Reflections from Them Days: A Residential School Memoir from Nunatsiavut
Reflections from Them Days: A Residential School Memoir from Nunatsiavut
Everyone had their own little wooden desks. A lot of children spent half their time in the corners with their hands behind their back. You wouldn’t have to do too much bad anyway for you to get put in the corner. Trying to whisper to one another, I suppose.
I used to like the books they had back then. We didn’t used to have Inuttitut classes then. Everyone was already talking it, just about. After I was going to school, must’ve been after, the kids wasn’t allowed to talk Inuttitut, only English. We usually spoke English and Eskimo, both of it. Auntie Katie could talk Eskimo, and Mr. Peacock could preach in Eskimo. They taught in English.
The girls sleeped in the old anatalak, what they used to call it. We used to sleep in the rooms. We had bunk beds, them old tin ones. Nothing upstairs, only what they had put up there. We used to light the fires every morning, the girls.
Reflections from Them Days: A Residential School Memoir from Nunatsiavut is the life of Nellie Winters when she was a child in Labrador. This memoir is a series of stories and drawings from Nellie Winters, edited by Erica Oberndorfer. The first stories are from her life with her family in Okak Bay on the north coast of Labrador. Most of the stories are from her two years, beginning when she was 11, at a residential school in Nain, 400 kilometres south of Okak Bay.
Nellie Winters was born in 1938 and went to residential school from 1949-1951. Before 1949, Inuit children received a traditional education from their families, although there was pressure to send the children to residential schools. After Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, school attendance was mandatory for families to receive the Canadian family allowance payment. The Nain Boarding School was the closest school to Nellie Winters’ family.
Accompanying the text are a series of inukuluk drawings done by Nellie Winters. She is a well-known artist and drew scenes from her life with her family and her life in the residential school in order to pass the stories on to others. This book grew out of those drawings, from Nellie Winters telling Erica Oberndorfer the “stories that lived in each of these drawings.”
Winters said:
“It’s good for children to learn the stories from long ago, how we lived back them days, when we had no TV, no phones, nothing. Back them days, work and learning was our pastime. In boarding school, it wasn’t always good, but whatever we went through we learned a lot. Others had it worse than us. If I don’t share my memories, my own children won’t know the stories.”
Reflections from Them Days has both happy and unhappy times in it. The contrast between Nellie’s life with her family and her life at the residential school is quite strong, and it is clear to readers that the school was a hard time in her life. There are a few points where Winters alludes to worse things happening than what she describes in her stories, such as punishments for misbehaving and the work the children had to do at the school.
Reflections from Them Days offers a good look at what life was like for Inuit children in residential schools as well as with their life with their families. Winters’ drawings and stories are a great way for children to learn how people and children lived back in them days.
Daphne Hamilton-Nagorsen is a graduate of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia.