THE INTERVIEWER: Could you please say and spell your whole name for us.
ELSIE PAUL: It’s Elsie Paul; E-l-s-i-e P-a-u-l.
Q. Thank you.
And where do you come from?
A. I’m from the Sliammon First Nations. It’s the Coast Salish. This is in Powell River. We are neighbours to the City of Powell River.
Q. Great. What school did you go to?
A. I went to a day school on the Reserve first of all when I was a little girl. It was kind of hit and miss because my grandparents travelled a lot up and down the coast. So when we were on the Reserve in the winter months I went to school there, a one-room day school. Then when I guess I was around ten I went to Sechelt Residential School.
Q. Okay.
A. I was in Sechelt for probably a year. But it turns out it was two years. They identified two years. So that was quite an experience because I had never been away from my grandparents up until then. I speak mostly our language of the Sliammon people, so adjusting to a totally different culture was very difficult for me and just being away from my grandparents who had always been there for me.
My grandparents took me when I was a new baby from my mom because I was the third baby. I was my mom’s third child. In our culture this quite often happened that grandparents helped with the grandchildren. And because my mom and my dad were moving away from the community, they were moving off to Port Alberni where my dad was going to go and work, my grandmother said to my mom that, you know, “you’ve got a handful, you’ve got a little toddler and the oldest being just over two”. We were all a year apart.
Q. Wow.
A. I being a new baby, my grandmother took me and named me after a child she lost who had gone to Residential School in Sechelt.
Q. Did she die in the school?
A. She did not die there, but she died shortly after they went and picked her up and brought her home. She was ten years old, nine or ten. So that was a terrible experience for my grandparents. She was younger than my mom.
My mom was in Residential School until she was sixteen. When she came out a couple of years later my aunt Elsie went to Residential School. She had never been away, of course, from home. My grandmother said she died of a broken heart.
By the time they let my grandparents know that she was very very sick, they finally got a hold of my grandparents and they went by boat, open boat, from our community, which is probably about fifty miles south along the coast to Sechelt, and they got to the beach there and my grandfather went up and picked her up. Nothing was ever said about what she was sick from or what kind of illness she had, but she had lost so much weight and she was really really ill. She couldn’t even walk. My grandfather had to carry her to the boat.
So they took her home. They of course rowed home, or whatever means they had. They got home and within a few days she passed away. So for my grandparents that was a real difficult experience for them. It was a tragedy. And from then on when I came along, they named me after that youngest daughter they had.
They refused to send me to Residential School. How they did that was by being absent from the community when the children were gathered and taken away to the Residential School. I guess once the school was filled to capacity they didn’t bother with the ones that they weren’t able to capture at the time. So my grandparents always made it a point to be away from the community when the round-up happened. So that went on until I was probably about ten years of age. And then I was sent there. I was pretty much forced to go.
It was difficult. It was difficult to be in that environment that had so many restrictions and being with people I didn’t know, other children I did not know at all. But I do remember some kids that came from another community north of us. I was a big sister to one little girl. She was very little. She must have been about five or six years old at the time. I remember her crying and being really sad. So I was made the big sister.
I was in the Intermediate Dormitory and she was in the Little Girls’ Dormitory. It was my job to look after her in the morning and get her dressed and to help her with her bath and stuff, and grooming. She didn’t have much hair after the initial entry into the school because, you know, they cut your hair off, so it was just a matter of taking care of her and looking after her. But I remember her crying all the time, being lonely. When you’re ten years old, how do you comfort another child? That’s what sticks in my mind about that time.
And kids never having enough to eat. I think back on those days and I wonder was it during the Depression. Was that why there was so little food? Was it because food was rationed at that time? I guess in my own mind I’m trying to justify or make excuses why we didn’t have enough food. There was plenty of food on the table of the people who looked after us. There was butter on that table. We had fat on our bread. That’s what they put on our bread, one slice of bread per meal. The spread that was on there was beef fat or pork fat. When you do your duty and go to clean up the table of the caregivers and you see a beautiful setting there and they have a good choice of food —
So when I think of all that I resent that. But I try to let it go. That was back a long time ago and I’ve learned to let it go. There’s nothing you can do about any of that any more.
I remember kids getting punished for wetting their bed and kids crying in the night, being sick, and no one to comfort them. I remember a lot of praying, constant praying.
