MASKWACIS, Alberta — To this day, Flo Buffalo doesn’t drink milk — not since two nuns force-fed her the sour milk she had refused at the Catholic-run Ermineskin Indian Residential School for Indigenous children that she attended in the 1960s.
Holding out her right hand, she showed how she has never been able to fully straighten it out since a nun severely beat her with a stick.
“The nuns, they were real mean,” Buffalo said.
With international attention focusing on the former school in the prairie town of Maskwacis as Pope Francis visits Monday to apologize for abuses in a system designed to sever Native children from their tribal, family and religious bonds, Indigenous Canadians such as Buffalo are voicing a range of skepticism, wariness and hope.
Buffalo, a member of the Samson Cree First Nation in central Alberta, doesn’t often talk about her two years at the school. But ahead of the pontiff’s visit, she sat down to relate her experiences to Associated Press journalists and a small group of teen girls who are learning about the traumatic legacy of the schools.
Speaking in the council chambers of the Montana First Nation, a neighboring Cree tribe where she now works, Buffalo recalled that the nuns, who were white, beat the girls when they spoke in their native Cree instead of English.
At the same time, Buffalo, 67, said she often defied the nuns. “I scared the hell out of them, because I wouldn’t put up with their …” she said, completing the sentence with a mischievous chuckle.
Buffalo still considers herself Catholic. But she’s not going to attend Monday’s event with Francis — she doesn’t want to deal with the crowds, and the ones she holds responsible are the nuns who abused her and never offered an apology while they were alive.
“It shouldn’t be him apologizing,” Buffalo said. “It should be them.”
When Mavis Moberly heard the pope was coming, the news triggered some of the trauma she carries from her years at a residential school in northern Alberta. But after tears, prayers and a traditional smudging ceremony, a purification rite with scented plants, she found herself looking forward to hearing the pope’s apology.
“Maybe it’s going to help me to heal and to have a little bit more inner peace,” she said after last Sunday’s Mass at Sacred Heart Church of the First Peoples, a Catholic parish in Edmonton oriented to Indigenous people and culture.