SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - A handkerchief soaked with tears, a loneliness so strong it was palpable and a feeling of guilt that carved itself into her being were what Alice Perrin said she took from her years at residential schools.

Alice Perrin will share her residential school experience and how she overcame it at the Explorer Hotel in Yellowknife on Saturday. Perrin was asked to speak at an event in Yellowknife as part of National Victim of Crime Awareness Week hosted by Yellowknife Victim Services Program. - photo courtesy of Alice Perrin

No hugs were offered to the four-year-old girl who found herself so utterly alone in a residential school in Fort Resolution in the 1950s.

Alice Perrin found a way to ease the pain through words, through talking about her suffering.

She will share her story and how she overcame her residential school trauma while in Yellowknife on Saturday, to conclude National Victim of Crime Awareness Week at an event hosted by Yellowknife Victim Services Program.

Perrin was born on the north shore of Great Bear Lake, in Cameron Bay, a community that is no longer there.

She arrived at Saint Joseph's Indian Mission, a Roman Catholic residential school in Fort Resolution, in 1952 at the age of four.

She could speak Slavey when she entered the system, however when the nuns could not communicate with her, Perrin said they became "mean and rough with us."

She said communication was a constant struggle, with nuns reading prayer books in French and speaking in Latin.

"When we first went there, they stripped us of our aboriginal clothes and then gave us a bath right away. They put us in cold water and started to wash us and pulled on our hair and because I was crying, I got hit right away," she said.

"In order to have me stop talking my Dene language, they'd hit me under the chin and sometimes I'd be biting my tongue at the same time."

She said these were her first memories.

She often cried because as a young girl away from her family, she would be overwhelmed by loneliness; instead of receiving comfort, the nuns would hit her.

"I guess they were trying to break us in. It didn’t work. What I ended up doing was crying quietly, without a sound. My handkerchief would be soaking wet from crying all the time."

"I was stuck there without going home for 72 months. That’s six years," she said.

She was in the residential school system for 12 years, until 1964. She spent some time at Catholic Lapointe Hall in Fort Smith and Akaitcho Hall, Yellowknife's vocational school.

She said her chores as a young girl consisted of cleaning the stairway that exited the dining area. She said she would be bent down, using a dustpan and a brush.

"A few times they pulled my ears and yelled at me and put my head right near the floor, pointing at two little hairs at the stairway that I had left there."

She said the residential school students submitted to the punishment because they had no one to turn to for help.

"We were in confinement. There was nobody around to protect us. They never gave us any hugs. No love, no compassion," she said.

The students would have liked to have been spared the humiliation of having their sheets presented to the whole school after they wet the bed. Perrin would have liked protection from a man who touched her between the legs.

She said as she grew up, she carried with her the immense shame of seeing what happened to her "sisters" -- the girls at the school -- and being unable to help..

"We didn’t want to let anybody know about it. It wasn’t our fault. It wasn’t our fault."

While crying over her keyboard, and her husband holding her, Perrin wrote a book. It is titled "How My Heart Shook Like a Drum" and it took her six years to complete.

"It was a healing journey for me," said Perrin.

Although she lives in Chelsea, Que., now, Perrin is visiting Yellowknife this weekend and will speak at the Explorer Hotel.

"I hope that the residential school students, the former students, find a way to heal themselves. I would like to let them know that whatever happened to them in residential schools was not their fault.

"When you're abused like that you really do have to deal with it. Cry, scream or yell. Whatever you need to let it out in order to recognize and acknowledge that it happened and move toward harmony," she said.

Marie Speakman, a worker at the Yellowknife Victim Services Program, recommended that Perrin come to speak.

"I have gone through it myself," said Speakman of abuse. Speakman has been sober for 28 years.

"It takes a long time to get to be where you are at. It doesn't happen overnight.

"It's important to see the positiveness. Even if you've gone through the abuse, you can still make changes," she said.

Perrin's talk comes right after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was in Yellowknife on Thursday, where others had the chance to share their experiences from residential schools.

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