Jerry Wood- I Don’t Remember Too Many Happy Times
All these things that happened in residential school. You know, all the lickings and the beatings I got. Food, food was terrible. If you got sick, you get it on your plate, and then you recycle it until you kept it down. We used to walk by the priest’s dining room. You know they had a nice white tablecloth, polished silver, two candles, two bottles of wine. Great food, while we ate the garbage. Yeah, I can only say that.
I don’t remember too many happy times in residential school. I think just the Saturdays where sometimes we were allowed to go rabbit hunting, you know with sling shots. So, it’s a time to, you know, we roast rabbits out in a bush. You know, and have a good feast. Other than that, there weren’t that many happy times, you know?
I guess we had one of our boys from Cold Lake Reserve, Dene. He was good at opening doors which were locked up. So, we used to borrow the priests mass wine. We’d have two pails, two pails, one with water and one empty. They were all in big ceramic jugs with corks. We’d take a little bit and fill it up with water, shake it, and then we go to a bar or go into the nuns’ and priests’ storage room. You know, where they had all the good canned stuff, liberate some of the food and you know, that’s how we had to learn how to survive, you know?
So I can’t really remember too many happy times out there. It was all of the things that I went through. You know, the physical abuse, you know, the sexual abuse, mental abuse, spiritual abuse, cultural abuse. All those things that happened to me and it took me a long, long, long time to deal with it, you know?
– Jerry Wood
Notes:
Jerry Wood Testimony. SC143_part02. Shared at Alberta National Event (ABNE) Sharing Circle. March 29, 2014. National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation holds copyright. https://archives.nctr.ca/SC143_part02
