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Residential school experiences retold

Learning Day at Maskwacis Cultural College educates students on Indian residential schools.

Canada’s controversial residential school experiment and the painful abuse inflicted on the First Nations students at those schools was one of the topics of discussion in the course of the “Learning Day” at the Maskwacis Cultural College Library at the Samson Nation reserve on Friday, Oct. 2.

Marvin Littlechild, who lived and studied at a residential school for his entire secondary education, recounted his memories from that period to a small group of participants gathered at the library and Bruce Cutknife gave a presentation on the historical development of the concept of residential schools and the practice in Canada.

Littlechild spoke extensively about how they were treated at school and he stressed that he was still not prepared to share the abuse he suffered at the school, not even with his children. He said they used to go to sleep hungry and they would sneak into the kitchen after midnight in order to get some food before they could sleep.

“We played hockey over frozen sewer,” he recalled, explaining that it was probably the main reason why he got TB and spent 14 months in a hospital.

He said they were segregated as boys and girls and that simply because one of the priests didn’t want him around, he was sent a Blackfoot reserve residential school. “I could survive there thanks to my hockey skills, they accepted me to their team,” Littlechild recalled.

He said he had learnt a lot from his grandmother about the kinships in the Cree communities. He explained that their clan had their name changed due to wrong interpretation and that it had stayed in that way because the documents were drafted in the mistakenly translated name.

“Our clan used to be called Swiftchild,” he remembered. “But then we were called Littlechild because of the wrong translation and then they simply started to call us Child.”

He said their name was restored as Littlechild only because there were documents containing that name but because Swiftchild was not recorded anywhere, they could not claim that name.