THE INTERVIEWER: Could you please tell us your name and spell it for us.
CECILE KETLO: My name is Cecile Ketlo; C-e-c-i-l-e K-e-t-l-o.
Q. Where are you from?
A. I was born in Fort St. James, but I married into the Nadleh First Nations.
Q. Nadleh?
A. N-a-d-l-e-h. W-h-u-t-e-n.
Q. I’ve seen that on some people jackets.
A. Yeah, the Elders. I never got the jacket.
Q. No? They’re nice jackets.
What school did you attend?
A. Lejac. And Kamloops.
Q. How many years were you in Lejac?
A. I think from 1944 to ’49.
Q. What about Kamloops?
A. Kamloops I went from 1952 to 1956. I spent a couple of years in day school on the Reserve that was run by the Catholic church.
Q. Okay. What was the name of that school?
A. Hmm.
Q. Was that before 1944?
A. It was 1950, I think.
Q. In 1950 there was a day school?
A. The first year we spent in the Community Hall because the school wasn’t ready.
Q. So did it only last a few years, the day school?
A. It’s been there for years and years.
Q. But some people still went to Residential School, even though there was a day school on the Reserve? Is it hard to remember?
A. I remember after my mom passed away, I guess my younger brother and sister were brought there by the Social Worker to Lejac.
Q. Okay. How old were you when you started at Lejac?
A. Seven.
Q. Seven. Good for you. Do you remember your first day?
A. No.
Q. No memories.
Do you remember what life was like living at home before you went to Residential School? Were you able to speak your language? Did you speak your language at home and did you practice any cultural traditions?
A. Hmm. I don’t know. I can’t really remember. My dad was —
His dad was from McLeod Lake and they don’t have a clan system up there. My mom was already a product of Residential School. There was a Residential School at the Nadleh Reserve.
Q. Do you remember what a typical day was like at Residential School? What time you would wake up?
A. Gee, I can’t remember. I know we would go to church in the morning before breakfast.
Q. It was a Roman Catholic school; right?
A. Yeah. Then we would go down for breakfast and pray before breakfast, pray after breakfast, do our chores and then we would go to the classroom and pray before classes. All day.
I guess in a way I was more fortunate than the boys because a lot of them spent a lot of time working outside.
Q. What would they do outside?
A. Milk cows. Make wood.
Q. So there was a farm?
A. They farmed, yeah. In the fall there were all those vegetables to be brought in and stuff like that. We did the —
What did we do? We darned socks and cleaned the buildings on our side.
Q. Did you live off the food that you grew on the farm? Or did they sell the food?
A. I think they sold the food. But the vegetables —
I can’t remember eating vegetables. But I remember one time they cooked cabbage and I couldn’t eat it. I just could not eat it. I sat there until I don’t know how long to finish it.
Q. So the food wasn’t very good?
A. No.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
Q. You can take a minute and have a sip of water if you like.
— A short pause
Q. Are you okay? Do you want us to stop for a minute?
A. I want to take a break.
Q. We’ll stop for a minute. Okay.
— A short pause
Q. Can you talk about a typical day at school? We were talking about the food a little bit. What about your education? Do you think you got a good education at Residential School?
A. I think I did. I think my second year there I spent a year and 3 months in the hospital for TB.
Q. Can you talk about that a little bit? Did you contract TB at the school?
A. Yeah.
Q. Were there quite a few students who got TB?
A. There were quite a few. And it was just the hospital in Vanderhoof. People talk about going to Prince Rupert, but at that time it wasn’t open in 1945. It must have been about ’45 when I went.
Q. To the hospital?
A. Yeah.
Q. What was it like in the hospital?
A. Gee, I can’t remember the food. I remember this nurse. She was mean. She would take away our nightgown if we turned around. I remember sneaking away from the hospital. My mom picked me up. I went home to the Reserve for a weekend I think. But it was really brave of her to pick me up. She didn’t ask permission. We went out the back door!
But a lot of stuff I don’t remember, even like my first day.
Q. Do you remember what it was like to go home in the summer for summer holidays?
A. It was good. We were glad to see our parents.
Q. Do you have brothers and sisters?
A. There were twelve of us.
Q. A big family. Did they all go to Residential School?
A. My older brother —
How old was he? He went one year and my dad took him out to help him go trapping and stuff like that. But he still got affected, you know.
Q. Did any of your brothers or sisters get TB?
A. My sister and my brother. I remember going home and my sister passed away. She was up in Prince Rupert. She was seventeen or eighteen.
Q. That was from TB?
A. I remember her being in the hospital with me and she had an open sore. They said she had TB. But I wonder if it was cancer or something. She passed away.
The next month when we went home, the brother who was 2 years older than her passed away.
