My Late Father: Joseph Desjarlais Interview at the TRC

Originally posted on wherearethechildren.ca on July 29, 2013

The original video of this interview transcription is available through the ISHDC here.

THE INTERVIEWER: Okay, Joseph, I’ll get you to spell your last name for us.

JOSEPH DESJARLAIS: D-e-s-j-a-r-l-a-i-s.

Q. Okay. Great.

What school did you go to?

A. I went to a couple of them, actually. The first one I went to was in Fort Simpson. It was called Lapointe Hall.

Q. How old were you when you went there?

A. Nine.

Q. And the second one?

A. Fort Smith. And that was called Breyant Hall. Those were both in the Northwest Territories.

Q. How old were you when you went to Fort Smith?

A. Eleven.

Q. Can you recall your first day at Fort Simpson?

A. Yeah. It was pretty strange because we had to fly in by small DC-3 from Yellowknife. Actually, I went to the wrong school. I wanted to go to Fort Smith but somehow I wound up going to Fort Simpson, because all the people that were coming back from Fort Smith had these really nice jackets. It read “Breyant Hall” on the back and it was kind of like those jock jackets. So I wanted one. Everybody else had one.

Anyway, I thought I was going to Fort Smith but I wound up going to Fort Simpson. It’s on an island so there was no way to escape. Once you land there, there’s no way off the island, unless you swam.

When we landed you could see the Residential School. Up there we call them hostels. We could see the hostel. I could see this humungous building. It looked like an “H”. One side of the “H” would be all the women and girls, and the other side would be Junior boys, Intermediates and Seniors. And the same with the girls. The Administration people lived in the centre part of the “H”, the part that bridges the two. The cafeteria was there, as well as the chapel.

The first thing I noticed right off the bat when I got off the aircraft was all the kids were dressed exactly the same. They all had blue jean overalls. They all had tennis shoes. They all had their hair cropped and they really didn’t look too happy, a lot of them. I knew I didn’t really want to be there because none of my friends were there. They went to the other school. I wound up going to this school so I was all by myself, really.

The minute I got my foot on the ground I seen the tree line and I grew up in the bush so I felt more safe in the bush than I did —
I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. So I just made a beeline and ran like heck to the tree line and disappeared into the bush. Those guys tried to catch me but they couldn’t, so I stayed in there until the sun went down. There were still lots of mosquitoes so I finally gave up and turned myself in.

Because this happens all the time when first time people come in there, they send out the older kids who have been there for years into the bush to talk us out of our hiding spots and say we won’t get punished if we give up now. Plus, it gets dark and you don’t know the area. There was nowhere you could go anyway, like I was saying, you’re surrounded by water. There’s only one bridge and usually what they did was they would park a vehicle at the bridge going out so you were trapped, really. So I gave in and turned myself in.

They threw me in the shower. Half the time a lot of the people from the north, well, you know, they hadn’t even seen showers because we all grew up in the bush, on the trap line, more or less. So our first experience with showers and all that kind of stuff was at that hostel. That was kind of strange.

Q. What did you think?

A. Well, they threw all the guys in there. We had shower shorts. That’s what they called them, anyway. They just threw us all in there. And then it’s kind of like getting processed, in a way. You get your overalls and you get your Sunday blazer and tie and whatnot. Plus everybody spoke French, too. For me it was kind of hard because I didn’t learn how to speak English until I was in Grade 1. Up until that time I spoke Chipewyan. So by the time I went to this school I was in Grade 3 so I had only been speaking English for 3 years, and I was just getting the hang of the English language.

All of a sudden we were thrown into this French speaking environment because the hostel was administered by the Jesuits and the Grey Nuns from Montreal. They said all these things to us in French. We had no idea what it meant. But by the tone of their voice you could tell it wasn’t really good, some of the stuff. Right?

Q. You weren’t getting a pat on the back?

A. Definitely not. You know you’re getting reprimanded for something or other, but you didn’t know what because you had no idea what the rules were either if you were just a newcomer like I was.

Usually you would hook up with somebody who had been there at least a year before you and they kind of took you under their wing and showed you the ropes, so to speak. That’s how I managed to get by.

I used to get phone calls at least once a week on Sundays and a little bit of money from home, money orders, for canteen. But we weren’t allowed to spend it in town at the Hudson’s Bay Company. Because we all wanted to buy snare wire and go out and catch our own rabbits and whatnot. But we weren’t allowed to.
We were sick of eating the food they gave us because we weren’t used to the food they served us. Beets and all this kind of stuff was just gross for us. Asparagus tips, stuff that we don’t eat because we’re meat eaters; caribou, moose, and fish all our lives. So they tried to give us all this other strange stuff that just made us barf, really, because we weren’t used to it.

