The journey “The train of tears.”
Frederick Ernest Koe recalled that one morning, there was a knock at his parents’ door in Aklavik, Northwest Territories.
Anglican Minister Donna Webster and rcmp officers at the door, and they’re asking for me and telling me to pack up because I had to go. Well pack up, a few little things, no suitcases, my hunting bag is still kind of dirty, throw whatever stuff you had in it and off you go.
And I didn’t get to say goodbye to my dad or my brother Allan, didn’t get to pet my dogs or nothing, you know, we’re going. Marched over to Frankie’s house which was just half a block away and picked him up and then we were marched to the plane, just like we’re criminals, you know marching to this policeman to get on the plane.
And that was my experience leaving Aklavik. And it was pretty monumental point in my life, very dramatic I guess. You don’t realize this until after, because those times, you just did what the people in charge told you to do.54
Howard Stacy Jones said he was taken without his parents’ knowledge from a public school in Port Renfrew, British Columbia, to the Kuper Island school.
I was kidnapped from Port Renfrew’s elementary school when I was around six years old, and this happened right in the elementary schoolyard. And my auntie witnessed this and another non-Native witnessed this, and they are still alive as I speak. These are two witnesses trying, saw me fighting, trying to get away with, from the two rcmp officers that threw me in the back seat of the car and drove off with me. And my mom didn’t know where I was for three days, frantically stressed out and worried about where I was, and she finally found out that I was in Kuper Island residential school.55
For many residential school students, the school year started in a long ride in the back of a school-owned farm truck. Shirley Leon attended the Kamloops, British Columbia, school in the 1940s. She described her first memory of residential school as
