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The home-made electric chair used for years to punish aboriginal children at St. Anne's Residential School in this James Bay ( Fort Albany, Ontario ) community has dissappeared, but its memory endures.

Hundreds of children who survived the horrors of the school have bitter memories of the chair - used as a means of forcing them to bend to the will of Roman Catholic missionaries who ran the school.

"The nuns used it as a weapon" says former student Mary Anne Nakogee-Davis, 41. " It was done to me on more than one occassion. They would strap your arms to the metal arm rests, and it would jolt you and go through your system. I don't know what i did that was bad enough to have that done to me."

Edmund Metatawabin, 49, former Chief of the Fort Albany First Nation, remembers being forced to take turns with his classmates sitting in the chair and receiving painful jolts of electricity to entertain visiting dignitaries.

"I was six years old. There was no sense of volunteering or anything. We were just told by the brother to do it and there was never any question of not doing it. Once the thing was cranked up, I could feel the current going through me, mainly through my arms. Your legs are jumping up, and everyone was laughing."

St. Anne's operated as a residential school from 1904 to 1973 in this isolated Cree community of 1400 about 1000 kms north of Toronto.

A three year investigation by Ontario Provincial Police has found evidence of widespread sexual and physical abuse of students, hundreds of whom have been left with deep emotional scars.

Regional Crown attorney Martin Lambert has said some priests, brothers, nuns, and lay workers who ran the school soon will be charged.

The federal government forced Cree and Ojibwa children to leave their families and live for ten months of the year at the school, which was operated as part of a nationwide policy of trying to assimilate aboriginals into the dominate white culture. It was a policy that didn't work. Most schools were closed during the 1960s and 1970s.

St. Anne's was operated by the Roman Catholic diocese of Moosonee, the Oblate order and the Grey Nuns, without much outside supervision.

Other students have told police investigators of heterosexual and homosexual rape, sexual fondling, forced masturbation and severe beatings. Students have complained of humiliating treatment, such as being forced to eat their food off the floor.

Boys and girls in the school weren't allowed to speak to each other, and if brothers and sisters communicated, even by a wave of a hand or a smile, they were beaten, students say.

When children died of natural causes, their parents were not always notified. They learned of the death only when their child failed to come back to their community for the two-month summer holiday.

"What happened at St. Anne's is the truth and we have to acknowledge it," says Nakogee-Davis. "If we don't do anything, then people will say it never happened, that we are just talking. We have to prove it happened and help the victims."