CHAPTER 3

Oblates and the Beginnings of Residential Education

Since the mid-1980s, historians have devoted considerable attention to the role of Oblates in the establishment and administration of schools in northern and western Canada. For the most part, their investigations have focused on the period after the signing of the first seven numbered treaties (i.e., post-1877), when Oblates—together with Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian missionary organizations—entered into a “joint venture” with the federal government to provide residential education for Indigenous children.1 The forging of this relationship has generally been regarded as the beginning of Oblate involvement in a project of comprehensive social, cultural, and linguistic assimilation—a project comparable in intent and implementation to the United States’ “policy of aggressive civilization.” Like their missionary counterparts in the United States, Oblates in northern and western Canada were commissioned by the federal state to operate residential institutions in which Indigenous children were to be isolated from the influence of their families and “educat[ed] in industry and the arts of civilization.”² Yet while acknowledging the Oblates’ role as executors of this assimilative project, some historians have cast doubt on their commitment to its underlying objective. Martha McCarthy, for instance, has suggested that Oblates in the Vicariate of Athabasca-Mackenzie were drawn reluctantly into the project in the aftermath of treaty negotiations: “It was only when the treaties made it mandatory for the government to provide schooling for the Dene that the policy of ‘aggressive civilization’ was promoted, using denominational schools to accomplish this aim more economically than the government could. Thus, even if the Oblates … had had any different notions of education, they would have had to conform to government regulations in order to obtain vital financial support.”3 J.R. Miller has similarly cast Oblates as ambivalent collaborators. According to Miller, Oblates were critical of the virulent assimilative thrust of federal policy, but ultimately accepted residential schooling as an opportunity to subsidize their evangelical work and to assist Indigenous peoples in adjusting to coexistence with a Euro-Canadian settler population.⁴ Oblates nevertheless held lingering reservations about implementing the most aggressive federal directives and were particularly reluctant to enforce an outright ban on the use of Indigenous languages in residential schools.⁵

While shedding light on complexities and tensions in the relationship between Oblates and the federal government, the prevailing historiographical focus on the post-treaty period has tended to obscure—if not to negate—the agency of Oblates in formulating an assimilative project predicated on residential education.⁶ Decades before the advent of federal intervention in their mission field, Oblates had devised a program of social, cultural, and linguistic transformation that relied on the convent boarding school as its operative instrument. They envisaged the convent boarding school as a highly disciplined space in which Indigenous children would be weaned from beliefs and behaviours deemed characteristic of la sauvagerie and prepared for inclusion in la civilisation chrétienne. The present chapter examines the articulation and implementation of this project through the lens of the convent boarding school at Île-à-la-Crosse, from its founding in 1860 to its integration into the federal residential school system in 1898. In their capacity as administrators and principals of this school, Oblates produced a vast commentary on the role of residential education in their civilizing project. This commentary is analyzed in this chapter for its insights into the Oblates’ conception of la civilisation chrétienne and its accompanying behavioural expectations. Oblate commentary is also analyzed for its insights into the strategies they adopted in order to sustain a residential education program without state assistance. In laying the foundations of a convent boarding school at Île-à-la-Crosse, Oblates acted in accordance with a mandate from the founder and first Superior General of their congregation, Charles-Joseph-Eugène de Mazenod. As an addendum to the second edition of the Oblates’ Constitution and Rules (1853), Mazenod issued instructions on the operation of les missions étrangères and included a directive on the establishment and supervision of schools:

Far from eschewing the work of preparing sauvages to participate in social life, members of this Society will embrace this work as an excellent way to contribute to the good of the Mission and to render their apostolate more fruitful…. Given that the prosperity of civil societies is intimately linked to the instruction of youth, we must—as far as possible—open a school in each Mission. There, under the guidance of a schoolteacher, children will acquire the rudiments of Christian doctrine as well as temporal knowledge and all that they need to know of the arts of everyday life.7

Mazenod envisioned a strictly administrative—rather than pedagogical—role for the Oblates. Loath to divert his missionaries’ time and energy from their regular ministry, the Superior General encouraged the recruitment of full-time teaching personnel from outside the ranks of the congregation. In January 1857, he approved Bishop Alexandre-Antonin Taché’s proposal to negotiate a contract with the Sisters of Charity of Montreal—or Grey Nuns—to staff a series of convent boarding schools in Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory.⁸ According to Taché, the Grey Nuns were particularly well-suited to this task, as they had been exercising a teaching vocation at Saint-Boniface since 1844 and had expressed willingness to expand beyond the confines of the Red River Colony.⁹ With Mazenod’s blessing, Taché met with Mother Superior Julie Hainault Deschamps in summer 1857 and reached an agreement whereby the Grey Nuns would staff daughter convents at Lac Sainte-Anne, Île-à-la-Crosse, and Lac La Biche.¹⁰

Underlying Taché’s choice of personnel was the belief that childrearing—the teaching, disciplining, and socialization of children—fell within the natural purview of the “missionary woman.” Despite having renounced physical motherhood through her vow of chastity, the female religious was assumed to possess the quintessentially maternal qualities of nurturance, tenderness, and patience. Taché believed that these qualities could be harnessed toward the inculcation of civilized habits of thought and behaviour in Indigenous children.¹¹ His belief was shared—and likely reinforced—by the Grey Nuns themselves, many of whom conceptualized their role in the western mission field as that of adoptive mothers. Hence, while travelling by barge to Île-à-la-Crosse in August 1860, Sister Agnès (Marie-Rose Caron) wrote to Taché to assure him that “my motherly heart will embrace all of those little sauvages.”¹² As the first superior of Saint-Bruno, Agnès instructed her two subordinates—Sister Philomène Boucher and Sister Pepin (Marie-Anne Lachance)—to adopt a motherly approach to the teaching and supervision of Indigenous schoolchildren.13 She outlined this approach in her chronicle, “Annales de l’établissement des Sœurs Grises à l’Île à la Crosse,” prepared in 1883:

We had to make up for all that was missing from their first education; we had to become like mothers to them and get back to the basics. Our first task was to get them to acquire the habit of washing themselves and combing their hair each morning. Until then, their single greatest pleasure had been to run recklessly through the woods…. We therefore had to teach them to play calmly and quietly, without harming one another or themselves. We also had to teach them better conversational manners, as they thought it ridiculous to speak politely. Such were the children whom the Sisters found in their care when they arrived at Île-à-la-Crosse in November 1860. It may not have been an attractive posting for everyone, but oh how we loved those poor children of the woods!¹⁴

In becoming “like mothers,” Agnès and her consœurs adhered to a gendered division of roles and responsibilities in the civilizing project. Their duties reflected contemporary French and French-Canadian conceptions of the mother as the ideal educator and the natural agent for instilling norms of civility, composure, and cleanliness.¹⁵

