As related by teacher Minnie Braithwaite Jenkins : One morning , during breakfast , the staff of the boarding school heard a big noise and a great fuss . After looking up the matter, it was found out that the nursery NATIVE children who were locked in one of the rooms, had escaped through the door after they broke it open by using a big log that was there . They broke loose through the broken door and took their legs until they reached the river . The log was so heavy that even determined grown ups could not lift it, and the staff who was there could not believe their eyes that little children who had not reached six of age, could break through like this ; but all the evidence was there on the scene : the log , the broken door, and the children who were trying to cross the river .
As for those children who could not escape their fate in the Boarding Schools, they had no choice left for them but to commit suicide . Historian Trennert speaks about the collective and individual suicides that happened in these schools and the silence imposed around these suicides and the total absence of their mention in the schools’ records. As for the cause of these suicides, it is the mental and physical abuse that the Natives children were subject to.
The oldest record in our possession regarding these suicides goes back to year 1894 and speaks about the suicide of a child from the Pima Nation and happened in the Phoenix Boarding School . Native Children used to commit suicide by eating poisonous herbs that they could identify .But some also recurred to other means probably when they could find not the desired poisonous herb around . Nine Native boys thus committed suicide in the William Lake Boarding School by hanging themselves using bed sheets and socks, and six other Native girls committed suicide collectively, the youngest one of them aged eight and the eldest aged, ten in the same school .
Another amazing incident happened at the Regina Boarding School when one Native girl aged eleven wanted to put term to her life and did not know how to go about it which made her address the supervisor of the school saying that she wanted to take her life and did not know how . The supervisor than coldly handed her a gun and showed her how to pull the trigger. Thus half of the Native children died in these schools before graduating and enjoying the western way of life and civilization.