An era of neglect: Canadian government policy in the North before 1950
The Canadian government’s interest in the North until the Second World War was extremely limited. Much of the North was acquired in 1870 in the transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to Canada. Until 1876, the North-West Territories included all of present-day Alberta, Saskatchewan, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut, as well as much of present-day Manitoba, Ontario, and Québec.1 As settlement increased, new provinces were created out of the territories, portions of the territories were added to existing provinces, and the territories were subdivided. Today, northern Canada is made up of three territories: Yukon (created in 1898), the Northwest Territories (the name was changed from the North-West Territories in 1906), and Nunavut (created in 1999). Portions of Québec and Labrador that extend into the Ungava Peninsula also make up part of the northern Inuit traditional homeland and are properly considered part of the Canadian North. The Québec portion of the Canadian North is known as Nunavik, while the Newfoundland and Labrador portion is known as Nunatsiavut.
In the late nineteenth century the northern portion of the territories was subdivided on several occasions into a variety of administrative districts, including Ungava, Mackenzie, Yukon, and Franklin. Canada north of the sixtieth parallel is over 3.9 million square kilometres, about one-third of the entire Canadian land mass. It is home to members of the Tlingit, Athapaskan, and Inuit (or Eskimo-Aleut) language groups.2
The discovery of gold in the Yukon in 1898 led to the establishment of a separate Yukon Territory. The federal government appointed a commissioner as head of government and an advisory council, composed largely of white southerners, to serve as the governing body. While the gold boom saw tens of thousands of people come to the region and hundreds of millions of dollars of gold shipped out of the country, it was short-lived. By 1911, Dawson City, home to 16,000 people in 1898, had a population of only 2,500.3
In 1903, in response to the presence of American whaling stations in the Far North, Royal North-West Mounted Police posts were established at Fort McPherson and Herschel Island, thereby asserting Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic.4 In 1905 the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were created out of the southern portions of the old North-West Territories and Manitoba’s northern border was extended to the sixtieth parallel. At the same time the federal government amended the North-West Territories Act, allowing for the appointment of a territorial commissioner who would govern the territory with an appointed council. The first commissioner was Lieutenant Colonel Fred White, a former Mounted Police comptroller. On his death in 1918, White was replaced as territorial commissioner by W. W. Cory, the deputy minister of the interior.5
The Yukon went into economic decline after the Klondike gold rush, while the North-West Territories remained, from the Canadian government’s perspective, an unknown land: its features were unmapped, its people uncounted.6 Well into the twentieth century, First Nations and Inuit people of the territories continued to organize their own communities and maintain their own lifestyles, although they were involved in the fur trade and affected by disease.7
No Northwest Territories council was appointed until 1920, when the government was spurred into action by the discovery of oil at Norman Wells near the Arctic Circle. The following year, a Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch was established within the Department of the Interior. Under the supervision of Branch Director O. S. Finnie, the first permanent federal government offices in the Northwest Territories were established in Fort Smith, just north of the Alberta border.8 The Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913 to 1918 was one of the government’s first efforts to map the islands of the western Arctic and conduct a study of the Inuit.9 In 1922 the government began conducting annual patrols in the eastern Arctic, providing limited medical services and carrying out scientific surveys.10 Both the patrols and the police presence were primarily intended to assert sovereignty, not to address the needs of the people of the territory.11
Throughout the 1920s the members of the Council of the Northwest Territories were all officials of the Department of the Interior or of the Mounted Police. Their meetings were held in Ottawa.12 Aboriginal people, who constituted the vast majority of the territorial population, had no direct ability to influence the council.13
Only two Treaties were negotiated in the Northwest Territories: Treaty 8 and Treaty 11. Treaty 8 covered much of northern British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan as well as a portion of the western North-West Territories. It was reached in 1899 in response to the presence of prospectors drawn north by the Klondike gold rush. First Nations people were forced into negotiating this Treaty in 1898 when they refused to allow police and trappers into the Fort St. John area without a Treaty. The federal government chose to leave the First Nations of the Yukon out of the Treaty since it was believed the gold rush would not lead to a permanent settlement. The land around Great Slave Lake, however, was thought to hold considerable potential for long-term mineral development.