To further harness the civilizing potential of motherhood, Oblates enjoined the Grey Nuns to devote particular attention to the education of young girls and thus to ensure the transmission of la civilisation chrétienne and its sociocultural characteristics to future generations.¹⁶ In December 1861, Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin reported to l’Œuvre de la Propagation de la Foi that the Grey Nuns had been called to Île-à-la-Crosse specifically to mould future wives and mothers: “Their calling is to civilize our sauvages by training young girls and, ultimately, mothers of families.”¹⁷ Accordingly, the first cohort of schoolchildren at Saint-Bruno contained more girls than boys—nine of the former, six of the latter.¹⁸ Among the girls were Julie and Esther, both Chipewyan-speaking orphans; Marie and Thérèse, daughters of Charles Lafleur (an HBC apprentice in the English River District); Sophie, a daughter of Antoine Morin (an HBC guide in the English River District); and Catherine, a daughter of Pierriche Laliberté (postmaster in charge of Portage La Loche).19 From the first day of class (25 November 1860), these girls were trained and readied for their future roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers through a curriculum based on contemporary French and French-Canadian domestic norms. They received instruction in cooking, cleaning, laundering, knitting, sewing, and embroidery from Agnès and were assigned daily chores in the kitchen and in the refectory.²⁰

Through intensive schooling, the girls of Saint-Bruno were expected to become the vanguard of a regenerated and emancipated womanhood. For at least a decade before the establishment of the school, Oblates had bemoaned the status of Cree- and Chipewyan-speaking women living in the vicinity of Île-à-la-Crosse. Oblates had commonly described these women as degraded victims of fathers, husbands, and sons who would sell them, beat them, and ultimately abandon them.²¹ In his first published letter from Île-à-la-Crosse (1851), Taché had even equated local womanhood with slavery: “It is painful to see woman—who was created to be man’s companion—become his slave, subjugated by the superior strength that he was given in order to protect her, rather than torture her…. We have seen some local men knock their spouses unconscious and treat them with barbaric severity.”²² According to Taché, Chipewyan-speaking women bore a particularly onerous burden as the conditions of their “slavery” were aggravated by extreme poverty and frequent starvation:

While the fate of this tribe is unhappy in general, that of the women in particular is filled with privations and sufferings that are virtually unheard of among civilized nations. “I will multiply your pain,” said God to Eve, and this terrible anathema still applies here with all of its original force; misery is heaped upon misery, creating a terrible mass of tribulation. Christian women, if you do not understand all that Religion has done for you, come to the school of the infidel peoples and you will see what you would have become without the saving influence of Christianity!²³

Informing Taché’s ascription of the terms “civilized” and “barbaric” was a normative assumption about the place of women in society. This assumption held that women needed to be cared for and protected in order to fulfill their God-given roles as helpmates and homemakers.²⁴ Only through Christian education could women gain an awareness of their place in the divine order and acquire the skills necessary to assume that place. Thus, in December 1861, Grandin declared that the founding of Saint-Bruno represented a major first step toward “the elevation of women … who are so despised and degraded in this country.”25

The school was also intended to effect a transformation of local manhood by producing conscientious husbands and fathers. With the exception of a Chipewyan-speaking orphan known as Francis, the first contingent of schoolboys consisted of sons of local HBC personnel: Antoine, son of Pierriche Laliberté; Gabriel, son of Charles Lafleur; Baptiste, son of Antoine Morin; and Joseph and Zacharie, likely sons of James Bruce (an HBC boat builder).²⁶ These boys were entrusted to the supervision of Oblate lay brother Louis Dubé, who conveyed them at 5:30 each morning from the Oblate residence at Saint-Jean-Baptiste to the common room at Saint-Bruno. There the boys spent the morning learning basic arithmetic and acquiring skills in written and spoken French—a language that none of them spoke natively.²⁷ Their teacher—Sister Pepin—struggled to assert authority over the boys, prompting her sister superior to marvel at her fortitude and devotion:

What patience was needed to discipline those boys! They were accustomed to doing whatever they pleased; in this country a ten- or twelve-year-old boy is too big—“too much of a man!” as they say here—to submit to his parents…. It is easy to imagine how those children, having been raised according to such principles, reacted upon finding themselves under the authority of a Sister. And in their eyes, the only difference between a Sister and their mother was a habit. We therefore needed to be very cautious and very gentle with them. We needed to assert authority without hurting or humiliating them. Above all, we needed help from above and the blessing of our heavenly Father, for although we may sow, it is God alone who gives growth. Sister Pepin, to whom the principal task of teaching had fallen, knew this well…. And while this devoted Sister cared for the children, … we prayed that God would bless her efforts and crown them with success.²⁸

In the afternoon, Pepin dismissed the schoolboys and they performed manual labour under Dubé’s direction. Their tasks were meant to prepare them for lives as industrious heads of households. Hence, the youngest boys worked in the barn milking cows, mucking out stalls, and distributing fodder. Older boys were assigned more strenuous tasks, such as chopping and hauling firewood and maintaining mission buildings. In the spring, the boys tilled the soil around the mission and sowed barley, wheat, and potatoes. They assisted in harvesting these crops in the late summer and autumn.29 Eighteen months after the implementation of this daily regimen, Father Henri Faraud reported that a gradual transformation was underway among the schoolboys: “These children … are slowly becoming pious, losing those sauvage characteristics that are so detestable among the children of the North, and will eventually become dutiful and conscientious fathers.”³⁰

Yet while confident in the transformative power of Saint-Bruno, Oblates expressed concern about the rate of the schoolchildren’s progress. In June 1861, Father Valentin Végréville reported that the children had made little headway in learning French and recommended that they be subjected to a more intensive pedagogical program:

It is urgent that the children learn to speak French. This, in my opinion, must be our priority. It is true that we are already working toward this end by speaking only French to them, but this is not enough. The children only speak Cree among themselves, and thus more than three-quarters of their conversations take place in sauvage. The result is that they have made very little progress in French conversation…. Until there develops a core of French-speaking children, neither the Sisters nor the Oblates should content themselves with merely supervising the children. Rather, we must involve ourselves in their games, place ourselves in greater contact with them, and not tolerate their speaking sauvage among themselves. We must force them to speak French by various means…. We will need to make sacrifices to achieve this goal, but our school will otherwise remain inconsequential. The sooner we make these sacrifices, the sooner we will reap the benefits: once a small French-speaking core has formed, newly arrived children will be drawn to it without realizing it and without our having to force things.³¹

Father Julien Moulin echoed Végréville’s recommendation seventeen months later, noting that the schoolchildren persisted in speaking Cree among themselves: “I do not think that the children are sufficiently supervised at mealtimes or at other times. We cannot seem to stop them from speaking Cree among themselves, and this is harming their education a great deal…. I think that we are giving them too much freedom.”32 Moulin further opined that the children had made little progress in reading and writing. After more than two years of schooling, they could barely hold a pen, let alone compose a legible sentence.³³ More worrisome than the pupils’ slow progress was their teachers’ apparent disappointment and despondency. In his capacity as principal of Saint-Bruno from July 1861 to July 1863, Faraud registered concern that the Grey Nuns were beginning to doubt their own abilities and to waver in their commitment to the civilizing project. He confided to Taché that he suspected the nuns of wishing to return to Saint-Boniface and Montreal.³⁴ According to most Oblate commentators, the principal impediment to the schoolchildren’s progress was frequent contact with their Cree- and Chipewyan-speaking relatives. Starting in November 1860, Oblates had endeavoured to alleviate strain on mission food stores by permitting the schoolchildren to spend Sundays and Thursdays with their families.³⁵ While accepted as an economic necessity, this strategy prompted concerns that the children would remain impervious to la civilisation chrétienne because of their regular re-immersion in la sauvagerie. Hence, in spring 1861, Végréville and Moulin recommended a decrease in the number of “congés,” or holidays, allotted to the schoolchildren so as to mitigate the influence of their families.³⁶ This recommendation proved impossible to implement, however, as a series of crises shook Saint-Bruno over the following decade and compelled its administrators to return the children to their families for extended periods. The first of these crises occurred in spring 1866 when the local fishery failed completely. Unable to secure daily sustenance for all schoolchildren, acting principal Father Jean-Marie Caër cancelled classes for two months and sent away children who had relatives in the vicinity of Île-à-la-Crosse.³⁷ The second crisis occurred the following year when the schoolboys’ dormitory burned to the ground. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, Oblates attempted to lodge nineteen schoolboys in a small warehouse with beds stacked four high. They soon ascertained that this situation was untenable and returned most of the boys to their families.³⁸ The final crisis occurred as the new dormitory was nearing completion in August 1869. While preparing to resume his supervision of the schoolboys, Dubé suffered a bout of paralysis and was committed to the Grey Nuns’ infirmary.³⁹ His incapacity prompted Grandin to introduce a day-student system whereby the children of local HBC personnel—“children of the fort”—were permitted to attend classes during the day and return to their families in the evening. This system remained in operation until April 1871, when Father Prosper Légeard restored the original “système de pensionnaires” whereby all pupils boarded at the mission.⁴⁰