Q. Was it Catholic or Anglican?
A. Catholic.
Q. Were there Nuns?
A. Nuns and a couple of Priests and a Brother I remember being there.
I remember being woken up by the Nuns clapping their hands to wake us up. That was our alarm. Without hesitation, without thinking, you dropped on your knees beside your bed and pray. You get up and you go to the washroom and get cleaned up, get your “care” child, the child you’re looking after, and you get her ready as well. You go back and make your bed. You go and help her make her bed. And the beds had to be done just so. This is very early in the morning.
Once the beds were all made up we were all lined up in the Dorm and you pray again before you leave that room. Then we go down to the Chapel and go to early Mass. We leave there and go have our breakfast, and then we pray again before breakfast. After breakfast we pray again.
Then we go into our classrooms. When you enter the classroom you pray again. When you leave the classroom to go out for recess, you pray again. So every time we entered a room or left a room, we have to pray. That was the whole day. It was just ongoing, constant. You didn’t mingle, you didn’t talk, until you were spoken to. You always had to line up.
I remember the food being so very different from what I was used to. The food was so foreign and I thought so terrible.
Q. What kind of food did you have at home?
A. Mostly we lived on game, deer meat, and a lot of seafood prepared traditionally. That was all I knew, my grandmother’s cooking. We had fried bread or oven bread, jam or dried fruits, dried meat, dried fish and clams. Those were all the foods I was familiar with. And to get there and to have a dish of some sort of stew put in front of me that I was not familiar with at all —
I always remember the food that was put in front of me. It must have been pork stew. I remember the rind being in the stew with the hair on it, with fur on it, and the child next to me was saying that you have to eat that food or else you’re going to be punished if you don’t. I think I blanked it out. I don’t know if I ate it.
And then there was custard. I had never had custard before, custard pudding. She kept telling me I had to eat it. In the meantime the Nun is walking back and forth watching over us. You can’t pass it on to anyone else. You have to eat it. So it’s pretty much forced down your throat. If you didn’t want it, that was too bad. You’re going to eat it.
Another thing I remember is being given cod liver oil every day. At mealtimes you go and line up. I always remember just dreading that moment of having to go and line up and the Nun would hold the plate in one hand and the can in the other hand. As you get up there you pick up that spoon that’s on the plate – we shared that one spoon – so you pick up that tablespoon while she pours cod liver oil in there. You have no choice. You take it.
I remember one time the spoon was so big and it’s so full that I just kind of turned it, you know, dumped out a little bit. Well, just for that I had to take two tablespoons. So you just didn’t go against the rules. That was the worst thing I remember, having to take that.
Q. What was the hardest part about Residential School for you?
A. Just being homesick. Just being homesick and missing my grandparents. It’s just so foreign and so different. It was such a different environment. We were cooped up and fenced in. I wasn’t used to that, not being able to go home. We were a distance away by boat and there wasn’t the road we have now whereby maybe they would be able to come and visit me by road if we had a road then. But it was by boat that they travelled.
So that is what I missed most of all, my grandparents, and the totally different lifestyle altogether.
Q. I would like to ask you Elsie, do you remember what years you were at school?
A. It was about 1941 and 1942.
Q. Thank you.
You only had to stay for two years, until you were about twelve.
A. Um-hmm.
Q. Do you know why you were allowed to not go any more?
A. Well, again, my grandparents left the community. My grandfather was a hand logger. He was a fisherman. And he pretty much lived off the land. He had a houseboat that he towed from one place to another up and down the coast, and we lived a lot on the houseboat. So when it was time to go to another logging show that he went to log, things were so different then that he could do that hand logging without having to work for a company, a logging company. He would send the logs down on skids and boom it up and send it away.
Or he’s just fishing. Dog fishing we called it. He would set out his line and I would go with him and bait the line and set it out. That’s how he made his living. They used to save the dogfish liver. That’s all you took and that was being processed, sent away, and he made $4 out of a four-gallon can. When he had about ten cans he would take it to market. That was one way for him to make a living.
He had a trap line so he had all these different kinds of activities, the kind of work he did, that’s what kept him away from the Reserve, so we only went back to the Reserve around Christmastime. In the fall time we would go back there. But they made it a point to be away from there come August, the end of August, to September.
