Madelaine Kioke

My name is Madelaine Kioke. I’m a member of the Attawapiskat First Nation. I was actually born somewhere in the wilds of Attawapiskat. I grew up in Moosonee, I’m now living in Timmins for the last 27 years. It’s my Dad’s story, as told to me when I was growing up, about his brother who was lost in 1941. My Uncle disappeared in 1941. My Dad reluctantly shared his story because it was so painful for him, when I was younger. And, because my Dad is now gone, all his brothers and sisters are now gone, my generation, my sister, myself and my brother – the three of us would probably be the only three that actually have the real story about my Uncle John. My Uncle John Kioke disappeared from the Residential School in April of 1941. He was at the St. Anne’s Residential School in Fort Albany, Ontario. Yes, he was a member of three who disappeared in the spring of 1941 and there’s a lot of stories about them, they’re called “the three boys.” I’m not really sure how old he would have been but when he disappeared, I think he was about 14, 14-15. From what I heard from my Dad, they used to go by boat – they called it the “Missionary Boat” – it was a wooden boat that travelled the James Bay. The James Bay it’s a water, on the east – Hudson’s Bay and James Bay and Hanna Bay are the Bays in my area and the boat would travel from Moosonee north on the James Bay and Hudson’s Bay. That’s the boat that would pick up student’s from along the shore and that’s how he would’ve ended up there.
From what I understood, when I was hearing these stories from my Grandmother, from my Dad, the expectations was there – I don’t think that they wanted to go there, they were forced to go there – but their expectation was that they would be treated well, but unfortunately as evident by his bit running away, it wasn’t that way at all. When my Dad was telling the story, he had said that his brother was very – like he knew what he wanted, and if something was done wrong to him he would try to work it out and because of that, he was looked at as a trouble-maker and he didn’t, I guess… (I’m having hard time trying to find words here because my train of thought is all over) But, he was a young lad who knew what he wanted and he knew what his role was at home and for some reason his Residential School experience at the time, did not match with what he wanted at the time… because they were punished for things that they didn’t even do, they weren’t fed as well as they should have… so, a bunch of other things led to the decision when he chose to run away. My Dad didn’t know any particulars of why they ran away, other than when they did run away he was part of the search party to go and look for them – but he didn’t have a story as to why they did it and how they planned to do it kind of thing.
When I was younger, my Dad would tell us the story of family life prior to – his meeting of my mother, being with his family, his brothers – different things like that, and as time went on he started to share his brother disappearing and I wasn’t aware of my uncle having disappeared until 1957, I think. I would have been about 6 or 7 when I started hearing little bits and pieces of my Uncle disappearing because I remember in 1957 my Grandmother used to say prayers on the trapline, we’d be on the trapline and every evening we’d have prayers before we went to bed and I remember my Grandmother praying that she might see her son again – but at that time I never questioned it, I just assumed that my Uncle John was somewhere and he’s be back. But, as I got older and as my Dad started sharing the story, and he always shared the story with tears in his eyes, and I didn’t, as I got older, I started to find out a little bit to what happened. When my Uncle and his two friends, there was a Michelle Sutherland and Meeshan Mattanus(?) along with him who decided to run away. My Dad was involved in looking for them in the Spring of – I don’t know when exactly, April or May – But, they found them. They took them back to the school. And that was the tears behind my Dad’s eyes, it was because of the fact that he went looking for him, he found him – not just him it was his Dad and other men that went searching and found them, and they took them back to the Residential School and when my Dad took his brother back, he told him, June is just a couple of months. You’ll be home. He always said those were his famous last words to his brother. And that was the reason he always told the story with tears in his eyes. It was because, like he said, if it weren’t for him, his brother would still be alive. Which is the reason, why I want to share this story because my Dad never had a chance to. He was never able to share this story with people who might be able to help him. He was never able to take that pain away, he always felt it. And sometimes it would come out in