Beyond their persistent linguistic and cultural influence on schoolchildren, local families prompted concern among Oblates because of their apparent ambivalence—and occasional hostility—toward Saint-Bruno. Under the terms of the “système de pensionnaires,” the families of schoolchildren were expected to pay an annual “pension”—a fee in cash or in kind—to cover their children’s material needs.41 Yet payment of the “pension” became increasingly rare after the first school year. By the winter of 1862–63, the schoolchildren were being fed, clothed, and sheltered entirely at the expense of the mission.⁴² This situation aggravated the strain on mission food stores and increased the burden of manual labour borne by Grey Nuns, Oblate lay brothers, and engagés. “I find it totally unreasonable that we are expected to feed all the children of the Company men,” grumbled Faraud in late November 1862. “Our own men must devote so much time to fishing that it is impossible to get them to do anything else around here.”⁴³ In March 1864, Moulin reported that the mission was compelled to provide at least twenty fish per day for the sustenance of the schoolchildren in addition to the usual thirty-five required for the sustenance of Oblates, Grey Nuns, engagés, and sled dogs. The following year, Grandin reported that the schoolchildren required at least thirty-six fish per day. Besides forcing Oblates to devote more time and energy to fishing, this situation presented complications for the Grey Nuns, as their kitchen was under-equipped for the preparation of such large meals: the nuns relied on a “chimney system,” in which fish was cooked slowly and in relatively small quantities.⁴⁴ According to Oblates and Grey Nuns, this lack of material support from local families was symptomatic of their general disengagement with Saint-Bruno. Reinforcing this perception was the reluctance of several families to enrol their young children in the school.⁴⁵ In an effort to extol the benefits of a mission education and to garner community support for Saint-Bruno, Oblates and Grey Nuns launched a publicity campaign centred on the annual examen public.⁴⁶ The priests and nuns reported mixed results from this campaign: although it boosted enrolment and encouraged payment of the “pension,” the campaign did not dispel all misgivings among local families. Hence, in her chronicle entry for the year 1871, Agnès noted that the enrolment of a record thirty-five “pensionnaires” coincided with vociferous criticism from local families over the treatment of their children: “Some families were beginning to appreciate the benefits of education, so they took the initiative themselves to enrol their children. Nevertheless, these poor sauvages retained their old habit of finding fault in our treatment of their children even though we were exhausting ourselves and sacrificing so much for their benefit…. Yet to draw as many children as possible to our little school, good Sister Pepin resigned herself to all reproaches, all difficulties, and all suffering.”47 Such “reproaches” were especially common when schoolchildren fell ill or perished at Saint-Bruno—as occurred in January 1865, when six-year-old François Beaulieu died of pleurisy, and in March 1875, when four-year-old Patrice Stevenson died after an outbreak of chicken pox.⁴⁸ Cases of juvenile illness and death provoked some local families to accuse Oblates and Grey Nuns of being negligent, unloving, or excessively severe with their charges. While these accusations dwindled during periods of relative good health among schoolchildren, they left a legacy of uncertainty among Oblates and Grey Nuns as to the local community’s goodwill and support for Saint-Bruno.⁴⁹

Oblates perceived another obstacle to the operation of Saint-Bruno in the internal dynamics of the mission personnel. Even while publishing descriptions of their relationship with Grey Nuns as a seamless cooperation between missionary congregations, Oblates struggled with scruples and apprehensions in their daily interactions with the nuns.⁵⁰ These scruples and apprehensions stemmed in part from the clerical vow of chastity and its accompanying gendered divisions of space, labour, and power. In the early 1860s, the Oblate General Administration instructed Oblates to avoid frequent, prolonged, and unnecessary contact with Grey Nuns, but it issued no specific protocol on daily interaction between members of these two communities. Such interaction was to be regulated according to the discretion of local superiors.⁵¹ This situation created serious administrative concerns at Saint-Bruno, especially during the intermittent principalships of Father Julien Moulin (November 1862 to January 1863, July 1863 to September 1864, and March 1867 to October 1870).⁵² Moulin attempted to impose unprecedented restrictions on personal contact and communication between Oblates and Grey Nuns. For instance, he sought to discontinue the practice whereby Oblates consulted directly with the nuns in preparing the annual list of supplies required at the mission. He urged the nuns to compile their own list and recommended the complete material separation of the two communities.⁵³ More drastically, Moulin instructed Oblate lay brothers to conduct their daily exchanges with the nuns through handwritten messages delivered by schoolboys. Even the most prosaic exchanges were to be conducted in writing—including commentary on pupils, updates on the fishery, and requests for services and supplies.⁵⁴ When Bishop Grandin returned to Île-à-la-Crosse after completing his three-year tour of the northern missions in August 1864, he was shocked at the isolation and divisiveness that had arisen under Moulin’s supervision.⁵⁵ Grandin reported to Bishop Taché and to Father Florent Vandenberghe—delegate of the Oblate Superior General—that the nuns had encountered inordinate difficulty in conveying requests for such basic necessities as water, food, and firewood, and that they had become sorely alienated from the Oblates. Grandin therefore requested Taché and Vandenberghe promulgate binding rules and regulations on interaction between the two communities: “I implore you, Monseigneur and Reverend Father, to draft rules and provide instructions so that these two communities—which are capable of doing so much good together—need no longer experience such deplorable circumstances…. It seems to me that if the [Grey Nuns’] superior general, or even the provincial, knew about these troubles, she would have no choice but to recall her sisters.”56 In the absence of such rules, Grandin feared that the relationship between Oblates and Grey Nuns could be irreparably damaged at the whim of an injudicious superior. His fears were rekindled in August 1868, when he returned to Île-à-la-Crosse after a year-long sojourn in Canada and France.⁵⁷ Despite having admonished Moulin for his earlier administrative gaffes, Grandin discovered yet again that the Grey Nuns had chafed under Moulin’s austere direction: “The sisters suffered from this administration: their relationship with the director of the mission was so awkward that they were afraid to ask even for bare essentials.”⁵⁸ Given Moulin’s “tiresome severity” and “unpleasant bearing,” Grandin resolved to replace him as superior of Saint-Jean-Baptiste and principal of Saint-Bruno as soon as a suitable candidate could be found.⁵⁹

