Laying the groundwork: Mission schools: 1850 to 1900
The arrival of two Oblate priests at Red River in 1845 marked the beginning of a period of intense Catholic missionary work throughout the Canadian North and West.1 Oblate missionary Henri Faraud created the church’s northern beachhead, establishing a mission at Fort Chipewyan in what is now northern Alberta in 1849 and the St. Joseph’s Mission at Fort Resolution in 1856.2 The Anglicans followed them north. In 1858, Oblate father Henri Grollier learned that James Hunter, a representative of the Anglican Church Missionary Society (cms) was on a Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc) barge headed for Fort Simpson in the Mackenzie region. Hunter intended to drive the Catholic missionaries of the North “into the Arctic sea.” To prevent Hunter from seizing the advantage, Grollier sought to travel to Fort Simpson with him. Initially, hbc officials told him he would be taken only to Big Island, where he could minister to the Métis. However, the Roman Catholic boatmen insisted on taking Grollier all the way to Fort Simpson, where he and Hunter devoted considerable energy to undercutting each other.3
Throughout the North, the cms and the Oblates countered one another in this fashion: an Anglican mission at Fort Liard was matched by a Catholic one, with similar pairings occurring at Hay River, Fort Norman, and Fort Wrigley.4 By the 1890s, the Anglicans acknowledged that, as a result of the Oblates’ work, most people in the Athabasca-Mackenzie region were at least nominally Catholic.5
The situation was very different farther west, in the Yukon. In the 1860s, two Anglican missionaries, W. W. Kirkby and Robert McDonald, began their mission to the Yukon. When the Oblate Isidore Clut undertook a journey to the region in 1872, he conceded that Kirkby and McDonald had already won over most of the Aboriginal population to Protestantism.6 William Carpenter Bompas consolidated their work. Born into a Baptist family in England, Bompas converted to the Church of England as a young man. After hearing Rupert’s Land Bishop David Anderson speaking at a fundraising meeting in 1865, he volunteered his services to the cms and was sent to the Canadian North that year.7 Under Bompas’s direction, by the 1880s the Anglicans had ten mission stations in the North that were served by eight clergymen and four teachers.8 Bompas became bishop of the Yukon in 1891. Just as the Mackenzie River basin was largely Catholic, the Yukon came to be seen as Anglican territory.
From missions to schools
These early missions became the basis for residential schools in the North. Father Henri Faraud was originally opposed to opening a residential school at Fort Providence. He reversed his position when he found out that the wives of Hudson’s Bay employees were interested in having their daughters educated by nuns. By 1865, he had set to work on the construction of a school, complete with tiers of bookshelf-like bunk beds. The school’s opening awaited the arrival of five Sisters of Charity (Grey Nuns), who trekked much of the way from Red River to Fort Providence in 1867. A few years later, the threat of an Anglican school at Fort Chipewyan led Bishop Isidore Clut to dispatch a small contingent of Sisters of Charity from Fort Providence to Fort Chipewyan, in 1874.9
Educational goals were limited. Henri Faraud believed young girls needed little more than knowledge of the Catholic catechism and the ability to read and write.10 Education was left in the hands of the Sisters of Charity.11 Religious instruction took the form of ethics, catechism, music, services, and devotions. The hope was that with such an education, the student would not stray from the church after leaving school.12 It was anticipated that students would return to their home communities, where hunting, trapping, and fishing would remain the primary economic activities.13
Life at the schools could be hard. At Fort Providence the Sisters of Charity were initially housed in a storage shed, just over a metre in height. Accommodations remained cramped for them and their students for years. According to a history of the order, by the time there were nine sisters and forty-five children,
the conditions were no longer tolerable. In the day-time, it was not too hard to find room for all. But at night it was pitiful, though marvelous, to see how the little ones were stowed away in regular lines, some on them on tables or in cupboards, only one corner of the house being reserved for the Sisters themselves.14
There were no potatoes, meat, flour, butter, or grease during the school’s second year of operation. Not surprisingly, the worry that their children were not being well cared for was a concern for many of the Métis parents.15 The Oblates came close to closing the Fort Providence school in 1881 because money was so scarce. It was only when the Society for the Propagation of the Faith sent 15,000 francs that the school was saved.16 At Fort Chipewyan, the Sisters of Charity discovered that the provisions for their first winter at the school consisted of “one sack of flour, one small barrel of sugar, five barrels of wheat, seven or eight of barley, and some potatoes.”17 For years planks suspended on trestles were the only chairs, and the nuns slept on tables and the children on the floor.18 In 1882, the Sisters of Charity at Fort Providence argued that the students were being made to spend too much time working and not enough in class.19 The schools had to make do without government funding: in 1875 Faraud had asked for support for his schools at Fort Providence and Fort Chipewyan, but the government declined to provide funding because there was no Treaty with the First Nations people in those regions.20
The first permanent Anglican boarding school in what was to become the Northwest Territories grew out of a mission that T. J. Marsh established at Hay River in 1893. He opened a small day school in his residence; with the arrival of seven students from Fort Resolution, it was redefined as a boarding school in July 1895.21
Following the negotiation of Treaty 8 in 1899, Indian Affairs began making per capita payments to the Hay River school.22 It declined to make a similar payment to the Fort Providence school since it lay outside the Treaty 8 boundary.23 The decision had nothing to do with the education provisions of the Treaty, which made no mention of residential schools. Rather it reflected the department’s administrative priorities. Indian Commissioner David Laird supported the decision, saying that schools outside of the Treaty boundaries were “beyond the range of the visits and inspection of the officials of the Department, hence we have little opportunity of ascertaining the precise nature of their work.”24
Residential schooling in the Yukon got its start in 1891 when Anglican Bishop William Bompas began boarding orphaned children, who attended the mission school he had established in the community of Forty Mile.25 Because he focused his efforts on Métis children, he received no support from either the government or the Church Missionary Society. By 1896, four of his first six boarding students were Métis. Like others of his contemporaries, he viewed Métis children as a threat to social order if left unschooled—likely to become “the bitterest enemies and most formidable obstacles to our mission”—but having the potential to serve as cultural mediators between settlers and First Nations.26 The small-scale boarding school closed in 1900 when Bompas moved his mission to Carcross (Caribou Crossing), also in the Yukon Territory,27 and this eventually became the home of the first government-supported residential school in the territory.28
As the nineteenth century ended, certain enduring patterns had been established: a strong Catholic presence in the Mackenzie River basin, Anglican domination in the Yukon, the importance of residential schools in the ongoing competition between Catholics and Protestants, and, with the signing of Treaty 8 in 1899, the beginning of federal funding.