THE INTERVIEWER: Evelyn, I’m going to get you to spell your first and your last name, please.

EVELYN LARIVIÈRE : Evelyn Larivière.

D'accord. Et dans quelle école es-tu allé ?

Pensionnat de Pine Creek et pensionnat d'Assiniboia.

Is that the one that was on…?

Route de l'Académie.

Oh. D'accord. Assiniboia. Je n'ai jamais interviewé personne de là-bas ou de Pine Creek.

Ah bon?

Oui. Première fois.

Quel âge aviez-vous lorsque vous êtes allé à l'école pour la première fois à Pine Creek ?

I was seven in September of 1950. They haven’t found my records yet.

They haven’t?

Not in Pine Creek. But all of a sudden they found the ones in Assiniboia but so far nothing from Pine Creek. So I don’t know where it’s at right now. The ADR process found my records. But the other, the CEP, they didn’t find them.

Cette école était-elle une école catholique romaine ?

Oui c'était.

As-tu eu des frères et sœurs qui sont allés à l'école avec toi ?

Nous étions dix dans ma famille.

Et ils sont tous partis ?

Nous sommes tous allés.

Êtes-vous le plus jeune?

Non. J'ai une sœur cadette qui est toujours en vie. Notre plus jeune frère est décédé à l'âge de quarante-neuf ans. Mais nous sommes tous les dix allés au pensionnat.

Wow.

Y compris ma mère et mon père.

Ils y allèrent tous les deux. Dans la même école ?

Oui.

Wow. Avez-vous déjà discuté de vos expériences avec vos parents?

Non. Parce que ma mère est déjà décédée. Mon père est décédé quand j'avais dix ans.

Tellement que cette école vous a élevé les gars.

Oui.

So you didn’t get to go home on weekends, obviously.

We did. When I went I was seven years old. We stayed in the school and my sister and my brother were there also, the older ones, and we didn’t go home. We only went home at Christmas, at Easter time and June. It was like that only for me for one year, but my sister went like that. I was only like that for one year. And then the following year we were allowed to go home Friday and come back Sunday. And then it carried on like that with my younger sister and my younger brother.

Mais les plus grands y sont tous restés jusqu'à Noël et Pâques, comme je l'ai dit, vous savez. Nous vivions seulement, je dirais, à moins d'un kilomètre de l'école. Mais ma mère et mon père ont dit que nous devions aller à l'école là-bas.

I don’t remember my first day of school no matter how hard I try; I don’t. All of a sudden I was just there. But for me to walk in the door and to know, you know, I don’t remember at all. I try as hard as I can.

And yet I can remember when I was four years old when my little brother was born. You see we were all born in our house and my mother didn’t go to the doctor or to the hospital. My grandmother was the midwife, so we were all born at home. I remember when my brother was born because we were all kept upstairs. We had sort of a lean-to, not a lean-to, but our house was like that (indicating) and we all slept upstairs. My mother was downstairs having my little brother and I was four. I remember that. But aside from that being in Residential School I don’t remember.

I do remember a lot of good things at the school and I don’t like to say it sometimes because I have such a guilt because not everything was bad. Do you know what I mean? We did learn to read and write. I couldn’t speak a word of English when I started school. We didn’t even know our names. I had to learn my name. We had Indian names. I had to say my name over and over again so I would remember my name.

The same thing with my sister and my little brother, and my older sister, we all had our names. Sometimes, like I said, when I talk with Mel and Shirley, it was hard for me because I have a guilt, a hatred of the school, but I also have a guilt because they weren’t all bad, the Nuns and the teachers. Well, they were all teachers but they were all Nuns who looked after us. As a matter of fact today my daughter had a picture of a Priest – I won’t say his name – a Priest who had sent me his picture and he was a good Priest. He used to come and visit my mother at our home and take our pictures. And then he sent me this picture and he said, “To my good friend, Evelyn”. I remember him because he was good.

— Speaker overcome with emotion

1. I don’t like to say they were all bad. Because of my healing journey I tried to let go of the bad things that happened and just try to get on with my life. That’s what I would like to do.

I turned sixty-five the other day —

— A Short Pause

You’re doing really well.

You’re not going to put that on there, are you?

You’re doing really well.

Anyways, there’s only one thing I really wanted to share. There is a lot I could share. I could sit here all day and share with you but that would take too much time.

