My Bedroom
- Nishnawbe Aski Nation, 2005 -
When I went to residential school I slept in a dormitory. When I arrived at the school I was taken up to a small room near the dormitory where I put my clothes in one of many little cubby-holes which they called a closet. It is a good thing that I did not have very many clothes in it because they wouldn’t fit! The dormitory was a huge room, which held about sixty beds. The beds were lined up side by side along the length of the room in four rows. The room was full of beds. My bed was in one of the middle rows, so there was a girl on either side of me, at my head and at my feet. I was surrounded. There was hardly any space between the beds – just enough to get up and walk out. When any of the girls cried, sneezed, coughed, or talked everyone could hear them. There was no privacy whatsoever.
