story, I want my grandkids to know, I want my great grandchildren to know, I have great-grandchildren you know, and I want the youth in our community and across Canada and our lands to know what happened to us. How we suffered. There’s a lot of other things that happened to us, my sisters went through a lot too, they were physically abused, sexually abused… and same with my brothers, my younger brothers… before they passed away they told me what happened in that school and they told me it was sexual abuse and I was so shocked like I didn’t know that had happened to him… and he died too, of alcoholism. He didn’t live to see the day where we’re able to tell our stories and he never got to see anything like, compensation or nothing, he died before all of that – it came out – and me and my sister, my sisters the three of us, we have talked about what happened to us, and we did a walk across, a walk from Vancouver to Ottawa one time. Many years back, you know because she was still angry – ‘It has to be told.’ – she said, and I said it has to be told because we have to tell it for our grandkids, and our children… and to love our children, you know, hug our children, no matter what happens you know, we love each other… and I try to hug my grandkids all the time, and my great-grandkids. You know, we didn’t have that. That kind of love. But, it made me more strong, I think, you know, more resilient, and I’ve gone through the whole thing – you know, abuse, physical abuse, in school – and my other children too. And, that was a new thing for me. When I went to school, it was really… it just totally ruined some lives and it almost ruined mine – but to my husbands Dad, he was kind of the one who put me on the right road. I didn’t know nothing about my culture and the teachings, and he taught us all that, and I was able to recover, you know, to learn that.

And I think that’s… I guess it was because I wanted to get away from the school, like, I wanted to go back to where my parents were, when I was a young child, that’s what I wanted. I was so lonely I wanted to go back home, and that’s why we ran away, me and my sister. The first time, when we little kids… and I guess the abuse, we were already being abused at that time – physical abuse and emotional and sexual abuse too. So we were younger, and the second time we ran away it was mostly the physical abuse and emotional and the loneliness also, like you know, we were kept separate when we were in Residential School, you know my siblings, they kept us apart, but we managed to sneak together at certain times and it was like a scary experience. I remember when I was a little girl, they locked us – we were crying me and my sister – and they locked us in a closet, and there was just a little hole above the door where we could see a light come in. I remember that very well… and I was, you know, afraid of the dark all the time when I was younger. When I was older, like we got into a lot of physical fights when we were in school, with other kids or like, other, we were sent to non-native schools, so got into a lot of fights there and just the experience of being abused and fought and we were told we were ‘Savages’ or ‘You’re stupid’ or stuff like that… and just emotional abuse was, you know, was just horrendous, I don’t know any child that would want to stay there when you’re getting treated that way. So that was the reason why we wanted to get out of there and you know, go home. We just ran, we just ran spur of the moment, you know, we see a chance, you know me and my sister – you know, there’s nobody around, the road’s right there, and we’re, ‘Let’s go.’ – so we took off and ran down the road. That was the first time, and of course we got caught, because we were just little. The second time, we didn’t plan, but we just all took off at the same time with the other kids. No planning, we didn’t have no food, we didn’t have no warm clothing, we didn’t have anything, you know, anything for protection. We just left, that’s how desperate we were to get out of there, you know. So, that was that. We didn’t plan anything.

I’m just hoping that… this wont repeat itself, history wont repeat itself. But in my view, like right now, the present… there’s Aboriginal Child Family Services and its seems to be repeating itself. I see a lot of kids going through turmoil, you know being separated from their parents and I’m hoping that these Child Family Services will look at the families first, you know they need to be together, or have the families heal, you know, the parents. A lot of parents have lost their way, you know through alcoholism, drugs, and they need to be healed. And, I think that the communities need to get together and work to save the families and the young families and to teach them – you know, the traditional teachings, and seven teachings, the sacred medicines – they need to teach them all that, you know to save our children. Because you know there’s so many kids being lost into care now, there’s so many, and it seems to be repeating itself again – the history. And I know, because I used to be a worker, a CFS worker, and I had the experience of grabbing a baby, a newborn baby from the hospital, and I was told to do it and I couldn’t say no, because that was my boss right… and I could feel the anguish of the Mom, as I took the baby… and seeing the children being taken away from the parents, I just relived that memory… then I didn’t last that long, working as a CFS worker. I resigned. I said I don’t want to take kids away from their families. This is it for me, there’s got to be a better way to do this… you know to heal the families, and the children they shouldn’t be going through that. I could see the tears, you know, from the Mother and it’s heartbreaking.

To love each other, love, take care of each other. You know, let’s put away the racism, you know, the colour… you know, we’re neighbours now we need to get along and help each other out. It’s amazing to see how people are so stuck up in their roles, of superiority of whatever, and they’re trying to disrupt our lives. We have our own lives, you know, we want to keep our children. There’s no need to take them away. You just have to let us heal. Let’s get along… And they talk about Reconciliation – well let’s make that work – Reconciliation. Work on it… and that’s what I want to tell the Canadians, you know. On our land, lets get along, you know follow the wampum belt, we’re supposed to be working side-by-side… and the treaties, you know, follow the treaties… You know, we let you come here, lets get along, you know… and help our families out and just work together… and keep our children sacred, love them… and that’s my message.