 So I'm just going to figure out how I can slip through to my first slide. Let me see here. I'm not sure how to get the next slide up. Oh, there we go. Great. So I wrote Sadie Leggs about my mother-in-law's story. And there's two things that people find really interesting about that. One is that a daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law would work together on a story. And the other is that it has a really unusual name. What happened is Margaret and I live in the country. And we have quite a long drive into town. And when we drive into town, she tells me stories about growing up in the high Arctic. One day she told me about an incident that happened at her school. She said, we were just driving. And she said, they used to call me Sadie Leggs. And I said, oh. And she said, yes. When I went to a residential school when I was younger, mean nun gave me these horrible red stockings and made me wear them. And then everybody laughed at me and made fun of me. But then she told me what she did with the stockings. And that's a secret she kept for about 65 years and didn't tell anybody. And when I heard what she did with the stockings, I just knew right away that it had to be written in a story. It was sort of the first story of any kind of triumph I'd ever heard come out of residential school. And I thought, this is perfect. This is something that we can tell children about. I went on begging her to let me write the story. And I'll let her tell you why she didn't want me to write the story. I didn't want my grandchildren to know about it. I was nodding at one time. So that is why she was reluctant to have the story told. So if you look on a map here, this is a map of the northern part of Canada. And I'm not sure if my cursor shows up. But Saks Harbor is on here. And if you look down how far it is down to Alberta, it's quite a long way. So that's where Saks Harbor is. And that's where Margaret grew up and was born. And when she went to school, she had to cross the way across the ocean and up the river to a clavec. It was actually quite a distance. So on Saks Harbor, there was no schools on Saks Harbor. There was no schools. And Margaret really wanted to learn how to read. So she traveled this long distance to go to the school. But when she was there, she ended up being stuck there for two years because of the distance. So on the map, it doesn't look very far, but it's very far. And I often tell children to kind of put it in context for them. I say that if she was any further north, if she was a mile further north, she would be living with Santa Claus. So this is actually a picture of bank silence where Margaret grew up. And the ocean in the front there, that's frozen for most of the year. And so that trapped them in at the island there. There was no airplanes that landed at that time. And no other vehicles just boat when the ocean wasn't frozen. So the buildings in the picture, they look like wooden houses, but they're actually tents. The Margaret's people were semi-nomadic. And they lived in tents so that they could follow around in these communities occasionally to follow where the game would be because they hunted and trapped. I also point out when I'm speaking to children how there's no trees in this area. That's how far north she was, that there was no trees. That's true. And here's a picture, Margaret's the larger one in this picture. And this shows how very warmly she was trapped. So I'd like to show this picture and talk about how the Indigenous people of the north had some really great skills for coping with living on the land and surviving a very harsh climate. And this is a type of park that is called the Mother Hubbard. And inside underneath the fabric is a very, very heavy stick for lining. I'll click through in here. And this is a picture. This is where Margaret ended up going to school. The time that she actually went to the school, this building was turned into a hospital. And then another building was built beside it. And that was the school she went to. In the center, the center nun is Sister McQuillan for anybody who's actually read Fat and Legs. She would be the swan. And in this picture, you can see the girls have the gray outfits on. Those are actually smocks over their uniforms because they were required to do a lot of very heavy physical demanding labor. And that was to keep their uniforms from getting dirty. Over behind the school, there are some trees visible. They're pretty tiny trees. But that was unusual for Margaret. For most of us and for the students that we talked to, they've grown up around trees. So the idea of not having trees say to be put in a desert kind of environment or up north where there's no landmarks to find your way from us, that would be something very scary. We'd be very scared of getting lost with no way to find where we were at. But for Margaret, the trees are very scary. So when they used to take her berry picking, she was always very terrified of getting lost in the trees. I'm just going to go through some residential school history. I'm not sure how much you know, but I'll tell you how I present it to children when I'm talking to them and how I put it in context. So it started in the 1840s, but that's really hard for children to understand because it happened so long ago. So the way that I tell children