Grandin’s resolution suggests that the presence of Grey Nuns generated tension not only between religious communities but also among Oblates themselves. Indeed, during the 1860s, several Oblates of Saint-Jean-Baptiste expressed concerns and misgivings about their confrères’ relations with the nuns. In April 1863, for instance, Moulin reported that Faraud was spending excessive amounts of time at the convent. Faraud visited at least once a day in order to give Cree and Chipewyan language lessons to the nuns. He in turn received private English lessons from Sister Pepin. According to Moulin, word of these intimate sessions could be exploited by Protestant detractors who spread scandalous rumours about the sexual hypocrisy of Catholic missionaries. “The Anglican ministers of the Mackenzie River District are telling everyone that we’re all married,” noted Moulin. “This habitual exchange with the sisters might lend credence to such rumours and make us lose our standing among the sauvages.”⁶⁰ Three and a half years later, Grandin expressed similar concerns about the conduct of Father Jean-Marie Caër during the latter’s brief tenure as superior of Saint-Jean-Baptiste and principal of Saint-Bruno (June to September 1866). Having spent the summer of 1866 at Saint-Boniface, Grandin returned to Île-à-la-Crosse on 21 September and was promptly briefed on an unsettling situation. He subsequently informed Taché of what he had learned:

Having spoken with all of the brothers and sisters, I am convinced that this poor priest [Caër] cannot be left alone with the sisters. According to our three lay brothers [Louis Dubé, Patrick Bowes, and Jean Pérréard], who are surely exaggerating, he spends more time at the convent than here [at the Oblate residence], and allows himself such familiarity with the sisters that the brothers are scandalized and the sister superior [Agnès] deeply troubled. This good sister assured me that the priest always has a good reason for visiting the convent, but he stays too long and spends hours on end with Sister Pepin during her classes…. I forbade him to spend so much time with the sisters.61

“Familiarity with the sisters” became a recurring theme in the conflict that simmered between Grandin and Caër over the next two years. This conflict reached boiling point in September 1868 when Caër—ostensibly on behalf of the nuns—reproached Grandin for habitually standing too close when speaking with them. In reporting the matter to Taché, a flabbergasted Grandin insisted that he could not keep a greater distance on account of his “lazy ears” and suggested that Caër had simply delivered the reproach out of spite. “Could the sisters really have wanted to relay such a message to me through an inferior, through someone like Father Caër?” asked Grandin with rhetorical incredulity. “He must have relished telling me, after all of the times that I admonished him for his imprudence, after all of my insistence that the sisters see him exclusively in the confessional…. I believe that he is the source of all of this.”⁶² It was therefore with a sense of relief that Grandin learned of Caër’s resolution to leave the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in spring 1869 and to seek admittance to a Carthusian monastery in France. Grandin marked his departure with a terse farewell: “May he be a better Carthusian than he was an Oblate!”⁶³

While never entirely placid or unguarded in the presence of Grey Nuns, the Oblates of Saint-Jean-Baptiste registered a marked improvement in their relationship with the nuns over the course of the 1870s. This improvement resulted in part from a joint effort by Grandin and Sister Ursule Cécile Charlebois—Assistant General of the Grey Nuns—to clarify and codify rules on interaction between the two communities. Grandin accompanied Charlebois on her visit to Île-à-la-Crosse in late August 1871, and together they devised “sensible regulations” for local use, which included an outright ban on unsupervised contact between individual Oblates and individual nuns outside of the confessional.64 Responsibility for implementing these regulations fell to a young Oblate who inspired tremendous confidence in his superiors. Having assumed direction of Saint-Jean-Baptiste and Saint-Bruno the previous autumn (October 1870), Father Prosper Légeard quickly garnered praise for his administrative and interpersonal skills. “All of my hopes for this priest are being realized,” reported Grandin after his visit to Île-à-la-Crosse in August 1871. “One can confidently assign any task to him; he gets along exceedingly well with his confrères, the sisters, and the local people.”⁶⁵ In pursuing his mandate to regularize and to improve relations with the Grey Nuns, Légeard endeavoured to enhance their material position and their standard of living at Île-à-la-Crosse. He drafted plans and oversaw the construction of two buildings that he entrusted to the nuns in 1874. The first was a two-storeyed structure measuring ten by seven metres. It was subdivided into a classroom, a parlour, and a dormitory. The second was a three-storeyed structure measuring fifteen by ten metres. It was subdivided into a private chapel, an infirmary, a kitchen, a refectory, and a dormitory.⁶⁶ This second structure—commodious by the standards of the time and place—was dubbed “the little château” by Agnès and her consœurs.⁶⁷

Another reason for rapprochement between Oblates and Grey Nuns was their adoption of a shared devotion in the early 1870s. Through Légeard’s pastoral guidance, both communities began venerating the Sacred Heart of Jesus and its most celebrated interlocutor, the Blessed Marguerite-Marie Alacoque.⁶⁸ Légeard had developed a personal devotion to the Sacred Heart and to the Blessed Marguerite-Marie while studying at the Oblate scholasticate of SacréCœur in the Diocese of Autun (department of Saône-et-Loire) from June 1864 to October 1865. This diocese was home to a burgeoning pilgrimage site at Paray-le-Monial, where the Blessed Marguerite-Marie had experienced her divine visions in the 1670s and ’80s, and where her remains lay displayed in a reliquary.⁶⁹ “You should have a great devotion to this Bienheureuse [the Blessed Marguerite-Marie],” Légeard had written to his younger sister, Hortense, in 1865. “I do not doubt that through her intercession, your love for the Sacred Heart of Our Lord will grow…. One does not suffer when one truly loves the Heart of Christ, for it transforms the worst bitterness into sweetness and radiates joy amid pain and humiliation.”70 Légeard made the very same recommendation to the Oblates and Grey Nuns of Île-à-la-Crosse a few years later. As their confessor and spiritual director, he urged the missionaries to dedicate their labours to the Blessed Marguerite-Marie and to pray constantly for her intercession.⁷¹ His efforts appeared to bear fruit in the miraculous healing of Sister Sara Riel in autumn 1872. The twenty-four-year-old Riel— younger sister of the famed Louis Riel—had arrived from Saint-Boniface the previous year and had since experienced a rapid decline in her physical health. By 23 November, she was bedridden with severe pneumonia and was apparently in extremis. Légeard, after administering the sacrament of extreme unction, advised the dying nun to pray to the Sacred Heart through the intercession of the Blessed Marguerite-Marie. Riel followed his advice and soon experienced a rapid recovery. Oblates and Grey Nuns hailed this recovery as a genuine miracle and both communities endorsed Riel’s decision to pay homage to her heavenly benefactress by adopting a new name—Sister Marguerite-Marie.⁷²

