Isabell Muldoe- The Three-Day Train Ride
We’re from BC. Those of us that are sitting up here and there were many, many, many students from Haida Gwaii to the Gitxsan Nation that went to, that came to Edmonton to go to school here. I suppose we were brought here because the residential schools in British Columbia were full so they started shipping us out.
Our journey started from Prince Rupert, some of us were very, very young, and others were a bit older. We got on a train and this one supervisor that came from here to Edmonton on a train ride. He had boxes and boxes and boxes of lunch with him. In these big cardboard boxes, were our lunches. In this lunch were bologna sandwiches, peanut butter, and maybe an apple or an orange. Three days, he traveled from here to BC. to come and pick us up to be a supervisor on the train on the way back.
You know as well as I do that after three days, Bologna not sitting in a fridge turns green. That’s what was fed to us on a train, green bologna, and some of the children are hungry but I think that most, most of us probably ate just the peanut butter sandwich and got rid of the rest.
Some of us were fortunate enough to have money so whenever the train stopped somewhere, we’d jump off and go to a store if there was one close by. We buy a little bit of goodies and shared with those that didn’t, didn’t have money. The three-day train ride we didn’t have coaches to sleep in, back in those days in the early ‘50s. With the old trains they had these big luggage areas, they were so huge that you could actually climb up there and sleep there. And that’s where a lot of the young people and the older students slept, wherever you could see, we crowded in one, two boxes, two cars- the boys on one car and the girls on the other.
When we got to Edmonton, we were bused there from the train station, or no, actually, I think it might have been from Jasper. We were bused to the residential school. Again boys in one bus, and girls on the other, in another bus.
We got off in front of the school, we looked up at this big building, it was huge, because we were a little then. It was a huge building, you’ve seen pictures out there, and to us it was like we walked in there and we were just literally swallowed up in these buildings.
We got swallowed up and for the girls that’s where we stayed.
– Isabell Muldoe
Notes:
Isabell Muldoe Testimony. SP205_part06. Shared at Alberta National Event (ABNE) Sharing Panel. March 29, 2014. National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation holds copyright. https://archives.nctr.ca/SP205_part06