Then we had to eat everything that was given to us. They made sure that we didn’t waste anything. So even if you didn’t like it, you learned to like it eventually.

Q. What happened if you didn’t eat all of your food?

Well, they would give you laundry duty after laundry duty. The place was actually —

They said the Residential School, the hostel, was built on a graveyard. It was right next to —
You could see a graveyard right next to the hostel. Sometimes if you were caught talking at night, like lights were out at 9 o’clock if you were in Junior boys, but they would make you stand at the end of the hall and you had to keep your eyes open. You weren’t allowed to close them. You had to look at all these gravestones for hours on end, know what I mean, because we had an outdoor hockey rink that was always illuminated. But the shadows and everything would just illuminate these headstones. It was really strange stuff.

Then you would eventually get to go to bed about a couple of hours later and when you closed your eyes, all you see is these tombstones. Weird stuff.
Another thing, like I was saying, the Residence was built on a graveyard. So all the laundry was in the basement. They knew that we knew there was some sort of rumour that the place was built on a graveyard so they would send us downstairs to fold sheets late at night, just freak you out, because you would think if they didn’t dig up those people, this is probably where they would be right about now, where we were folding laundry. It was a pretty heavy head game they used to play on us.

That’s the stuff I kind of remember the most.

Q. So you said that some of the kids used to run away. But it was an island so you had to be a good swimmer if you succeeded. What happened to them when they got caught?

A. When they got caught some of them used to get roughed up. They knew who to pick on and who not to pick on. Like myself, they never really bothered me because I got a phone call every Sunday. I was always in touch with my family. I always had money in my account for canteen. But there were other children there that their parents were trappers and they would go on the trap line in the fall and they wouldn’t come out until the spring. So basically they were the ones that got picked on the most because they knew there was no one there to defend them.

But all those kids were really good in the bush. They could take off and survive out there if they had to. But after it got dark, especially when it’s forty or fifty below weather, and even in the fall time it’s inclement weather when it’s raining and gusting. Because you’re right on the Mackenzie River. Fort Simpson is actually what they called Fort of the Forks in the old days. It’s where they built a trading post. The Liard River and the Mackenzie, that’s where they fork and the island is dead centre. It used to be a very important trading post in Alexander Mackenzie’s day and Thomas Simpson.

The missionaries have always been there since Day One, really.

Q. So you hear the stories of the abuses that happened. Did you see anything like that?

A. Well, it certainly happened there. For myself, I was fortunate. There was sexual abuse, but in my case it was just physical. I would get punched out by some of the staff.
When the government took over from the Roman Catholics, they only lasted a year and then they abolished all the Residential School system in the Northwest Territories. The only time I received any physical abuse was when the government took over and they brought in these red neck type people from the south, Cowboys and whatnot. They brought that whole attitude, the same way they would treat the Plains Natives, except now they’re in the north.

I know for a fact the Priest, he was the administrator —

There was this one woman, one young lady she was pregnant, and then everybody in the community, as the kid started getting older and older, everyone is going, “Gee whiz, that kid looks just like Father Passé.” The more they looked at him, “Yeah, it’s true.” “Hey, you were in school when he was the administrator of Lapointe.” Finally everything came out. I guess he was in another area, the Priest, because he couldn’t handle the truth, so he wound up committing suicide. He took a bunch of pills because everything was going to hit the fan and he couldn’t handle it. Lapointe Hall was where I was. It wasn’t that bad really. A lot of good came out of it. There was still a lot of sexual abuse that went through there. We didn’t really know it was happening at the time. But especially after the government took over after the RC’s, all the guys from Yellowknife, which is where I’m from, and a couple of the other guys like the top track stars, they put us all in one room, like the privileged type. If you were academically out there or a good athlete you got put in this one little special dorm where you got extra privileges. The supervisors used to come in late at night with tea and cookies and hot milk and all this kind of stuff.

That was kind of cool. We weren’t thinking much about it. But then he would grab this one guy every time and take him out. He would be gone for a few hours. He would come back. We didn’t think nothing of it, really, at the time. Until this guy comes back one day and he’s got a big bandage on him. What the heck happened there? We’re still too young to put two and two together. But this guy wound up dying, the student, the friend of ours.

For the longest time I tried to figure out what to do about that. Do you say anything about these things? Because you really don’t want to rat out on people or anything like that, but some of these people that did do these things deserve to be put up for whatever actions they had done.

