Margaret Cardinal- I Was Number 40
I’m originally from Saddle Lake, I went to boarding school for about 10 years, I went to Blue Quills, I started in late ‘59 to 1969. My parents are also went to the same school, my mother, she was there from the age of three till she was 16, until she was married off to my father.
My father was also there, my mother actually only had grade three, all those years she was there she spent cooking, sewing for the nuns and working, and not being able to go to school. I didn’t realize till I was about five years, in grade five, that she didn’t know how to write, because I wrote to her when I was in Charles Camsell hospital, and she wrote back and I didn’t really, I couldn’t believe that her writing was lower than my writing. I had to ask her “why?” and she said, “that’s because I spend most of my time doing work, rather than being educated.”
And my father spent all his school in the barn, and the reason, what I say, I mean by the barn, is that when he entered school, he had 90 percent hearing loss as a result of a childhood illness. So naturally, they thought he was [disabled] and uneducated, uneducational… so he spent all his boarding school life, managing cows, horses, and the animals and the farm.
When I entered boarding school, my first day if I can describe it would be, being gathered at a Sunday at the local church and being put into a granary truck. I had never seen a granary truck before. Because we didn’t have school buses then, they hauled us away in this granary truck to Blue Quills.
When we got to Blue Quills, we were herded into this cave, I’d never seen such a huge cave, I didn’t know at the time that it was a gym. It had big windows on the top but none that you could look out, it was very scary.
They um, they sorted us by size and gender, and I was the smallest. I was number 40. I was number 40 all those 10 years. I wasn’t just, you know, it wasn’t. I think that only on formal occasions that I get called my Christian name. I didn’t even know my name was Margaret Cardinal, until, when they started registering us, my cousin had to tell me that my name was Margaret Cardinal. I refused to believe her because I only spoke Cree and I kept insisting know what my name was but my cousin she said, “You better start learning your name because otherwise you’re gonna pay.”
Like any boarding school, they cut our long hair, because in my family when you have long hair, it means you have a good life. And the only time we cut our hair is when we have deaths in our family…
– Margaret Cardinal
Notes:
Margaret Cardinal Testimony. SP118_part16. Shared at Slave Lake Hearing Sharing Panel. June 18, 2013. National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation holds copyright. https://archives.nctr.ca/SP118_part16
