At the age of 12, Irma Scarff ran away from Yukon Hall and ended up on the streets of Vancouver with a syringe in her arm on her 13th birthday.

'That syringe never came out until nine years ago,' she told a packed Yukon Supreme Court courtroom Tuesday afternoon.

Scarff was among the 28 people to speak to Justice Ron Veale about the residential school experience as the hearing into a proposed compensation package wrapped up.

The package is being provided for residential school survivors across the country. Courts in nine regions across the country, including the Yukon, must approve the settlement before it can take effect.

Before telling her story, Scarff acknowledged her brother, another survivor, who has passed away.

'As a whole, as a people, it was a genocide,' she said. She described it as a system which took children away from their families to schools where officials could do whatever they wanted.

'It didn't take them nine years to drag me off to residential school and sexually abuse me there,' Scarff said.

Speaking of sexual and physical abuse she suffered in the system, she said she couldn't tell anyone about it at the time.

At one point, when she went to the school's Mother Superior about an incident, the nun used a floor brush to scrub between her legs.

It was due to the hurt and anger Scarff carried as a girl in residential school that she ended up spending more than half her life in penitentiary, and it's only now that she's started working on herself with her family, she said.

Raised on a trapline until a school bus came 'and took me away,' it was at the schools she she lost her culture and learned to hurt people because that's what she was taught there, she said.

'I can't speak one word of Indian,' Scraff told the courtroom.

She and other students were also taught they were 'dirty little Indians.

'You grow up with that in your heart,' she said.

After a suicide attempt, she was put on medication, but there have been other survivors who killed themselves, she pointed out.

As she spoke, a number of spectators in the courtroom were crying.

'I'm not the only one,' Scraff said. 'We all need help.'

Many survivors continue to live in poverty and have trouble holding onto jobs, the courtroom was told.

At the age of 49, Scarff said, it's only this year that she'll graduate from a business course she started in 1999.

Her experience has also affected her family.

Her children haven't had a normal childhood because of it, she said.

Finding help has also been difficult, and even psychiatrists couldn't help her.

When a non-native person means well in trying to help her, it's difficult because they can't relate to the experience, Scarff said.

She'd like to see survivors become the counsellors for other survivors because they have learned how to get through the experience.

'These are the people we need to heal us,' Scarff said.

Submissions on the compensation package wrapped up Tuesday, the second of two days of hearings.

Similiar hearings are being held across the country.