In the wake of this healing, Oblates and Grey Nuns invoked the Sacred Heart and the Blessed Marguerite-Marie to protect and to promote the convent boarding school at Île-à-la-Crosse. The most committed proponents of this movement were Riel (Sister Marguerite-Marie) and Légeard. When Sister Pepin was reassigned to Saint-Boniface in August 1873, Riel and twenty-six-year-old Sister Angèle Langelier (lately arrived from the Montreal motherhouse) assumed joint responsibility for teaching the schoolchildren. Riel’s first initiative as a teacher was to usher the schoolchildren to the mission church on 12 September 1873, where they consecrated themselves and their studies to the Sacred Heart.⁷³ She subsequently painted images of the Sacred Heart, which she hung on the classroom walls and distributed to the children.⁷⁴ For his part, Légeard made use of his personal contacts with the Visitation Sisters of Paray-le-Monial to procure devotional material—including sheet music for hymns to the Sacred Heart, printed images of the Blessed Marguerite-Marie in ecstasy, and banners emblazoned with a bleeding heart and the motto “Honneur, amour, réparation au S.C. De Jésus” (Honour, love, reparation to the S.H. of Jesus). He even obtained a bona fide relic—a lamp that had burned on the spot where the Blessed Marguerite-Marie had experienced her visions.⁷⁵ Finally, Légeard obtained permission from Grandin to re-consecrate the convent boarding school at Île-à-la-Crosse. It became known officially as l’École de Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur (Our Lady of the Sacred Heart School) in August 1874.⁷⁶ Légeard expressed confidence that this re-consecration would bring “extraordinary grace” to the school and to its pupils: “I am certain that they will receive all of the blessings that Christ Himself has promised to those who honour His divine heart.”77

This re-consecration was an expression of renewed commitment to residential education in the early 1870s. A sense of urgency infused Oblate writing on the subject after the transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to the Dominion of Canada. Underlying this sense of urgency was a collective fear that Indigenous peoples would shortly be displaced and marginalized by large-scale Euro-Canadian immigration and settlement. As early as 1873, Légeard predicted that “the coming of the whites” would have dire consequences for Indigenous peoples. “Civilization has reached the edges of our region, or at least the edges of the prairies,” he reported to the Oblate General Administration in August of that year. “This is all well and good, but it will hardly help our sauvages and our métis, who will all disappear little by little. The strangers are watching and waiting for the moment when a treaty is reached between the sauvages of the prairies and the Canadian government; then they will pounce on the Saskatchewan Valley and other places.”⁷⁸ Grandin made a similar prediction two years later in a circular issued to the Oblates and Grey Nuns of the Diocese of Saint-Albert. He insisted, however, that the ills of la civilisation moderne could be tempered through the initiative of missionaries:

The different tribes of sauvages who inhabit the immense territory of North America can, through the patient and devoted zeal of missionaries, convert to the faith and become good Christians. But by continuing their wandering and unhappy ways, these poor Indians cannot be brought to a civilized life and will forever remain sauvages.

Owing to the annexation of their territory to Canada, they find their hunting grounds increasingly taken over by strangers; their hunting is dwindling and will soon fail altogether; widespread misery will follow and will be compounded by the immorality that civilized people all too often exemplify. The sauvages will be lost, both physically and morally.

For a long time now, missionaries have foreseen this tragedy and have wanted to prevent it, or at least postpone it, at all costs. Extensive experience has shown us that sauvages, taken in as children, can be educated and civilized. Young Indians raised in our orphanages or even entrusted to Catholic families have effectively ceased being sauvages; they can now live honestly from the fruit of their own labours and can become members of society. We currently have no means to undertake this important work other than the support provided by the Propagation de la Foi. Thus, we have been able to prove that the civilizing of the sauvages can be accomplished through their little children, but we lack the means to accomplish this work on a larger scale.79

In other words, the imminent physical and moral degeneration of Indigenous peoples could be forestalled—or at least mitigated—by missionary intervention in Indigenous childhood. Whereas the behaviours and lifestyles of adults were deemed fixed and unalterable, those of children were considered eminently mutable. Missionaries could harness this mutability to effect a transformation among Indigenous peoples and thereby prepare them for the encroachment of Euro-Canadian settlement.⁸⁰ The convent boarding school seemed a particularly well-suited institution for this purpose; indeed, it had been at the core of the Oblates’ civilizing project for over a decade. In order to meet the vicissitudes of the 1870s, however, this institution would need to be thoroughly revamped. It would need to intensify its assimilative capacity. It would need to enrol, lodge, feed, and clothe greater numbers of children. Above all, it would need to obtain a significant increase in funding.

In hopes of meeting this financial challenge, Oblates turned to their long-established underwriter—l’Œuvre de la Propagation de la Foi. At the dawn of the 1870s, this society remained the principal financier of Oblate missionary activity in the Northwest Territories and Grandin commended it to Pope Pius IX as “the temporal benefactress of the Diocese of Saint-Albert.”⁸¹ In 1872, Grandin requested that l’Œuvre increase his annual allocation so that he could improve the existing schools in his diocese and establish several new ones. To publicize this project and elicit donations from associates of l’Œuvre, Grandin embarked on an extensive lecturing tour through several dioceses in France the following year.⁸² He also made use of l’Œuvre’s official periodical—Les Annales de la Propagation de la Foi— to reach the broader French Catholic reading public. In the 1872 edition of Les Annales, Grandin extolled the civilizing potential of the convent boarding schools through a panegyric on the Grey Nuns’ establishment at Île-à-la-Crosse:

For the past ten years, the Sisters of Charity—also known as the Congregation of Grey Nuns of Montreal—have lent us their zeal and devotion. These Sisters work tirelessly in several of our missions, but the good that they accomplish is more perceptible at Île-à-la-Crosse than anywhere else…. Over forty children, thirty of whom are pensionnaires and a good number born to sauvage parents, receive a very sound and thorough education there. Several of these children write and speak French so well that, while attending their examens, one forgets one’s exile from beautiful France. These pensionnaires are divided into two houses: the little boys live with the priests, the little girls with the Sisters. We often speak of civilizing the sauvages. I can see no better way of doing this than by taking them in as small children. Those who leave our schools are no longer sauvages in their habits, and we foresee them establishing truly Christian families.

Our schools are not terribly costly, but we cannot increase them because we alone pay for them, the parents being unable to help. But if instead of thirty pensionnaires we could lodge and feed a hundred, we would be able to recruit them immediately: the sauvages whose children are in our care are proud that, as they say, their children have become French. Scores of other parents pester us to accept their children so that they too can become French. Let our schools and our missions multiply, and the sauvages will disappear without ceasing to exist.83

Grandin’s panegyric—tailored specifically for a French Catholic readership— presented the convent boarding school at Île-à-la-Crosse as a model to be replicated throughout the Diocese of Saint-Albert. This replication would accelerate an ongoing civilizing process that transformed “sauvages” into Frenchmen and Frenchwomen—a process that had already created an oasis of French Catholicism in the wilderness of British North America. This replication could only occur, however, through an increase in financial support from l’Œuvre de la Propagation de la Foi.