about it, I describe it that it was before your great-great-grandparents. It was a long time ago. But most of the students we talked to, their parents would have been in school while there was still residential schools open. For myself, I was graduated from high school before the residential schools ended. I tell them that not for Margaret, she lived far enough away that they couldn't take her away to the school, but lots of children were forcibly taken to these schools. And the children always want to know, well, how come the parents didn't just say no, or how come they didn't hide them? The reason is because RCMP would arrest the parents if they didn't hand over their children. Some people did hide the children and they did what they could to protect the children and keep them safe. Obviously, their very loving parents didn't want the children to go, but they didn't have much recourse. And sometimes the children were kidnapped, a plane would come into a community, for example, and any children that were standing around just sort of grabbed them and take off with them without the parent's permission. One thing I tell the children that's important to remember is residential schools weren't about what they wanted the children to know. It wasn't about what they were going to teach them. It was about what they didn't want them to know, what they didn't want them to be taught. What they didn't want them to be taught was anything that helped them live off the land. Indigenous children were extremely skilled and strong and creative and had a lot of skills that even as adults today, we couldn't imagine having those skills. They knew how to sew, how to tan highs, how to fix nets, how to set trap lines. There was so many skills that they had. When the settlers came, they looked around and they saw the land that they wanted. But of course, there's people already living here. So they tried to find the best way they could to get the people off the land. And the best way to do that was to take away any of the skills that the children had to live off the land and to cut any ties that they had with their communities, with their cultures, any spiritual ties. And they replaced those with very low-skilled jobs because they knew if they took the people off the land, they had to go somewhere. So the idea of where they would go was that they would go to urban centers and they could do very menial jobs. They taught the boys things like furniture making and sometimes even hired them out on ranches. And the girls they taught, sometimes they taught them how to sew or they taught them things like being a nurse's aide. There's certainly no eye to teaching an Indigenous girl any skills that would benefit her if she wanted to become a doctor. They just figured that they were fit for changing bedpants and serving meals basically. I know many children who have been to these schools who didn't actually spend any time in a classroom. I have a friend whose mother went to school when she was about five and left when she was 14 and never learned to read or write, never entered a classroom. The minute she got to the school, they put her in the kitchen to work. I'd like to explain to the children, we don't cover the abuse very much. We don't talk about the abuse because we deal with talking to young children that isn't very appropriate generally. But I do like to tell the children about the living conditions. And I think that's enough sometimes to give them a general idea of what it was like at the residential schools. So for Margaret, the meals were pretty bad. They had weak cabbage soup and porridge and things like that. They weren't fed a whole lot. And a lot of schools, they had what they call blue milk. The survivors talk a lot about blue milk and blue milk is milk that has turned and they would often make children drink stuff like that. Also, a lot of residential school survivors, they don't like to eat fish because they were forced to eat fish that had turned or just other foods that wasn't very good. And the children stick a lot of these schools, obviously. One of the most important things I think to cover when thinking about residential school or talking about it is the distance that it created between parents and children. For Margaret, she was gone from home for two years and lost her language. When she went home, she wasn't able to communicate then with her mother. She spoke very, very little English. And Margaret remembered very little in a reluctant. So that created a lot of distance. And also the growing up apart from each other created distance as well. Children went back and they didn't have any of the skills that they needed to live off the land. So the elders would look at them and go to their parents and say, what's wrong with your children? How come they don't know anything? How come they're so useless? So that created a lot of shame so that the beginning of the story or the end of the story was not when the children went home from the school. When ended up happening is exactly what was intended that children couldn't sit in very well. So they ended up going to the cities and trying to find places they could fit. Another big thing that happened is the children grew up without parents. They grew up in an institution. So they didn't get, I tell the children they didn't get bedtime