She survived a Canadian residential school

Brut America

"I feel like they couldn't take the Indian out of me.”  She was taken away from her family and sent to a residential school for Indigenous children in Canada. This is her story of survival.

Transcript

00:00Do I feel like a survivor? No. I feel like a victor. I feel like I won.

00:07I feel like that they couldn't take the Indian out of me.

00:16I feel that I lost nothing but my language. But I could gain that back. They didn't take

00:25everything they thought they were going to take from me. They didn't take it.

00:29I still have it here.

00:43They discouraged everything of our own culture, of our own people. They didn't want us to

00:50practice our own spiritual activity. They discouraged whatever we participated in.

00:59There had to be anywhere from 30 to maybe 20 to 35 kids in each dorm.

01:05Prayed after breakfast. Prayed before we entered the classroom. Prayed during dinner,

01:11before we had dinner. Prayed after dinner. Prayed after school. Prayed before supper.

01:17So we prayed a lot.

01:41There is a possibility of it being a turning point. We're just in the very beginning. This

01:46is only the second finding publicly. I don't think there's any instrument

02:00more destructive than residential schools as the Canadian government moved to oppress us and to

02:07control and manage our lives so they could access freely without impediment.

02:37The Pope needs to apologize for what has happened to the Maryville Residential School

02:49impact on Taos' First Nation survivors and descendants. An apology

02:58is one stage of many in the healing journey.

03:07We are sorry. It was something that we cannot undo in the past, but we can pledge ourselves

03:19every day to fix in the present and into the future. And that means

03:24recognizing the harms, the impacts, the intergenerational trauma.

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