“I too went on the wrong road,” she told those attending a National Day of Truth and Conciliation event held in Yorkton Thursday.
It was a road she stayed on until a second marriage, when she talked about things with her husband.
“We talked about it. We wanted to change our lives around,” she said, adding “it wasn’t easy.”
But now she sees the effort as worth it.
“I’m glad I changed my life around,” she said, adding it remains a process including prayer and smudges asking to have a good day each day.
“You can pray in your own way. It doesn’t have to be the way you learned in residential school,” said Bob.
The residential school was not a good place for Bob, who said she saw too much abuse.
“Ya it was hard being in residential school,” she said.
One incident Bob shared was about another girl at the school who was 11, or 12. She had wet the bed.
The girl was taken to the prayer room where she had to stand “with the wet sheet over her head.”
“Imagine how she felt,” said Bob.
Another time a girl ran from the school. She was found and brought back to the school, where she was put in her pyjamas and then laid on her bed and strapped, recounted Bob.
“We couldn’t do anything,” she said.
Bob said the nuns and priests running the school had “no knowledge how to treat us,” adding, and “they used to call us savages.”
Bob said another great sadness of being forced to attend the school was the loss of her own language.
“I never got to learn my native language,” she said.
Bob’s family suffered too.
“As I was on my way in life I knew I didn’t treat my children right,” she said. “I wouldn’t want them to have the lives residential school survivors did.”
But in time Bob said she found a way to heal.
“Elders always talk about forgiveness . . . Why hold all that inside, the hate and the hurt.”
