Velma Page
Kuper Island Residential School
THE INTERVIEWER: Velma, first I have to have your name spelled out for me, so can you tell me your name and spell it, please.
VELMA PAGE: Velma Page; V-e-l-m-a P-a-g-e.
Q. Thank you.
A. My maiden name was Bob.
Q. Cob?
A. Bob; B-o-b.
Q. That’s why Dave mentioned you were cousins. Right?
A. Yes.
Q. And where are you from?
A. From the Nanoose First Nation.
Q. Is that where you always lived?
A. As far as I can remember, they told me that I lived in Comox, BC and Deep Bay, BC, them two places.
Q. When you were a child?
A. Yes, before my mother died in 1950. But after 1950 I lived in Nanoose until I left and went to Duncan, BC.
Q. When did you go to Duncan?
A. In 1956, I think it was. I think it was in ’56.
Q. How old were you then?
A. Fifteen.
Q. Is that when you went to Residential School?
A. No. I went to Residential School in 1950. I thought I went there two years but I looked at my paper and they said I went in 1948-49, besides 1950-52. I don’t remember being there in 1948-49. But I remember being there in 1950, 1951 and 1952, after my mom died. It’s like I just started remembering everything after she died.
Q. When did she die?
A. In 1950.
Q. And you were how old?
A. Eight.
Q. Eight. So you went to Residential School in 1950?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you remember how life was before you went to Residential School?
— Speaker overcome with emotion
A. It was just being on the Reserve all the time, seeing my mom around, though I don’t remember her ever talking to me or hugging me.
I remember being happy there or feeling safe on the Reserve before she died. Everything changed when she died and they put me in Residential. I didn’t know she was dead. They didn’t tell me she was dead when they called us out of the bedroom to tell us to look at her in the coffin. I didn’t know it was a coffin and I didn’t know she was dead. They didn’t tell me where they took her.
Q. When you were at the Residential School they took you out to show you?
A. No. In March of that year, 1950, when she died. It was in September I went to Kuper Island Residential. But all my young years I didn’t know where she was. I didn’t know she was dead.
Q. Did you have brothers or sisters with you?
A. Six of my older siblings were in Residential in Kuper Island. I didn’t know that they were. I didn’t know I had brothers and sisters because they were there all the time, I guess. My one remaining older sister who lives in Duncan said that she went there for nine years. She was sixteen when my mom died. There were four of us younger ones at home; two younger brothers and a sister. They sent my younger sister and I there. But when I looked back, just this last year, I don’t remember seeing my younger sister there. I think they must have sent her home because I don’t remember seeing her in the school, though we got on the train together and went across on the little ferry to Kuper Island from Chemainus. I don’t remember seeing her there.
And that older sister that is deceased now, she went with us that first year. I don’t remember seeing her there either.
Q. What was it like for you when you got there?
A. Right from the beginning I was scared walking down that dock in Chemainus to get on that boat. I didn’t know where they were bringing me. A Priest or a man picked us up and walked us down there from the train. Going on that ferry on the water for the first time – it was the first time I had been on a boat – and walking up that dock to school, I didn’t know why I was there.
Q. Did anybody explain it to you?
A. No.
Q. Was there anybody you knew waiting for you at the school?
A. No. And I didn’t see my dad before I left, either. I don’t know if he was around when I left. I don’t remember leaving my house. I just remember being at the train station and getting on that train in Nanaimo. But I don’t remember leaving my home in Nanoose.
Q. After you arrived at the Residential School can you describe what it was like for you?
A. I didn’t know why I was there. I didn’t know nothing.
Q. It must have been very different from your home?
A. It was. I was scared. I was so scared.
Q. Do you remember being scared the whole time you were there?
A. Yeah. I was always scared because I didn’t know nobody.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
Q. Do you remember a typical day at school, like things you may have done?
— A Short Pause
Q. It’s okay. Take your time. It’s okay.
A. I was always scared but I kept it inside and just tried to stay real quiet. I was scared of the Nuns and scared of the Priests. I never had seen no White people on our Reserve. It was the first time I had seen White people there and they were all dressed in black.
Q. I guess they didn’t make you feel very safe if you were scared of them.
A. Just being around everybody I didn’t know. And they told us we weren’t supposed to look around when they lined us up in the Rectory, they called it. The other girls weren’t allowed to look around. We weren’t allowed to talk or you would get strapped or get your ears pulled or your hair pulled.