Bishop Vital Grandin and Father Albert Lacombe, leading Catholic missionaries, acted as intermediaries in these negotiations. They encouraged First Nations to approve the Treaty, urged Métis to opt for Indian Act status, and demanded assurances that parents would have the right to have their children educated in schools of the religion of their choice. In this context, both the Catholic missionaries and the government Treaty commissioners envisioned a system in which the only choices open to parents would be between various Christian denominations. When it came to education, the Treaty committed the federal government to “pay the salaries of such teachers to instruct the children of said Indians as to Her Majesty’s Government of Canada may seem advisable.”14
Roman Catholic Bishop Gabriel Breynat lobbied to have further Treaties negotiated in the North.15 It was not until 1921, following the Norman Wells oil discovery, that Treaty 11 was signed, extending Treaty provisions down the Mackenzie River basin. Once again the government decision to enter into a Treaty was based on its desire to further colonization and economic development. Without a Treaty, the government was uncertain of whether it could dispose of the land under which the oil had been located.16 Breynat’s presence at the Treaty talks played a role in convincing many of the First Nations leaders to overcome their opposition to the Treaty.17 Like Treaty 8, Treaty 11 provided a commitment “to pay the salaries of teachers to instruct the children of said Indians in such manner as His Majesty’s Government may deem advisable.”18
Having negotiated the Treaties, the federal government demonstrated limited interest in implementing their provisions.19 In the mid-1930s Breynat helped organize the Oblate Indian and Eskimo Commission to lobby the government for improved Treaty implementation. By then he had concluded that
the text of the Treaties was too vague and did not contain all of the promises that were verbally made by the representatives of the Crown. Nevertheless, these promises were made, and without them the Indians would never had consented to sign the treaties. It was on the faith of these promises, guaranteed by the bishops and missionaries, that it was possible to persuade the Indians to affix their signature.
In particular, Breynat was distressed by the government’s unwillingness to protect Aboriginal fishing and hunting rights.20
Responsibility for the provision of services to Aboriginal people was fractured. For example, the 1905 North-West Territories Act made no reference to the Inuit, suggesting that they were to be treated like any other Canadians resident in the territories. While they were not seen to have status under the Indian Act, Indian Affairs did provide some funding to missionaries and traders who were providing education and relief to Inuit. From 1918 to 1923, this included about $4,000 in educational funding. Finnie sought to have his branch assume responsibility for the Inuit and provide educational services to them. However, in 1924, at the instigation of Duncan Campbell Scott, the deputy minister of Indian affairs, the Indian Act was amended to give Indian Affairs responsibility for “Eskimo matters.” Within a few years, this responsibility was shifted back to the commissioner of the Northwest Territories, and the provision was dropped from the Indian Act in 1930.21
The boundaries of Québec were not extended to include Nunavik until 1912.22 Even after that transfer the provincial government took little responsibility for providing services to the Aboriginal people of the region. During the early years of the Great Depression, the federal government provided relief to the Inuit of Québec, who had been particularly hard hit by the decline in fur prices. It subsequently required the Québec government to cover the cost of relief, arguing that the Inuit were the responsibility of the province. The Québec government made the payment for three years, but then challenged the federal government in court, successfully arguing that Inuit were a federal responsibility. During the four years that the case was being argued, government services remained minimal.23 In fact, there was little improvement until the 1950s. Aside from the Roman Catholic and Anglican schools at Fort George on James Bay, neither the federal nor the provincial government established formal residential schools in northern Québec until after the Second World War.
Labrador did not join the Canadian confederation until 1949, when Newfoundland became part of Canada. Before then Labrador was governed by the British colonial government of Newfoundland and was, in effect, the colony of a colony. The colonial government in St. John’s provided almost no services to the residents of Labrador, be they Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal. Until 1949 any services that were provided were delivered by the Protestant International Grenfell Association and the Moravian Brotherhood.24
Given the federal government’s lack of interest in entering into Treaties with First Nations in the North or in providing them with services, it is not surprising that residential schooling in the North was, for many years, solely a church initiative.