To Get a High School Diploma, Indigenous Kids like Me Had to Leave Behind Everything They Knew

When we arrived in Yellowknife, the high school residence, Akaitcho Hall, felt like the biggest building I’d ever seen. Even though so many of us were arriving at the same time, there was no disorder at all; it felt almost scripted. Arrive, walk in the door, go up the steps, wait in a room, and then a supervisor comes in and does their checks; the absence of chaos added to this complex feeling of controlled confusion. Everything was so structured and ordered, but it was at odds with how I was feeling on the inside. I never felt truly clear about my role in that environment; I was just told to go here, do this. Here’s your room, okay, check. Here’s your roommate, okay, check. This is your bed, these are your drawers, that is your desk, check, check, check. You get up at this time, you have lunch at this time, and you come home from school at this time. These are your chores at this time. Check.

Everybody had to keep their room clean, and beyond that, we had monthly duties too, such as vacuuming the hallways and cleaning the shared bathrooms, the recreation room, and the area where we ate. Some girls worked in the kitchen. It was very organized, and everybody took turns. We could sign up with our roommates and work in the same area together, and it was like a half hour of bonus time to chat with each other before we had to get back to our room at 7:30 p.m. to do our homework when the whole building had quiet time.

In fact, everything was so structured, it felt like we were guinea pigs. I felt disconnected from it all, never truly engaged. We were robots doing what we were told, and if we didn’t do what we were told, or if they caught us doing something we shouldn’t be doing, there were consequences. Three times and you were out, you had to go back home, and then you were a failure because you didn’t have your diploma.

There was no high school where my family lived in Arviat, or in our region, the western shore of Hudson Bay, so kids had to go away for grades ten through twelve in order to get their high school diploma. At the time, in the 1980s, “the North” was all the Northwest Territories. Nunavut didn’t exist yet. All Indigenous children—Inuit, First Nations, and any Metis in the area—who were ready for high school had to go away, and it was always quite a distance. For kids from the eastern Arctic, we had the choice between Iqaluit, on Baffin Island, and Yellowknife. The risk of children getting lost during the journey was so high that parents had to sign a release form.

My attitude when I got to Yellowknife was: I just want to get through this. I want to get out of this. I want to be done here and move on with my life so it isn’t so hopeless anymore.

• Diary of a Black High School Student
• First Nations Are Rethinking Education in the Yukon. And It’s Working
• The Dangerous Allure of Residential School Denialism

The semester of grade ten I had spent studying at Maranatha in Saskatchewan made me realize that maybe the way I felt—that there was something wrong with me and that was why I struggled—was not because there was actually something wrong with me but rather because there was something wrong with this system, the way things were set up for us but not by us. If it’s not me, then what is it?

There was a problem here, but what was the problem? That line of thinking would later define my nonprofit, the Arctic Rose Foundation: changing the way we as Inuit think and engage. Letting go of the government process that was imposed on us, because it isn’t the only way—it’s part of one way. The government process was rooted in “the Eskimo problem,” and school was the first time I personally experienced that attitude. School was when we started spending a chunk of our day with white folks. Until then, our days were with the Inuit, our parents and family. There were a few great teachers I loved, but it only took one or two or three to do some real damage. Those teachers were pretty cruel, and if you were on the receiving end once, it stayed with you. “You’re kind of dumb, why don’t you get this?” They’d get short with us and they’d get angry because we weren’t getting a concept the way that they thought we should. I felt as if something was wrong with me, and that, added to everything else that was going on around us, made for a toxic environment. Especially as I got older, some of those teachers weren’t happy to be there, and we bore the brunt of it on a school day.

One bright spot was that our roommates in Akaitcho Hall were often people we knew. I flew to Yellowknife with my sister and a couple of friends from my community. It was a bit of—well, I wouldn’t quite call it joy, because it wasn’t a joyful experience, but it was good that we got to be with people we knew. It made that part of the experience a bit lighter. We arrived in mid to late August, and it was a frantic time. It took about a month to settle in, but I soon began to realize how unprepared I was for grade eleven. I started to really struggle, and I felt a growing distance between me and my peers. I began to look for isolation, just to remove myself from that uncomfortable feeling I had around everybody.

