She'd have imaginary conversations out loud in Anishnaabe

Peterborough's Shirley Williams used to get so lonesome in her residential school, where she was physically and emotionally abused, that she'd sometimes crawl under her bed covers and imagine she was in her family's kitchen with her mother and father.

During these stolen moments, says the Ojibwa woman, she'd have imaginary conversations out loud in Anishnaabe -- the language she was forbidden to speak at St. Joseph's Residential School in Spanish, Ont.

Williams, a retired Trent University professor, recalls a nun pulling the covers off her and asking what she was doing.
"Praying, Sister!" she recalls replying.

The anecdote drew laughter at last night's Kawartha Truth and Reconciliation Group meeting held at the Peterborough Public Library.
But Williams knows there's not much to laugh over from those dark times.

It was 1949 and Williams was 10 years old, living with her parents in the Wikwemikong reserve on Manitoulin Island, when a priest took her away, like other First Nations children, to be assimilated into western culture through residential schools.

She still shudders, she says, whenever she hears a slap because it brings back memories of public beatings of the children and sounds of continual slaps behind closed doors.
She spent six years at the school and when she went home each July and August, she says her father always told her, "Don't forget your language; don't forget who you are."

Williams is now a member of the Kawartha Truth and Reconciliation Group, formed a about a year ago and made up of 12 people who meet regularly to share stories and promote healing from the legacy of physical, emotional, cultural and sexual abuse in Canada's residential schools.
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