All those people that I went to school with, a lot of them wound up having a lot of substance abuse problems and criminal problems. Some did manage to do quite all right. But there were a lot there who were really good students when I was there. And then to see them ten years later when I go back to visit every now and again. What the heck happened over the years?

Even myself, I try to say to myself that I came out of it relatively unscathed I like to think, but when I think about all the things that I’ve done in the past, whether it’s alcohol related or substance abuse related or whatever, you wonder why you do all these things. Is this normal? It can’t be.

So you start looking way back right to the time when I first went to Residential School and figure out the chronology of all the various traumas and see how it affected me.

Nowadays I’m trying to rebuild myself and see where I’ve got to work on certain things because I still think the same way I did way back when in certain areas. I haven’t grown, really. But I’m taking steps to try to figure out myself.

Q. Look at your life. You know your language. Right?

A. Oh yeah, for sure.

Q. So if someone said, “Well, I guess it wasn’t that bad Joseph”, what would you say?

A. I would have to say “yeah” because we did have a lot of very caring teachers. The school system and the residence were 2 different things. When we went to school we went to a public school that the local community also attended. It wasn’t just strictly —

I believe in the old days the Residential School and the school were one and the same. The residence, Lapointe Hall and Breyant Hall up north in the Territories, you have all your meals and you would reside there, basically. They had the dormitory system and all of that. And the school was just across the street so you would walk across the street and go to school like a normal kid.

Q. What about Fort Smith? You were eleven when you went to Fort Smith?

A. Fort Smith was actually a lot better because there were a lot more children there who spoke the same language that I did. I’m Dene and there were a lot of different Bands within the Dene Nation, different dialects, so when I went to Fort Simpson I was in Slavey Territory. Slavey and Chipewyan are very similar. You could get by, but we’re not the same, sort of.

There were all kinds of Dene and Chipewyan people at Fort Smith so it was easier for me to go to town. I could hear somebody speaking Chipewyan and I would understand them.

Q. So they let you speak your language?

A. Oh yeah, for sure. They had to. That was at the very tail end of all the boarding schools in the Northwest Territories when I attended. But there were other people there that actually started out in Grade 1 and never left until they were in Grade 12. Some of those people came back to become supervisors, which I’m really grateful for.
Jim Antoine, for instance, became premier of the Northwest Territories. He was the first guy —

He went through the whole school system. When I was 9 the first half of the year it was just the Brothers and the Priests and the Nuns that were the supervisors. But after Christmas Jim Antoine came into the picture and it changed the whole story like night and day, being able to live in that type of environment. He used to take us out on wilderness outings on the weekends. We would go out in the bush in forty or fifty below weather. It didn’t matter. In the spring time he would teach us which plants were good to eat and how to survive. Really, it was kind of good for us because sometimes when we did run away we actually didn’t have to starve when we were out there.

Q. Well, there were some things that you lost, though, right?

A. I sure missed my family, especially my grandparents. That’s the only reason I can speak Chipewyan the way I do is because they didn’t speak English. When that plane first came I was all gung-ho to go. I had my little suitcase all packed and I was ready to go. But then when the plane came all of a sudden I just changed my mind really quickly because I realized none of my friends were with me. I was going all by myself.

I signed up because the year before all my friends took off to Fort Simpson and I stayed behind. When they got back that summer, they made it sound like it was really good, so I signed up to go but they didn’t go! Yeah, I guess I missed them. If I had stayed home I would have been a lot better hunter than I am now, and fisherman.

I work as a surveyor and I spend a lot of time out in the field, flying around in helicopters and seaplanes and what not, getting dropped off by chopper and having a compass, a map. a GPS Unit and a good axe and I could be gone for days. I feel very comfortable. But I’m not hunting. I’m working. There would be herds of caribou walking by me and I’m not afraid of them or anything. Some people don’t know what certain animals are and they freak out.

But when I went home one year I wanted to go to this Chipewyan gathering up in Fond du lac but the plane was full so I just decided to hang out in the community. Then I noticed that they were looking for guides. Big game hunting is a big deal in the Northwest Territories in the fall time, for caribou hunts. They were saying they didn’t have enough guides. So I figured, okay, I’ll apply for a job as a guide. But I didn’t have my guiding license and I really didn’t know how to hunt caribou or clean them, really. I just ate it a lot all my life. I never actually had to go and kill one myself.

