Extracts from Marie Alma Poitras hearing:
Testified in Fort Qu’Appelle, SK, on May 14-15 2012
I welcome you all that are here today. You are here to support something good. This is something very difficult for me. To remember something that happened many years ago. This is so difficult. So many people have felt this. It is so difficult. I’m thankful for all of you for coming here (translated from Cree).
What is happening today is good but it’s very, very hard. It’s hard on the emotional part, spiritual, mental, and physical. As I was sitting over there listening, I feel a lot. I feel it in my stomach. My feelings. And I’m sitting over there thinking I’m back at home when I was a girl coming home from residential school. But I will say my Indian name first [given in Cree]. My name is Brown Horse Blanket Woman. My Christian name is Maria Alma Poitras. …
My mom was a very traditional woman; she only speak Cree, she didn’t really get to speak English. My dad was fluent in both English and Cree. My dad was a hunter and trapper. He was a very kind person and so was my mother. Like the ones that came before me, the ones that spoke about their parents. Our parents were very kind. Very, very kind people. But they suffered a lot.
I guess for me as I was listening, I got to understand that the residential school effects are not only in the residential school, they’re at home, too. While I was growing up, when I would come home to our home as we were getting older, my dad started to drink, and that’s when we used to see him abuse my mother a lot. He used to be very mean when he drank. I used to wonder why. Until later on, I learned that him, too, he went through some things in residential school, but these things were not talked about too much. But we saw a lot of action that told us that something was very wrong. When we were supposed to be coming home to our parents, to our siblings, to be happy, a lot of times we would get home to people drinking, fighting, lots of abuse. You would see my brothers beating each other up and my dad fighting my mom. I remember one time as we were riding along the country, my dad was drunk and he was beating my mom in the back and, us, we were just kids. The horses were running wild, and one of my little brothers was reaching down out of the wagon box to try and grab the reigns…It was a nightmare.
This is called reconciliation. [Cree word] To tell the truth. So, for many of us, it is very hard to go back. But as I’m listening, there’s so much that’s been opened in here. No matter how many times you tell your story, or how many times you try to heal yourself, there’s always something else that comes. So that is what I was seeing today. My brother trying to pick up the reigns and get us home while my dad was beating up my mom. And when we got to our house, I got into our house, [and] a little bird was in the house flying around. I was so full of anger, I chased that little bird around until I got a hold of it, and what I did to that little bird, I broke its neck, and I was just a little girl; I was so full of anger. I could never … forget that day.
For many of us, we never spoke English when we came to school… just our languages. We had to come back to school with so much pain, to see what happened at home. Then you had to carry on the best way you could in school. Maybe that’s why sometimes a lot of these things that happened in the school are kind of erased because it is so painful to see what goes on at home. My mom and dad were, my dad was a residential school [student]. He spoke a little bit about some incident that happened, something that affected him for the rest of his life. He went to a different residential school, he went to an Anglican. Us, we went to a roman catholic. He told of something he seen, the boys seen in the basement, a young man getting whipped, and that young boy died. But nobody ever talked about it. These things were hidden. There’s lots of things that are hidden. I used to wonder why my dad was so mean. But you never forget these things.
And then, as we are in the school, there’s a lot of kids that are very unhappy there, too. Same things must be going on at their homes too. We bring our hurts in there. Nobody really talks about anything. Everything is kept quiet. And that’s how it was in the residential school. Everything was kept quiet. Nobody really shared. I guess we were made to feel ashamed.
There’s many things that happened in the residential school that I had shared before, but that was one thing that came to me was what happened at home. Lot of abuse happened at home. And it was my older siblings. We were fourteen in the family. Nine boys and four girls. The abuse I remember happened at home from my older sibling. Today I find out that he went through a lot in that residential school, too. So we were bringing all this sickness to our homes. And I think today it’s still happening.
But there was lots of love, too. I remember our dad because he was a hunter and trapper he taught us many things to share with other people. And he told us a teaching when we were young, when we were riding in the wagon, he stopped the wagon and we were just children; these things you don’t forget; they say we don’t remember days, but moments. I know this one moment, I never forget. He stops the wagon, and he tells us…[in Cree the English] Look around you it’s so beautiful here. … This is how we have to leave this when we leave here. … when we leave here, there will be other visitors and this is how nice we have to leave it for them. He told us this and we were just children. Those are the things that I hold on to.
My parents were beautiful parents…I used to see my mom working hard too, like a man, walking alongside the men when they’d work for the farmers. She used to do pickets, bush sweeping, rock picking, root picking; she was right beside my dad and besides having to do housework and skinning. Our parents really worked hard but they were full of pain, them too. And I think that’s what today, our communities, they’re suffering from all this. I heard somebody saying ‘that happened long time ago, how come people are still talking about it?’ It may have happened a long time ago, but it is still with us today. It’s something that we don’t just get rid of and say it never happened. And, I think because the way the government treats us today, it’s that same concept as the residential school; the way the government treats us today, it’s the same thing. And maybe that’s why there’s so much hurt and pain out there yet in our communities amongst ourselves. No matter how hard we work to get better. It’s just like a farmer, I was saying, that cleans his fields, picks up all the stones. Next summer there’s some more stones that pop up. It’s just that way with healing. You work, you get rid of as much as you can. Next thing, there’s something else that comes up. And you have to deal with that right away or else you get sick. And that’s why I had to come and share. There was so much that I felt in here today. I had to come and share that part where I remember my dad abusing my mom and where I turned my anger to a little bird that was helpless; I went and broke its neck. And that’s how that anger comes.
And when I got married, I went through the same things, too. My husband and I abused each other. I may look small today, but I was very mean when I drank. I was able to punch him out and he was a big man, and that’s how much anger I had. I used to wonder why is it that we punch each other out and the next day we can’t talk about anything. Just like nothing happened. We didn’t know how to deal with our pain. And like other people said, we turned to alcohol. For us it was alcohol we turned to. We used to punch each other out. I know I had a broken nose twice, black eyes, and at the end, I was starting to pick up stuff to fight back with. And that’s when I thought I’d better stop. I was starting to hit him with all kinds of things. And that tells me that next time I might not know what I’m doing. It’s scary when you carry that much anger.
So in 1980, I went to my first sweat. And in that sweat, I was given an Indian name. .. the one I talked about…
Since then, I believe that name helped me find my way to healing. I found my way to that program… the AA program. It is very similar to our traditional way of life except long ago our ancestors didn’t need AA because alcohol was never a part of our way of life. But it’s very similar walk of healing. They had very, very strong spiritual beliefs. Their minds were clean. They didn’t have alcohol and drugs to deal with. That’s why they had strong visions. Now today we have buggered up our minds; we messed up our minds, and our spirit and that’s why it takes so much longer to heal. We have a lot of work to do, towards healing. Because my children today now are suffering from what I did when I was bringing them up, seeing us fight. We’d come home and we’d beat each other up until my oldest girl sat me down and said ‘Look mom, when you come home you scare us, you and dad scare us when you come home and fight in front of us.’ And it was just like I had to sit up and try and do something. I knew. I went to different religions to get prayed on; I wanted to get healed fast. But it didn’t happen for me that way. But today I still believe that those prayers brought me to my first sweat, to where I got my Indian name, and then from there, I’ve been on my healing path.
Took me a long time. My grandaughter’s 20 years old, my oldest one. None of my grandkids have seen me drink today; they haven’t ever seen me drink.
Translator: She thanks the Creator every day of her life for all the love for her grandchildren not to see her the way she used to be.