Q. Was that from TB as well?
A. Yeah.
Q. So how would you describe your experience at Residential School? Are you able to talk about any things that happened?
A. I guess one of the things is being afraid all the time, like scared of punishment. So I did what I was told all the time.
We would go to church all the time, and I would faint. Wherever we are we would have a choir I’d faint. It just kept going on that way. Finally the Nuns let me sleep in with the Junior girls, but I kept fainting.
We had chores to do. Like you go into the bakery. You go to work as a cook, or work in the egg room. I tried cooking and they kicked me out because I fainted on them. So I didn’t really learn how to cook. I didn’t know how to bake. I never worked in the bakery.
Q. Do you know why you fainted so often?
A. No.
Q. Did that only happen at Residential School?
A. Yeah.
Q. Are there any other things you want to share about your experience at Lejac?
A. It is such a blur. Even going to the first day of school, I can’t remember. I keep trying to remember.
Q. Do you remember how you got there the first day?
A. No.
My dad and his brothers had a huge trap line up by the Nation River, way up. Father Simpson would go right up there with his pick-up and pick up all the kids that had to go to school, towards the end of August. For 2 weeks in August we would go up and make dry meat and stuff like that and live in a tent. My dad had a cabin and we were so carefree.
Q. Did you ever try to run away from school?
A. No.
Q. What about Kamloops? What was that like?
A. It was okay. We were older but still under the rule of the Nuns. If any of the girls had a boyfriend they always thought that we would go farther. They expected that of us and it wasn’t that way.
I guess one of the things is we were never taught anything about sex. They just made us feel ashamed.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
Q. Before we talk a little bit about how life has been since then and your healing, are there any final things you would like to say?
A. I was ashamed to be an Indian and ashamed of my language. I didn’t know the difference between religion and spirituality. Every time we did something wrong we were always told we were going to go to Hell.
Q. So what happened right after Residential School?
A. After Kamloops?
Q. Um-hmm.
A. I met my husband and I got married. But we had no emotions. I never told my kids I loved them.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
Q. How many children do you have?
A. I have 8.
Q. Do you want to stop again for a minute?
— A short pause
Q. How is healing for you now? How is your healing journey?
A. It’s been good. We’re able to talk about it. Our kids never knew our story. They were surprised that we would go home in a cattle truck. We would get picked up by the same one. We weren’t allowed to speak to the boys.
Q. So you are able to talk to your kids about your experiences now?
A. A little bit. There’s a lot of anger, though, especially with my husband. I know he had a terrible time but he didn’t talk about it, not to me. The only time he could talk about it was when he was drunk. But he’s been sober seventeen years.
But for me I didn’t think I was good enough.
Q. Do you feel good enough now and proud of who you are?
A. Yeah. Because I got a lot of non-Native friends. I go golfing, even after my daughter-in-law quit golfing, I’m the only Native up there that plays golf. I don’t feel ashamed of who I am.
Q. That’s good.
A. But Kamloops gave me a good education. I guess that’s the one good thing. And another good thing is I know people from all over BC because everybody went to high school there. We were always segregated.
There used to be a basketball team and they were pretty good.
Q. Did you play?
A. No.
Q. How old are your children now?
A. The oldest one is forty-eight.
Q. And the youngest?
A. My youngest is thirty-six. I brought one grandchild up, too. Well, 2 actually. I took her out of the hospital and I brought her up as my own.
Q. How old is she?
A. She’s twenty-eight now. She has 2 girls. I told her “good payback”. She gave me the hardest time when she was a teenager. Now she’s got 2 girls.
But it’s been a hard go. I worked as a Social Worker for the Band for nineteen years, trying to help people, but I had to help myself first. There are so many problems on the Reserve and so many people are in denial.
I hope this moves them along.
Q. Do you think that things like this that go on and more people coming out and more people talking, do you think that is helping?
A. I think so, because of the family violence, the secrets that are kept within families. I know my kids suffered from that, what we went through in Residential School.
Q. They don’t teach people how to be mothers.
A. No. But I figure my kids turned out pretty good. But they still suffered the family violence. I tried to tell the old man to go through ADR, but I don’t push him. He’s got to do it on his own time. But we lived with his anger, the family, the kids and I.
But I guess Residential School made us afraid of everything.
I remember before going to Residential School our cousins and I would play hide-and-seek in the bush. We were not scared of anything. We weren’t scared of bears. My brothers and I would go check our snares before breakfast.
Nowadays I can’t even walk because of bears in the spring. I don’t know. It was carefree.
Q. Are there any final things you would like to say before we wrap up?
A. It’s too hard.
Q. Okay. You’ve done extremely well. Thank you very, very much for coming.
A. It’s too hard.
Q. We’re done. That’s okay. That’s really great.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
— End of Interview