Native American Boarding Schools

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Transcript (written copy of the sound recording):

My great-grandfather was a Tribal leader, Peter Paul. There’s a collection, an archive on him at the University of New Brunswick, which I didn’t know until later in life. Although as a child, my gramp would say to me, you know, ‘You come from good people,’ or whatever.

I did know my, on my mom’s side, my great-grandmother, who we called Grammy Paul, who was a brilliant woman and a healer, and very strict and very correct and mannerly and tidy and so forth.

But I was raised by my mother and my grandfather. He came from Kingsclear, New Brunswick, First Nations. And he told me when I was young that he had been sent to residential school. And his experiences there very much affected him, and then in turn, our family.

My gramp didn’t speak English when they sent him away. He spoke French and he spoke two different Native dialects. I know one was Maliseet, Passamaquoddy dialect. I don’t know what the other one was, it might have been Micmac. And he said, ‘I learned English quick enough.’ Because they would beat him, obviously, for speaking. And, uh, he said they locked him up, you know, in a closet, which I know was typical. My granddad was one of the ones who just couldn’t and wouldn’t accept it. So he told me he kept running away. And he ran away from the residential school in Canada four or five times, and they kept bringing him back.

Now my gramp was an intelligent man. He never graduated from high school. Um, he was brilliant in his way. But I think that generationally, he didn’t have a chance to fulfill his potential because of what happened to him. And so, you can see how quickly the effects of his being taken from his family then shaped the succeeding generations.

Because when you start damaging the family relationships, then people don’t have the kind of support network that they should have. And so I think it makes you easier to succumb to things like substance abuse, because people give up. You know, the despair is so powerful. And then, once you introduce the substance abuse, then you’re adding another layer of problems onto the family structure. And so here we are.

You know, my gramp was born in 1912, and that in that span of time, how much is lost? And I was the only one of four that was taught by him. So I’m the last person in my family to have any sense of a traditional upbringing. To have any knowledge, to have a strong cultural identity. You know? That I have fully internalized. And it’s sad to me to think that my siblings and their children only know of their cultural identity indirectly as a sort of a fact. They don’t have the living experience of it.