Okay. This happened, I know, during my lifetime in the residential school. I saw my friends being woken up in the morning and told that they were getting married at six o'clock in the morning. I've since spoken to some of them, and 50 or 60 years later they're still in the same relationship, a lot of them, and mainly because it was implanted in our head that once you marry, you stay married forever. That's life. You're in there for life--through bad, through good, through sickness, through health, whatever, and we took that literally. I'm still with my husband, and thank God I didn't experience any violence, but I know that some of my friends did, and they stayed in the relationship, and they're still in the relationship.
So it's all these other things that were taught to us in residential school. The nuns pounded into our heads that if you leave your husband for any reason, you're going straight to hell, and this message scared us, and it continues to scare me today. For instance, I'm still scared to miss church on a Sunday. I think I'm going to go to hell if I do. Everything we did in the residential school was a sin. We went to confession every week not knowing what we were supposed to confess about, but we were told we had to go to confession and tell the priest. And some of these priests wound up to be sexual abusers.
In the residential school, we were not taught the good things. We were taught everything that was bad, not the way we were taught at home. I remember the elder always telling me, if I took good care of myself, life would be good to me. That's all they told me. They never said everything we did is a sin. They never said that. So the teachings of the elders and the teaching that we received in residential school were very contradictory. So many of us left residential school very confused, and some of that confusion stays with us today.