kisses. They didn't get hugs. They didn't get bedtime stories. Nobody helps them if they skin their knee. When they grew up to be parents, they had no idea then how to be parents themselves. So for myself, my stepfather went to residential school. And I can remember washing dishes in boiling water. I tell the students I talked to, that's not because he was a bad man. It was because he was taught that's how you wash dishes. And that is the only way that you can get them properly cleaned. We also used to get our knuckles wrapped a lot with this fork when we were sitting at the dinner table if we didn't have impeccable manners. Again, that was something that would have been done to him, the knuckle wrapping. I'll tell the children about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And I believe it's next year. I could be wrong on that, but it's coming up. You can find it on the Truth and Reconciliation website. The national events will be held in Alberta. And they have, I believe it will be Edmonton. And they have a wonderful education day where people get to learn a lot about residential school as a good resource for students. But I tell them how what the Truth and Reconciliation National events do is they bring in residential school survivors and give them a very safe place to share their stories. They're very supported there. And then these stories are then recorded so that they can be remembered and not forgotten. And also they have a lot of, it's not just about all the sadness. They have cultural celebrations. It's usually at powwows and they have a talent show and they have ceremonies and lots of great stuff going on. And my personal favorite part of the TRC is the very last thing that they do before closing ceremonies is have a birthday party for the survivors. And they hand out hundreds of cupcakes and candles. I would think that students really identify with the idea that when these children went to school they never got to have a birthday party. So when we go to these national events and they have the birthday party, it's not unusual to see somebody 80 or 90 years old even having their first birthday party and the first time that they've ever had anybody sing happy birthday for them. And that's something that the children, it really hits home with students. This is a location of a lot of the residential schools that I don't have a map of all of them. This shows the provincial or the federal schools that have been recognized. But many federal schools have yet to be recognized and it's lacking all of the provincial schools on this map. So particularly for the prairie provinces and throughout the including Alberta where there is high Métis population, most of the Métis schools were provincial. But I do like to use this map as a resource because I can say to children now if you look where you live you'll see that there are dots near there. And then I tell them that means that one of your friends may have a parent or a grandparent who went to residential school or your parents may have a friend who went to residential school or even maybe your next-door neighbor may have gone to residential school. So this is something that affects people in your community. I like to set up if the children haven't read the book, we set up about who the characters are. And it's important when I tell them, when we talk about Margaret and discuss her that she's actually a real person and that this is a real story. It isn't made up. And luckily when I'm in the classroom I have Margaret with me. So it's easy for them to see that it is a real story. And Margaret is a girl who had no way of learning to read without going to the school. And so they had to go to the school and then was stuck there for two years. And then we talk about Catherine. And children really have a good sense of what a bully is. Unfortunately, we've all known bullies in our lives. And I use this opportunity to talk a little bit about lateral violence. So when Margaret arrived at the school there was an older girl there who really bullied the other girl. I tell them that probably when Catherine first went to the school she was probably treated very badly by the nuns, by the older girls. And that people who have a lot of hurt in their life sometimes turn around and put that hurt on other people and turn around hurt other people. Also, Catherine was somebody who helped keep the other girls in line for the nuns. And by doing that she probably kept herself very protected. And it was a way of making sure that she wasn't going to be a victim herself. In this story, for those of you who haven't read it, there's the swan. And she'd be the one in white. And her name is Sister McClellan. And she's a real person who is very kind to Margaret. The other character is the raven. The raven was not a very good person at all. And we chose not to name that particular nun who was nasty to Margaret. And it is based mostly on one particular nun who was nasty. But then we added in some stuff that happened from other people who were also nasty. So it wasn't just one particularly bad apple at the school. There were other nuns that weren't very nice. When I ask the children about their first day of school, usually most of them can remember their first day of school. And I tell them about recently I took my daughter to her first day of