1975: Our School Year Fizzles Out

      A lot of the educational materials that I did receive from the School District, were not very well suited for Madelaine and Hannah my two First Nation’s girls, since they had spent most of their lives living in the bush.  I showed the first graders a photo of a man raking leaves and I asked the question, “What could this man do with the leaves, so they wouldn’t be wasted?”  I got the relies, “Put them back on the tree,” and “Save them for next year.” 

               When I pointed to the mast of a sailing ship sticking up in the background of an old historical photo and asked what the sail was.   I got a question back in reply, “Is it was a television antenna?”

               Our continually fluctuating school population plunged a couple of weeks before the end of the school year, because the Carrier Indians blockaded the railroad tracks that connected the mill to the rest of BC.  That blockade caused the mill to shutdown.  They laid off most of the employees and flew them back to Williams Lake, which left the camp without most of their families, and my students.

      My school was left with just 3 students; one whose family had remained in camp, and Madelaine and Hannah, my two Indigenous students, who lived down on the shore of Takla Lake.  Despite my decimated student population, I continued on with our school year until the official close at the end of June.

            When Madelaine found a dead sparrow on the ground, I did an impromptu science class.  After examining the bird, we buried it.  Madelaine said it would come back to life the next day, and so I told my three students we would dig it up on Monday, to see if that was true.  On Monday we did re-dig the grave, and discovered that the bird was still dead.

            On the last two days of school, I was down to just Leigh Anne in the class, because  Madelaine and Hannah failed to show up.  After Leigh Anne left on the final  day of school, my wife and I scrambled to clean up the school, taking down all of the pictures from the walls, packing up and storing all the educational supplies, and then closing up the school building for the summer.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca