What Was Said to Me by Ruby Peter

Author:Ruby Peter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Royal British Columbia Museum
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

1 The English name is basalt.

Fifteen

BECAUSE I WAS ONLY eleven or twelve years old when I started working on the tractor—plowing, disking, harrowing, seeding. This is all during the spring. Going to school was a very important role. The hard times that we had in school about the language; but it seemed like that our parents seemed to have set their lives into trying to have us work, trying to better with our lives in both worlds, in the white society and in our Indian ways. By the time I was a teenager, a lot of things had come back, things that went underground, like potlatches that they used to have that was forbidden, that we couldn’t have the Indian dances, and our language that was forbidden, that we were getting punished for. It seemed that a lot of our people, the parents that came out of residential school—a lot of the parents, a lot of the people that were in residential school were away from home for seven to eight years from nine until they were sixteen. Some of them didn’t come home until they were sixteen years old. Some of them left at seven years old and they never made it home until they were eleven, twelve years old. There were many reasons for that happening. Like one person that, persons that I knew, they never came out of residential school from the time they left at seven and eight years old, and they never came out until they were twelve and thirteen years old. This was just an example of young people being sent away, and the mother didn’t have no way of keeping them home and she just left her children there—in residential school. Then when they came out, they only understood part of their language. They didn’t speak it at all, and this happened to a lot of the people. They didn’t get to learn the teachings. People that were from the Mask Dance Sxwuyxwi that were left in residential school, they didn’t get the teachings about the Sxwuyxwi and the Longhouse and their own teachings about raising families. This was lost, completely lost from these young people that were in residential school.

And there were many of them. I know my dad went to residential school, but he was only there for three years and he came home. But the ones that from 1940 to 1948, a lot of them stayed there for many, many years and a lot of them came home when they were sixteen years old. Some of them couldn’t even speak their language or some of them just understood their language. They just totally lost their culture and the teachings, how to raise children, how to take care of themselves, how to keep from temptation, and even the cultural things like the Sxwuyxwi Mask Dance and the Rattler. A lot of them lost this altogether. Some of the people lost their Masks. That was taken away from them. At one point,

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