What did these Children have to go through? Point of View of a Child
“I can never get over it. I’ve gone for counselling but it’s no use, I’m too old and it’s been a part of me for so long,” said Georgina Iron, who attended the school in Ile-a-la-Crosse from 1949 to 1956. “There’s a lot of pain.”
Former students say there were pencils jammed into ears, skin pinched and heads banged against wooden benches, and students locked in closets. Fed rotting meat, old vegetables and porridge so watered down it was transparent; the students also had their hair doused in kerosene whenever they returned from a home visit in case they had picked up lice.
Despite indoor plumbing, they used outhouses in the dead of winter and used pages from catalogues as toilet paper. They were given a single blanket to sleep under while the air froze basins of water. They lived next to a large lake, yet dozens of students bathed one after another in the same water, the students say.
“These aren’t stories. This is the truth,” said Yvonne Lariviere, who attended the school from 1947 to 1955 and remembers being beaten by a nun wielding a metal yardstick. “I didn’t know why I was being hit because I didn’t speak English. I was seven years old and I had never been hit before in my life.”
Former students say there were pencils jammed into ears, skin pinched and heads banged against wooden benches, and students locked in closets. Fed rotting meat, old vegetables and porridge so watered down it was transparent; the students also had their hair doused in kerosene whenever they returned from a home visit in case they had picked up lice.
Despite indoor plumbing, they used outhouses in the dead of winter and used pages from catalogues as toilet paper. They were given a single blanket to sleep under while the air froze basins of water. They lived next to a large lake, yet dozens of students bathed one after another in the same water, the students say.
“These aren’t stories. This is the truth,” said Yvonne Lariviere, who attended the school from 1947 to 1955 and remembers being beaten by a nun wielding a metal yardstick. “I didn’t know why I was being hit because I didn’t speak English. I was seven years old and I had never been hit before in my life.”