So I couldn’t look for my sisters. I felt alone all my life.
Q. If you weren’t allowed to look around or talk to people was it hard to have friendships? Did you have any friends when you were there?
A. No. Nothing. Because we always seemed to have to be doing something. We always had to be working. We always had to be —
In free time we had to be knitting socks, darning socks, the boys’ socks after school. When we were in school they taught us about God and devils. I don’t remember doing no math and all that. It was always about God and devils.
Q. Do you remember if you received any kind of education? You say you don’t remember math. Did they teach you reading or writing?
A. No. When I finally got out of there they sent me to public school and I didn’t know nothing and I felt so stupid. I was older then. Everybody in the Grade they put me in —
I don’t know what Grade they put me in, but I didn’t know hardly nothing what they were teaching in the public school because that’s all we did was write about God all the time and do tests on that.
Q. Did you finish public school?
A. No, I didn’t. I just passed into Grade 8 when I left and went to Duncan.
Q. How old were you when you left the Residential School?
A. I think I might have been ten. I don’t remember my age. I didn’t know I had a birthday until I was thirteen because we never had no birthdays. When I was really little I don’t remember my mom ever having birthday parties.
Q. Do you know if your mother went to Residential School?
A. Yes. My oldest sister said that she went, and so did my dad. They both went to Residential.
Q. Do you know where they went?
A. My dad, my late dad, went to Port Alberni. And my late mom went to Coqualeetza, wherever that is.
Q. And that wasn’t something that the family talked about?
A. No. My older sister hardly talked about it, but she said that it wasn’t nice. She said that she had to work with the cook and she said she had to cook a lot of rotten meat, spoiled meat, for the kids. My other brothers — I had six brothers – and I have two left. My one brother that’s all he told me was before he died that he had a medical problem that could never be fixed because they kicked him so hard in his rectum that he couldn’t sit too long, what little bit he revealed to me when he visited me. And the doctors couldn’t fix it. He didn’t go right away. They were abused. He was abused.
Q. When did you finally talk to your brothers about that?
A. My late brother died about two years ago, so probably about four. He was in his seventies. He died of cancer.
Q. And your sister?
A. About two years ago, or something, she was telling me about the food that she had to cook for the kids, about how spoiled the meat was. It was real bad food that she had to cook for us and the other kids. She said that she was there nine years. And she said that they hit her so hard on her ears that she’s deaf now.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
She’s an angry lady. She won’t talk about it. She won’t cry.
Q. What about you, Velma? When did you first talk about it?
A. I heard about Scott Hall, the lawyer from Victoria, gathering people and he said that he would help us. So I went over there about six years ago. I don’t know when it was. It was the first time I started talking about it because he told me to go to a psychiatrist over in Duncan there.
Q. So you have never shared that after you left Residential School. You had no friends or family or anybody that you ever shared your experiences with?
A. No, I haven’t.
Q. Do you know what a brave woman you are to be able to do that six years ago?
A. I don’t know about this bravery and courage. A lot of people tell me I have it. Since I’ve been going to treatment in Sakaluten (ph.), since it opened, they tell me that. I guess I have it. I don’t know.
Q. Did you ever feel angry that your sister —
A. Yes. I did start feeling it.
I got married when I was only fifteen and a half over in Duncan to my kids’ father. I started having all these kids. I had them year after year. I started feeling anger having so much work to do. But then after going through what the Priest did to me over on Kuper and my brother molested me after my mom died —
I was sent to the Nuns. And I’ve gotten to where I was being sent to Nuns’ rooms and when I would get to the door and it’s dark and then I don’t remember anything.
— Transcriber’s Note: This lady is having such a hard time telling her story through her tears. I have tried to capture all her words but it is very difficult to hear.
I don’t remember. I just opened the door and it’s dark. When I told Scott Hall, those lawyers, they said they don’t believe my story. But they weren’t there when I had to go to the Nuns’ rooms. I know I opened the door and it’s just black.
I remember what that Priest did to me.