school. I get the children to talk a little bit about what their first day of school was like. So for my daughter, I took her and her teacher met her at the door and led her over to her space on the carpet. And they sang songs and they played centers. I went back to get her. You know, she's rarely away from me. She didn't want to come home. She wanted to stay at school, which broke my heart, but I was glad she liked her teacher. Margaret would have had her own fantasies about what school was going to be like for her. And I imagine, you know, she thought that the teachers were going to be just like her mom and really nice to her and care about her, that she would magically learn to read right away and play lots with the other children. But that's not what her first day was like at all. So I'm going to just hand it over to Margaret here. And I'm going to let her read about what her first day of school was like. And I'll see if I can get her up on the screen here while I do that. Okay, let's see if we can get you up there, Margaret. I'll hold that for you. Yeah, I'll hold it and you can just read. I followed the deep, none upstairs that creeped under my feet to a large room filled with beds. Across the room were seven girls who had been among the seven children I had seen earlier. We were standing in a somber line in front of four foul-smelling wooden stalls along one wall. The outsider pushed me into place at the end of the roll, and I nearly gagged from the odor that leaked it from the stalls behind it. Another dark cloth none passed by the girls, eyeing them up and down one by one. She clutched a large pair of shoes. She stopped in front of a small, sickly-looking, inlet girl. I knew the girl must be of the copper inlet from then Victoria Island because her park of cover was drawn high at the sides. The front and the back hanging low like a beaver's tail, unlike the Mother Hubbard Park as we were in the west. The girl shrank under the nun's glare, catching a firm hold on one of the girl's long braids. The nun sniffed it off with a clean slice and let it fall to the floor. The girl he had her face in her hand since the second braid was cut. The nun did the same to four other girls, staring only one old girl and one of the outsider's children, who was likely a trapper's daughter. The sound of shears severing thick black hair drowned out the hollows of the disgraced girls. At last only I remained. I held my breath. I was large for my age. Surely she would pass over me. She did not. She stopped directing in front of me. I stepped back from her head across, which nearly struck me in the face. But she reached out and yanked me back by one braid. I couldn't fix my own hair. I protested and developed them. I tried and with the same motion a bird makes to pull a piece of flesh from a fish, clamped the jaws of the shears down on my braid and severed it. I was horrified. I wasn't a baby. My other braid fell to the floor to meet the first, and I joined the others in their weeping. There we stood, sobbing in the humiliation of our discarded hair. So that's really a very different sort of first day of school. It's true here. So one of the things I like to talk about with the students is their reasons why they think that the hair was cut. And I don't know if anybody wants to add to that. So you can either type on the slide using the text tool, or if you'd like to use your microphone, anybody has any ideas? Definitely go ahead and turn your mic on. I think they wanted to take their identity away. And yes, that's definitely something that they wanted to do. And when I talk about that part to the children, I tell them you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror and you fix your hair, how you want it to be, or if you're a boy, you basically go to the barber shop maybe and decide if you want it long or short or exactly how you want it and how our hair is a really big part of our identity. And then I go back to showing the cover of the book and how everybody looks the same and they had that identity stripped from them. And let's see what else we have here. Oh, yes, and life. Well, life is definitely one of the reasons, but sometimes they did it without having to do that. When the settlers came over, they looked around and they said, okay, these people are living in the bush and they're living on the plains and how could they be doing all the things that we do? So they just assumed that they were very dirty. So in some cases, it wasn't necessary and their hair was clean, but they just assumed that they were dirty because we didn't know that much about indigenous cultures at that time. And the third reason that they did it and it's not for Margaret's cultures, which I find for most plains cultures, which you're teaching in Alberta, a lot of plains indigenous people, the hair had a lot to do with the length of the hair to do with your strength, your courage, and your honor. So to have that cut was a very, very shaming thing, especially for the boys. And yes, conformity was definitely something they were looking for. They wanted everybody to be the same and that's why when Margaret was giving the stockings, it was such a horrific thing. And yes, and definitely it was establishing authority over the children to be able to... I mean, it's a way that you can amputate something from