SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - "We had a good life. Something happened, but I didn't know what. My mom told me that my sister Alice and I had to go. If we didn't go, the RCMP were going to put my parents in jail," said Muriel Betsina of Yellowknife.

She was referring to the day she left her home community of Tulita for the Grey Nuns Mission in Fort Resolution.

On Saturday, April 18 at the Explorer Hotel, Yellowknife Victim Services held its main event to wrap up National Victim of Crime Awareness Week. The main speaker was author, residential school survivor and former NWT resident Alice Blondin-Perrin. Blondin-Perrin spoke and read from her book about her days and healing journey since attending the same Grey Nuns Mission in Fort Resolution as her sister, Muriel Betsina.

Betsina continued to remember her experiences. "We lived in the bush, we ate good food. Fresh ptarmigan, fish, prairie chicken, moose and rabbit. We had everything. At residential school, we never saw meat. Just soup. The main thing we ate was beans. To this day I will not eat soup."

She remembers exactly what they ate, because she spent up to and sometimes more than twelve hours a day in the kitchen preparing meals for the other children.

When Muriel reached twelve years of age, she was transferred to live in the older girls' ward. She rarely ever saw her younger sister Alice after that. Muriel had tears flowing down her face as she remembered the experience.

Betsina is now on a healing journey of her own.

"I talk a lot with elders. They told me I was a good person. No one had ever told me that."

Elders have told her to let go of the pain, she said. To hang on to it will bring more sickness into her mind, body and spirit.

"The more you talk about it, the more you remember, the more you get mad, the more you get your frustrations out," said Betsina.

Della Green, the co-ordinator of Victim Services in Yellowknife, wanted to acknowledge and say a special thank you to all of the donators for National Victim of Crime Awareness Week 2011.

She said they make it possible for Victim Services to continue promoting its program in many different ways.

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