IQALUIT - The events happened decades ago but the pain of residential schools is still present to the survivors who took their turn at the microphone in Iqaluit recalling the smells, sounds and coldness of the schools late last month.

Residential school survivor Mark Oklaga, right, was one of 17 people to speak to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Iqaluit last month. - Jeanne Gagnon/NNSL photo

Tears flowed from some in attendance and many of the now middle-aged survivors telling their stories to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

One woman recalled a time she went to sleep at the Turquetil Hall residential school in Chesterfield Inlet, and visualized rewinding her life to when she lived at home with her younger sister. They were the only two children left at home, as her siblings had been sent away to residential school.

She described her residential school experience as a "culture shock," as she couldn't speak Inuktitut anymore. She would eventually re-learn it.

"But I hate baloney until this day," she said, adding she also hates sardines.

She still remembers the smell of both, she added.

She eventually attended the teacher education program in Fort Smith, where she was raped by a group of four men, she recalled, sobbing. She told the commission it took her 20 years to talk about it.

The cadet hall was silent as another survivor took his turn at the microphone.

He said that he had been a happy 10-year-old child living with his family in an outpost camp in Pond Inlet when at Christmas, his mother told him he had to attend one of the community's hostels so the family would receive a family allowance. He told the commission he had never spoken before of his experience there from 1961 to 1964.

He recalled living in a co-ed dorm with an older female student who raped him. Sobbing, he said he had held that secret for 45 years, ashamed to face the public and turning to drugs and alcohol when he thought about it. As an adult, he was charged with sexual assault and sent to jail.

"No wonder," he said, as he had been sexually assaulted as a child.

"It's so painful for me. I want to live healthy with my fellow human beings," he said. "When people ask me, I say 'I'm good' but my heart is crying inside."

As he stepped up from the microphone, his courage was applauded by those in attendance.

Another woman said that in the early '60s she was a 15-year-old living in Coral Harbour when she was sent by plane to the Churchill Vocational Centre, a residential school in Churchill, Man. She said it seemed like she went into the army, adding it was a totally cold environment and strange place. She told the commission she was there 10 months out of the year, unable to write or call home. "White people" looked down at her, she said. She said a Catholic priest molested her and a drunk teacher tried to abuse her. She can't forget about the experience, she added, and there was never love around them.

Decades have passed but the woman said she is angry to this day that she cannot sew, and cannot make traditional clothing. She is angry, she added, residential schools have taken away her language and culture.

"For 59 or 60 years, I've been living a life of sorrow. I've been living a life of secrecy," she said.

Commissioner Marie Wilson said 17 people testified in Iqaluit, a community she said is a gathering place for people from many of the outlying communities.

"What they struggled with today had to do with feeling they were completely on their own or not knowing who to turn to and not having the same sense of small community support that exists in the smaller communities," she said.

She added almost without exception, people testifying realize how deep the scars run when they are at the microphone and are overwhelmed by emotion, even if they don't intend to be.

"The thing that I have been struck by consistently, and Iqaluit was no exception, is just how profoundly personal it is when people start to share their feelings about this experience," she said. "They realize it is a matter that really shakes them to the core and they end up being very emotional about it.

"Very consistently people say they didn't want to carry around this load any longer, that they wanted an opportunity to set it down so that they could feel free and they could let go of their anger and move forward."

The commission heard often, said Wilson, people saying they had never shared their story or part of their story to anyone before.

"That sense of the power of a secret and how it has the power to corrode that person and to make them feel like it's kind of eating away their insides," she said. "That was a very striking and recurring message that we got."

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