somebody without physically hurting them, taking the hair. Even the girls sometimes had their heads completely shaved and I've heard stories even of them being washed, of them washing the children in kerosene, which is just a really awful thing to think about. When the children were getting ready to go to these schools, often their mother or their grandmother would make them a really nice new pair of moccasins or maybe sew them a new dress and send them off with these handmade clothes because there's no Walmart at the time and make them something special. And very often those would be taken and burned. Sometimes they're just taken and stored away but a lot of times they're actually taken and burned and destroyed. And I think of all that handy work that I'm going to waste and what a shame that was. I find after when I talk with students, no, I'm just going to wait until somebody's taking care. I'm just waiting here as I'm reading as the typing so we can all read along. Yes, and yes, I use the word sever instead of just cut for the hair because if you think of severing it really brings about that idea of amputation and that's what I was thinking of as it was like an amputation of something that they could get away with. So I'll just click through here now. So what I do when I'm presenting is I find that we introduce a lot of stuff that's very heavy to the children very quickly and I like to switch gears right after doing that so that the children have a little bit of a break. So I don't have all of the slides as a photograph that we use in our presentation because we'll be talking about other things and run out of time. So what I do then is I switch gears and so I think this is a helpful thing because of the nature of the way Sadie Lake is it's a very helpful sort of thing that in the book there's a whole lot about the Arctic as well. And so you can kind of use that to, if you're possibly getting a little bit fatigued from hearing everything, you can switch it up to just talking about where Margaret came from and about the Arctic. So Margaret, I'm going to get Margaret to go through some of these pictures and that we talk about when we're presenting. And that's the schooners we use to go back and forth from the island to the mainland to get supplies and writing a picture there put up on a beach so that they won't get broken up by the ice on it, bros. So what we talk about when we show the pictures of the boats is that Margaret's family were only able to go once a year to do all of their shopping and I just can't even imagine how they would know or how they would be able to figure out everything that they would need for the whole year. So I tell children, you know, if you run out of milk or eggs, your mom or dad just runs to the store and gets it right then and there. But for Margaret's family, that was an option. They had that one time. Also I tell them about how Margaret's family was semi-nomadic and these ships were used for them to travel. So I tell them, say if I'm speaking in BC, I say, so imagine if your entire city block or your apartment building, everybody in there gathered up all of their possessions and then they picked it all up and moved to Saskatchewan and re-established the community and set up there because that's what it was like. Margaret's entire community would pack up on these boats and move. Let's see if I have the other pictures here. And then there's the boat all painted and then they're getting ready to push it back into the water. And we didn't have no tractor or cats to do that so the men got all together and pushed the boat into the water. And when I'm talking about this picture, I like to tell them that this shows how cooperative, innovative, and strong that the Indigenous peoples were. If we had a whole room full of people, I imagine that even that kind of manpower we would have a very difficult time figuring out how to get these boats in and out of the water without modern technology or without heavy equipment. But they were able to do this and it would have been very hard work, I'm assuming. This is something I forgot to mention when I talk about how they could only go shopping once a year is that they didn't use money when they went shopping. They used furs and pelt that were taken to the Hudson Bay Company and then assessed and then however the furs were assessed that would determine how much they could buy. So if they had a really good year, one of the treats they would get is they would get barrels of butter that would be kept in like a salt water brine. And this is the missionary schooner. It goes up and down the Mackenzie River and along the shores of the Arctic to pick up children. And so I tell children this is a school bus except for when we think of a school bus going twice a day, this school bus only went twice a year. So this boat would go up and down the river and gather the children and they'd be really packed onto this boat just crammed on and they'd spend hours there without being able to get off to go to the bathroom or anything. And this is the school bus that's a little bit extreme. And that is the children get to unload the barges of cordwood that they use for heating up their school and the hospital. And it's hard work. And if you look and see the girl who is next to the man with the log or the boy with the log