Beatrice Lavallee on Treaty Four
Beatrice Lavallee recounts her residential school experience
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That was a different time for a lot of our people, the residential school experience I guess. This is where we kind of were told that we were the pagans and we were the savages. Still in, in 1938 we were being called those things. And that there was a place they called Hell and that’s where we were all gonna go, you know. So I’d come back home in the summer cause I’d got to speak a little bit of English and try to teach my brothers a little bit of English. I have five brothers and uhhh so they wouldn’t have such a hard time cause I had a hard time when I went to school. I didn’t even speak one word of English uhhh just Cree. A lot of us girls in that time, in my age group at that time would say well and even if you had a family, a brother, you never got to speak to them cause they were hidden on another part of the school. We had different dining rooms. We had different classrooms. We had, we, you never mingled with the boys even with our own brothers or the brothers and their own sisters. We just never did.
But the (*inaudible) part would not only because I didn’t like being in school, but it was because I had to be away from my family for those 10 months out of the year and I would hear all these things about who we were and their version anyway of who we were and that we were (*inaudible) and we were all gonna go to this place that they called Hell. And I would go home in the summer time, like I said uhhh teach my brothers the English and my grandmother would catch us and she’d say (***the speaker speaks a long sentence in Cree here). Now translation for that is “Speak your language, speak your language. You’ll never be white anyway.” That was my (*inaudible) she would tell us that.
Uhmmm those days I would also try to convert her cause I loved her very much cause I knew what she, the pipe and the sweet grass she was using every day and the prayers she was doing was all what they called paganism. Cocum (**phonetic) you’re gonna go to Hell I used to tell her. You’re a pagan cocum (**phonetic). And she then used to tell me that that is not ours she used to say. That is not ours, that’s theirs. She used to have a bowl, she used to have a bowl that had ridges, she used to say this is what we as Indian people were given. The pipe, the pipe, the sweet grass, the berries, the cloth. That is how we open communication to the Creator. It also gave us the sweat lodges, the herbs, the sun dance, rain dance; that’s ours she used to say. Then she used to name the, the (*inaudible) and all the other nationalities; the Germans, the French, the, all the English. She used to name them. Them too were given away (*inaudible). Never mind it’s their way. Over here it’s our way. That’s what she used to tell me.
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