As soon as the homework period was done, or if we had a bit of a break between the end of the school day and chores at the residence, I would seek out isolation. I wanted to be away from all of the smarter ones, all of the ones who seemed to have this school figured out, because that was never me. Some evenings, I would hide when it was lights-out, and when the building was quiet, I would grab a notebook and go to the girls’ washroom. It was a large space—there were about a hundred girls in residence—with mustard-yellow walls, showers on one side and toilets on the other. There was one bathtub, and it was private, in its own little room, so you could close the door. I think it even had a lock. Every now and again, if I didn’t have the isolation space during the day, I would sneak into the bathroom and close the door and sit in the bathtub and write.

There was also a piano in the basement, and every day when I got back to residence, I would try to run down to it before anybody else got there and plunk away. I didn’t get to do it every day, and usually it was just for twenty to thirty minutes because there were a lot of us who wanted to play, but the piano became one of the things that saved me. I’d always been drawn to the piano since the first time I heard it when Dad started the new church in Arviat. We were so fortunate because it had some instruments, including an electric piano.

There was an upright piano in the homeroom at school in Arviat as well. The homeroom teacher, Sheila, must have heard me playing around on it, because a short time later, she offered piano lessons for some of us girls; we would have been in grade five or six. It was so exciting to see her play and hear what she could do on the piano, the sounds that she could make, and what she was teaching us. We started with “Chopsticks” and the very basics, but I enjoyed it so much, just the very act of making sound with my hands moving across the keys. The word “chopsticks” alone sounded so fun. I had no clue what chopsticks were. Watching this teacher play, I observed something subconsciously: “She is a teacher, but she is also a musician, she clearly loves the piano, and she uses it to make music.” I was devastated when I had to stop after just a couple of lessons, but my parents needed my help back home. (Years later, I saw Sheila and her husband when they came to a concert, and she remembered our few lessons.)

So coming across the piano in the residence in Yellowknife on my way to do laundry one day was like rediscovering an old friend. It was a physical relief to see that piano. Sometimes I’d get just ten minutes on it, other times thirty minutes, and not every day. Sometimes the room was locked. I was obsessed with the song “Music Box Dancer,” an instrumental song by Canadian composer Frank Mills. It was a big hit in 1978 and ’79, and everybody was playing it. I figured out the notes and taught myself, and I’m not a great piano player by any means, but I was hyper-focused and played it over and over and over again. The music was so happy, and just knowing the piano was there got me through most of the toughest school days. Playing the song and the sound of the piano was like a pressure-cooker valve releasing. I loved that piece of music, so I taught myself to play it, because there was no other way to hear it when I wanted to. And in teaching myself to play, I also got to tell myself, “You’re not an idiot.”

Finding that release at the piano and with that piece of music, I realized that, in my heart of hearts, I’ve always been a dancer. But my body can’t release through dance, so “Music Box Dancer” helped me to feel like a dancer, and that’s the closest I could get. It was the sound of a child playing, totally free, and I wanted that to be me. I don’t think I’ve ever mastered it, or that I’m even really good at it, but I played it enough to feel it and to get what I needed from it.

The piano was an important outlet, as was the alone time I carved out for myself writing in the bathtub, but I needed more, so I did what I’d often done at home when I was looking for quiet isolation: I took to the land. There were walking paths around the residence, and out back were these giant rocks and trees in a wooded area. Yellowknife was only the second or third time that I’d ever seen trees, so every tree looked huge to me.

The biggest difference between Yellowknife and Arviat is that Arviat is mostly flat tundra for miles and miles. You have to go a decent distance to find shrubs and bushes. There are some slight hills and eskers, but nothing major. Rankin is more like Yellowknife, hilly and rocky, but in Yellowknife, the hills are higher and rockier, and there are trees. The trees were kind of mysterious to us. Many of us hadn’t been that up close and personal with trees before, so it felt more exotic than seeing trees in the south, like when I was a child and went to Winnipeg. In Arviat, the smell of tundra is earthy, so I was surprised by the smell of the air in my temporary new home. It was sweeter. In Yellowknife, we lived among the trees. I could hide in those trees, and that felt magical. So I’d go sit out there on the rocks and look out into the old town and the water and write and daydream. I felt safe, and it was the perfect solution to my craving for isolation.