There is one thing I wanted to share because my family have passed away and my brother that I looked after for two years – he had cancer – his name was George and he had a lot of children. All his children are doing very well today because they have helped themselves. But he shared with me what he went through in the school. He said, “Someday you’ll tell my children.” I still can’t do it until today. It’s not the time. I just can’t.

All I did was I told them that your dad loved you. They said that their dad never hugged us or told us he loved us and they don’t understand that. They thought their dad was bad, like a bad man, you know. I told my brother, I said, “No, you weren’t bad.” I know my brother. We were very close. He shared with me what had happened to him and he became bitter. But I’m glad that his children turned out good.

Sometimes that’s what I want to do, too and that’s why I’m in the city today. I was here all week.

Because I don’t like my grandchildren to be alone — they live in the city, you know — to be alone, so I came to stay with them. I have two grandchildren, but the other one —

My daughter is away so I said I would stay with them. And he said, “Kocha (ph), I’m so glad you came, stay with me.” So we enjoyed our time together. I did tell them stories of different things and they just looked at me. Not the really bad stuff but some stuff that I shared with them. They don’t understand. Why did your mom let that happen? That, too, I don’t understand why my mom and dad let that happen, why they let us —

Well, of course, that was the only school. We had to go to school. But we could have walked there and walked home. I remember all the good things of when we were at home. Everything was good, to me, until I was about nine or ten, then I said, “Oh, I guess we were poor.” I didn’t even know we were poor. Yet to me it was good, the way my mom and dad raised us. We had lots of fish to eat and my mom made bread and everything. Until we started school and then I realized that we were poor. That’s what we were told, that we were poor people and that we had to try and educate ourselves in the ways of the White man, which is good but maybe if it had been done a little bit differently, you know. I quit school when I was in Grade 8 and I was so sorry after that I did.

So I had to have —

J'ai travaillé tout ce temps. Nous avons vécu à Winnipeg pendant trente-trois ans, mais c'était toujours des emplois comme le nettoyage de maisons. Je n'ai jamais eu une bonne éducation. Bien sûr que j'aurais pu, je suppose, mais je suis resté avec mes enfants. J'ai élevé quatre enfants.

Avez-vous parlé à vos enfants de votre expérience au pensionnat?

Oui.

Ils comprennent?

I don’t know if they understand but I hope they understand. My oldest daughter also went to Residential School but she didn’t stay in the school. She went to Dauphin. She didn’t stay in residence but she went to Native school. But my other three children went to school here in Winnipeg. They all read my stuff that I wrote down. I have about this thick (indicating) of what I wrote. My baby, I call him, who is going to be forty in May, cried. And my daughter, Rose, cried. It’s stuff that happened.

Right now I don’t feel comfortable talking about it, with the Priest, you know, and with the Nuns, too.

What do you want people to know about you and your experience, because there are some people who still don’t believe this happened to our people. What would you want to say to people who are still very uneducated about your experience?

My experience is I missed out to be with my mom and my dad. It was just up to a certain time that I was with them and then all of a sudden they were not there. I had to sleep with my sister on a little bed about that wide (indicating) when I first started. That incident really bothered me. I guess some people would say it’s not something that should bother me, but it did. Even today I would never do that to my children or to anybody else’s children. I slept with my sister and then we were giggling and the Sister grabbed me and threw me in the bathroom. It wasn’t actually a bathroom. It was just a toilet. I had to stay there. We didn’t even have nightgowns. We used to wear our petticoats to bed. We had a petticoat and it had two pockets. One was your handkerchief and one was your rosary, you know.

I sat there and sat there. Finally I came out and she was sitting outside in a chair. I didn’t know she was sitting there. She said, “I didn’t tell you to come out.” And she pushed me back in and she shut the light. I don’t know how long I sat there. Finally I sat on the floor and I put my petticoat over me to keep warm until she was ready to come and get me.

Elle m'a jeté dans mon lit et m'a dit que j'aurais dû apprendre ma leçon. Je pensais que c'était si cruel de faire ça à quelqu'un.

Our parents never did that to us. I don’t recall my mom and dad ever hitting me, ever. We weren’t bad at home. Everybody —

I didn’t see any violence in our house.

