Survivor Truths: The Art of Reconciliation

My name is Daisy Laing, everybody knows me as Gina. My Indian name is Ah-ooma-took which means medicine bird woman.

My memories are mostly of my grandparents, my parents were very busy and my grandparents more or less taught me everything they knew and were teaching me many things about medicinal medicines from the forest. And those teachings were interrupted when I left to go to the residential school.

My very first day at the residential school, at seven years old, I saw a friend from Bamfield and I hailed her in our language. And I got grabbed by the top of my head, by my hair and thrown across the room. And I got punched and kicked and that was my very first day at the residential school when I was seven years old.

The first time that I was raped, I was nine. And I was held down on the bed and my offender said to me, “Scream. Scream as loud as you want. No one is going to come.” I didn’t believe him, so I did, I screamed. I was terrified. Well, no one came. Nobody came. The only way to escape what was happening was to join the choir or some kind of a sport team.

And when Mr. Aller who was the art teacher came to the residential school after hours he, I can’t say he taught us art, he let us express ourselves with the artwork. When I first went to his class I waited for three or four days right beside the door hoping to run if he tries to do something to me like the staff had done at the school. He never did. He never once did anything. And so I got more and more comfortable and able to paint more and more and express myself and to trust in him. And it was a wonderful release that we could do that. We could paint pictures of our homes, of our culture, of the things that were, we missed so much and couldn’t have anymore.

My painting depicts the beach where I played as a child. We swam on it, we picked crabs, we went fishing for perch, and we had a pole and we’d vault from one log to another. I don’t like to paint houses. And that’s why, is because of what happened in our homes. There was a lot of abuse, sexual abuse and our parents, my parents went to school, the residential school. And my father did to me what was done to him there. He was a violent man. I lived in terror.

Yup, my father and my mother both went to residential school. My mom tried hard to be a good mother, I know she did now, I didn’t back then. I blamed her for everything. And it wasn’t her fault. It was the fact that she had gone to residential school and she went through the same thing I did.

I went to a treatment centre on Quadra Island and it was art therapy. And I found that that was the best way for me to express the horrors that I went through at the residential schools and I put them down on painting. Once I painted a picture, once it was down on paper, I felt that the emotional part of it wasn’t mine anymore, um, I could move on from it. When I got the painting back, I realized how important it was for me to express myself that way. And because of the flood of memories from my original painting when I was 11 at the residential school, I realized that I need to do this and I need to put these thoughts and memories and try and convey the feeling onto paper. I have a painting of myself looking out the basement window at the residential school and I wanted to convey the loneliness and the longing to get out of there. I painted a picture of myself being force fed spaghetti and blood running down my mouth because that’s what happened to me. I have a picture of the vice principal of the residential school forcing me to perform fellatio on him. I recently did one of the first time that he raped me and I left my body. And I was watching the whole thing from up above myself. And I wanted to do that with the express purpose of helping people to understand how we felt as children. How helpless we were. How hopeless it was. And how we had no place to turn for help. I want that message to get out there. I want people to feel it the way I felt it. I don’t want them just to read a book or look at a picture and come to a conclusion. I want to let them know and I think I can do that with these paintings. I continued to paint and I am going to continue to paint some more paintings on the subject.