Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From "These quotes from residential school Survivors can help kids (and parents) understand their experiences" by Arisa Valyear, 2021-06-08:

Typically as soon as Indigenous children arrived at residential schools their names were replaced and they were assigned numbers.

Wilbur Abrahams attended a residential school in Alert Bay, B.C., and remembers how important it was for students to remember their numbers, as this is usually how staff referred to children.

"They told us to remember our number, instead of calling my name, they'd call my number, and if you don't remember your number, you, you know you get yelled at. And I, I think we did extra chores, so you had to really keep memorizing your number. Mine was 989."

Lydia Ross, who attended Manitoba's Cross Lake Indian Residential School, recalls the different numbers she was assigned throughout her residential school experience.

"My name was Lydia, but in the school I was, I didn't have a name, I had numbers. I had number 51, number 44, number 32, number 16, number 11, and then finally number one when I was just about coming to high school. So, I wasn't, I didn't have a name, I had numbers. You were called 32, that's me, and all our clothes were, had 32 on them. All our clothes and footwear, they all had number 32, number 16, whatever number they gave me."

[Today is the first annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, honouring children, survivors, families and communities affected by residential schools in Canada. It's Orange Shirt Day, elevated to a federal statutory holiday but not yet observed as a provincial statutory holiday in all provinces -- it's official at the provincial level in British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and the Northwest Territories, but not in Alberta, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario.]