Latest news with #Bernice
Metro
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
Major Emmerdale legend set to return - and it's good news for fans
Bernice Blackstock is reportedly returning to Emmerdale, two years on from her departure. Samantha Giles has played Bernice on and off from 1998. The character is the biological mother of Gabby Thomas (Rosie Bentham), and was often involved in light-hearted storylines to contrast the ongoing drama in the village. In November 2023, Bernice's sister Nicola King (Nicola Wheeler) discovered that she had been buying things in her name. With Bernice drowning in debt, she attempted to run away and leave her family to pick up the pieces, but Gabby helped her realise that putting things right and facing her problems would be best. To pay off the debt, Bernice gave Nicola her shares in the B&B. She then left the Dales for Portugal to visit Diane (Elizabeth Estensen). Bernice is reportedly heading back to the Dales ahead of Gabby and Vinny Dingle's (Bradley Johnson) wedding. According to The Sun, Samantha is due to start filming in a couple of weeks. 'Everything is being kept very hush hush but of course Bernice's return is a big deal as one of the soap's most loved characters', a source told the publication. 'And Samantha being back among the cast is a real win too, as everyone loves working with her.' More Trending Metro has contacted Emmerdale for a comment. Want to be the first to hear shocking EastEnders spoilers? Who's leaving Coronation Street? The latest gossip from Emmerdale? Join 10,000 soaps fans on Metro's WhatsApp Soaps community and get access to spoiler galleries, must-watch videos, and exclusive interviews. Simply click on this link, select 'Join Chat' and you're in! Don't forget to turn on notifications so you can see when we've just dropped the latest spoilers! Vinny and Gabby announced their engagement to Mandy (Lisa Riley) and Laurel (Charlotte Bellamy) a few weeks ago, and suffice to say it took them both by surprise. The couple haven't been together for very long, but decided they both wanted to spend the rest of their lives together as husband and wife. View More » But what drama will they face in the lead up to the big day? MORE: Legendary TV star 'busy' as he joins Casualty MORE: EastEnders legend 'in denial' as he makes unexpected life change with real-life wife after show exit MORE: Emmerdale star 'excited and a little nervous' as she confirms she's pregnant
Scottish Sun
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Emmerdale legend returning to the Dales after years off screens for bombshell new plot
You won't have to wait long to see them back on your screens BACK FOR MORE Emmerdale legend returning to the Dales after years off screens for bombshell new plot Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) THERE'LL be champagne corks popping in The Woolpack as Emmerdale's beloved barmaid Bernice Blackstock returns to roost. The Sun can reveal actress Samantha Giles is making a return to the ITV soap after two years away. 5 Samantha Giles is making a return to Emmerdale after two years away Credit: ITV But fans will have to soak up every minute of her scenes, as she won't be back for long. Bernice is back in the Dales for Gabby and Vinny's wedding and filming is due to start in a couple of weeks. A source said: 'Everything is being kept very hush hush but of course Bernice's return is a big deal as one of the soap's most loved characters. 'And Samantha being back among the cast is a real win too, as everyone loves working with her.' Samantha first began on Emmerdale in November 1998 until she left in April 2002. But she was back again for two further stints, once in 2004 and then again in 2023. She left two years ago to pursue other opportunities, including a theatre production of The Syndicate. During an interview at the time Samatha, was asked if she'd return to Emmerdale. She replied: "I don't feel I'd want to go back to Emmerdale at the moment. "I'm enjoying doing other things, and the show changes. Horrifying moment Emmerdale's April comes face to face with man who committed disgusting act on her while homeless "I haven't had a chance to see what's going on with the show, so I don't know whether Bernice would fit into it at the moment. "Who knows? They might not want the character to come back. "I don't think they've killed her or anything – they could still do that. "It's something that's there for the future possibly, or not. "Never say never is what I'm saying. "For now, I'm enjoying doing lots of different things.' DOUGRAY PLAYS IT SCHOOL DOUGRAY SCOTT has been confirmed as the leading man in new BBC drama Crookhaven. In the series – based on the book of the same name by JJ Arcanjo – the Vigil actor plays Caspian Lockett, the headmaster of a school for young criminals. 