Survivor accounts of residential schools vary — sometimes from the very same person. Nunavut Senator Nancy Karetak-Lindell told Nunatsiaq News in 2001 that her time at Akaitcho Hall was “a home-away-from-home” and that “it’s not like what you’re hearing about all the residential school issues today.” In the same piece, she said, “At Akaitcho, we were in a structured environment compared to where we came from. That taught us perseverance and how to discipline ourselves.” “It taught us a lot about doing things in life that we didn’t always want to do, but those things had to be done … We had to learn how to live with people from different cultures who spoke different languages and came from different parts of the NWT,” she continued, adding that those friendships helped her political career.