different things, like he turned to alcohol to ease the pain and when he would get mad that would come out and he’d be violent. Some points he would, maybe in his alcohol, he would… it would come out and he would hit something or somebody and that somebody was either the Priest or the Bishop or the people who were part of punishing his brother. Later on, as I go older, and I heard more of the story – and this is stories that he heard from other people that were part of the Residential School at the time – is that, the three boys were punished quite severely, because of their running away. And, as part of their punishment, they were segregated from away from the main population and then they disappeared. He didn’t know how they disappeared. People were saying that – people told him, and I heard these stories from other people, later much later in life – that they were punished so severely that they might have died as result of their injury. Or, another story from another man, who said they killed one, they had to kill the other two because the other two were witnesses to the first, the first person that was killed. But when the missionaries started providing documents as to reports or whatever, they never told the RCMP about the disappearance of the boys until later. And they always said that, they might have died because it was Spring and they might have been swept away through the James Bay – or Hudson’s Bay, as they put it – Hudson’s Bay was quite a ways from where they were, like hundreds of miles, So I’m not sure why they said that. But the documents that were provided by the missionaries, that I have seen, were totally inconsistent with what my Dad and my Grandmother had told us when we were young. There’s a story that my Grandmother provided a letter in Cree which was translated that forgave the Priest for the fact that the boys disappeared. And I sincerely believe that’s not true, the document, somehow was made up. Many of the documents that were given as a result of reporting and what not were just totally false. I call them the cover up letters, the cover up documents, the cover up stories because I think that’s what they were. We’ll never know because there’s nobody to tell the story any more but I wanted to share this story of my uncle because my father not got the chance to share the story of his brother. And, if I don’t share this story – because my siblings are much younger and probably didn’t get the same story that I have – it’s up to me my sister and my brother who are part of… when we were in the bush, is where we had heard it most, when we were living off the land before we got into living in town, kind of, where we just a family and so the older ones in my family are the only ones who that share it and I think it’s just the three of us, myself, my older sister and my brother who is 3 years younger than me. If we don’t tell that story, I don’t think it’ll ever be told and I want to be able to share it so that my great-grandchildren and their grandchildren will know a bit of the history, of my family and of the Residential School as well. I am also a Survivor of St. Anne’s Residential School. My expectation of going there was totally different from what it was when I got there. At the same time, my mother was sort of forced to take us or to allow us to go there because of my Dad’s health at the time. He had tuberculosis and the Priest at the time suggested that my mother couldn’t handle all her kids. So, some of us had to go to Residential School. And so, my expectation was to be there to be treated nicely, to have a bed to sleep in and to have good food but it didn’t happen that way. And so, when I think of my Uncle, he must have had a worse time… he must have had a real bad time. And so, I don’t want his story to just disappear. I want his name to be mentioned ten years from now as being part of the three boys who unfortunately disappeared from the school, however it happened, I don’t want him to be lost in history and gone and never have a story to be told because I think the story that the missionaries gave was totally false. I believe that when I see all of the documentation that they provided, and how late they reported to the RCMP at the time, and if they were so caring for those boys why did they not report them right away? I understand there was you know like, it might have taken the dog team 3 or 4 days to go and tell the story but why not do it? And so, for those reasons, for the reason that they had tried to hide the story or the fact that the boys had disappeared. I want it shared, I want to share it with as many people as I can. And not… my Dad’s pain was real. I remembering him crying, I remember him sobbing, I remember even my Grandmother, when she cried. It wasn’t just a natural cry it was a wailing of sort, in pain. For that reason, I want to share this story.
