A residential school survivor recounted his harrowing trip to school at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in La Ronge today.
Paul Sylvester told the commission the day he was taken from his family was the day something was ripped away inside him.
Sylvester says he took a barge near Ile a la Crosse to the building, along with many other kids.
He testified the children were basically left out in the open and weren’t allowed to use any of the cabins — including when they needed to use a bathroom.
Sylvester says it wasn’t long after that he started being called names like “Dumb Indian” or “Stupid Indian”.
He spent the next eight years in the school, and says he lived all of them with anger in his heart.
Meanwhile, a broken window in a dormitory is what started a terrible experience for a former student of the residential school in Prince Albert.
Hilary Cook is one of the survivors who took the mic yesterday in La Ronge.
Cook says one of his supervisors ordered all of the boys in his dormitory into the shower room when he found out the window was broken:
“We had to go in there, we had to kneel down and we had to have our hands behind our backs — until somebody owned up to it.”
He says two of the boys fainted until one of the older boys stepped forward to say he was the one who broke the window.
Cook says he doubts that boy was responsible.
A northern Saskatchewan woman says she recalls lots of fights and being called an “orphan” during her time at residential school in Prince Albert.
Lily Charles testified yesterday the school separated her from her brothers and sisters, and they still have trouble connecting.
Charles says when she went home in the summer, she would tell her father about all the wonderful things that had happened to her — even though her life at the school was full of work, humiliation and shame.
She adds she tried to run away, but got caught at Christopher Lake because her clothes and hair were so recognizable.
Charles says, to this day, she can’t stand looking like everyone else and has to wear different clothes due to her experience in the school.
The three-day TRC event in La Ronge wraps up later today.