Profile of Doe Thomas
Doe Thomas is a storyteller. As soon as you meet her it becomes clear the impact and value of her storytelling. When Doe tells you a story it has a bigger meaning, it shows the experience and wisdom she has gathered through her life.
She has the capacity of making you feel seen and understood. Her stories relate to her grandchildren and her children. She is one of 18 children and went to the Kamloops Residential School.
Every Monday, Doe goes to Cplul’kw’ten (House 5) the Gathering place at the Thompson Rivers University (TRU) campus. She is one of the four elders that interacts with students. Doe sits at one of the tables in the middle of a room who is surrounded by computers normally used by Indigenous students. She has beads in front of her and a small box that contains the more of them and other supplies. Different colours can catch your eyes varying from pink, blue and white.
At the time of the interview, she is working on recreating a blue rose that her youngest granddaughter painted when she was in grade four. She shows me a picture saved on her phone. The plan is to make a laptop cover for both of her granddaughters. She says that the youngest is really girly and the oldest not so much, so she tries to keep it simplified. “I don’t sell my beadwork I gift it. It takes me a really long time,” she says.
As a young girl, she learned how to bead with her grannies (as she calls them), it was interrupted when she went to residential school, and she got back into beading when she retired.
Friends and family know her as Doe, but her full name is Leona Thomas. She was born and raised in Tk’emlúps (Kamloops) with seventeen brothers and sisters. Doe’s mother had eighteen kids with two sets of twins, but they do not share the same father. “I’m the sixth oldest, my mom had nine boys and nine girls,” she says. Her father died when she was six, and because of his death, her siblings started attending Residential School. In 1958, there were no social services to help them, so her mom thought that was the best option for them.
Doe attended the Residential school for several years but graduated from a public high school.
“I remember my first day going into those doors, not understanding anything at all. It was the first time I was segregated from my brothers and sisters,” she says. As soon as they tried to separate her, she jumped into his brother’s back and would not let go. For that reason, they allowed her to go to the boys’ side for a couple of hours and tried to force her to go back to the girls’ side. She would not go, not until one of her sisters came to find her.
“Almost on the first day I realized that our lives were never going to be the same,” she says.
The rules of the school were rigid and swift. The food was half-cooked, and she was always hungry. She tells a story about the time that she met an older girl from Merritt. The girl was as hungry as Doe was and showed her some petals, they could eat to help their hunger. Later, she found out that those petals were used for medicinal purposes.
The recreational room was the place where they would get strapped. Everyone would go in, and the people at fault would kneel on the floor. They would put their hands out with their palms facing up, and get strapped. It was a message to the peers of what would happen if you did something so you would not repeat it.
Doe got strapped a lot because she questioned a lot. She says the church had a need to control and enforce religion on Indigenous people. As part of the dance team in the school, none of them were allowed to do traditional Secwe̓pemc dances.
She recalls a time when she first heard drumming. As she looks at the distance, her brown eyes start to fill with tears and her mouth is pouting. “I didn’t realize what that was,” she says.
Through her aunt, years later she learned how to do the traditional dances. She describes herself as lucky since she did not face any sexual abuse during her stay in the school. Although she knows some of the girls at her dorm were abused by the nuns. There were so many blind eyes on everything that went on in the school she says.
At the school, there was a big apple orchid, and she says, “I remember we would sneak away and get apples. ‘Cause we were always hungry and if we got caught down there that was the worst strapping, we got and now I understand why”. The big apple orchid was one of the places where many of the 215 were recovered. When she first found out, she was angry, and she connected experience of her past.
As she is asked more about the effects that the school left on her life she says, “at the school, we were taught to be seen and not heard primarily”. She did not believe she had a voice.
The abuse was centered around identity, who she was, after being told you are a dumb Indian time and time again in an age that shaped her beliefs. She was segregated from her parents for ten months of the year. The impact it had was directly in dysfunctional family dynamics since she did not develop feelings like nurture, love, honor, and respect.
In an event organized by the TRU Wellness Centre, Doe is about to teach the use of the medicine wheel. She is standing next to the image of a medicine wheel and does not seem nervous to speak in front of sixteen people.
Before she starts teaching, she introduces herself and shares a story about herself. One of her sisters had recently decided to stop her dialysis. Her sister had called her to ask if she could call all their sisters and brothers to deliver the news. In the call, Doe asks why she would want her to tell them, and her sister said, “you are the strongest”. Doe agreed to share the news with her siblings after crying for forty minutes she started making the calls. She told the story to a group of strangers and acquaintances.
Doe’s eyes light up as soon as she is sharing her knowledge through stories. She explains how she uses laughter as a mechanism in life.
“We laugh with each other not at each other”, she says.
The healing elements of laughing at nothing and the way she uses it with other Survivors as an unspoken language of making sure they are okay. They do not take each other seriously and to her, the ability to laugh is one of the greatest gifts humans have.
She is proud to be Secwépemc but also proud to be a mother and grandmother. Doe has two sons. Her oldest son is forty-six and she lost her youngest son twenty years ago. “As a Survivor and a foster care kid nurturing was not part of the plan that I grew up with,” she says. For that reason, she made a promise to be the best mother and grandmother.
As part of the workshop, she asks, “What scares you about your future?” and motivates three volunteers to speak up. A woman, sitting to her left says that she has a fear of not achieving her goals and she has a lot of fear in her life.
“When we allow fear to control us, we’ll never move away from that seat. When I was a child, I could speak my language and when I did, I got strapped a lot. I can’t speak my language today ’cause subconsciously I am fearing for that strap”, Doe says.
She is trying to sing more songs in her language. “Face your fear, interact with your fear, and shake the hand of that fear”, she says. The group went silent. “Our gift of words is important to ourselves and to others”, she says.
Doe was standing for at least an hour, and she decides to sit down. She says it is not the same as when she was younger. Her legs are hurting. Nevertheless, her voice is still clear, firm, and confident.
This year she will be seventy-one years old and even though she describes herself as being old school she has an open mind. She says that talking with young people keeps her young. For her, is not hard to share her story. She likes to reach out to young people. Share the pain. Share the laughter. Share the healing and stories, good and bad but ending always on a positive note.