CANADA
Oak Bay News
STEVEN HEYWOOD
May. 14, 2018
Angel Sampson recalls being called “heathen,” “savage,” and “evil.”
She also remembers the fear of attending school, where she experienced not only emotional abuse, but physical harm at the hands of the people entrusted with her education and care.
From 1964 to ‘67, and starting when she was six years old, Sampson attended the Tsartlip Indian Day School in Brentwood Bay. It wasn’t what people might recognize as a residential school — the site of pain and suffering by many of Canada’s Indigenous people — but the conditions Sampson says she faced were not any different.
In fact, the only difference, she said, was that the children got to go home at night.
That still didn’t prevent the abuse from happening, she said. Sampson remembers having her hair pulled, being choked and battered unconscious to the point where other students thought she’d died. As a young child, she said you were afraid to talk about it, and the nuns of the Catholic Church who ran the Day School created an environment where the children were fearful of speaking up.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.