CANADA
CBC News

Residential school survivors in Williams Lake, B.C., are reuniting this weekend to remember and heal.

Though St. Joseph’s Mission School was torn down in the 1980s, the painful memories are still fresh for the school’s former students.

Esketemc Chief Fred Robbins was taken to the residential school when he was six years old.

“My aunt and uncles brought me, dropped me off, and said, ‘We’ll see you in 11 months’ and left,” he said. “Then they shuffled me into the dormitory. The first week all I did was cry. All I wanted to do was go home.”

Yesterday, a commemorative monument was unveiled in the cemetery at the former school — a tribute, Robbins says, to those who died at the school and those who are still healing.