Residential school...

Verne, a few little corrections on numbers quoted in the Blog. In 1922 Lejac got it's first students. The school was built to accommodate 60 girls and 60 boys but all through the Sixties we always had between 90 and 92 Boys and the same on the girls side, thus the bunk beds. The need was there and we did our best to accommodate. There were no schools on most of the isolated reserves at that time. Teachers of the day were not prepared to live in isolation and besides that the native people of the time were partially nomadic as they followed game, berries and fish as a means of a livelihood.

Re the changing of clothes. In the blog you stated that you got clean clothing every two weeks. In fact all the students got a complete change of clothing once a week not every second week. As you can see by the enclosed picture keeping everyone half decently clean was not an easy task. The picture was taken on laundry day. Roy French on the extreme left of the picture has just come outside, everyone else has been outside playing broom ball in the mud for about a half hour. By the smiles you can see they were enjoying their game despite the mud. The mud probably added to the joy of the game. Life at Lejac had lots of good times and most of them found in the simple things of life. Jim photo courtesy of Jim Callanan.