Third floor – Digitally Preserving Former Indian Residential Schools in Alberta

Donna Axe Running Rabbit- Finally I Got Fed Up

I think when I was nine years old. I started to run away from here.

And at nights you get hungry but what are you supposed to eat? We don’t get nothing.

Mandel Old Woman- Every Little Thing You Get Punished For

It’s just so miserable out there. You never get to see your parents. Sometimes I have to stay at the at the residential for I say maybe, sometimes for two three weeks there, nobody’s around

Rita Jane Many Guns- And Then Another Time

I went to the bathroom we were already in bed, I got caught for getting up and I had to kneel outside, outside the door. I don’t know how long, my knees were really hurting from kneeling down

Eileen Black- They are Not Going to Beat Me

It now is a place of learning, so it is teaching people to have good lives. In that way all that ugliness will not win, the evil the was there

Allan Stevens- It Was Bad What they Call Residential School

If we are late for supper, the following weekend we don’t go home. We were held back at the school

Isabell Muldoe- There Were Many Rules

Of course, there were many rules. We learned from the others, or we learn by the mistakes that we made, while we were there, and we got punished. I don’t know if the students that were there already, who knew the rules already, might have enjoyed watching us suffer being punished because we didn’t know the rules… but, we weren’t, the rules weren’t shared.

Verna Daly- They’ll Just Blame Me

I was sent away to go to Blue Quills school, and I was just a little kid, five years old. So, I had to go stay in the school and I was ahead of some of my classmates because I knew how to write, this and that, and I had learned English at the Charles Camsell Hospital.

Margaret Cardinal- I Was So Scared

The most awful time in classes was my grade three, I had a teacher from hell. In grade three, it was really hard for me to go to the classroom. I would be almost throwing up, getting sick because I was so scared of the teacher.

Margaret Cardinal- I Never Saw My Brother

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.