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233 Appendix A Interview Transcripts Interview with Allan Pard Date: September 5, 2011 Interviewer: GabrielYanicki Location: Oldman River Campground, Hwy. 2 west of Fort Macleod Gabriel Yanicki (GY): Ok, recording.This is GabrielYanicki. It is the fifth of September [2011].Allan, could I get you to say your name? Allan Pard (AP):My name isAllan Pard,and my Blackfoot Indian name is Mikskimmisukahsim. GY: Ok, and that’s it, we’re good to go. AP: Ok.The reason why I’m so liberal with sharing information and knowledge of our customs and ways is because of how rapidly we are losing our traditions and our culture, and how rapidly our elders who were very knowledgeable, we pretty well have lost those real knowledgeable elders. So, I think it’s important that if we don’t record our history and preserve our history that there’s no way our culture’s going to ever be preserved.So I do this for the future generations of our people so that if they’re seeking information or knowledge of their ways that they have, hopefully, access to this kind of information.. and that’s why I allow myself to be recorded and whatnot. GY: Ok.The first thing that you wanted to talk about was, or that we discussed, was how the traditional knowledge has been lost and the impact of things like the boarding school system, and not just that but like, permits to go off reserve and experiences that you’ve had with that. AP:Yeah, well [coughs].. In my generation we were still involved… being sent to boarding school, and at those boarding schools, we weren’t allowed to use our language, speak our language, and we were told at the time when we were first being indoctrinated by the nuns and the priests at these boarding s[chools].. I went to a Catholic boarding school that was called Sacred Heart Residential School and, I think it was established in 1926, that school. GY: Ok AP:And there was some before that, that were established, and anyway, it was probably the third generation of boarding school in my family.And like I said, we weren’t allowed to speak our language, and everything that was basically Indian was, we were told that our language was the devil’s language, that our beliefs, you know, was basically.. praying to the devil. So a lot of us were brought up with this concept of being afraid of our 234 APPENDIX A ways, scared to speak our language.And so [coughs] anything that was being Indian, we just basically were losing our self-esteem as a people, and how we were treated and mistreated in those boarding schools. [Interview abridged.] And so I started questioning what they were telling us,you know,what…You know, I was taught… My great grandmother was a Sun Dance woman.She put up Sun Dances, and she was still alive at the time.And I used to think, I hear her praying and our ways, and [laughs] I never hear her praying to the devil, and in fact the way she lives, and how she conducts herself, it was so saintly, how [laughs] she conducted herself.And I just never really bought into what the boarding school,how they were trying to indoctrinate us.So later on in life I was able to,once I started,you know,reaching adolescence,being a teenager, I started.. kind of.. thinking more about.. you know, our ways, because basically when I was in Grade Eight that’s when..the first real form of integration started happening… We were bused off the reserves to start integrating in white schools, eh? And that’s when I started noticing the difference of how far behind we were in English and math, and etcetera, etcetera. So a lot of our school kids started dropping out of school because they just couldn’t catch up.And you know, like it’s unpleasant for you when you can’t understand what’s going on and, you put yourself in an unpleasant situation, pretty soon you start, you know, resenting and hating going to school. GY:Yeah AP: So a lot of our people dropped out of school. And I.. kind of was in the fortunate generation, because the generation just before me, at that time [coughs], you went to school, it was either Grade Eight education or sixteen of age, whatever came first, that was as...

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