John Janvier- I Was Taken Away
Good morning. My name is John Janvier. I’m not a Frenchman, but I have a French name. That’s a way back in history, and I’m from Cold Lake, and I speak Dene.
I went to residential school, I was in Blue Quills for 12 years, and just before that time, I had two little sisters. That was, my little sisters, both of them passed away and just… The year after they passed away, my other siblings were, it was at the end of, or early September, 1st few days in September, a big farm truck came to the churchyard, in my community. They were putting on students that were, that were to go to going to Blue Quills, and my [older] brother and my sister were already going there. So they went to, they were put on the, on the farm truck, and I, losing my little sister’s just a while back, I didn’t know what to do so I cried my head off.
And finally, the principal at that time said to my father, “well, we will take him, and you know, I will try, if he’s okay at the school, we will keep him.”
So, they put me on a truck just to be with my siblings. And then it took us, I don’t know at that time about three hours, to get from Cold Lake churchyard to Blue Quills, about three hours.
By the time the truck left us it was almost evening, and you can imagine us standing at the back of a big farm truck, and it was you know, it was wide open, it was cold. The lucky thing there, was there, was some older students already, some were teenagers, and I we’re just a little boy about six year old. Anyway, they kept us, they took us in their arms, and just to keep us warm, the smaller, smaller of us, was quite a few of us.
Anyway, and we were only a handful of Dene at Blue Quills. The remainder of the student body were all Cree, they used to make fun of our language, because it was such a different language. But anyway, it didn’t, that didn’t really matter.
But anyway, my first experience really was loneliness, because I was taken away from a place where I was loved. All of us, all my siblings were loved very much by our parents and to me they were model parents. But anyway, I missed all that.
– John Janvier
Notes:
John Janvier Testimony. SC142_part03. Shared at Alberta National Event (ABNE) Sharing Circle. March 28, 2014. National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation holds copyright. https://archives.nctr.ca/SC142_part03
