Daniel Saul

Daniel Saul outside the museum.

Last week, I spoke with Daniel Saul. He’s the manager of the Secwepemc Museum in Kamloops but is from the Simpcw First Nation, north of Barriere. He looks after the staff, facilities and grounds. He’s been manager since 2006 and before that he worked for the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society.

He was born in 1949 and is 61 years old. He went to a school in Barriere then one in Moose Creek. He was taken to the Kamloops Residential School in 1958 and then paroled from the school ten years later.

I sat down with him outside the museum on a beautiful warm spring day. The view from the spot had the old residential school on one side and the museum facilities including a pit house on the other.  I spoke with him about his job at the museum, the role of education and his own experiences.

Here are some part of that conversation:

Role of the Secwepemc Museum:

“I think it’s a cultural and educational centre and that’s the big role. Most museums they play the same role but we have First Nations staff and interpreters so visitors come here get the whole gambit of the experience so we like to think it’s cultural education as well as tourism cause tourism’s actually a form of learning, formal education because they come to see us to learn, to learn about things and we also learn from them. I mean, it’s really interesting to see how things work and what they think and all this kind of things and a lot of is the way people thing we should be, like some of the questions we get asked like, how come you don’t have your outfit on or your regalia or costume is usually what they ask and then we explain it, this is the 21^st century and it’s really not practical to do that kind of stuff unless there’s special events or some kind of ceremony or things like that, right, to wear regalia. Number one, it’s too hot in the summertime plus you don’t want to damage them right cause getting the real material is getting scarcer and scarcer so like when you do have the regalia, you’d want to keep really good care of it so it wouldn’t get damaged.”

“The whole idea is for everyone to get to know each other, right so how can you do that if you don’t participate, if you don’t talk to each other, if you don’t mingle together and ask questions and learn from each other because if you don’t do that, then it’s like a segregation and when that happens, people don’t get the truth. They may read things in books, but that’s not all that’s true as you know, in newspaper and TV’s and movies, things that are actually not what is portrayed. We have in the museum a lot of information and we say is what you see is the First Nations point in history because we never get to write it so when the visitors come they get to see our point of view on all these things, how did it effect relative to them and most of the educational tools and books, it’s not so bad now, but in the past it had one point of view.”

“When you go to a place and you want what’s there, minerals, fish, trees, all that kind of stuff so what do you do, you get rid of the people who are there.”

“There’s real bad and there’s good. A lot of people just, Oh I didn’t realise that kind of thing and there some people like that, it’s good when they say that but a lot of people say, well I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it, whatever, stuff like that, well doesn’t matter but now that you know, you can help make things right. That’s all you can do basically.”

“The whole site is kind of like a historical site because it was a residential school, right. You know that’s not a very good topic but it was a part of our history so we can’t ignore it. The museum, it’s all together and it’s used as an administration building, etc. Etc., they had the buildings here, these are historical buildings and the park all within one location, rather than move somewhere and try to rebuild and all that stuff and we do the schools and it gives them a chance to get out of the classroom, come here and visit. We also go to schools but it gives the students, they remember more if they’re actually here inside a pit house or doing actually activities, they’ll remember that whereas in a classroom, it’s good in a classroom when they learn but it’s very sterile. Because when we bring people through the building, they’ll remember that... I think it’s the effect of being in the whole environment.”

Reclaiming the space of the old residential school for the Secwepemc Museum:

“Absolutely. There was a lot of discussion about that. It was some people’s opinion, well we should just tear the joint down and be done with that, like I think with Lytton and Williams Lake, correct me if I’m wrong and I get asked that quite a bit, right, how come it’s still there and I say, well, like I said before, it’s part of our history whether you like it or not. You can’t just block that out. People, you have to learn from that. History’s not always good, it’s painful a lot of times, but it’s still there. It does no good to hide it or try to ignore it because so many people have been affected by that you can’t so when I first started doing this, when I first came back here, it was pretty tough for me to actually go through that kind of stuff cause that was like, I don’t know, 25- 30 years later after I left here.”

“It was actually pretty strange because when you go actually through the buildings, you see the same places and the same rooms and the same physical surroundings and things start coming back to you and you start, ‘oh gee, I don’t know. I don’t know about this.’ When I was first asked to do a tour, I was pretty hesitant about it and I struggled with it, just looking around. I didn’t do a very good job and the people I explained to them so they understood right. It took me awhile right and after I’d done it maybe a dozen times, I started getting better, not easier but better and after awhile it was better and I used this. They say in counselling there’s things you have to confront whatever it was so I used that experience to look and overcome those kind of like fears.”

“You get the real hands on, like we’re the real, we’re the survivors. We were there. We experienced it and a lot of people don’t know the actual experiences, what did we do? What happened when we got up in the morning, what did we do then? So we go things like that with them and it’s way different from reading in a book like that’s fine there’s nothing wrong with books but you don’t get the experience of somebody who’s actually there, who can look at a book and say that was full of beans.”