Through his entreaties, Grandin did obtain incremental gains in his allocation from l’Œuvre over the course of the 1870s.⁸⁴ Yet he confided to his confrères that these gains were sorely insufficient to effect any substantial improvements in residential education in the Diocese of Saint-Albert.⁸⁵ By spring 1875, Grandin had resolved to solicit additional funding outside the auspices of l’Œuvre. He eagerly endorsed a proposal by Légeard for the sponsorship—or “l’adoption”—of schoolchildren at Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur (formerly Saint-Bruno) by private benefactors in Europe.86 Légeard recommended that the Oblates of Saint-Jean-Baptiste use their personal and professional contacts to find a sponsor for every schoolchild. Sponsors could be individuals, families, schools, seminaries, convents, parish congregations, or even commercial enterprises. Each sponsor would donate at least fifty francs per year to feed, clothe, and shelter a schoolchild. In return, sponsors would receive special mention in the schoolchildren’s daily prayers. An additional honour would be reserved for sponsors of orphans and foundlings (who generally incurred greater expenses than did the “children of the fort”): “We will give to the orphans whom we receive the name of the sponsor, or at least the name of one of the people who contributes to this good work.”⁸⁷ Grandin’s elder brother—a Parisian layman—received this honour in 1875 after he agreed to sponsor a Chipewyan-speaking foundling who had lately been admitted to Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur. At his baptism, the child was given the name Joseph Grandin.⁸⁸

Although intended originally for the maintenance of schoolchildren at Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur, Légeard’s proposal became the basis of a large-scale project to finance residential education throughout the Diocese of Saint-Albert. In March 1878, Grandin announced his intention to create a new charitable association that would be known as l’Œuvre des écoles du Nord-Ouest. This association would consist of sponsors—or “adoptants”—who would collectively assume the costs of boarding, feeding, and clothing Indigenous schoolchildren in the diocese. Sponsors would be divided into four classes. A first-class sponsor would donate 400 francs per year and, in return, would have the privilege of bestowing his or her surname on a beneficiary. A second-class sponsor would be a group of four to eight members who would each contribute between fifty and 100 francs per year. They would decide among themselves which member would bestow his or her surname on a beneficiary. Third- and fourth-class sponsors would be groups of ten and twenty members who would each contribute “a few francs or pennies” per year.⁸⁹ To avoid overburdening France with an additional charitable association, Grandin sought to establish l’Œuvre des écoles du Nord-Ouest among Catholics in the United Kingdom and justified this decision on the grounds that the Indigenous peoples in his diocese were British subjects. He enlisted support for his project from prominent British Catholics—including Father Robert Cooke (superior of the Oblates’ Anglo-Irish Province) and Dr. Henry Edward Cardinal Manning (Archbishop Westminster and titular head of English Catholicism).⁹⁰ Yet while preparing a journey to London to meet with potential sponsors in June 1878, Grandin was stopped in his tracks by the intervention of the Paris council of l’Œuvre de la Propagation de la Foi. Members of this council had read published reports of Grandin’s intention to establish a “sister organization” to the Propagation de la Foi in England and had become wary of a possible competitor.91 Léon Colin de Verdière—the seventy-seven-year-old president of the Paris council—consequently wrote to Grandin and threatened to withhold his allocation until he renounced l’Œuvre des écoles du Nord-Ouest. “We have full confidence,” added Colin de Verdière with Parisian aplomb, “that in renouncing this project, which completely violates the rules of l’Œuvre [de la Propagation de la Foi], you will allow us to continue providing the Diocese of Saint-Albert with an assistance that has always been a source of great consolation for us.”⁹² Seeking to defend his project before the Paris council, Grandin insisted that l’Œuvre des écoles du Nord-Ouest would pose no threat to l’Œuvre de la Propagation de la Foi because the two organizations would have different functions and would draw their funds from different sources.⁹³ The council was unmoved by this argument; it promptly reissued its threat to cut off Grandin’s annual allocation.⁹⁴ Unable to forgo this allocation—insufficient though it was—Grandin officially abandoned his plan to establish l’Œuvre des écoles du Nord-Ouest on 24 June 1878.⁹⁵ He subsequently confided to Taché that l’Œuvre de la Propagation de la Foi had asserted a paralyzing grip on the Diocese of Saint-Albert: “Under this exclusive system of la Propagation de la foi, we are condemned to stagnate, unable to grow, unable to break free of the confines in which we find ourselves.”⁹⁶

No longer able to rely exclusively on the largesse of Catholic benefactors in Europe, Oblates in the Diocese of Saint-Albert turned to a new potential source of funding—the government of the Dominion of Canada. In January 1875, Grandin wrote to Alexander Morris—Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories—and informed him that the Oblates and Grey Nuns were operating convent boarding schools at Île-à-la-Crosse, Lac La Biche, and Saint-Albert. Grandin affirmed that these schools were integral elements of an ongoing civilizing project and insisted that the Dominion government had a vested interest in supporting them so as to facilitate the transformation of sauvages into productive citizens. “We must acknowledge,” noted Grandin, “that the only way to civilize the sauvages is to take them in as small children. I, along with all of my missionaries and all of the pious nuns who devote themselves to teaching our children, have no doubt that Her Majesty’s Government will assist us in this civilizing venture.”⁹⁷ The following year, Grandin commended these three schools to Lieutenant-Colonel James Farquharson Macleod—stipendiary magistrate for the Northwest Territories and former assistant commissioner of the North West Mounted Police—and urged him to use his government connections to obtain federal funding for them. The bishop assured Macleod that the convent boarding school was the most effective and the most economical means of redeeming the sauvages:

At Saint-Albert, at Île-à-la-Crosse, and at Lac La Biche, we are raising at least sixty children…. I can assure you that these children, from whichever nation they hail, are no longer sauvages when they leave our schools. Obviously they could not join the high societies of civilized countries, but they can certainly take their place with honour among the métis and the ordinary settlers of this country. Experience has proven that civilization kills the sauvages, but more than twenty years of experience has convinced me that our manner of civilizing does not kill. If, instead of three orphanages, we had ten or more, and if, instead of raising only fifteen or twenty children in each of these establishments, we could enrol a hundred or more, civilization would soon make the sauvages disappear without killing them. When they leave our establishments, these children have nothing of the sauvage left in them but their blood. They have even forgotten their natural language, so much so that returning to the sauvage lifestyle is no longer possible for them; we inspire such strong aversion to that lifestyle that they are humiliated when we remind them of their origins. You see, Colonel, our objective is not to produce monks or partisans of our Religion; our objective is uniquely to produce men. Thanks to the combined efforts of priests, lay brothers, and Sisters of Charity in their complementary spheres, we can succeed in this work more easily and more economically than anyone else. Bound by vows of celibacy and therefore having no one else to provide for, we think only of our mission. We see only our mission. We live only for our mission.98

Grandin thus presented the convent boarding school as an ideal adjunct to the Canadian state. By sponsoring this institution, the state could hasten the transformation of sauvages into industrious, conscientious, and self-sufficient individuals—“men”—who would contribute meaningfully to a settler society and raise civilized children. The bishop emphasized two particular benefits of the convent boarding school in order to garner the support of government officials. First, graduates of this institution could never revert to “the sauvage lifestyle” because they had been thoroughly acculturated to European/ Euro-Canadian modes of thought and behaviour and because they had been inculcated with contempt for ancestral ways. Second, the operational costs of the convent boarding school were comparatively lower than those of Protestant educational institutions. Oblates and Grey Nuns laboured gratis pro Deo and were unencumbered by the obligation to provide for spouses and children. They therefore offered the promise of a better return on state investment in residential education.

