A scene from residential school, Moose Factory (absolutely not related to the following story).
The year was 1979, the final winter on the island of Fort George. The new community, Chisasibi, was quietly being built several miles inland. The move that following summer was the furthest from our young unthinking minds.
The people in our charge had decided to close down the eight hostels which housed the students studying in English and moved them into the old Roman Catholic built residence at the far end of town. Away from the general population I suspected. But maybe it was just cheaper to herd all of us into one giant pen and let us roam.
The average age in the pen was perhaps fourteen, male and female, with a population of under two hundred. A minibus would drive students to the school at the other end of the town in the morning. Although most had to, or simply preferred to, walk the kilometre or so through the village. Strangely, my memories of times in class are not as fresh as the ones from the “R.C.”, as we came to call it.
A number of us had been placed in private homes when we arrived and I considered myself one of the lucky few until I saw how much more freedom the inmates of the R.C. enjoyed. My friends also tempted me in Waskaganishese, “Nooj moojigun oyh.” I don’t remember how it came about but two weeks later I found myself and my knapsack in Room Three, the Waskaganish boys’ territory.
Next door to us was Eastmain’s Room Four. Across the hall, the Wemindji boys had stakedout their room. Beside them, in a larger, longer room, the younger boys from variouscommunities, humbled and ghettoized while waiting for a bed to open in one of the Rooms.A smaller room held a few older boys waiting to graduate. At the far end of the hall theguys from Great Whale, strangers to most of us, lived under siege. Anyone who wanted totest their strength and fighting skill would visit them.
The girls lived in a separate wing of the building across from us. The kitchen, dining room and storage room separated us. In the basement was a narrow passage way connecting the two wings. We would jimmy the locks on the doors to visit after lights out. One night a friend of mine hid in the ceiling’s crawl space so he could spend a little more time with his girlfriend. Fie tried crawling through to the girl’s side but found the way blocked. He turned back and ran into our room covered in black dust. It was just as well, his girlfriend would have never let him crawl into her bed appearing like that. Besides there would be other nights for him to go courting so he just laughed it off and took a shower.
One night early in the year some village boys came to the residence to visit the girls but were quickly sent away by the head supervisor. They came back later that night drunk and armed. The next morning the supervisor’s suburban sat parked in front with its tire blown out.
The village boys weren’t the only ones who were armed. We found a .22 rifle hidden atop ahuge cabinet in our room one day. One of the guys bought bullets for it and waited tillnightfall for some target practice. Around midnight we spotted a cat sitting in the middleof the road under the street light. Our roommate loaded the rifle and started shooting atthe cat. The cat sat there as the bullets bounced off the gravel straight toward the nurses’apartments down the road. He managed to get a few harmless shots off before we convinced himto stop and the cat left with eight lives to go….
