These nuns looked scary: a big rosary and cross hanging from their hip, and on their other hip a strap

In “The Fire Still Burns: Life in and after Residential School,” Squamish Elder Sam George writes about his childhood on a reserve in North Vancouver, starting residential school at age seven, and the addiction and violence that would follow. It would be many troubled years before he began healing and helping others with similar experiences.

I remember my first day of residential school vividly. I remember that I was playing at home on the floor of the living room with my brother Andy, when there was a knock on the door.

It was a strange thing because on the reserve no one ever knocked. I remember my parents opening the door and a man coming inside and talking to them. Whatever they were talking about seemed to make my mom really upset and my dad really cross. I looked the strange man up and down. He was an older white guy. He had grey hair combed right back. He wore glasses, a kind of heavy suit jacket, and brown pants. I came to know that his name was Mr. Taylor and he was an Indian agent.

After talking to my parents at the front door for a few minutes, Mr. Taylor made his way into the house. I didn’t understand what they had been talking about, but I remember having the sense that it was about us kids.

Shortly thereafter — days or weeks — my mom got all of us kids together and said, “Put your coats and your shoes on. You’re going with your dad.” I don’t know why my older siblings hadn’t gone to school before me, but we did what we were told; we all got dressed up and made our way out the front door.

I didn’t know where we were going. I remember walking away from our house and looking back at my mom standing on the porch. She looked so sad, like she was going to cry. We kept on walking.

My best guess was that we were walking to my Ta’ah and Papa’s (grandparents’) house. My brother Andy and I walked a little behind, goofing around and play-fighting, the way boys do. My dad, who walked holding my sisters’ hands, seemed off, but I paid no mind. By this time, my oldest brother, Ross, was around 15 and working with my dad as a longshoreman, so he wasn’t with us.

We walked the half a block to my Ta’ah’s house, but when we got there, we walked past it. We walked another block, to the foot of the hill. I looked up at Andy, who was looking back at me. We both knew what was on top of that hill, casting a shadow over the reserve. We knew that all the kids who walked up that hill disappeared.

Andy and I joined our dad and sisters in silence, and we solemnly walked the final two blocks up the hill to our new residence, four blocks from our house: St. Paul’s Indian Residential School.

When we got to the school, we walked up a set of old, worn-out stairs. The school was really old and dingy. It was a greyish-white colour, and all the paint was cracked and peeling. When we got to the top of the stairs, there was a door. My dad knocked. A nun named Mother Michaela, who was the school’s principal, opened the door and told us kids to sit down.

She was a tall, thin-faced woman, maybe in her fifties, with really sharp features. She wore glasses, and you could tell by the way she spoke that she was in charge, that if you disobeyed her, there would be consequences. I never saw her smile.

My dad walked into her office, and I could see him signing papers. I didn’t know it then, but he was signing our lives away. When he was finished, he walked out of the office, looked down at us. “You kids listen, and you be good.”

He turned toward Mother Michaela. “Take good care of my kids.”

And then he left. He never said goodbye. He never hugged us. He just turned around and walked out. I’m sure he and my mom weren’t happy when we went off. Maybe they hoped it would be different for us.

I remember being confused and scared. I remember that feeling of being abandoned. It was a lot for a seven-year-old. Little did I know that it was only the beginning of the trauma that would suffocate my innocence and change my life forever. It would be a long time before I would ever have the opportunity to process what was happening to my siblings and me.

Before we knew it, two nuns came in, one for my sisters and one for me and my brother. They led us off in separate ways. These nuns looked scary, alien. They wore long black tunics with a hood-like headdress. Each of them had a big rosary and silver cross hanging from their hip, and on their other hip they had a strap.

The strap was a piece of leather or rubber, maybe a foot long and about a quarter-inch thick by about two inches wide; it was used specifically to beat the kids. All the nuns always carried their straps hanging from their hip.

