'I knew I shouldn't be there, but I couldn't leave': Mi'kmaw Elder recalls decade of cruelty at residential school

Elder Rose remembers residential school 92-year-old Elder Rose Knockwood-Morris recalls her painful past at Shubenacadie Residential School.

GOLD RIVER, N.S. — Imagine being told speaking your language and following your own traditions is a sin.

That's what Elder Rose Knockwood-Morris endured.

She spent nearly a decade at a residential school and the rest of her life recovering from the experience.

Now, drumbeats sooth the soul of Knockwood-Morris, but as a child she was deprived of this art.

She reconnected with it in her 40s, thanks to an old cassette tape of Mi'kmaw drumming.

"Chills come all over me," she said. "And I cried, I just cried. I thought to myself. I found myself. I found me. This is where I belong."

She is a mother, a grandmother, a university graduate, and a former social worker.

Elder Rose is also a residential school survivor.

"It's damn frustrating, you know, but being a child, it's terrible," Knockwood-Morris says. "It's hell. Just plain hell. Day after day."

She attended Nova Scotia's Shubenacadie Indian Residential School from about the age of six until she was sixteen.

"I knew I shouldn't be there, but I couldn't leave once I got up there," she said.

Trapped in a foreign place, she says she was forced to forget her upbringing.

"If they heard us speaking our language, they hauled off and banged us on the side of the head," Knockwood-Morris said. "Many times, they slapped us. Stop that gibberish; that's what they called it."

Motivated to avoid beatings, the children came up with their own sign language.

"When we see the nun coming, we always make a sign and tell whoever it is, I couldn't do it now, but I could at that time," Knockwood-Morris says. "Sister is coming. Be careful. She's coming."

Perhaps more scarring than the violence, was the cruelty.

Elder Rose remembers a young friend named Beatrice who had her doll -- a special gift for from her father -- taken away.

"You know what that nun did? She took that doll and she gave it to a white little girl," Knockwood-Morris said. "And poor Beatrice cried. I could hear her crying at night for that little doll, you know."

Those painful memories flooded back for Elder Rose this year, with the discovery of thousands of unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools in Canada.

"I just cried," she said. "I cried and I cried -- so hard -- all by myself."

The triggering news, also offered some hope.

"At least they're doing something about it. They're not ignoring it, like they ignored us for so many years," Knockwood-Morris says.

But forgiveness is far too much to ask for.

"I just cannot forgive," she said. "I tried. No way. No. Not me. Maybe some people, but not me."

An accomplished artist, these days Elder Rose spends her time surrounded by loved ones and creating.

"I use to make big baskets, but I can't do that anymore, so I make these tiny little ones to pass time, you know," Knockwood-Morris says.

Angela Doyle-Faulkner is an Indigenous student support worker for the Halifax Regional Centre for Education.

"Elder Rose is regarded in the Indigenous community as a warrior, a hero and a survivor," Doyle-Faulkner said. "That gives everyone hope, when you see what she went through, and other elders went through, I call those people warriors."

A warrior who faced demons and survived.

And while her drum beats on, so too does the pain of her past.