[children singing] ♪ One little, two little, three little Indians ♪
♪ Four little, five little, six little Indians ♪
♪ Seven little, eight little, nine little Indians ♪
♪ Ten little Indian boys. ♪
♪ Ten little, nine little, eight little Indians ♪
♪Four little, five little, six little Indians ♪
♪ Seven little, eight little, nine little Indians ♪
♪ One little Indian boy. ♪
♪ Jump around, ten little Indians ♪
♪ One little Indian boy. ♪
♪ One little, two little, three little Indians ♪
♪ Four little, five little, six little Indians ♪
♪ Seven little, eight little, nine little Indians ♪
♪ Ten little Indian boys. ♪
♪ Ten little, nine little, eight little Indians... ♪♪
[singing fades out]
(speaker 1) "Ten Little Indians."
That's a song that was counting dead Indians
back on the trails when they would kill Indians.
-We'd see all these little kids in uniform,
and we'd be wondering how come they're like that.
We weren't dressed like that, but these little kids were.
-I remember being younger,
growing up on the reservation, and being told,
"Don't trust white people; don't listen to them."
Never told why.
(recording) The government schools are constantly being built,
and hospitals added.
We bring them in, clean them up,
and start them on their way to civilization.
-So I would ask social services and human services audience,
"How many people know about residential boarding schools?"
How many people here do?
This never makes it into the history books.
This is never talked about.
-Why did those schools get started, and who started them,
and what was the rationale behind it?
-The first general policy was
"the only good Indian was a dead Indian,"
that we needed to be killed, exterminated, eradicated.
Once they realized that's a little bit more difficult to do,
is to have mass genocide of a population,
then the policies changed, from killing,
to killing the Indian and saving the man.
There's a General Pratt who is well famous and documented
for using those words, "to kill the Indian and save the man,"
and that we are subhuman, and that our ways are savage,
and we needed to be civilized.
Well, the governments in Canada and the United States
followed that policy up until the 1980s, in one form or another.
(survivor 1) There is a boarding school far, far away,
where we get mush and milk three times a day.
[singing] ♪ Oh, how the huskies run, when they hear their dinner bell. ♪
♪ Oh, how the huskies run, three times a day. ♪
Like I say, I went to the Mush Hole when I was four years old.
I was there for nine years.
And once in a while, we'd come home in summertime,
but not all the time.
When the counselors came and told my dad
that he couldn't raise us properly,
we were at the Mush Hole one week, and our heads were full of bugs.
(survivor 2) There was a lot of sad times, but I mean, like,
I didn't get, like, angry and have any resentment
till after I got out.
'Cause I didn't know, from just five-and-a-half to sixteen,
I thought it was just, like, a normal upbringing,
like, to not have no parents and stuff like that [chuckling].
So that's, uh--
And after I got out, and then they thought,
well, this is the way they were supposed to be treating us.
(survivor 3) I think my mother couldn't take care of us
because our father was into alcohol.
Me and my sister, we started there
in 1945.
I was five years old at the time.
-We had all our hair cut off.
We were made baldies; we were really bald.
And that wasn't a very good feeling to have.
And they used to call us "Mush Hole baldies."
That's what the kids on the reserve used to call us.
-Well, we can go in now.
I mean, this is going to take like, all day, eh?
[laughing] -Looks like it.
-We were taken to the hospital
to get checked out for nits and whatever,
I guess that was, you know.
Well, they checked us out, you know.
Then they split us.
The school was split in age group,
and by boys and girls.
Boys were on one side, the girls were on one side.
And they went from the lower age up to high school level.
-My ma was gonna walk out here and go to the store,
and, at five-and-a-half, my sister tells me that
I grabbed my ma's leg,
and of course we were all just crying.
The whole four of us were just crying.
Like, you know, 'cause my ma was going to leave us here.
So I grabbed my ma's leg
and, well, crying and that,
and just kinda like, hollering, like, "Ma don't leave me."
"Don't leave me," like, you know. So...
But anyway, while that was going on,
a supervisor came over and just kinda grabbed me,
and took me off my ma's leg, and uh...
And then my ma just walked out,
and I never seen her.
For those ten years, I don't see her.
She never come to see me once. I don't know why.
-They took my brother away
to where he was supposed to stay.
And my sister, she just went on her own.
I was with most of the four- and five-year-olds.
We didn't go to school 'cause we were too young.
-Yet, to the agencies of the government,
they are being rapidly brought from their state
of comparative savagery and barbarism to one of civilization.
-When we used our language-- at that young age, too,
we were just learning, so...
They used to wash our mouth out with soap.
They would take the whole bunch of us
and march us to the shower-- cold shower--
and they'd throw us in there, and beat us along the way.
That was a routine thing, I guess. I don't know.
But... that taught us, you know.
-They'd throw us in this dark press room
where they kept all our Sunday "go to meeting'" clothes.
And they'd throw Rosemary and I in there,
and tell us the rats were going to get us.
But I didn't know then why I was being thrown in there,
and I used to wonder, what did I do?
And I would cry, and Rosemary would cry,
and we cried and cried for hours in there,
not knowing why we were in there.
And they'd take us out.
And when I did get to learn a little bit of English,
I knew then they were throwing us in there
because we wouldn't speak English.
And... I must have been stubborn right from the day I was born,
because I thought to myself, "I'll never speak English, either."
"You want me to speak English? I won't speak English."
So I didn't speak at all for two whole years,
because I figured if I spoke Indian I'd get a lickin',
and if I spoke English,
then it would be against everything that I stood for,
and so I didn't speak at all.
-But today, they all speak English,
and some have taken business courses,
home economics, and other higher training.
-Took us into another room down there, and maybe down in the play room,
we took all our clothes off and we put the clothes of the school on.
And they give us a number.
So my number was, like, 48.
And my brother was 36.
-My family was the state-run institute.
And the nickname for the Thomas Indian School is "Salem".
And Salem was derived from "asylum."
And you now what an asylum is; it's for crazy people.
So we were thought of as being crazy, I guess.
They were just considered bad people, bad children,
but they weren't bad children, okay?
They were placed there for so many different reasons,
But not because of any kind of delinquency on their part.