Until I went to school —

And another thing that really bothered me was we used to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning, not every morning, but one morning it would be the boys and the next morning it would be the girls, and we had to go to the chapel to pray before breakfast. There was this friend that I had. Her name was Olive. She used to faint every time we would go to chapel. At first I thought she was dead when I seen her fall. Nobody —

We weren’t allowed to help her.

La laisser reposer là ?

Just let her lay there until she got —

Everybody had to keep praying. And then she would get up and sit up and come out of her faint. That bothered me. It terrified me. A few years after I was married already I asked about her. She died of leukemia not long after when we left the school. She must have been sick already at the time. We weren’t allowed to do that, you know. That bothered me. I always remember her. I always think about her, if her life would have been different. She was an orphan. Her mother had died and her and her brother were put there in the school. That, too, I didn’t like very much. It bothered me.

1. Vous souvenez-vous de la nourriture à Pine Creek ?
2. The food was not very good but I was asked that question if I was every hungry. I don’t remember or recall ever being hungry there. That didn’t affect me at all, although I didn’t like the food. We would smell it. My sister and I would remember. She said we would smell the good aromas coming from the kitchens, but it was not the food for us. Our food was different, what we were going to eat. But if we smelled this food we thought that was for us, but it wasn’t. That’s what she remembers.

I don’t recall ever being hungry. I can’t honestly say I was ever hungry because I don’t remember that.

In later years when we were already going to day school my mother baked bread at the school. She was hired. She had this big machine where she baked the bread. She would talk to the Sisters and asked them if she could make the buns for the kids to have after school at four o’clock. They had a meeting, I guess, the Sisters and the Nuns and they decided well maybe we could do that. That was already when we were older.

When we came down at four o’clock from classes we could smell all these fresh buns and they were all there and the kids just went crazy because my mom had made little buns for all the kids to eat. From then on it was like that every day. My mother was the baker. They hired her. It was in a big machine, you know, this dough they would mix.

Cela devait être sympa.

Oui. C'était ça. Mon père est mort quand j'avais dix ans et ils lui ont donné un travail à l'école en tant que boulanger et raccommoder des vêtements et des trucs comme ça.

Quand êtes-vous allé à Assiniboia ? Quel age avais tu?

Quand j'avais dix ans, mon père est mort en octobre 1953, parce que je m'en souviens très bien. J'ai été au Sanitarium de Brandon pendant deux ans. Je suis parti le 22 septembre^sd, 1953. They said I was sick. I guess that’s why I never participated in sports and stuff like that and I was never hungry. I guess I was sick but I didn’t know that at the time. And then all of a sudden my mom told me they had contacted her and said that I was sick and that I was to go away. I was in Brandon for two years, and my dad died on October 10^e. I came back in ’55 when I was released.

I was in Assiniboia until —

I can’t really remember if it was ’58 or ’59. And then I quit. I didn’t like the city.

That’s when you quit school?

It was all fenced around. We weren’t allowed to go anywhere. You had to stay there. My memory of that is we were walking around because we were kind of lonely. We were walking in the yard and people were driving by staring at us as if we were —

We were embarrassed because they would drive slow and stare at us, not on Academy Road, but on the other street along the river. I don’t know its name.

Sur Wellington ?

Oui. Donc je ne suis resté qu'un an et puis j'ai arrêté.

Êtes-vous rentré chez vous ?

Yes, I did. My mom didn’t encourage me to go back. She never, I don’t know why, but she never encouraged us to go back. Well, it’s up to you, whatever, you know. That was it.

Tu dois rester à la maison un moment ?

Yeah. I worked in a restaurant in Grand Rapids. And when I came back, when I came back to Winnipeg, I came to the city with twenty dollars in my pocket! I stayed at the “Y” and then I got a job. I worked here. Of course it wasn’t a sewing factory.

From there my husband and I got married in ’65 and I was in the city from that time on until my husband had to retire twelve years ago and we couldn’t afford to live in Winnipeg any more. My husband had back problems so we decided all of a sudden just to move back. We built our house on the Reserve. We moved back there right along the lake where I was born. So that’s where we live today.

And I never in my life thought that I would move back because I was one of those people that was ashamed to be a Native. It’s hard to say that and people shouldn’t say that, but I was. Not now, though. Today, this morning, my cousin phoned me three times and wanted to ask me a word in our Native language. She’s older than me. She lives here in the city.

