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Stewart Bernard: My Aunt Alice was the last one to move here, to die rather. She was ninety-nine, ninety-eight. Mrs. Bernard: Almost ninety-nine. Stewart Bernard: Yeah. And she moved away when she was young and how young, I don’t know. But the thing is, when she moved away and Margaret used to talk to her quite a bit and try to get information out of her. But there was, you know, that many years back there, like I say it wasn’t the proper thing to be native. It wasn’t you know, it wasn’t . . . so you moved away and left your native ancestry here. You moved away and you know somebody asks you what nationality you try to avoid it, you wouldn’t tell you were native, you know what I mean? And what she done, she forgot a lot of stuff, she forgot a lot of stuff, she was even afraid to come back here. For a while she didn’t want to come back, because you know all the memories that had, you know, the way she was treated and all this and that so she never wanted to come back. And my Uncle John was the same way. My Uncle John left here and he moved to Salem, Mass., or he eventually ended up in Salem, Mass. We were there when he died and looked at this birth certificate or something like that and they asked him what his nationality was, wasn’t it? And he wrote down that he was a British subject. Mrs. Bernard: He never said native. Stewart Bernard: Never said he was native, he never said he was white, blue, green, purple or nothing. Mrs. Bernard: They want to forget, that’s the thing. Stewart Bernard: That’s the sad part about it, it’s really . . . And you say, well, that’s in the past, forget about it, but you get the same thing in the residential schools today. You can’t forget that. You can’t forget how you were treated.
