Donate NowRosalie Sewap attended the Guy Hill Indian Residential School from 1959 to 1969.
“We had to pray every day and ask for forgiveness. But forgiveness for what? When I was 7 I started being abused by a priest and a nun. They’d come around after dark with a flashlight and would take away one of the little girls almost every night. You never really heal from that. I turned into an alcoholic and it’s taken me a long time to escape that. I can’t forgive them. Never.”
Sewap is one of thousands of former indigenous Canadian residential school students interviewed by Daniella Zalcman for her project "Signs of Your Identity." Zalcman recently visited classrooms around Washington, D.C., where she discussed her interviews and photographs of former residential school students with middle schoolers and high schoolers.