extra man, that's actually Margaret and she was about 10 years old there. I like to tell children that we're very fortunate now in schools that our children, they just go to school and they don't have to worry about cleaning the school. They have a janitor, a custodian who does that. They don't have to worry about heating the school. They don't have to worry about the maintenance of the school. But where Margaret went to school, they had to take care of everything. And there's a lot of schools still today in the world at different places where students are responsible for the school. And we're down here in Vancouver right now and we did a visit a few days ago at a school. And there was a young boy from Zimbabwe and he said that he put up his hand and he said at the last school I was at, that's how it was. So he was a young boy who, when he went to school in Zimbabwe, he had to get up in the morning and go and would have the children and clean the classrooms and things like that before school. So I always ask the children who thinks it would be fantastic if you showed up for school one day and you were told for the next three weeks you don't have to go to class. All you have to do is unload firewood. And usually there's several boys who put up their hands because they think it would be great to be outdoors instead of in class except for, this is all the wood that they had to haul. It goes several rows back and wraps around that building. So it's quite a lot of work. And they would do that from the time they got up until they went to bed basically. So very intensive labor to expect little children to do. Over on the left-hand side is the school where Margaret went and it split into two, sort of two wings. The reason it split into two is because one was a girl's side and one was a boy's side. And the girls and boys were not allowed to interact whatsoever. I asked the students that I'm talking to them who thinks it would be fantastic if you never had to speak to your brother or sister again and of course a bunch of hands always go up. But then I say what if your parents weren't there and nobody from your community was there and you didn't have any friends and the only person you knew was your brother or sister. And then the hands usually go down. I know for myself when I lived in the-when I was little we lived in the country and my mom, if my brother and I were really fighting she would say, oh that's it. You have to get out and walk. And so she'd make us get out on the gravel road and then she'd drive a quarter mile and park around a corner and keep an eye on us. But we think we were abandoned. And the minute our mom was gone we would become the best of friends. So I think that the children who went to these schools we really had a need to be in contact with each other. For Margaret, she was only able to see her brother. Later on her brother went to the school and she only got to see him on Christmas and special occasions like that. And that's my two little sisters. And I didn't have any toys like that when I was going to school. But the floors are still the same. They're hardwood. And you spend time scrubbing. And then when you've got the scrubbing done you and put wax on the floor. The fun part was when they gave you woolen socks and then you skidded across to polish the floor. And so I asked the children, and quite often we're talking like to a whole gymnasium. So I say, what if we cleared up this gymnasium and you got put on some wool socks and go slipping and sliding up and down the floor. And they think that that sounds fantastic until I remind them that this was in the days before the switch for wet jet. So they had to get down on their hands and knees and scrub the floor. And they did that really often. The nuns were very big on having the schools be immaculately clean. And actually when we think of a school day we think of a set amount of hours where children would be reading and writing and learning arithmetic. But in Margaret's case, this actual doing of school work was probably definitely a minority of the time. The majority of the time they spent doing things like maintaining the school. And also if there's any questions as I go along please feel free to pop them in there. Margaret, you want to talk about this? And that's the boys that went to residential school and had one of the girls but lost a picture. And these boys, they were sent out to work trap lines and collect the furs and pelt to make money for the school. And I'll let Margaret tell you what happened when they came back. And when the boys came back they saved the fur. They also saved the carcasses. And they said them to us, the children. So children usually have a pretty strong reaction when you say so who thinks eating muskrat would be very yummy? And there's always a couple of boys who think that it would be yummy but I'm sure they're doing it for shock failure because I didn't want to eat muskrat. And I like this picture quite a lot because it's Margaret when she's 16 and this is an outfit that she's made herself and it shows kind of a picture that symbolizes the reclamation of her culture. It shows that she can sew and it's also a very traditional outfit. What I tell the children is probably the skill that an Indigenous woman would be most handy for an Indigenous woman would be sewing because