To assist Grandin in his bid for federal support, Légeard petitioned for subsidies to Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur. On 3 April 1874, a federal order-in-council authorized the payment of $300 per year to each “Indian school” attended by at least twenty-five pupils in the Diocese of Saint-Albert. Légeard subsequently notified the Lieutenant Governor of the Northwest Territories that Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur was attended by upwards of forty pupils and that it was duly entitled to an annual subvention. Accordingly, the convent boarding school received a payment of $300 in 1875 and another in 1876.99 The following year, however, the school was denied further subvention on the grounds that it lay outside the limits of Treaty Six—negotiated and signed at Fort Carlton and Fort Pitt in late August and early September 1876 by Crown officials and representatives of bands of Plains Cree, Woods Cree, Saulteaux, and Chipewyan.¹⁰⁰ In an effort to obtain a renewal of federal funding, Légeard wrote to David Laird—Lieutenant Governor of the Northwest Territories—on 25 March 1878, and drew his attention to the clause in Treaty Six that obliged the Crown to “maintain schools for instruction … whenever the Indians of the reserve shall desire it.”¹⁰¹ The most effective way to fulfill this obligation, insisted Légeard, was to support Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur:

It is true one could tell us we are not properly speaking on the ground comprised in the Treaties made by the Government with the Indians of the North West, but a Government as liberal as the one that rules Canada actually will not look so narrowly, I hope, from the moment the question is the promotion of education in a portion of these countries of the North West he [sic] desires so much to civilize. He will not I trust refuse to come to the help of the most ancient school now existing in the North West, the only one in the English River District. More so I will take leave to make Your Honor observe that this school is open to all of any religion. It is true we only have Catholic children actually, but at different periods we had few Protestant ones, their parents were in the Company service and they entrusted them to our care. Moreover allow me to say that although we are not really in the territories included in the Treaty, we depend from [sic] them in some way. At the time of the Treaty made in 1876 between Her Majesty, Our Most Gracious Queen, and the Indians of the Plains at Carlton and at Fort Pitt, the Government engaged himself to give to each band who adheres to the Treaty school and teachers. The Indians of Green Lake who have taken the Treaty at Carlton, and the Chipewyans at Fort Pitt would have the right to ask for a school, and the Government I am sure would do all in his power to satisfy them, but the band of Green Lake and that of Cold Lake are really not in number sufficient to have a school each, they will not ask for one, but finding a school all organized, as much as they can they will ask us to instruct their children as they have done and as they would do more than ever if they knew we could accept them. We have some of Green Lake, and lately a request has been made from Cold Lake to place a child in the summer. For all these reasons it would be preferable it seems to me to support a large school where the teaching is better organized, where there is more emulation, than to try to establish many small schools that would not maintain themselves certainly.102

Légeard’s letter—written in English and sprinkled liberally with Gallicisms— outlined the practical advantages of off-reserve education for the Cree and Chipewyan children of Green Lake and Cold Lake. These children would have better educational opportunities at Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur than at smaller—and as yet nonexistent—schools on their reserves. They would be better taught, better supervised, and better accommodated at “the most ancient school now existing in the North West.” Légeard noted also that the children would receive a solid grounding in both French and English, as the Grey Nuns had been giving English lessons at Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur since autumn 1873.¹⁰³

Another advantage identified by Légeard was the large contingent of “Half-breed children” at Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur. Légeard’s letter to Laird contains the earliest pronouncement by an Oblate that the majority of the schoolchildren were of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry. This majority had purportedly remained consistent since the early 1860s: “During the first years also Half-breed children were more admitted than Indian ones, room missing absolutely to receive many Indian children, and so much the more that from the opening of the school, all the pupils were boarders.” According to Légeard, this core of mixed-blood pupils would exercise a “civilizing influence” on Cree and Chipewyan children recruited from Treaty Six territory.104 Informing Légeard’s projection was a growing tendency among Oblates to advertise the instrumentality of mixed-blood children in their correspondence with government officials. In April 1875, for instance, Grandin had written to Laird—then federal Minister of the Interior—and had characterized mixed-blood children as “people who are more advanced in civilization.” The bishop ascribed to them a salutary role in the civilizing project:

I have the advantage of operating three orphanages in my diocese where we are raising around fifty métis and sauvage children. We often speak about civilizing the sauvages. … Fifteen years of experience have left me with little doubt that this can be accomplished by raising them from childhood. Not all of them need to receive a complete education, but at least they will cease speaking their sauvage language and become accustomed to work. The sauvage lifestyle will no longer be possible for them, so they will merge with the métis to whom we will marry them without much difficulty. I have no doubt that, in the end, they will establish good families who will have nothing sauvage about them but their blood. If I had more orphanages and could enrol more little sauvages, we could greatly advance the work of civilization. Surely this work is worthy of government support.¹⁰⁵

Implicit in the statements of Légeard and Grandin was the notion of a spectrum of moral, social, and cultural development between la sauvagerie at one pole and la civilisation at the other. “Half-breeds” or les métis occupied an intermediate—and potentially transitory—position between these poles. They could assist in impelling “little sauvages” along the spectrum toward la civilisation by serving as role models and by reinforcing new standards of thought and behaviour. Their mere presence enhanced the civilizing potential of convent boarding schools.¹⁰⁶

Yet despite repeatedly touting the merits of convent boarding schools, Oblates failed to obtain the level of federal funding that they considered necessary for the maintenance and growth of these institutions. They were particularly aggrieved by the refusal of Lawrence Vankoughnet—Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs—to consider renewing the annual subsidy to Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur in 1879 and again in 1880 on the grounds that the school was located outside Treaty Six territory. Their requests for smaller one-time grants were also denied for the same reason, such that Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur received virtually no federal assistance at the dawn of the 1880s.107 Oblate displeasure with this situation soon festered into resentment and suspicion when Anglican schools in the Lesser Slave Lake and Peace River regions began receiving federal support in the mid-1880s, despite being located well outside treaty limits. Grandin expressed his ire at this apparently inequitable financial arrangement in a memoir penned in 1890:

The school of Île-à-la-Crosse has existed for thirty years; enrolment there has averaged twenty-five to thirty children during this period…. Since the establishment of a regular government, I have been begging incessantly for government support for that school…. My requests have always been refused on the pretext that the sauvages of Île-à-la-Crosse were not part of the treaty. I nevertheless remained convinced that, as a gesture of goodwill, the government would do something about this situation…. No sooner had Protestant schools been established at Lesser Slave Lake and Peace River than they began receiving government assistance. That seems fair enough, but why not do the same for the school at Île-à-la-Crosse? Everyone knows the reason, and the gentlemen at the Department of Indian Affairs better than anyone: it’s because this establishment is Catholic…. This is an undeniable crime.¹⁰⁸

The bishop perceived this “undeniable crime” as evidence of an insidious plot on the part of federal bureaucrats to discriminate against Catholic schools in favour of Protestant ones. He perceived further evidence of this plot in the administration of day schools and boarding schools on the reserves lately established under Treaty Six. According to Grandin, “Treaty Indians” had been guaranteed freedom of conscience and were therefore entitled to schools operated by the denomination of their choosing. He claimed, however, that officers, agents, and employees of the Department of Indian Affairs (established in 1880) systematically violated the treaty rights of Catholic Indians by prohibiting Oblates from establishing schools on their reserves and—more commonly—by moving Catholic Indians away from pre-existing convent boarding schools.109 Grandin informed the Oblate General Administration that the latter practice had effectively ruined several Catholic schools his diocese by 1887: “Although the government itself is quite liberal, we have become convinced that far too many of its agents are much the opposite. For shameful reasons that are well-known to us, they have moved the sauvages far away from several of our establishments and in so doing they have rendered these establishments as useless as if they had burned them to the ground.”¹¹⁰ Grandin attributed this trend partly to the discriminatory hiring practices of the Department of Indian Affairs. In November 1887, he informed his clergy that the department was staffed almost entirely by like-minded Protestants who were hostile to Catholic interests: “None of these employees, at any level of the department … can escape the influence of his religion, goaded on as he is by his friends and especially by the ministers of his cult. The latter, enjoying political support, are empowered to do whatever they like against us…. There is no denying it: we are targets of a steadily intensifying persecution.”¹¹¹

