By Marnie Eisenstadt
Syracuse, N.Y. — The six year old boy did not have a name. He was only a number: 266.
“Immediately the nun tells me, ‘Remember this number, don’t ever forget this number. This is who you are’,” Virgil Brave Rock said. “They stripped you of everything that you were going in.”
The moment he entered the St. Mary’s Residential School on the Blood Reserve in Alberta, Canada, he lost his name. If he used it, spoke his native tongue, or talked of home, he’d be whipped.