Page:TRC Canada Survivors Speak.pdf/35

 A place of refuge "They'd be in a good place."

Poverty and the inability to feed and clothe their children forced some parents to send their children to residential school. When Ivan George was enrolled in the Mission, British Columbia, school, his father was a single parent with six children under the age of fourteen. When the time came to return to the school after his first summer holiday, Ivan told his father he did not wish to return. "He says, 'You have to. I can't provide for you, or nothing to feed you, clothes on your back, education.' So, I went back, and I said, 'Oh, I better,' because you know where, what, what's going on, all that. So, I stayed the whole year without running away."45

Cecilia Whitefield-Big George said her mother was not able to support her family when they lived in Big Grassy in northwestern Ontario.

She would go and clean, work for people, eh, like do their laundry and clean their floors and clean the house for them and that's how she fed us. They'd give her food, eh. And then when the priest arrived he told her, you know they'd be in a good place if they went to school. And so that's how that happened. I, my little sister, she was only four years old. So that's how we first got picked up.46

One former student, whose grandparents had also attended residential school, placed his daughter in residential school when she was thirteen.

I didn't have a wife at the time and I felt that was a good place for her, so I wasn't really fully aware of the, you know, the negative parts of, the parts, negative, negativity of residential school 'cause really, I guess, when I look at the residential school issue, you know, I saw, you know, physically, I guess, better than what I experienced at the reserve. On the reserve I had a very abusive dad, my dad was abusive, physically abusive, and we lived in a little log cabin and we didn't have regular meals.47

Ethel Johnson said she and her siblings were sent to the Shubenacadie school when her mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

My father couldn't look after us. I was ten years old, there was another one, there was five of us, and the youngest was about nine months old, at the time. So the three of