Grandma showed a photo and told thier story
Answers
Explanation:
On a hot spring afternoon, my mother brought my sister and me to visit our grandmother. The three of us were sitting at the kitchen table with our only living grandparent. Such a beautiful afternoon it was, with the sun shining through the windows and onto the clean floor, the Rocky Mountains in the distance, and the hills close by. Surely I couldn’t have asked the Creator for a better day to hear my grandma’s story.
She had been making berry soup from Saskatoon berries that she had frozen from the past summer. We all had already been telling stories of the past. As my sister and I were talking about living in the city, laughing and having fun with the time we were sharing with our grandma, I asked her, “Mom, what was it like when you were a child?” I call my grandma “Mom” because of how much she is like my own mother.
“Well, my son. It was a difficult time,” she said. Immediately I knew she was talking about when she had to leave home to attend boarding school. “What kind of difficult time, Grandma?” asked my sister, who had no idea of the troubling time of colonization and boarding school. “When I and my brothers and sisters had to move away from our family to attend residential school,” Grandma replied. Looking a bit uneasy, she got up from her chair to tend to her soup. “But I won’t bore you with my old depressing past,” Grandma said.
“But Mom, it’s the past that tells us who we are now.” I remembered talking about that in social studies: how the past is important because it tells our individuality, who we are today. I thought it would be amazingly interesting to hear the story firsthand from someone instead of from a textbook, so I pressed on. “Oh, all right,” Grandma gave in. “You see, back then, it was a time of turmoil and depression for our people . . .”
The story went like this:
Until my grandma was about seven years old, she lived with her mother, father, and all her brothers and sisters. They lived poorly: they didn’t have a lot of money or food. Her father worked all that he could. They didn’t have any type of electronics, except a radio, so she spent her time outside playing in the bushes and simply using her imagination.
One afternoon, playing in the plains of the reserve near her family, she spotted a truck coming down the road with a white man inside. When the truck reached the house, her father came out and greeted the man. They talked outside for a little bit, then proceeded inside. This is where it got sad, something neither my sister nor I could ever handle.
After awhile, she saw some of her brothers and sisters crying and getting into the truck. She had seen this before with other brothers and sisters she had that were her age when they left. Her mother was crying and her father was the most upset she had ever seen him. As young as she was, she knew that she was now leaving her mother and father for a new, alien place. She did something not a lot of children of her age would have thought of doing in those times: She ran, ran straight into the bushes with tears streaming down her cheeks. Deeper and deeper into the bushes she ran, afraid of being caught by the scary white man that once had had to chase one of her brothers who tried to escape. She found a ditch that she lay in, hoping no one would find her.