5 Dougray Scott has been confirmed as the leading man in new BBC drama Crookhaven Credit: Getty Adolescence star Amari Bacchus will lead the cast of weird and wonderful schoolkids, known as Crooklings, who are trained to use their skills to be a force for good when they are eventually released into the world. Industry actress Claire Forlani will play Lockett's wife Carmen, and will be joined on screen by Slow Horses' Naomi Wirthner and The Pembrokeshire Murders' Keith Allen. The show is expected to make its debut on BBC iPlayer early next year. Bizbit NOEL EDMONDS quit the UK in 2018 – but now he is back, for an ITV special all about his relocation to New Zealand. Cameras followed the radio and TV presenter on his move to a rural town to start up a hospitality business. Noel Edmonds' Kiwi Adventure airs from June 20. HOLLY TO RETURN? YOU BET! STEPHEN MULHERN will be joined by a very familiar face as You Bet! travels up and down the country. Holly Willoughby, who quit as co-host due to scheduling conflicts, will return as a celebrity guest. 5 Holly Willoughby will return to You Bet! with Stephen Mulhern as a celebrity guest Credit: ITV She will be joined by Alison Hammond, Rob Beckett, Judi Love, Aj Odudu, Josh Widdicombe and Josie Gibson for the ITV show's upcoming second series. Babatunde Aleshe, Alesha Dixon, Danny Jones, Alex Brooker, Nick Mohammed and soap brothers Adam and Ryan Thomas will also compete. Stephen said: 'I'm thrilled that You Bet! is back – and this time we're hitting the road. 'Each week I'll be joined by a top celeb panel as our challengers take on some brilliantly bonkers and amazing challenges.' FANTASY WOLVES GoT REAL MOST Game Of Thrones fans will have assumed dire wolves were just mythical creatures when they appeared as pets on the HBO fantasy series. But the animals are real and were extinct – until now. 5 Sophie Turner in Game of Thrones Credit: Rex Boffins at US biosciences company Colossal Bioscience used 73,000-year-old DNA to bring the beasts back to life last year. And nobody was more surprised than GoT star Sophie Turner. Speaking with Colossal's CEO Ben Lamm, the actress, who played Sansa , joked: 'I thought they weren't real, so when are the dragons coming?' The male wolves, named Romulus and Remus, are growing bigger by the day and are about to get company. Ben added: 'We're about to introduce the girl, Khaleesi, into the pack. Bizbit BRADLEY WALSH will be back with his quiz expert chums with Beat The Chasers returning for two more series. Season seven of The Chase spin-off is currently under way, while the eighth is due to be recorded this autumn. ITV is expected to air the two new runs from next year. MORE IN STORE FOR NICK NICK FROST might be having some awkward conversations on the set of the new Harry Potter TV show if he bumps into JK Rowling. The comedian will play Hagrid in the HBO adaptation, but later this month he will also take centre stage in a new comedy that is unlikely to appeal to JK, who is outspoken about her views on trans issues. 5 Nick Frost is starring in six-parter Transaction Credit: ITV Nick will star in six-parter Transaction, airing weekly from June 24 on ITV2 then available on ITVX. As store manager Simon, Nick appears alongside Liv played by Jordan Grey, who is described as 'a transgender egomaniac' working the night shift in a supermarket. I exclusively revealed last year that Shaun Of The Dead star Nick would be making the show for ITV alongside Jordan who found fame as a contestant on The Voice in 2016. Unlock even more award-winning articles as The Sun launches brand new membership programme - Sun Club.
