It was decades before Vera Slippery had her first flashback.
She was nearly 40-years-old.
She says she remembered the punishments – kneeling in the shower for hours, the yelling and swearing, being sent to bed early – but she didn’t remember the sexual abuse until she started intensive counselling.
“Then all of a sudden things started to come up,” Slippery says. “I had my first memory and it had to do with an injury I sustained during my sexual abuse.”
Slippery says this while standing in a second-floor hallway at Muscowequan Residential School amid peeling paint, debris and broken glass. Pigeons have made the school home; their droppings cover entire floors of the building and they can be heard cooing. One flies overhead out of one room and disappears.
It’s cold and dark, except for the small light on a CTV News camera and a sliver of light at the end of the hallway where a board on a window doesn’t quite fit. A blue un-hinged door leans up against the wall.
Slippery was a student here for nine years in the 1970s, beginning in Grade 1. She walks us through the school, pointing out different rooms, explaining how things have changed. We do an interview in the room she slept in when she first arrived.