Q. Do you want to share that with us?
A. He used to take us, us little girls, on Sundays he used to take us to some field on Sunday, I guess, when we didn’t have to be in school. It was supposed to be an outing I guess. He used to either grab me or hold me and put me on his lap. He put his hand up —
Because we always wore skirts. And then he put his hands up my dress, my skirt. And I had to stay on his lap until we got to that field.
Q. Velma, I’m so sorry when you shared that before those people didn’t believe you.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
Q. You were talking about the Nuns and you used to go to their room.
A. I don’t know what I had to do in there.
Q. You don’t remember that part?
A. I remember going to two different Nuns’ rooms. It was dark.
Q. Was there anybody at the school, any other children that you were able to talk about that with?
A. No. I don’t know why I was chosen to do that. I don’t know if they had to do it, too. They must have if I had to. They chose me. But I never told nobody.
Q. You mentioned also the Nuns used to pull your ears or pull your hair.
A. I seen them do that to other girls. When I would go get in line, they would tell us to get in line, I would go way to the back so they wouldn’t pick me out or anything. I was scared.
Q. Did you feel that you had any way of protecting yourself?
A. No. Just to be quiet and not to be seen. I would get behind the other girls. One girl told the Nun that I had lice in my head and she cut off all my hair. Then they put this white rag on my head and I had to go to school with that white thing on my head. I felt everybody there was laughing at me.
Girls were mean to you. They would tell lies on other girls just to get somebody in trouble. So I tried to be always by myself.
Q. Did you ever go back to your home community?
A. Yeah, I’m living there now.
Q. When you were a child did you ever go back?
A. I had to go back there. I think I went back there in the summer. I’m not sure if I went home at Christmas. We never had no Christmas dinners either. I don’t remember.
Q. Can you tell me some ways you think that Residential School might have affected your life as a mother?
A. A lot of ways. I never learnt how to be friendly or have friends. They never taught those skills.
On Saturdays they only allowed us to shower once a week there. We had to shower in cold water because there was a whole bunch of us girls lined up to shower every Saturday, I guess it was. I always hate cold water. We had to shower in cold water. It was always cold there. It was cold up in our Dormitory, and especially cold in the winter. It was always dark up there. I was always deathly scared of peeing my bed because girls had to sleep on the floor if they pee’d their bed and then I would hear them crying because they were cold.
We had wooden floors. They only gave us one old grey blanket. I was always cold. I was always cold.
Q. Did they provide you with clothes?
A. Yes, just a uniform, a skirt and blouse, long socks and black shoes.
Q. Sweaters or jackets or anything?
A. You know, I don’t remember any jackets. I don’t know what we used when we went out.
Q. Did you ever have to sleep on the floor?
A. No. I was scared. I always made sure I went to the bathroom. Well, they told us to. We had to brush our teeth and go to the bathroom before we went to bed really, really early. Because they woke us up when it was still dark to go to Mass every morning, they called it.
Q. We’re just going to change tapes, but I would like to ask you a few more things.
— End of Part 1
Q. Okay. Are you ready?
A. Um-hmm.
Q. You mentioned waking up in the morning very early to go to Mass.
A. Yes.
Q. Did you go to Mass right in the school?
A. Yeah, right in the school.
Q. And then there were classes or not really education, but what did you do the rest of the day?
A. We had to darn boys’ socks on the weekend. We were allowed to play for a little while. I remember trying to learn how to play softball, but other than that we were all assigned to do chores around the school. If I didn’t have to go to the Superior, they called her, I remember having to go to her room, too. But if I didn’t have to go there then I had to shine the banisters of the stairs they had. They gave us oil and we had to dust it.
I was assigned different times to clean the Sisters’ —
They had their own Dining Room off the girls’ Dining Hall. I had to clear their dishes off their table after the meal, and the Priests’. I had to clear them off the table different weeks. I guess we had different chores each week throughout the year.
And then having to work in the Laundry Room. I had to go and help. That’s when they did the whole week’s wash. But other than that I don’t remember.
Q. Did people call you Velma when you were there?
A. I don’t remember.
Q. Do you remember if you had a number?
A. Yeah. My number was forty-two.
Q. Does that ever come up for you now if you hear the number forty-two?
A. Yes. I was born in 1941. I was always so envious of some of the girls that got visiting on Sundays. Their mother and families —
Nobody ever visited me there. It was like I was a nobody all my life.