there was no Walmart to anything like that. If you ripped your parka, you couldn't just go buy a new winter jacket at the store. You would either have to be able to repair that jacket yourself or be able to make a new one. So sewing was a very important skill and Margaret actually makes traditional handy crafts that she sells as an artisan. This is the part where we talk about bullying. Sometimes we read the passage about how Margaret got the stockings and sometimes we're pressed for time and we don't. But it's... Oh, I forgot something right here. The thing about the stockings and the bullying is children understand bullying but they don't often understand about thank goodness. They don't understand about adults being able to be bullied. And children will say, well, why didn't she run away? Why didn't she tell her parents? How come nobody stopped this woman from being like this? Well, that's because there was no... I tell the children there was no email at this time. There was no phone. She couldn't just call her parents and tell them. The only communication she had with her parents was sometimes through letters. But when she sent a letter, she was told what she had to write in the letter and was not allowed to tell her parents what was really going on. Also, I point out to them that children have a lot of questions sometimes, especially if they come from a religious background. They want to know how could somebody who's supposed to be doing the work of God be so nasty and make fun of Margaret in this way? And I tell them that at that time, not everybody who became a nun or a priest did so because they wanted to do the work of God. At that time, there was some very large families that didn't have money. So sometimes they didn't have money. They would have to send one of the younger daughters, say, to a convent to be raised. And there was different various reasons why a woman would become a nun that would maybe have nothing to do with religious beliefs. Also, within the convent, some of the senior nuns were quite nasty to the younger nuns and this behavior was learned. So I tell them that there was no adults. If your teacher picked on you, then you'd go home and tell your parents and they'd come stick up for you. But Margaret didn't have that option. And you have an older neighbor picked on you. You could go to the RCMP or the police and they would stick up for you. But in this case, the RCMP made sure that the kids had to go to the school. I just got a question here. So I just wanted to ask Margaret if she'd ever considered a career as a close designer. Her outfit is most beautiful. Do you want to respond to that? She thought your outfit was very beautiful and if you thought of being a designer. I thought of it, but I think it's a little more work. Yeah. Margaret does sell her handy craft. She makes moccasins and Parkinson's stuff that she sells. So we just talked about some of the reasons why this situation wouldn't happen today with the adult being the bully. And if anybody had any input on other reasons why they think that this situation couldn't happen today or even in some ways it does happen still today, there are instances where children are treated very well. I adults would save a handy comment. Open that up. I'm not sure if anybody had anything to add to that. But as I said, it was a very unfortunate situation where Margaret was not able to be able to stand up for herself very well. And there was not that support in place for anybody to help her. If anybody has a question or a comment, I'm going to move on. Yeah, just feel free to ask questions or make comments as we go along. I'm used to being very face-to-face interactive. This is a little different for me. You can just write it in the side. Can I just talk? Oh, yeah. I like to think that we know that. Oh, yeah. That was great. But I can't say that things that I thought don't happen to kids today because I think that they do. But I think mostly things don't happen today. Like that because I think that generally we know better. That's what I hope anyway. Yeah, yeah, it's a good point. And yeah, we definitely, I'll talk about it in a little bit, that we do meet children who are in situations where they're quite bullied and have a lot of big bad things happen to them. But as of our classroom setting, I find the average child has a really hard time understanding how a teacher could just have such free reign over a child and be able to get away with the things that were done. Yeah, more sensitivity to children's needs today, less inclination for people today to see others as inferior, although racism still exists. Yeah, absolutely, that there is more sensitivity today. And I think nowadays in the classroom, when we look at children, I think so many more of us just see all the children, no matter what color they are, as children, and we can't wait to impart knowledge and wisdom into them and help nurture them. But that's not the way that Indigenous children were viewed in the classroom at the time that Margaret went to school. So it's definitely a different attitude. This is the second book that we wrote, and we wrote it because we realized after the first book that that was really just the beginning of the residential school story. We actually had a lot of residential school survivors comment that this is