EA long hallway leads to the girls’ wing: gray vinyl floor, white wooden ceiling, the walls painted bright yellow. It smells like detergent. Actually everything as before, says Evelyn Camille. The dormitories for the students were at the end of the corridor.
When danger threatened, the girls began to whisper: “Stelek re 7weyelkst.” The 83-year-old woman switches to Shuswap. Then she translates: “Be careful, the black robes are coming” (the 7 stands for a loud stop). A brief warning – and everyone was quiet.
The children feared the nuns. Any violation of the rules was punished with beatings. With resounding slaps. With stick blows. Or by punishment with the leather belt.
Speaking Shuswap, the language of the Secwepemc, the indigenous people of southern Canada’s western province of British Columbia, was one such infraction. The children of the Kamloops Residential School were to be re-educated: the students had to leave behind the language, culture and traditions of their ancestors. It was necessary to adapt to Christian civilization. The Catholic Church did this on behalf of the Canadian state.
The former Residential School in Kamloops, now home to the Reservations Administration. In the foreground, children’s shoes and toys are reminiscent of missing children.
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Image: Reuters
When Camille started residential school at the age of six, she didn’t speak a word of English. Shuswap only. Just like her siblings, who also went to boarding school. The children had been torn from the extended family. Parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts lived on a reservation 60 kilometers away. And the siblings, the nuns were very careful about that, were not allowed to have any contact with each other.
Only very rarely, for example at Christmas, did they go home. The children were driven to their reservation with a cattle truck. Camille was at the boarding school for ten years, from 1945 to 1955. She left school at sixteen. She could have stayed two more years. But she wanted nothing but get out of this hell.
In the basement, Camille shows the old dining room and the large kitchen where the students had to wash the dishes. She doesn’t want to go near the rooms further back in the basement. She was lucky not to have been taken there as a student.
Outside the school building, Camille points to a meadow and a closed area by the river. “No Trespassing” reads the sign of the Kamloops Reservations Administration, which is now based in the former school building. “There used to be a small plantation down there,” Camille recalls. She and her friends often go there to steal apples. But there was something strange about the place.
Evelyn Camille in front of the Kamloops Residential School memorial stone commemorating the dead and battered students.
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Image: AFP
Something wasn’t right. After the secret trips to the river, the schoolgirls exchanged ideas: “Did you feel that too?” It gave them the creeps.
Kamloops was the largest of the 140 or so residential schools in Canada run by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Most schools were Catholic, but there were also Anglican, Uniate, or Presbyterian schools.