CANADA
The Province
BY CHERYL CHAN, THE PROVINCE SEPTEMBER 12, 2013
Alvin Dixon was only 10 when he was torn away from his family in Bella Bella and sent to a residential school in Port Alberni.
It didn’t take long before he got his first thrashing. His sin: Speaking his Heisla language with another student.
“A supervisor heard me, took me to the playroom in the basement, leaned me over the bench and walloped me over and over with a strap,” says Dixon, 76, a member of the Heiltsuk First Nation.
It didn’t get better in the eight years afterwards, he says: “You’re sent to an institution very much like a jail, nothing gets better.”
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