The Irish Sun
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Irish Sun
Emmerdale legend returning to the Dales after years off screens for bombshell new plot
THERE'LL be champagne corks popping in The Woolpack as Emmerdale's beloved barmaid Bernice Blackstock returns to roost. The Sun can reveal actress 5 Samantha Giles is making a return to Emmerdale after two years away Credit: ITV But fans will have to soak up every minute of her scenes, as she won't be back for long. Bernice is back in the Dales for A source said: 'Everything is being kept very hush hush but of course Bernice's return is a big deal as one of the soap's most loved characters. 'And read more on emmerdale Samantha first began on Emmerdale in November 1998 until she left in April 2002. But she was back again for two further stints, once in 2004 and then again in 2023. During an interview at the time Samatha, was asked if she'd return to Emmerdale. Most read in News TV She replied: "I don't feel I'd want to go back to Emmerdale at the moment. "I'm enjoying doing other things, and the show changes. Horrifying moment Emmerdale's April comes face to face with man who committed disgusting act on her while homeless "I haven't had a chance to see what's going on with the show, so I don't know whether Bernice would fit into it at the moment. "Who knows? They might not want the character to come back. "I don't think they've killed her or anything – they could still do that. "It's something that's there for the future possibly, or not. "Never say never is what I'm saying. "For now, I'm enjoying doing lots of different things.' DOUGRAY PLAYS IT SCHOOL In the series – based on the book of the same name by JJ Arcanjo – the Vigil actor plays Caspian Lockett, the headmaster of a school for young criminals. 5 Dougray Scott has been confirmed as the leading man in new BBC drama Crookhaven Credit: Getty Industry actress Claire Forlani will play Lockett's wife Carmen, and will be joined on screen by Slow Horses' Naomi Wirthner and The Pembrokeshire Murders' Keith Allen. The show is expected to make its debut on BBC iPlayer early next year. Bizbit NOEL EDMONDS quit the UK in 2018 – but now he is back, for an ITV special all about his relocation to New Zealand. Cameras followed the radio and TV presenter on his move to a rural town to start up a hospitality business. Noel Edmonds' Kiwi Adventure airs from June 20. HOLLY TO RETURN? YOU BET! STEPHEN MULHERN will be joined by a very familiar face as You Bet! travels up and down the country. Holly Willoughby, who quit as co-host due to scheduling conflicts, will return as a celebrity guest. 5 Holly Willoughby will return to You Bet! with Stephen Mulhern as a celebrity guest Credit: ITV She will be joined by Babatunde Aleshe, Alesha Dixon, 'Each week I'll be joined by a top celeb panel as our challengers take on some brilliantly bonkers and amazing challenges.' FANTASY WOLVES GoT REAL MOST Game Of Thrones fans will have assumed dire wolves were just mythical creatures when they appeared as pets on the HBO fantasy series. But the animals are real and were extinct – until now. 5 Sophie Turner in Game of Thrones Credit: Rex Boffins at US biosciences company Colossal Bioscience used 73,000-year-old DNA to bring the beasts back to life last year. And nobody was more surprised than GoT star Sophie Turner. Speaking with Colossal's CEO Ben Lamm, the actress, who played Sansa , joked: 'I thought they weren't real, so when are the dragons coming?' The male wolves, named Romulus and Remus, are growing bigger by the day and are about to get company. Ben added: 'We're about to introduce the girl, Khaleesi, into the pack. Bizbit BRADLEY WALSH will be back with his quiz expert chums with Beat The Chasers returning for two more series. Season seven of The Chase spin-off is currently under way, while the eighth is due to be recorded this autumn. ITV is expected to air the two new runs from next year. MORE IN STORE FOR NICK NICK FROST might be having some awkward conversations on the set of the new Harry Potter TV show if he bumps into JK Rowling. The comedian will play Hagrid in the HBO adaptation, but later this month he will also take centre stage in a new comedy that is unlikely to appeal to JK, who is outspoken about her views on trans issues. 5 Nick Frost is starring in six-parter Transaction Credit: ITV Nick will star in six-parter Transaction, airing weekly from June 24 on ITV2 then available on ITVX. As store manager Simon, Nick appears alongside Liv played by Jordan Grey, who is described as 'a transgender egomaniac' working the night shift in a supermarket. I exclusively revealed last year that Shaun Of The Dead star Nick would be making the show for ITV alongside Jordan who found fame as a contestant on The Voice in 2016. Unlock even more award-winning articles as The Sun launches brand new membership programme - Sun Club.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
A Daughter's Reckoning With the Indian Boarding School System
One day in early fall 1930, a black car arrived at a small wood-frame house in Odanah, Wisconsin, to whisk 5-year-old Bernice Rabideaux and her four siblings away to St. Mary's Catholic Indian Mission School. After the break-up of their parents' marriage, the children, citizens of the Bad River Ojibwe tribe, had been living with their grandmother, but she could no longer afford to care for them. The Bad River reservation was one of the poorest in Wisconsin, and Bernice's grandmother had to fall back on 'the chilcare choice of last resort'—an Indian boarding school. At the school, which was operated by the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, Bernice lived in fear of pinches, slaps, and whipping from nuns, who regularly referred to her and the other students as 'dirty Indians.' Her daily life was heavily regimented. After waking each morning at 5 a.m., she washed up at a communal sink, cleaned her teeth with a towel, and walked a quarter-mile to Mass. She and her siblings were fed corn mush and forced to work long hours in the laundry and garden. They