By Jackie Powder, Illustration: Dung Hoang, Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health, April 15, 2022
At age 6, Priscilla Agnes Morrisseau became number 332A.
It was the identification assigned to the little girl when she arrived at St. Margaret’s Indian Residential School in 1953. Forcibly removed from her family home on the Couchiching First Nation reserve in Fort Frances, Ontario, by Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs, she spent the next five years at the school run by the Catholic Church.
It was a brutal place, says the 74-year-old, now Priscilla Agnes Simard. She remembers coal oil treatments that burned her scalp to kill nits. The nuns beat her with a leather strap on the hands and back of the legs when she spoke her native Ojibwe or mispronounced English words. Meals were mainly watery stews preceded by doses of cod liver oil.
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