Yellowknife felt familiar but different. It’s mostly First Nations land, though some Inuit live there. We were no longer among our own people, so it wasn’t ours, but there was still a familiarity. In parts of the Kivalliq Region, and Arviat specifically because it’s the southernmost community in Nunavut, we’re very close to Manitoba, so the Inuit always had relationships with Northern Cree from northern Manitoba. Even hundreds of years ago, Inuit groups would trade with Northern Cree. We always knew we were not the only Indigenous people of this country, but I hadn’t really been among others until Yellowknife. Yellowknife was the first time that I was on their territory. We have always known about territory. “This is not yours. You are a visitor here.”

Everything in Yellowknife, including the residences, was run by whites. It was the government town. Everybody who ran anything there was a white person, so that little bit of discomfort was something we Inuit and First Nations shared. We were coming to Akaitcho Hall, to high school, from our communities. It was our region, but we weren’t in control. We weren’t in control of anything there. And I didn’t yet know to what degree we had been displaced, but it was always there underneath everything. Even during my childhood in Rankin Inlet, we could feel that “shifting sands” feeling of my parents’ generation, never quite settling into their “new” lives. It was the same in Yellowknife. We were just always on eggshells, always afraid we were going to get something wrong.

I felt really dumb a lot of the time, and the strict structure made it worse. At home, there was a little bit of leniency, forgiveness, flexibility. At school, there was none. I would be sitting in a classroom and suddenly struck by the fear that I hadn’t properly tucked all four corners of the sheet into the bed. In retrospect, I understand that managing up to 300 young people is a lot, that there had to be rules. But this was a constant state of always feeling like an unwelcome foreigner and always afraid we’d make a mistake.

It wasn’t constantly a horrible experience, but I always come back to this: They knew the history of the residential school system. Why couldn’t there have been empathy? It was different now, of course—there were no more physical beatings or sexual abuses—but if they’d just taken the time to understand the implications of intergenerational trauma, it could have been better for us. They knew where we were coming from, mentally and physically. An acknowledgement of that would have helped me find ways around the complex baggage I brought with me to Akaitcho Hall.

When we returned to Yellowknife after the holidays, I felt overwhelmingly inadequate. I just couldn’t get into the way things were structured. I couldn’t learn. I just felt so dumb, which was incredibly scary, because we were constantly being told that a diploma was essential to getting a job. I was convinced that if I didn’t make it through this step and graduate, I would be a total failure, I wouldn’t amount to anything. What was wrong with me? That was my mindset when I wrote a piece called “Searching.”

I originally wrote it in Inuktitut, in the woods behind Akaitcho Hall, where I felt protected and sheltered, where no one could see me or peek at me.

Qiniqpunga—I am searching Maligaksamnit—something or someone to guide Pijumajakka—the things I wish for Ajurniaq&ugit—I can never attain Namullu—so then where? Kajusinialiqpit—Do I carry on? Inuusirilauqtavut—what once was our way of life Ajurniaqtara—I can’t live like that anymore Tukisinginnapku—I don’t understand it Kisianili—but, or, and yet . . . Ilumnit—deep inside of me Ikpigivunga—I feel something Ajurnaqtuqtaqangittuq—I feel that there is nothing impossible Ajurnarnianiraqpaktait—God, you say it’s going to be hard Aataniq tasiulaunga—God, guide me Tagvali—here I am Ikungavunga—kneeling before you Tukisitaulaunga—help me understand Kinauvunga—who am I?

This really deep feeling was pulling at me all the time. Something was very off about me. Why did I feel so dumb? Why did I think I was stupid? When did I start to feel this way, to think this way about myself? I loved my early childhood. When did things change? The deep disconnects were ripping me apart. I don’t recall ever hearing about counselling or working through trauma or even addressing trauma. Counsellors were for it if you were struggling with your grades at school. A lot of us were second-generation residential school survivors and had buried trauma, and being in residence did not help. We weren’t without hope, but it wasn’t hope for the future.

We simply hoped to graduate and get out of there. Maybe it wasn’t the supervisors’ jobs to help—many of them were quite nice—but the environment was one of “hush, hush, don’t bring it up,” and so I never did. Nobody ever did. We couldn’t even utter the words. And the deeper we buried that trauma, the more impossible it was to recover from. The effects of that were becoming more harmful, the damage increasing.

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, when we started questioning why we had to send children so far away to finish school, we finally started asking, “What supports do kids need? What supports do we need?” We started talking about it. My generation put an end to perpetuating the silence.

Excerpted, with permission, from Kihiani: A Memoir of Healing by Susan Aglukark and Andrea Warner, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2025. All rights reserved.