We followed the nun with her strap through a huge dining hall. There were three or four big old tables with benches on each side, and a divider in the middle of the room, with a similar layout on the other side. I saw into a kitchen that had a big, long wood-burning stove. We kept following her up a set of stairs.

I could see the paint peeling and feel the wetness of the old wood in my nose. The stairs led into a dark hallway. There wasn’t even a light in the hallway. She looked at us, told Andy to wait where he was, and instructed me to follow her.

She led me into a big dormitory. I took in the room and saw all the single-sized cots lined up in a row. She motioned to a bed and told me that every time I was brought to this room, I was to go to this bed. I sat down on the bed. The nun left the room and, unbeknownst to me, did the same routine with my brother in a different dormitory.

I was glued to the bed. My eyes searched the dimly lit room. A single light bulb illuminated the whole room. There was a small bathroom in the corner of the room, which looked to have four or five sinks and a metal wall that functioned as a mirror. At the end of the row of beds, there was one small window. At something like one foot by two feet, and covered by a drawn curtain, it didn’t add much brightness to the room. I felt paralyzed.

When the nun came back, she told me to take my clothes off. Once I was naked, she grabbed my clothes and told me to follow her again. I followed her into a curtained-off area they called the medicine room. When I walked into the room, my brother was sitting in a chair wrapped in a bedsheet. The man standing above him, with shears in his hands, had just shaved his head.

The man took off and shook out the sheet that had covered Andy and motioned for me to take my brother’s place. Andy, who stood about four feet away from me, stared at me blankly. He kept staring until the nun asked him to cover his eyes with one hand and his mouth with the other.

When he had done as she had asked, she took some sort of pump and started spraying him down with a white powder. She sprayed him everywhere: front and back, under his feet, and in between his legs. They wanted us to be white so badly. When he was caked in the stuff, another nun came and grabbed him, and, without being prompted, I knew what I was to do.

And so I stood in Andy’s footprints and she started spraying me. I thought to myself that it must be some kind of strong detergent because of the smell. It made me feel dizzy and nauseous. After she was done, she gave me instructions not to touch it or clean it off, assuring me that it would naturally come off. I found out some time later that it was pesticide.

Covered in pesticide, I followed the nun back to the dormitory, where there sat a stack of clothes on my bed. She told me to get dressed. While doing so, I noticed that all the clothes had the number 3 embroidered on them. All the children at the school got numbers: the boys got odd numbers and the girls got even numbers. I was number 3.

A lot of the time, the nuns wouldn’t even use your name. They would just say, “Hey, number 3, come over here.”

After I was dressed, I followed the nun once again, this time to a classroom downstairs. The classroom, which was for Grades 1, 2 and 3, was huge. All of the desks were big and heavy, and made of cast iron. The walls were lined with all of the school’s new kids, while the centre of the room was occupied by playing children. The playing children were inside because it was pouring rain.

I saw my brother and quickly made my way over to sit beside him. We didn’t say anything. Rather, we scanned the room, making note of all the children. Some of them were our friends and cousins who had disappeared from the reserve. Some even came over and said hi to us. We sat there until one of the nuns rang a bell.

All the kids stopped playing immediately and formed a line. Not knowing what to do, all of us new kids just sat there. The nun who had taken my clothes and sprayed me down informed us that we were to line up based on our assigned numbers, sharing that if you had a little brother, you were to help him find his place in the line.

Single file, we made our way into the dining hall that I had walked through earlier. I thought we were supposed to sit, but a boy put his hand out in front of me, telling me to stay in the line.

Beyond the divider that separated the room into two, I could see the girls coming into the room. The divider was used to segregate the girls and boys. I remember looking for my little sister — Honey Bee — in the crowd. I spotted her and started to wave, but she wouldn’t look at me. She just looked straight ahead. A nun ran over to me.

“Don’t look around! Either you look straight ahead or you look down,” she said in a raised voice. After all of the girls had entered the room, I bowed my head and looked down as all of us children knelt and prayed to their god.

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