were always hungry. Once, a nun beat Bernice for stealing an apple from the cellar. The few hours of daily education she and her siblings received were designed to 'civilize' them and assimilate them into white Christian culture. Bernice lived at the school until she completed the eighth grade. As her daughter, Mary Annette Pember, explores in Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools, Bernice was just one of tens of thousands of Native children who were coerced to attend Indian boarding schools across the United States as part of a 150-year project of forcible assimilation. Most Native Americans alive now can trace a family connection to the system, which was funded by the federal government from 1819 to 1969; by the 1920s, a jaw-dropping 76 percent of Native children attended such schools. Despite its scale and the impact it had on Native communities, the system was little known to the general public until 2021. That spring and summer, the discoveries of what appeared to be hundreds of unmarked graves at the sites of former Indian residential schools in Canada spurred a belated reckoning with the horrific history of such institutions on this side of the border. Canada had designed its residential school system after the U.S. system, wherein children were removed from their families and tribes and made to undergo forced assimilation that stripped them of their tribal languages, traditions, spiritual practices, and kinship connections. At boarding schools in both countries, Native children experienced rampant physical and sexual abuse, labored for long hours, and suffered from malnutrition and cramped conditions that facilitated the spread of disease. But while Canada completed, in 2015, a yearslong Truth and Reconciliation Commission process, with the aim of investigating and coming to terms with what happened at the residential schools, the United States has not yet launched a similar project. The U.S. government took a belated first step toward such a reckoning in June 2021, after the discovery of the unmarked graves in Canada, when then–Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo whose grandparents were forced to attend Indian boarding schools, announced the creation of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. The initiative was tasked with documenting the government's operation and support of Indian boarding schools, tracing their 'lasting consequences,' and investigating Native children's deaths there. The resulting reports have made clear for the first time the scale of a scheme in which federally funded education was used to assimilate Native children with 'systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies' at nearly 500 boarding schools across the country. In one of his last acts as president, Joe Biden issued a formal apology to Native peoples on behalf of the United States for our country's role in running these boarding schools. Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, notes in Medicine River that many Americans learned of the devastating history of Indian boarding schools for the first time when widespread reporting of the unmarked graves in Canada roused public awareness. But for Native communities, the reality of these schools has always been impossible to brush aside. 'For Indians, the most shocking element of the story was not the discovery of the graves,' she writes, 'but the fact that it's taken so long for non-Indians to acknowledge the grim details of this long-ignored history.' Pember has known of it since she was a girl growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. As her mother's 'secret confessor,' she often listened to fairy-tale-like stories of the horrors Bernice endured at the Sister School, as it was known, horrors that left Bernice with 'angst, mysterious headaches, nameless fear, shame, cruelty, and hypervigilance,' all of which Pember was forced to navigate throughout her own childhood and adulthood. A national correspondent for ICT News who has had a long career covering Native issues, Pember approaches Medicine River as 'part journalistic research, part spiritual pilgrimage.' Throughout her life, Bernice, like many Indian boarding school survivors, was too traumatized to dissect what had happened to her. What motivates Pember's project in Medicine River is a need to face what her mother could not. If she can understand what happened to Bernice at the Sister School—and to other Indian children at schools like it—she will be able, she hopes, to 'move forward as an Indian woman in the world.' This quest threads throughout her archival research and reporting on the boarding school era and its long aftermath, making palpable the very personal costs of America's attempts to acculturate Natives. Despite the new levels of public consciousness around the existence of Indian boarding schools in the U.S. in recent years, the literature of this history has until now been largely relegated to the niche of academic presses. Pember's accessible blend of the personal and the historical gives Medicine River the potential to further popularize this history. The book could not be more necessary or overdue, especially as we face yet another administration that refuses to reckon with the government's role in the attempted destruction of Native use of her mother's experience at the Sister School provides readers a touchpoint for comprehending the effects and consequences of assimilationist education. The school was founded in 1883, in what Pember calls a 'microcosm of what unfolded in much of Indian country during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.' During this period, tribes lost hundreds of millions of acres of land to exploitative treaties and legislation. An 1837 treaty with the U.S. government cost several bands of the Ojibwe 13 million acres of land in Wisconsin and Minnesota; an 1854 treaty further circumscribed the Ojibwe to reservations, like that in Bad River, where Pember's family lived. 