When my Uncle disappeared and my Dad said he took him back to school, that was in April of 1941. So that had no contact with his brother, from the time he had took him back to the school, when they found them. Either in late April, or I don’t know the exact time frame from when the boys had ran away and his Dad found his brother and took him back to the school. I don’t know the timeline of that. All I remember was my Dad saying ‘my famous last words to my brother were: “June is not too far away. You’ll be coming home.”’ And then they had no contact with him at all and then when it was time for the students to come home… when people were, I’m not sure how they were taken home, but he was not part of the students that went home. And that’s when they realized that they disappeared. Until then, they didn’t know that they had disappeared again. According to the missionaries, they ran away, they were brought back and they ran away again. But, most of the stories that I saw made it sound like they only ran away once – that April of 1941. That’s the stories I heard. And that’s what I see in documents, it never mentioned that my father and his father and a few other men found those boys and took them back. There is nothing that says that. But that’s what my Dad told us, me and my siblings, and so they never told any body until June. When the boys didn’t come home. And that was the same with one of the other boys, the mother, she was never told that her boy disappeared. It wasn’t until June when the kids came home that she found that her boy wasn’t there either. So I don’t know, I don’t think they told the parents of the second disappearance, at all because it wasn’t until June that they – I don’t even think they told them, it was when the students were going home and the boys were not home. When, what my Grandmother had told us, or had shared somewhere along the way, was she and Albert Mattanus – not she, but my Grandfather and Albert Mattanus, went to check to confirm that the boys were somewhere and they were not – that was when they realized that the boys were no longer around. That’s when they were told that the boys had run away. Whether it was again, or they’re still talking about April, I don’t know. But, it wasn’t until much later that he wasn’t there he wasn’t around and I don’t know how much of an investigation happened because my Dad didn’t go into details after the fact because he was dealing with his pain, having to do with the fact that: he found his brother, he took him back to the school and he told him, ‘its only a couple more months, you’ll be home in no time’ That was where most of the history ended, was at the point, he didn’t go into detail about the instigation. The investigation that I read about didn’t happen until the RCMP got told about it, maybe like in August or maybe later of that year. Yes, I was part of the school starting around 64’ or 65.’ One of my siblings was part of it, she also ran away. They ran away in the middle of winter. I don’t know what month. She’s five years younger than me and they were punished, they were found, and they were brought back to the school and they were punished. I’m not sure what kind of punishment they got, but I remember her reacting to the punishment and I remember them being isolated from other students. I don’t know what exactly what she was punished, how she was punished because she doesn’t really tell the story. She’ll mention it once in a while but even then, which was around 64’, 65,’ they were punished… They wanted to run away and it was the fact that the nuns would punish you for no reason. I got punished just because I’m walking down the hall beside another girl and we were delivering something to.. I’ll call it the Priest’s dining room, and I’m not sure I think I was supposed to walk a certain way and we didn’t and we got whacked on the head with that. And we were punished for smiling we were punished for our hair being out of place or paying too much attention to our hair or combing our hair too many times or… they seemed to find fault in just about everything. And you could just be sitting doing nothing – you got hit. I was hit for no reason. Some of the times I was hit I didn’t even do anything wrong. I was just sitting or standing or thinking and in my own experience I seen people being punished for no reason at all. I saw my friend Mary get beaten because she combed her hair too long. They called her… I forgot the word they used… “Vain.” She was vain, she was trying to pretty herself up kind of thing and I was punished for smiling I had to sit in the middle of the girls’ room for hours at the time. Another incident I was punished for is, I had to go to walk a girl to this little store, that the Priest had not too far away, it was in spring time and there was a guy getting water and so I asked the guy “has it broken up yet? Because we don’t see the river from where we were.” I had just asked him that one question when I got back inside the school I was punished and I was made to take a toothbrush and wash the floor of the girls’ room. Me and the girl I was with. All I said was “has the river broken up yet” Yet, we spend hours on our hands and knees cleaning the girls room with a toothbrush because all I wanted to know is if the river broken up.
I want to be able to share the story of my Uncle so it’s not forgotten… based on what my Grandmother and my Dad had told me, not what the documents say, not what the Priest said because their story is false. My mother once told me that my Dad was in pain all the time because of that because he blamed himself for taking his brother back. And for that reason, I wanted to share his story and I wanted to share it the way that I heard it, the way that he told it to me because I think the stories from the missionaries and the documents that they provided are all false and I want to be able to share it for my grandchildren and their grandchildren to know the truth. I want the world to know about my Uncle was an important human being and he deserved better than what he got and the way he was treated. So I want that truth to be told, as told to me by my Dad. Because after this, other than my two siblings I mentioned who grew up with me as part of living on our traditional lands and territory, living off the land, I don’t think my younger siblings know the story and even though my Dad would tell the story as I was growing up, like I remember him telling that story at some point when I was 16, 17, that age, but the impact of the, his stories may not have been, related to my siblings as much as it was to me and my older sister and my brother. So for that reason I want to share that story for my great-grandchildren and their children. So, hopefully a hundred years from now, someone will say ‘Okay that was John Kioke. He was a great uncle or great (…?…). That’s the reason I want to share that story.
I have the documentation that I keep referring to, the stories, the Bishops saying that my Grandmother wrote this letter, it’s been translated… What I wanted to do is be able to present those documents and say that these documents are false. Because my Grandmother didn’t say this and my Grandmother didn’t say that and my Dad didn’t say that and hopefully people know that the documentation are not necessarily the truth even if it came from a Priest because my Dad knew the story and my Grandmother knew the story and their stories is who I believe.