Haunted by the painful memories of their time in residential school, some Mi'kmaq survivors in Nova Scotia are having a tough time accepting the federal government's apology.
About 500 survivors of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School and their families gathered at the Indian Brook First Nation Wednesday to watch Prime Minister Stephen Harper deliver the apology on television.
While some people rose to their feet and applauded, many others sat silently.
Gloria Maloney said she came for the food, not because she cares what a prime minister has to say.
"I put in eight years in that dump," Maloney said. "My life was destroyed by going to that school so I don't think they could do anything that could help."
Gloria's daughter, Cheryl, said an apology does nothing to heal her family.
"I keep seeing my mother being a four-year-old girl being taken away and being alone, and that brings me to tears," she said. "She's not crying; she knows how to keep her emotions in. But we are, we're crying for her."
Benjamin Lafford, another one of the 2,000 children who were forced to attend the school outside Shubenacadie, N.S., said the prime minister's request for forgiveness would be easier to accept if he had made it in person.
"It's way up in Parliament and we're over here," Lafford said. "How can I forgive him it's when it's up there and we're over here?"
Before crowding into the hall to hear the apology, people gathered at the site of the old school, now long gone, for a "letting go" ceremony.
Lena Bernard travelled from Waycobah in Cape Breton to see old friends and classmates from her time at Shubenacadie. But she couldn't shake a horrible feeling as she made her way to the site.
"When I got up to that hill, I felt like when my feet stood there, I felt like everything was all coming back from the past," Bernard said.
The memories flooded back, like the time she was punished by the nuns for getting her winter boots stuck in the snow or for speaking her own native language.
Bernard said she was certain the prime minister's apology would do little to take away the hurt and pain, deep feelings she believes will never disappear.
But she took some solace from Harper saying it was wrong for Canada to take aboriginal children away from their families forcibly.
"As he was talking more about the aboriginal people and how we were hurt, how we were treated, I started feeling a little better," Bernard said.