They said, “Yeah, sure, you can come and work for us but the first week we won’t pay you anything.” I said, “Why not?” “Can’t I get at least minimum wage.” They said, “Well, work for us for a week for free and then you’ll get your guiding license.” So I said, “Okay.” At least it would give me a chance to get back out on the land.
But when my brother heard that I was out guiding, he had a laugh. Joe’s out guiding? He doesn’t know how to hunt. I did know how to hunt but I wasn’t really good at cleaning the animals and gutting them as quickly as the guys back home, you know.

I know I lost that part. I’m fortunate enough to have all my aunts and uncles still alive, and my mom, and they speak to me in Chipewyan. The story is much more—
It sinks in a lot more when it’s told to you in your Native tongue, as opposed to English, because there are certain words that are not there in English. Especially when you’re told stories of the old days and the bush medicines and all that sort of stuff. So that part there, I’m grateful I still speak the language, but a lot of the times I should have been out on a fall hunt or a spring hunt and winter trapping which I never had a chance to do.

Growing up with my aunts and uncles they would always come back from the bush with —
We used to have dog teams when we were growing up. In the summer time we would live off duck eggs. Everything we got from the land. The only thing we got from the store was sugar and salt and tea bags and flour. That’s about it. The rest of the stuff we got out there.

We would wear moccasins in the summer time and muskrat hats in the winter; real northern dress. It was forty and fifty below when I was growing up. I remember having a little fur coat. My grandmother made me a little fur coat. It was kind of funny coming from up there because we have so much water and so much minerals, people make a big deal out of wearing fur coats. Geez, you know, what’s up with that? I had one when I was a kid. I thought everybody had one of those.

Q. Is there anything else you would like to add about your experience?

A. Well, all I would like to say is there was a lot of good that came out of it. In the Northwest Territories a lot of people who did go through the Residential School system went on to become quite prominent in their chosen field, whether it’s fashion design or politics or science and art. Everybody’s got issues. We all have to deal with them the best way we can.

It hasn’t been addressed forever until just now, within the last few years. People are starting to think this post traumatic stress disorder type of syndrome, it’s starting to come to the surface. All these traumas that happened to you way back when must have had some sort of effect on the way you are presently.
I just want to say that all those who are having trouble out there, try to figure out all the way back to what was your first real traumatic experience and work your way back. Maybe you can figure out what went wrong somewhere along that line and deal with it the best way you can.

That’s about it.

Q. Great. Thank you for your story.

— End of Part 1

A. Like I was saying, when we were waiting for the plane to take us away, all of a sudden I changed my mind. I didn’t really want to go. I was trying to make a beeline for the hills but my grandmother got a hold of me and she said, “Joey, (speaking Chipewyan) you gotta go to school.” “If I had a chance to go to school, I would have went, but my mother wouldn’t let me go to school.” Because the Priests in the old days used to just come in with a boat and they would round up all the kids under a certain age and haul them all away and then there wouldn’t be any sound of children in the community any more. So I guess my grandmother was the youngest one so the Priest tried to grab her too, but my great grandmother said, “You’re not taking her, she’s staying behind.” “You’ve got all my other kids.” “She’s staying with me.”

Consequently she never learned to speak English or write. So she told me she found it quite difficult to live in the White man’s world without knowing how to read, write or understand English. She told me that my aunts and uncles went to school, to these types of schools before you, so in order to get along in today’s society you have to go. You really have to learn and get educated. So go. It’s for your future.

So I went. The second time, when I was in Fort Smith, Chief Dan George came up. This was when I was about eleven. He went up there and shot a buffalo. He shared it with all the students in the Residential School. All the Junior boys were at the front, and then the Intermediates and Seniors would be in the back because they could look over the shorter kids in the front. Chief Dan George looked at me. He could tell I didn’t want to be there, eh. But he looked me right in the eye. He said something to me. It was kind of telepathic. It was just like he said, “Don’t worry about it, you won’t be here forever.” “Stick with it and you’ll be out sooner or later.”

So I always remember that and I want to thank him for that.

That’s about all.

Q. What about your jacket? Did you get your jacket?

A. Oh yeah, yeah, I eventually did get my jacket. I got my blue jacket with Breyant Hall written on the back.

Q. Were you proud of it?

A. Yeah, for sure. It was really good. It’s kind of funny that’s what made me want to go to school, to get one of those jackets. But everybody was proud of their jackets. It meant something. I’m sure all the people who went to that school in Fort Smith all remember that blue jacket with the white letters “Breyant Hall”. It was almost equivalent to getting your name in the telephone book, like in that Steve Martin movie! (Laughter)

— End of Interview