As their hopes of obtaining necessary financial support dwindled in tandem with their confidence in the federal bureaucracy, Oblates abandoned their resolve to maintain Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur as a large-scale residential institution. Three local developments contributed to this decision. The first was the loss of mission personnel occasioned by the deaths of Légeard (1 June 1879) and Riel (25 or 27 December 1883).¹¹² Both deaths had serious repercussions on the quality of instruction and the level of surveillance at Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur, but Légeard’s was especially devastating as it portended the dissolution of an extensive network of private benefactors.¹¹³ The second development was the depletion of the natural resource base in the immediate vicinity of Île-à-la-Crosse. By the mid-1880s, the inhabitants of the Catholic mission and the HBC fort had drastically altered the surrounding landscape after decades of felling trees, sowing and harvesting crops, and husbanding livestock.¹¹⁴ Under these circumstances, Grandin doubted that his clergy could continue supplying the quantities of firewood and food required for the maintenance of a large pensionnat. “Local resources are steadily diminishing,” the bishop observed to HBC Chief Factor Lawrence Clarke in October 1884. “Fishing is becoming erratic; hay and firewood are harder than ever to procure. Soon we will need to import provisions just to feed the schoolchildren. It will be impossible for me to maintain this establishment under such conditions.”¹¹⁵ The third development was the evacuation of the mission during the Northwest Rebellion in spring 1885.¹¹⁶ The immediate impetus for this evacuation was a rumour—relayed on 28 April by a panic-stricken HBC clerk—that a horde of marauding sauvages was coming to capture the mission and the fort at Île-à-la-Crosse. Alarmed at this rumour, Father Joseph Rapet and Factor Roderick Ross resolved to relocate their respective personnel and dependents to a guarded encampment on Île Sainte-Croix—an islet in the rapids of the English River.117 Preparations for the relocation were frenzied and slapdash: mission stores were dumped into ox carts and barges; fishing nets were abandoned in the lake; fields were left unploughed; seeds were left unsown. After more than a month in self-imposed exile, the “refugees” returned to Île-à-la-Crosse on 30 May and found that neither mission nor fort had been touched by rebel hands. They also found that their exile had taken a serious toll on their material position, making it impossible for Oblates and Grey Nuns to continue providing daily food and fuel for a large contingent of schoolchildren. Rapet was therefore left with little alternative but to re-introduce the day-student system for children with relatives in the immediate vicinity of Île-à-la-Crosse. Only six orphans—three girls and three boys—would remain in residence at the mission; the other thirty would return to their families every evening. Thus, when classes resumed on 1 June 1885, Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur began operating primarily as a day school.¹¹⁸

The abandonment of the large-scale pensionnat was a source of bitter disappointment to Oblates. In January 1889, a sullen Rapet informed the Oblate General Administration that a day school could provide only a limited education to local girls and boys, whom he described as “children who have no taste for studying and whose sole desire is to leave school as soon as possible.” Nevertheless, he conceded that the Grey Nuns were making tolerable progress with their day pupils.¹¹⁹ Rapet and his confrères attributed this progress to Sister Marguerite Brabant, who had arrived from Saint-Boniface in July 1888 and who had begun teaching at Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur the following autumn.¹²⁰ In the “Codex historicus de l’Île à la Crosse,” Father Jean-Marie Pénard described Brabant as “métisse by origin” and posited a natural affinity between her and the day pupils: “As a métisse herself, she understood the métis well and knew how to deal with them.”¹²¹ While registering tepid satisfaction with the progress of the day pupils, Oblates pinned greater hopes on the small contingent of orphans who remained under the constant supervision of mission personnel. These orphans were deemed more readily civilizable because of their isolation from family members and their perpetual immersion in the company of clergy. Additionally, Oblates persisted in the belief that the rearing of “sauvage orphans” entitled the mission to a modicum of federal financial assistance. Hence, over the course of the late 1880s and 1890s, Rapet and Vicar Apostolic Albert Pascal petitioned repeatedly for funding from the Department of Indian Affairs.122

Their efforts finally bore fruit in autumn 1897. In preparation for the negotiation of Treaty Eight (1899), the Department of Indian Affairs initiated a major expansion of funding for schools in the northern portions of the Northwest Territories and British Columbia.¹²³ Within this context, the department recognized Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur as a boarding school and agreed to disburse per capita grants of seventy-two dollars per annum for twelve of its “Indian boarders.” The school received its first federal payment of $864 the following spring.¹²⁴ In reporting this development to the Oblate General Administration, Pénard noted that Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur had begun generating regular revenue for the first time in its history and that it would eventually cease being a burden on the debt-ridden mission. To hasten its progress toward financial viability, Pénard considered increasing the enrolment of “sauvage orphans” over the following years: “If we could manage to boost the number of government-sponsored boarders, the orphanage … could actually be of some help to the rest of the mission.”¹²⁵

For nearly four decades before its integration into the federal residential school system, the convent boarding school at Île-à-la-Crosse had served as the operative instrument in the Oblates’ civilizing project. The school had been devised to transform local Indigenous children into full members of la civilisation chrétienne. It was meant to reorder their social lives and to reshape their patterns of thought and behaviour in accordance with contemporary French Catholic norms. Through a pedagogical regimen based on French and French-Canadian notions of childrearing and socialization, Indigenous children were expected to become dutiful Catholics and fluent speakers of French. Their gender relations were to be reconfigured in preparation for their roles as Catholic wives, mothers, husbands, and fathers—the progenitors of civilized families. Schoolgirls were to become the vanguard of a regenerated and emancipated womanhood, possessed of domestic skills and fully cognizant of a mother’s civilizing vocation within the home. Schoolboys were to be taught care and respect for their future helpmates, whom they would support through diligent work outside the home. Both sexes were to undergo an inward moral improvement and an outward refinement of manners through constant supervision, intervention, and role-modelling by missionaries.

Yet after formulating this civilizing project in the late 1850s and 1860s, Oblates encountered continual challenges in implementing it over the following decades. Among these challenges was the ambivalence—if not outright resistance—of local Indigenous families. Oblates noted that many families were incorrigibly reluctant to contribute to the material welfare of the school and to enrol their children as pensionnaires. Another challenge was the Oblates’ perpetual struggle to maintain a productive relationship with their closest collaborators, the Grey Nuns. This relationship was fraught with tension arising from the imperative of celibacy and the ambiguous division of space, responsibility, and power at the convent boarding school. Finally—and perhaps most critically—Oblates encountered tremendous difficulty in securing the financial resources necessary to maintain the school. Despite their repeated entreaties, Oblates were never able to obtain a sufficient increase in their allocation from l’Œuvre de la Propagation de la Foi. Nor were they able to supplement this allocation with donations from other corporate benefactors. Their petitions for federal funding were equally unfruitful as the Dominion of Canada declined responsibility for schools located outside of treaty limits. By summer 1885, the school’s material needs had far outpaced its financial resources. Under the circumstances, Oblates had little alternative but to convert Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur into a day school and to retain only a small contingent of orphans as boarders.

Thus, when Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur became a federal boarding school in 1898, it was a much attenuated version of the institution that Oblates had envisaged four decades earlier. In deviation from the original civilizing project, missionaries were compelled to relinquish their hold on most of their pupils each evening and let them return to their families.