Residential School Survivor Stories

I lived in the bush with my family about twenty miles north of our home community. We used to go to the community at different times of the year to get supplies from the Hudson Bay Company store, things like flour, salt, tea, lard, and traps. When we went to the store my father always […]

I was born in the bush and I grew up in the bush. My father killed or trapped a variety of different animals and birds. My mother caught the fish in nets, which they had set, and she collected berries and other foods from the land. My older brothers also killed lots of different kinds […]

When I grew up I lived with my parents and my brothers and sisters. There were other people who also lived in the bush near where we lived. Some of these people were relatives, or kin, and others were people that my Dad trapped and hunted with. We spoke Ojibwe. Many of the words were […]

When I got a cold I got medicine from the bush. I knew what kind of berries, roots, leaves, twigs, bark, or plants to pick for almost anything that might be wrong with me. I would go into the bush and pick some medicines, bring it home, prepare it and use it. I always got […]

The priests always told us that we had no religion, that we were pagans. But we did have spiritual practices. These practices may have been different from the ceremonies that we saw in church, but they celebrated the same kinds of events – events such as births, weddings and funerals. There was a spiritual element […]

One day in the late summer of 1962, my parents said that my sister and I had to go to residential school. They started to pack my sister’s clothes. When they started to pack my clothes, I knew that I would be leaving with my sister. But I did not want to go away so […]

The year 1955 was an eventful year for me. Apart from turning twelve in February of that year, I had to go to residential school far away from my home. Two of my older sisters had been sent to the Pelican Lake School near Sioux Lookout because we were Anglican and that was an Anglican […]

When I went to residential school I slept in a dormitory. When I arrived at the school I was taken up to a small room near the dormitory where I put my clothes in one of many little cubby-holes which they called a closet. It is a good thing that I did not have very […]

I grew up in the bush. Our house was a small cabin with one room, but everyone had their own space. My parents slept in one corner of the cabin. The girls slept in one corner and the boys in another. The fourth corner was used as a kitchen and had a shelf with cooking […]