“I was brought here when I was in Grade 3 which was 1958 and I got out of here in 1968 so I went through all the main buildings, junior boys dormitory, intermediate, senior boys and I think it was 1963, we transferred into the, this was called the Annex where the museum is. Even though we were surrounded by hundreds of kids, we were all very lonely because you’re lonesome for your family, you know and we were very poor and they didn’t have vehicle or anything like that to come all the time until the later years and then we had let’s say, 1965 or more when they started loosening up here and I think it was probably ’63 when they started transferring us to schools, public schools in Kamloops and then we’d come back here at the end of the day, the dormitories but being away from your parents and your family and stuff like that and after all that time you don’t even know who they are. In the summer, I’d go or during Christmas, I’d go if I had some place to go, someone to take me, right, but after that you don’t really know who they are. Even when I’d get to back home to where I lived, there’s people, ‘Oh, you go to the school down there kind of thing’ and the mistreatment, you know the bad food, the cruelty, that kind of stuff but in the end I felt it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t cause that. I didn’t do anything to be treated like that because my parents never punished me like that. They’d give me a stern warning or something but they’d never beat me. I was never beaten in my life until I got here.”

Abuse and issues at Kamloops Residential School:

“It was here. It just never came out until later on. I think the Native Brotherhood in the early ‘60s movement to shut these schools down because of all that and we weren’t learning anything. When I went to school in town, I noticed I was two or three grades behind and it was really tough trying to catch up. We just had any old teacher who came along. A lot of them weren’t teachers so consequently when we got over there and I thought I did really good on my first test and I was like, ‘holy Toledo’ but there was no incentive to really do anything here like it was just do this and shut up and do it and if you didn’t you got a good whooping basically so you just did things so you wouldn’t get punished. That’s not learning, that’s avoiding.”

“Most of the time was spent on religious stuff. We had to go to church every morning and Saturdays and three times on Sundays and more when it was a Saints day or something like that or Lent or something like that and then when we’d get to class and have another 45 minutes of religious instruction so the learning was, I’ll just give you an example, when you learn a times table right, one times two and all that so this nun would stand there and hit our desk and say one time one is and you’d have to go right up to 12 times 12 so if  we weren’t able to stand there and recite that, we got punished. Then OK, we could recite the whole thing by memory but we didn’t know how to multiply, they didn’t really explain to us.”

“It was pretty bad. It was pretty rough cause then people thought we were stupid and that’s wasn’t true. We were very bright but not schooled in the proper schooling techniques or learning techniques or stuff like that even how to study, they’d just say study. OK, so we’d sit around and draw cartoons and pass it to each other but they didn’t explain, OK study what do you actually do. Do we just read it or memorize it or what? It was pretty strange but when we got over to the other school, they assumed that we knew all that, how to do your whole chapter and that kind of stuff, we didn’t. Shot in the dark kind of thing.”

Disconnect with home communities that the residential schools caused:

“I knew everybody and who they were because I never forgot about it. That time away you kind of lose touch and things. When you’re together all that time, then you know but when you’re separated and there’s a lot of people from my community that were sent her and come back, you’re kind of isolated from the community simply because you’re not sure of what’s been going on and all that because we’re completely different. We’re isolated at the school. We didn’t get things from the outside. Rarely would we sneak over to town now and then. In the end, I was the youngest one in my family cause they all left here before I came here so there was whole years and years that I saw them rarely. I’d see them in passing or visit that kind of thing. I had six sisters and two brothers even then I’m still getting to know them and learning what I’m supposed to know because here, we had to learn everything differently, under threat of punishment. You don’t learn that way so a lot of that stuff and when you grow up or get a little older and you come out of here, residential school, what was normal here was not normal outside because here you had to look after yourself. You learn how to fight, you learn how to steal just to survive here but once you got out and got to say in the city, you were thrown in jail for things that were completely normal here.”

“What happened in the end, the people here, the other student were taking the place of my family so there was kind of a disconnect in that way because when I got back, I didn’t really have anything in common. I’d have more in common with the people I went to school with.”

On Sk’elep School of Excellence:

“I think it’s pretty awesome because my granddaughter goes there. To see our own people managing it and teaching in the schools and our own kids there and they’re setting the rules even though they’re adopt the B.C. curriculum, there’s all these added things that go along with it, culture and language and things like that and its new compared to these at the time so give you a certain, ‘we did this’ so that gives you a perspective of taking back what should have been yours in the first place.”

“Most bands are pushing education as much as they can and I truly believe that because no longer can the First Nations sit back. They have to have professional, master’s degrees so we get at the same level as everybody else with a lot of these big companies and governments and big groups that try to do stuff on our lands so we can deal with them table to table.”

“Number one with education, they have to be aware of the issues, what’s going on, what’s the position of this government part or the position of the minister or matter of fact your own people. What is our position? What do we think about it is number one, us, our community, our small group. We have to have a position and we have to do it with knowledge. We can’t just throw a dart on the wall and say OK, I like that guy or whatever so a big part of that is finding out who’s who and what’s the issues... education will give you that. It’ll show you how to do that.”

Taking back responsibly from the Federal government:

“We just have to be careful that through the years and stuff, the Federal governments sense of doing that, sooner or later they’re going to say here take it all, but when the say that they don’t slide the funds along with it so I’m neither saying it’s good or bad, I’m just we need to be very careful of what’s happening.”

“I’d like to see the majority of our people be very well educated. I know everyone cannot get a degree or masters and all that but there’s other things like trades and all that, which usually pay more right and those kind of things, whatever people are happy with... I think the main thing is to be happy with what you’re doing and be a good contributor to your society.”

“They will progress, they’ll be ahead. They’ll succeed. If you’re successful individually and if you’re successful as a group, then everybody’s successful and through that perhaps we can eliminate a lot of the negatives. There’s always going to be negatives like dependencies and things like that but that’s through everybody but to minimize that and ... when you’re occupied like that and have a good job, enjoying it and you’re committed to it, there’s really not much time be going out and doing whatever.”