Residential School Term Analysis

Early in the nineteenth century, Hudson’s Bay traders used Tsimshian guides to show them around, which is when the names began to get confusing. “Kitamaat” is a Tsimshian word that means people of the falling snow, and that was their name for the main Haisla village. So when Hudson’s Bay traders asked their guides, “Hey, what’s that village called?” and the Tsimshian guides said, “Oh, that’s Kitamaat.” The name got stuck on the official records and the village has been called Kitamaat ever since, even though it should really be called Haisla. There are about four or five different spellings of Kitamaat in the historical writings, but the Haisla decided on Kitamaat. To add to the confusion, when Alcan Aluminum moved into the area in the 1950s, it built a “city of the future” for its workers and named it Kitmat too, but spelled it differently.

Now that I think back, the pattern of the little man’s visits seems unwelcomely obvious, but at the time, his arrivals and departures had no meaning. As I grew older, he became a variation of the monster under the bed or the thing in the closet, a nightmare that faded with morning. He liked to sit on the top of my dresser when he came to visit, and he had a shock of bright red hair which stood up in messy, tangled puffs that he sometimes hid under a black top hat. When he was in a mean mood, he did a jerky little dance and pretended to poke at my eyes. The night before the hawks came, he drooped his head and blew me sad kisses that sparkled silver and gold in the dark and fell as soft as confetti.

“Cookie got kicked out of three residential schools. At the last one—guess she was fourteen then—this nun kept picking on her, trying to make her act like a lady. Cookie finally got sick of it and started shouting, ‘You honkies want women to be like cookies, all sweet and dainty and easy to eat. But I’m fry bread, bitch, and I’m proud of it.’” He laughed and shook his head “She always had to be right. When I was losing an argument and wanted to piss her off, I’d call her Cookie and it stuck.”

“He’s a guide, but not a reliable one. Never trust the spirit world too much. They think different from the living.”

“What about Mom?”

“When Gladys was very young, lots of death going on […] She used to know who was going to die next […]”

“Mom doesn’t see anything” […]

“She doesn’t tell you […] Or she’s forgotten how […] Her grandmother, now she was a real medicine woman. Oh, people were scared of her. If you wanted to talk to your dead, she was the one people went to. She could really dance, and she made beautiful songs—that no one sings any more […]”

“[…] How do you do medicine?”

“All the people knew the old ways are gone. Anyone else is doing it in secret these days. But there’s good medicine and bad. Best not to deal with it at all if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Alberni? Really? There’s a treatment centre where the residential school used to be?” one of the women said to Aunt Trudy.

Another woman laughed, then said, “Hey, how many priests does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“How many?”

“Three. One to screw it, one to beat it for being screwed and one to tell the lawyers that no screwing took place.”

“That’s not funny,” Josh said.

“That’s the point,” the woman said.