the story that nobody ever tells. It's sort of the forgotten story. And that's the story of what happened when the survivors went home to their parents and their communities, and they no longer spoke the language of their community. They didn't know the customs and ceremonies and protocols. They didn't know the skills that they needed to have. Actually, I heard an elder speak, and I believe he was from Haida Gwai, and he said he went home after years at residential school, and he felt very lost. And all of the elders would go to his parents and say, what's wrong with your son? How come he's so useless? He can't speak our language. He can't be of any help. He's no good. And so this created a lot of shame in this man. His sister then came to see him, his older sister, and she had been at a residential school herself. And she said to him, I know this great place we can go where everybody speaks the same as we do. They understand where we've been. Everybody is young. They're just like us. And she took him to live on Hastings Street in Vancouver, which anybody who doesn't know is a homeless area, or a lot of homeless people in that area. And so he lived there for a number of years because he didn't know where he fit in. And that happened to many people that's not always on the streets, but they moved to cities. They had no idea where they fit in. So I'll just set this up a bit. So Margaret was two years away from her parents. And I imagine as an eight, nine, or 10-year-old, she probably cried into her pillow many nights missing her mom, thought about how great it would be when she got home to her brothers and sisters and how much they would love her. And of course, every younger person when she got home, her brothers and sisters didn't remember her that well. And she got home, and she no longer spoke any of the looked in, and her mom didn't speak English. So I tell the children, could you imagine if you walked, if you went home today and walked in your front door and tried to speak to your mom, and you couldn't understand each other. And I get them to think about all the things that, you know, all the problems that that would create. So what happened for Margaret is she got on the boat that we saw earlier, the residential school boat. And spent a few days on that boat and thinking about going home. And I can't imagine the anticipation of a young child like finally away from this horrible school and on her way home. But then it didn't turn out like she expected. The boat finally hit the shore. She jumped off the boat. She went running to see her mother, and her mother said, not my girl. And she didn't do that because she was a horrible person. She did that because Margaret had been gone for two years. She had grown really tall in that time. She was very skinny from the bad food at the school. And her skin was very dark from being outside doing a lot of work. Also when Margaret's mother dropped her off, she had very long hair. And when Margaret came home to her, she had very short hair. So I'll hand it over to Margaret to read about when she first came home. I'll hold that for you if you want to. I'll hand it over to Margaret. I turned again to my mother. Our eyes were level. I was no longer the little girl who had always looked up at her. I was desperate to find a game of graphic mission. There was none. Her face was still scrunched in protest. This believing that I was her child. Not my girl. Not my girl, she called again to the brothers. I looked again to the boat behind me where the brothers stood. And my tent, ready to run, they made a move to come down and haul me away from my family. I was going to vote. I'd run to the end of the peninsula and jump in the ocean if I had to. I was not returning to the school with them. I was never going to let them take me back. It was their fault that my mother did not know me. It was because of the brothers, the priests and the nuns that she was no longer seeing who I was. They had cast an outsider spell on me with their angels' chores and four meals. It turned me from the plump, brown-faced girl, my mother knew into a skinny, gunk creature. And they had cut my long black hair into a short choppy ball. They had spent two years making all these changes. I was now ten and several inches taller than I had been when my parents left me at the school up the river in a clavicle. I scanned the crowd for my father. He had to come and save me. One of the brothers stepped down to the game plank and I leaned forward to run. But I was saved. My father emerged from the crowd and caught me in a tight embrace. The smoke smell of his heart had wrapped him around me. His strong hunter's hand stroked my hair. Only mom, he said to me with special name I had not heard for two years, I whispered to myself, only mom. The only name my grandfather had given me felt strange to my tongue. I could not remember the last time I had thought of the name. That alone heard it spoken lovingly in my ear. I no longer felt worthy of it. It was like a beautiful dress that was far too big for me to wear. At the school, I was only known as Margaret. Margaret was like a tight-stretched dress too small like my school uniform. Not wanting my father to see that I was no longer his only mom. I'm very... Hi, Kristina Margaret. I think we've lost sound. We can't seem to hear you.