'Bad River' is a settler term for the river that flows through this part of northern Wisconsin; the Ojibwe call it Mashkiiziibii, or Medicine River, because 'it's said that everything needed for mino-bimadizwin, a good life—food, medicine, and spirit—is available in its coffee-colored waters and along its banks,' Pember writes. The settlers' misguided renaming of the river speaks to their wanton disregard for Native wisdom. As the government expropriated land from Natives and relegated tribes to reservations where they could not rely on traditional hunting and gathering for subsistence, driving them into desperate poverty, it also employed education as a means of pushing Indian children to abandon traditional ways of life in favor of farming or industrial wage labor. The first federally run Indian boarding school, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was founded in 1879, on the site of former army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Carlisle's founder, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, had lobbied Congress to open an off-reservation boarding school at the barracks after directing a prison for Indians at Fort Marion in Florida, where he found that a combination of isolation and education in the English language were successful 'civilizing' methods. 'Assimilation and indoctrination into the ideals and values of white culture were clearly a means to destroy tribal sovereignty,' Pember writes. The ultimate goal was 'to free up land for white settlement and exploitation.' But as Pember points out, the federal government had been funding the assimilationist education of Native children long before the founding of Carlisle. In 1792, under President George Washington, the U.S. began a practice of funding the work of missionaries to 'civilize, convert, and educate Indians.' The Indian Civilization Fund Act of 1819 later codified and expanded this policy, leading to a rise in the number of religious Indian boarding schools across the country; by 1877, there were 47. The Sister School on the Bad River reservation joined in this tradition. While Pember's meticulous recounting of this history can at times drag, when she pulls back from these recitations to draw connections to her mother's experience, Medicine River sings. Bernice may not have been successfully assimilated at the Sister School, but she did learn to be ashamed of being Indian. That shame was fueled by fear and trauma, and fueled Bernice's lifelong stubbornness and rage. 'Her vengeance would be disproving all the prejudices the sisters held about Indians as lazy, dirty, and biologically inferior,' Pember reflects. 'She started work on the outsized chip she forever carried on her shoulder, sometimes nearly collapsing under its weight.' Pember and her brothers were raised in the shadow of that chip on Bernice's shoulder, struggling with her 'harsh and baffling ways' and attempting to avoid the hidden triggers that set off anguished spells of hand flapping and head completes her exploration of her mother's time at the Sister School and the history of Indian boarding schools within the first half of Medicine River. In the remainder of the book, she moves far beyond that history, without losing sight of how it continues to color the contemporary Native experience. In this, Medicine River stands out against typical historical accounts of the boarding school era, which tend to focus only on what happened between 1819 and 1969. By expanding the frame up to the contemporary moment, both by telling her own life story and by examining the efforts of boarding school survivors to demand accountability from the Catholic Church and the federal government, Pember illuminates how Native cultures have resisted and persisted through centuries of attempts to eradicate their people, and how their long-standing traditions and spiritual practices can light the path forward for healing from the ongoing traumas the schools wrought. Native researchers, such as the social worker Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, explain these aftereffects using the theory of historical trauma. In the first phase, a population is subjected to a mass trauma by the dominant culture—for Native Americans, colonialism, wars, and cultural genocide. That population displays physical and psychological responses to the trauma, as Bernice did. Finally, the population that experienced the trauma passes their responses on to their progeny. The historical trauma theory makes sense of 'the high rates of addiction, suicide, mental illness, sexual violence, and other ills among Indian peoples,' Pember writes. She now understands her mother's anger, aloofness, and bitterness as trauma responses, and her own struggles with alcoholism as the only coping mechanism that she was given to handle the anger and fear she inherited. More effective healing methods could be found in tribes' cultural and spiritual practices. Pember writes poignantly of visiting the remote Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in Alaska, where Yup'ik peoples have developed a program based on traditional teachings to rapidly respond to crises among a community with high rates of suicide, physical and sexual violence, and substance abuse. Organized around the medicine of kaholian (unconditional love and understanding), the program also promotes traditional Yup'ik practices, such as the open discussion of feelings with elders to address problems—a cultural ideal that developed from the fact that 'in the unforgiving climate of the tundra, survival depends on cooperation, effective conflict resolution, and good mental and physical health,' Pember explains. Pember herself has turned to Ojibwe traditions and ceremonies to seek healing. Since her mother's death in 2011, she has visited relatives on the Bad River reservation to 'grieve and understand their lost childhood days for them, something they were never permitted to do.' Medicine River itself at once stands as a moving witness to Pember's family's traumas and a rousing demand for accountability from the government and religious organizations that attempted to destroy her tribe.
