Copyright © 2001 NLThomas
All Rights Reserved

Three stories tall and made of stone, it seems to jut out of the ground, like a chunk of hell that has dislodged the crust of the earth. The residential school they call "Spanish" is cold and fortresslike, more a crypt than a cradle. It is boarded up now, but still they return to its crumbling walls. They are elders, but in their minds they are still the children who were taken from their reservations and brought to this place to forget their "pagan" ways. Decades have passed, yet the memories are fresh. What draws them back to this place?

John, a Mohawk from Akwesasne, is finally able to put into words what happened to him in this school. It has taken over half a century for him to reach this point. Walking across the lawn toward Spanish, he spoke slowly.

"There was a boy I knew here at the school. He was always in trouble with the priests. He was always talking back. He would get hit by them and still he would talk back."

"One day he ran away. It was in the middle of winter. He was gone for quite a while. Eventually they brought him back. They brought all of us into a big room and then they brought him inside. They told us that he had run away and that this was what happened to kids who ran away. They beat him with a strap in front of all of us. There were kids as young as 5 years old watching this poor kid get a whipping by this priest. He held up his hands to protect himself but that just made them do it more."

"Later on he ran away again. We thought he was crazy to do that, since we were so far from civilization and he could have frozen to death. He also could have been eaten by animals. What happened was, he used an old board and made himself a little bench beneath a train. He rode that for a while until someone noticed him at a train station and called the police. When they found him he was nearly frozen to death. Still, they took him back to school and gave him another beating in front of all of us."

"Then he ran away again. This time we thought for sure he was dead, because he never came back. We thought the wolves got him. It wasn't until I was out of the school that I found out that his family had taken him out of there."

"Many years later, I ran into him in a city where I was ironworking. I asked him why he kept running away,even after having been beaten so many times and knowing how dangerous it was out there. He was very quiet and looked at me. 'John, you would have done the same thing if it had been you.' His eyes told me that he had been molested by those priests, and that is why he did what he did. We all have our stories. Sometimes you did what you had to do to survive."

The above article appears in the Winter 2000 issue of Native Americas Journal. Call (800) 9-NATIVE, or visit, for information on obtaining this feature article or to subscribe.

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