My name is Clifford Quah i am from the Sts’ailes First Nation I'm also an
elder and a residential school survivor. And I attended the Lejac Indian Residential School
located 200 kilometres west of Prince George.
My name is Cora Voyageur. I'm a survivor of the Holy Angels Residential School in Fort Chipewan Alberta.
My name is Rose Grace Miller I am survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential school in Kamloops.
I was five years old when that I was forcibly taken.
I was nine years old when i was taken.
I was only eight years old at the time. We were loaded onto a cattle truck in 1949 and brought to the residential school.
My two brothers and myself.
I was in residential school with my two younger sisters Lillian and Dorothy.
At this school I experienced emotional, physical, mental and sexual abuse
and the trauma was so great that I blanked most of my school days at Lejac.
The violence that we experienced at the hands of the nuns was quite random so it was like
you were walking on eggshells and didn't really know you know what was going to happen next.
And it was horrible to be there, they told us if we didn't pray the devil would take us to hell
and burn us. They said if we didn't pray the romans would come and they would rape us and they'd burn
our eyes and burn our hands and poke out our eyes.
Eight years old you believe whatever you're told.
So we pray all the harder.
When I was in residential school there was one instance that
I experienced where my sister was being beaten by a nun on the other side of a door
And my sister was screaming and crying and I was on the other side of the door trying to get in and trying to
to basically rescue her from a nun who seemed to be quite out of control.
It was terrifying to have someone that you love being being beaten
and really not being able to do anything about it.
Many times we got knocked to the floor by the nuns and they would call us a
whore we don't even know what a whore is. I was raped there at Indian school for me
It had followed me through my life. The anger, the fear, the shame.
I was so mad and angry and
everything all my life was a big negative negativity all my positive attitudes are buried.
My reaction to the news out of Kamloops from last week was of course great sadness and
sympathy for the families of those of those children who never did come back from residential
school, but I wasn't surprised by it. I don't for a minute believe that this is the only one
in Canada.
I survivor expected this, but what really shocked me was I thought it'd be 10 or 20.
But when it said 215, you'd expect to find that somewhere else but in Canada that was mind-boggling.
We knew that there was missing children, we knew there was children that were buried on the hillside there
And probably on the school. We knew there was people burned in an incinerator just below our rec room.
It could have very easily have been me or one of my sisters.
It could have been my brothers, it could have been me.
When I ran away I could have drowned in the river. I was only eight years old.
I want non-Indigenous people to know that there is a very dark history in Canada.
And that people have to be understanding and they have to be compassionate.
I want the non-Indigenous people to know that how painful it was and how the colonization hurt us so badly.
How still hurting us with the racism.
I want non-Indigenous people to understand they must know they must
learn more about the schools and that's really one of the reasons why I'm doing this to educate the
public about what happened in residential schools.
And how I went through about 20 years of my life
to where I am today.
They need to understand and stand beside us it's not their fault.
I'm not bringing this up to blame anybody, but I want the history be known.