Q. You have felt that way all of your life?
A. Yeah. I do still. My children, they don’t bother with me.
Q. Do you have grandchildren?
A. I have eighteen grandchildren. They don’t bother with me either.
Sometimes they’ll call me. Sometimes my kids will phone me.
Q. Do they know your story?
A. No.
Q. How are your kids? Do you know how they’re doing?
A. Dysfunction. Just dysfunction.
Q. Had your husband also been to Residential School?
A. My kids’ father I divorced in ’72. He didn’t go. He left us when my fifth daughter was a year and a half, he went to the United States and just forgot us. Then I got with a man that went to Kuper Island. I suffered in a terrible violent relationship. So my kids, especially my sons, are very angry about him. They are mad about him and mad at me for being with him, for staying with him and for the abuse that they seen me go through.
I didn’t know how to get out of it.
Q. Did you know that it was wrong?
A. No. I didn’t have any feelings for myself. I didn’t know that I should until eight years ago when my son got killed in a car crash.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
Imagine it took a death to start feeling for myself, it took the death of my son for feelings to come for me.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
It breaks my heart that my son, my baby —
I went to Round Lake for treatment because I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to drink again. I was thirteen years sober when he died and I wanted to drink again. I wanted to kill myself so many times, almost every day, because of the pain in my heart. The counselor, she asked me what did I feel when I would get beat up. What did I feel for my dad when he died? I didn’t feel nothing for so many years. I was a shut down person.
Q. You shut down.
A. I shut down when my mom died and they put me in Residential.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
A. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know what was going to happen from day to day.
Q. Have you ever come to realize it’s not your fault?
A. Now I’m starting to feel that none of it is my fault. But I’m so angry my mom died and I started getting molested by my brother. Nobody was there to help me, nobody to help me in Residential either, nobody to help me anywhere.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
Q. You said when your son died suddenly you were able to feel something, but you wanted to end your life. What do you think made you hang in there?
A. Because one of the Shaker People (ph.) told me that if I killed myself then I won’t see my son on the other side. And I want to see him. I haven’t even dreamt of him at all. He was my only child that seemed to care about me of all my six children, besides my baby granddaughter I raised. He told me he didn’t blame me for his childhood because he was always in a lot of trouble with the law, going to jail, going to Juvenile when he was younger and jail after.
He stayed home at Nanoose with me off and on, or he would stay home with me. So I felt a bond with him.
Q. Do you think feeling that loss and deciding to stay here in the world that you’ve healed a little bit since that time, and has this process of sharing helped you at all?
A. I try to think, I try to hope there is something, some purpose that I should go on with life considering all that I went through, but I don’t know what it is. But I don’t see none of my kids. They don’t phone or want to visit me, take time out to visit me in Nanoose. And they all mostly have cars. I guess that’s the way I brought them up and now I’ve learned that’s the way they are.
I can only change myself but I can’t change them. I can only stay sober and be as healthy as I can for myself and be there if they ever need me, like I was for my son before he died.
Q. As far as my questions go, I’ve asked as many as I want to ask and you’ve told me a lot more. But is there anything else that you would like to share with us?
A. Only that I find out when I’ve been going to Sakaluten (ph.) that opened on Quadra Island for survivors of Residential that I know that I’m not the only one that is going through, or are still going through what I did in my life. I have learnt to have faith in something up there, or wherever, a higher power, what I called upon when my son died, and I’ve had cancer, too, to give me the strength to go on that a person can do it.
Every day before I get out of bed I call out: Keep me sober today. Help me with my health because I’m scared my cancer will come back. I don’t know. I wonder if it’s —
Because I felt so much anger, so much anger in myself before that I got cancer. I don’t know.
Q. A lot of people say our emotions are tied to our health.
A. That’s what they told me in Treatment. I’m scared that it will come back. It’s silly thinking when I so wanted to die before, eh. Now I call upon that higher something to keep me alive today because people tell me about their family members who have cancer and it comes back and they die. I want to be with my son but I want to be here for my other children if they ever need me.
I know for my baby, for Carla, she’s the only one that cares about how I’m doing. To hear her voice on the phone, I want to be here when she wants me. She has given me the strength to go on. And I will as long as I have that.
Q. Velma, I want to thank you very much for sharing that with us. We really appreciate it.
Do you feel okay?
A. Yes.
Q. Okay.
— End of Interview
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