I’m glad that I moved back because a lot of my relatives I’m able to communicate with them in my language. I can speak S’odo(ph.) fluently and Cree. There’s not very many you can talk to in your language, but I remember all my language. I didn’t lose it. When I looked after my brother for two years we would talk. Whenever I would walk in I would say “good morning”, and he would say (speaking Native language), and then we would sit and talk in our language. Towards the end before he died he wanted me to talk to him in Cree, so I spoke in Cree all the time.

— Speaker overcome with emotion

Prenez une bonne respiration profonde. Prenez votre temps.

I helped my sister, my older sister. She only came here two times. She said she just found it too hard. I don’t know why but I wasn’t able to talk her into coming back.

Vers la ville?

To here, yeah. But I will keep after her to come again maybe once or twice. I tried to take her with me where I went but she didn’t want to.

— A Short Pause

Comment allez-vous? Est-ce que tu te sens bien? Voulez-vous continuer? Ou voulez-vous faire une pause ?

I’ll have a drink of water.

You’re doing a really good job, Evelyn. Your voice is really clear and you look great on camera.

HAUT-PARLEUR NON IDENTIFIÉ : (donne des conseils pour l'exercice de respiration d'une voix étouffée en arrière-plan)

— A Short Pause

Es-tu prêt? Te sens-tu mieux?

I’m better.

Bien. Y a-t-il autre chose que vous voudriez ajouter, quelque chose que vous voudriez dire à vos enfants au sujet de votre expérience, ou peut-être à vos petits-enfants ?

Comme quoi?

I don’t know. Maybe there’s something you want to share with them about being raised by a survivor, almost like the kind of feelings that your brother had for his children.

I always tell my children I love them when I talk to them on the phone. I try to talk to them all the time but sometimes I guess I overdo it. But I just want them to know that I’m there for them.

I don’t like cell phones. I phoned my daughter this morning but she told me to only phone her in case of an emergency. But I just wanted to tell her I was leaving her house and spending the night with my sister.

I love my children and not to blame me. Sometimes I know I wasn’t always a good mother. I don’t know what a good mother is. Maybe sometimes I overdo something. I did hit my son once and I still remember that to this day, my youngest boy, and also my daughter, Rose. I remember those very clearly. I told them that I was sorry that I did that. Maybe it was my anger or my frustrations why I hit them. But my other son I never hit. His name is Chris. I don’t recall ever hitting him. But I told my daughter I was hit.

What I would like to see is for the younger people to try and forgive their parents because it was not their fault. A lot of us are good parents. Not everybody is a bad parent. I did share all my stuff with my children. They read all my stuff. My younger boy cried. He didn’t know. He said, “How come you never told us all that?” I used to tell them some of the stuff but not everything.

And my husband, too, well him he didn’t go to Residential School obviously. But some people they don’t think that was wrong. Not everybody agrees with the survivors. Not everybody —

Or they don’t believe you or it didn’t happen. But me it was always in my head that it was not right. That I knew. It wasn’t right the way things were going.

Another thing that really bothered me was me being ashamed of my Native background because our history —

I like History. I loved History. But most of the history that I could remember was always the Indians that came in from Quebec that killed the people that came. I hated those parts that were told to us when they first landed. Well, there were some good things but the history that I remember that we were taught in school was the Indians were so bad, they scalped all these people and killed them. Yet us, we don’t do that. My mom used to say that even if you only have bread and tea you offer it to somebody. I think that’s what the Indians did to the White people. I shouldn’t say the White people. The people that came. But we weren’t told any of that. We were just told that the Indians were bad. I used to think I didn’t want to be like those Indians in Quebec that are so bad. They knew we were the same thing.

Très bien. Merci beaucoup pour votre histoire.

Oui.

Tu as vraiment bien fait aujourd'hui.

D'accord.

Tu as vraiment bien fait. Merci beaucoup.

I didn’t know what to expect. I thought you were just going to ask me some questions.

Oui. Eh bien, je vous en ai posé quelques-unes et vous vous en souvenez tellement.

Comme je l'ai dit, je pourrais m'asseoir ici et parler toute la journée.

That’s all right. You did really really well. It’s perfect. I got a lot of information from you. The most important thing is that your words were clear and it came from a really good place. You did a really good job and I’m proud of you. I know it’s hard to sit there with the camera on you and a light on you. I know that’s hard. Thank you so much for being courageous and coming in.

D'accord.

— End of Interview