Margaret Cardinal- I Never Saw My Brother
The other incident that happened in boarding school, was my little brother, he’s two years younger than me, he came to boarding school and he didn’t stay more than two. Two weeks, he ended up in the hospital because the nun there, she’s probably gone now, but her name was sister Jubeir, she ripped half my sister- my brother- my brother’s ear off, because my brother was… He just didn’t want to be there. He didn’t want to stay there, and he protested so much that his ear, he wanted to run so much that the nun ripped his ear.
I said to my brother when he was older, that he should claim this, and he said no, he said he wanted to forget it, and he did get the first payment. He said “I only stayed there a week and a half.” and I said, I said to him, “You suffered a week and a half.”
My older brother was there. One valentines, I made him a Be My Valentine card and I discreetly, at lunchtime, gave it to him. I didn’t realize we, we, got caught, and he suffered quite a bit, and I did too because I was made to feel that what I did was very dirty. That, you know, that was just… it was disgusting, that I dared to touch my brother, and be touched by a man. I never saw my brother for two weeks, because the only time we could see each other was when we went downstairs to the, to the, where we had lunch, at the cafeteria.
I spent a lot of time in the chapel when I was young, and a lot of time in the stairwell because the nun’s didn’t know what to do with me. When I was five, I had polio, I got polio in the hospital. So therefore, I couldn’t go skating, I couldn’t go do things that most of the kids could do at boarding school.
So I had to spend my time in the chapel because the nun said that I deserved the wickedness that I had in my life and that’s how I’m paying for it and that I had to spend it in the chapel. And if they couldn’t put me in the chapel, I was put in the stairwell.
– 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