Q. Did you go to school again after that?
A. No, I did not. I had a very limited education. I grew up and I learned from life experience.
Q. That’s a good education.
A. Yeah. I don’t —
Well, I shouldn’t say I don’t regret it. I do regret that I don’t have a formal education. But I did take upgrading. I did take upgrading. When I left school I was told I was at a Grade 4 level. So I took upgrading from then. It was difficult but I got my Grade 10 level. So that’s what I had.
And then I got a job as a Social Worker for my community, only because I could speak our language fluently I was given the job by our own people. I could speak fluently. It was very new to transfer the Social Work Program to the communities. So I acquired that job.
Before that I worked in other jobs like housekeeping and oyster shucking and jobs like that. I worked at the hospital in Powell River in housekeeping.
When I started Social Work then I got my Social Work degree, by attending classes at the University in Vancouver. I would go down there on weekends and do a Friday evening course, Saturday and half a day Sunday. Then I would go back home and continue my work. So that took quite a while. Back then you could get your Certificate with 200 merits, or whatever it was called then. Now I understand you can’t, so I was lucky to get that. So I did get my Social Work degree.
Q. How long have you been in Social Work?
A. I started to work for my community in ’72. That’s when I was hired.
Q. Wow.
A. I retired after twenty-four and a half years that I was a Social Worker for the Sliammon Indian Band, and also for the Hamalko (ph.) Band and the Klahoose (ph.) Band because we came under one administration. So I used to go up to the other two communities once a month to each community.
So after twenty-four years I couldn’t do it another day. I resigned. That was it.
Q. Do you think your experience in Residential School was helpful to you in your Social Work?
A. I really don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think what helped me is the teachings from my grandmother and the other Elders in my community, and having been around them all the time when I was a little girl growing up and being around the Elders a lot, doing things, that was my classroom. That was my teaching. That, to me, is so very important still today, the teaching in our language. It’s called T’ao (ph.). It’s our T’ao. How to respect things, your boundaries, all these things were taught in a very good way from the Elders, to be respectful, to care for people and to look after yourself, because if you don’t look after yourself, no one is going to look after you. You have to get up early in the morning and be busy doing things and not to be lazy and to be industrious. So with all those things my days were busy. I was always busy.
And not only that, in the evenings we were told legends and stories and things like that. I was never read to as a child like we do with our grandchildren now with the books, and stuff. But it was all oral teaching. Some of the legends we were told were funny, but there was always a moral to the story. That’s where you learned how to respect the animals, how to respect other people, how to respect Mother Earth, and to be appreciative of all of the things the Creator has given you. So those were my teachings. I value those things. I value those teachings today.
So that’s basically it in a nutshell.
Q. Thank you. You have answered all of our questions.
Do you have anything else that you would like to share?
A. Well, I do appreciate what is taking place now. It’s a little late for a lot of our people, like my mom, for example. I’m sure life was hard on her. She went to Residential School through no fault of her own and I’m sure it was very difficult for her because she was there for years, and a lot of other people that I know in our community that have gone there. Some have had it worse than others.
So on behalf of my mother I wish she had this opportunity to be able to go through the healing that’s happening.
So, that’s it.
Q. Thank you so much.
— Speaker overcome with emotion
A. Sorry.
Q. There’s no need to be sorry. Take your time.
— A Short Pause
A. I guess for those reasons is why I’m really motivated to be a part of the healing, not just for myself but for other people, other people who have suffered so much more.
My late husband had a difficult life. He went to Residential School for several years. He used to talk about the punishment that he endured, the strappings, and he was not a happy man. He had a lot of problems. He had addictions, alcohol addiction. He didn’t know how to love and embrace the children. He loved them, but he didn’t know how to show it, or for me. That was something he learned in that institution.
I regret that. He used to say, “I don’t want to be that way. I love my children.” Because I would get after him, you know, you need to show your children you love them. He would say, “I love my children.” But he could not show it. He could not say it freely, but I know he did.
There’s so many like him. He would tell stories about the kids he was in school with, the boys, and how they got strapped just for stealing an apple because they were hungry. Some of them tried to run away and they would get strapped for two weeks every day as a lesson to the other kids. So he lived with all that.
So on his behalf, too, I’m glad this is happening.
Q. Thank you, Elsie. I want to give you something from us. This is from Manitoba. It’s a rock and we want to give it to you to thank you, and some tobacco as well.
A. Thank you so much. And thank you for the work you’re doing.
Q. Thank you so much.
A. Thank you.
— End of Interview