DENINU KU'E/FORT RESOLUTION - While attending residential school in Fort Resolution, Dorothy Beaulieu made up her mind that she would make something of herself.

Beaulieu, 70, was born in Rocher River in 1938, where she spent the first five or six years of her life. Now a ghost town, the community had two stores and a café, the fishing was good and Dorothy’s family had a large garden with potatoes and carrots.

Dorothy and Angus Beaulieu celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in Yellowknife in April. Dorothy has spent her life teaching and helping others in Fort Resolution. - photo courtesy of Charlotte Loutitt-Tsetta

“It was a beautiful little town,” she said of the community, which was about 50 kilometres from Fort Resolution. “It was a beautiful life we had.”

Rocher River lacked one thing, though.

“My dad wanted us to go to school,” she said, so the family moved to Yellowknife in 1944 or 1945, where she and her sisters attended school until both her parents got sick.

Before heading down to Edmonton for TB treatment, Dorothy’s father made arrangements with the Catholic priest in Fort Resolution to have the church take Dorothy and her sister in.

The two sisters moved to the community by themselves in 1947.

“We stayed here at the mission and we never went home,” Dorothy said from her home in Fort Resolution. There were 11 students in similar situations – with nowhere else to go.

Dorothy’s father died of TB in Edmonton in 1949. Her mother remained there for years and when she returned, she was almost like a stranger.

While Dorothy said summers were nice – picking berries and swimming – at the mission, life was anything but easy.

“I hate to say this, but the sisters that looked after us, some of them were good but there was some that were really mean,” she said.

“We were always called down. ‘Good for nothing Indians’ and all that stuff but we kept that place clean so I don’t know what they meant.”

While she said there wasn’t any sexual abuse that she knew of at the school, it left its mark.

For one, it was lonely.

“They never showed us what love is. I’m not calling them down, but they never tapped you on the shoulder and said you did well or praised you a little bit. They never did that.

“And another thing too, we could not speak our language."

Dorothy said she was stubborn, constantly getting caught speaking Chipewyan.

“I remember I sure washed that floor. I thought I was going to wear it out,” she laughed.

At a point though, she stopped speaking her language, and didn't speak Chipewyan at all in high school.

“It was kind of hard, you know.”

Dorothy said she tried to put all the residential school memories away in the back of her mind, and it took a very long time for her to be able to talk about her experiences.

Friends would tell her “sister was rough with you when you were young,” she recalled.

“I didn’t remember.”

She said it started to come back to her when people began openly discussing their experiences. She would have nightmares. On a visit with her sister Nora, they began talking about their stories and Dorothy cried.

“You know, all these years, I blocked it out of my mind and slowly it all came back,” she said.

Today, the discipline from the school still lingers.

“If I knit a sweater or socks or gloves or mitts, if I make one little mistake, I undo the whole thing and I do it again,” she said. When she married, she would clean and clean her home. “I always had a feeling sister was behind me, telling me how to do things.”

She said she saw the effects of the schooling on others too. She said kids of parents from mission schools have told her they don’t think their parents love them because they don’t hug or kiss them. “I say no, that’s not the point. Your parents weren’t show to love.”

“I do not blame the church," she said, adding she is a lay presider at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in Yellowknife.

"A lot of people say, why do you work for the church when they were so mean to you? I keep telling them it was not the church, it was the people working for the church and some of them that were really mean to us.”

Dorothy finished her schooling in Fort Smith and then took a two-year nurses' aid course. She returned to Fort Resolution after her training, but all the TB patients were moved to Fort Smith.

“I stayed here,” she said, where she taught at the school for nearly 30 years.

In the classroom, Dorothy tried to teach her culture, showing kids how to cook wild foods, dry meat and fish.

“I taught Chipewyan language for five years and then I showed them how to bead, how to make mukluk slippers," she said.

“I find that some of the kids were not interested in that, but what can you do?”

When she began teaching as an assistant in 1974, she would speak Chipewyan to kindergarten students.

“In 1977 was the last year the kids, I was able to talk to them in Chipewyan and they answered back in Chip,” she said.

“After that, nothing. It really hurt.”

“I thought, why is that happening? I was not allowed to speak my language when I went to school, why aren’t these kids trying and why are they not speaking their language? Was it because they were ashamed of who they are? I tried telling them they should be proud of who they are,” said Dorothy.

Accompanying Dorothy through life is her husband, Angus, who she married upon completing high school, back in the spring of 1959.

With fifty years of marriage in the books – recently commemorating their golden anniversary in Yellowknife with family in April – Dorothy provides counselling to young couples.

“The most important thing is communication. You have to talk to each other about what you think and what you feel,” she said.

“I guess a lot of people fall out of love. I don’t know, I still love him,” she laughed.

While Dorothy and Angus never conceived a child, they adopted a girl – now living in Hay River with her own children – and took in many foster kids.

“I always kissed them well good night. I made sure they were clean and I’d go to school with them on parents day.”

“My foster care kids are well off now. They have good jobs. Some are good trappers and good hunters, so my fridge is always full,” she laughed.

Dorothy is also helps those in the community trying to stop using alcohol, or people who have recently lost loved ones.

“They used to phone me at all hours of the night,” she said, adding she would listen to their problems and help out if she could.

She retired from teaching in 2002.

“I stay home and I knit and I sew beads.”

Dorothy and Angus run a four-unit hotel together too: “That keeps me busy.”