The school itself looked like a Mennonite school. She was sent there from ages 4 to 6. Grandma says she was really mean to the other kids, she’s not sure why. She would beat them up every day. Perhaps she was simply reenacting her own abuses. It all started with the kids making fun of her because her face was messed up, she reacted, and then eventually everyone became afraid of her. Her face was messed up because of her mother, shifted left because of abuse Grandma herself doesn’t remember.

Grandma liked that the kids were afraid of her. It felt like power she didn’t have elsewhere. She was used to being rejected everywhere else, so what did she care if the kids also did.

It was a one-room classroom, the whole school. School 1, as it was called. School 2 was different grades, right around the corner. Then they built Walpole Island Day School and Grandma was transferred there. It was a full school, with a gymnasium and everything. There were climbers that folded up against the wall, and Grandma would go on those a lot without permission, and make the teachers catch her on the ladders. She would run away and make them chase after her.

She would sneak out when she could and go to the bush. Walk around town. Sometimes went home, but mostly to the bush. Playing with sticks, looking for snakes and salamanders. In the winter she’d endure the indoors, too cold to be outside, but whenever the weather was right, she was there. She had a friend who had a house right across from the Day School, where she would go as a home base when she would get kicked out of home at nights.

They would hit you for anything in the schools. They didn’t give a shit about the truth. They used wooden pointers, with a yellow cap on the end. Either hitting them or using them as spear chuckers at the kids.

Grandma’s mother tongue already taken the generation before in residential schools, only some of her Pa’s distant relatives speaking Anishinaabe by this point. There was no language or culture to beat out of them anymore, but there was spirit. They never got hers.

Grandma often wonders how the rez allowed that on their lands in the first place. White teachers who they knew were beating children. The teachers would travel to the children’s doors at 6 or 7 in the evening, and tell tall tales to the parents. Then the kids would get hit doubly. They came and told on Grandma once, her mom smacked them up and made them immediately go to bed.

They would bring their own lunches, which Grandma would swipe in her hunger. At least it wasn’t the mush her Pa was forced to eat at the mushhole.¹ He was later moved to the Shingwauk Indian Residential School in Sault Ste-Marie, Ontario. Grandma now considers herself lucky she didn’t have to experience what he experienced.

Grandma herself didn’t learn her parents had gone to residential school until much later. She noticed a new stone on Walpole Island and saw her Pa’s name was on the memorial. All the aunties and uncles also named.

In Grandma’s files it always said she went home when she ran away. “No, I didn’t,” she exclaims. She wasn’t going to go near her mom when she was drinking. She went deep into the bush instead. Away from abuse. Away from parents. Away from school. Freedom to play. She could just be a kid.

For Grandma, the bush was freedom.

FOOTNOTE

1. The mushhole is the name of the Mohawk Institute Residential School in Brantford, Ontario. It was so named because of the low-quality gruel that was served at meals.