Canada’s Residential Schools: The Inuit and Northern Experience: Volume 2

The mission-school era would not come to an end until the 1950s. During that decade the federal government undertook a major expansion of schooling in the North, opening day schools and a series of large and small hostels. As these new forms of residential schooling came into being, the mission-run boarding schools in the Northwest Territories closed: Fort Resolution was the first, ceasing operation in 1957, and the last one, Fort Providence, did not close until 1960.⁵

The northern mission schools were often great distances, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of kilometres, from children’s home communities, and transportation was difficult and often dangerous. Children often went years without seeing their parents. Difficulties in transportation also made the northern schools more reliant on local food, which could be scarce.

As late as 1944 there were only 170 students attending Indian Affairs schools in the western Arctic (55 in the day schools and 115 in the residential schools). At that time there were an estimated 2,450 school-age children in the Northwest Territories.⁹ By 1950, for both day and residential schools, Inuit enrolment was 210 and First Nations enrolment was 365 across the Northwest Territories.¹⁰

By the 1920s all the mission schools in the Northwest Territories were receiving funding from Indian Affairs if they had First Nations students. The Indian Affairs per capita allocation for the Northwest Territories boarding schools was increased from $165 to $180 in 1929. From its opening in 1926, Aklavik had an allocation of $200 per student.¹¹ The northern schools were subject to the same cuts in per capita rates that were imposed on the system in general during the Great Depression years of the 1930s. Per capita rates were cut by 10% in 1932 and 5% in 1933.¹² It was not until 1939 that the per capita payments returned to their 1931 levels. The next year, as a wartime cost-saving measure, the maximum number of students the government would fund at each school was reduced by 7.76%.¹³ In 1945 the per capita funding for schools at Fort Resolution and Fort Providence was still only $180, and for schools at Aklavik it was $200. In effect, the schools were receiving the same rates that had prevailed more than twenty years earlier.¹⁴

In the case of non-First Nations students, including Inuit, an application had to be signed by the rcmp, stating that the child was a territorial resident and was “an orphan, destitute or neglected child and not eligible for admission under the Indian Act.”15 Such children were eligible for funding by the Department of the Interior, which had responsibility for education in the territories.

In 1931 the Shingle Point principal asked Ottawa for a definition of “what constitutes a destitute Eskimo child.”¹⁶ The issue was of pressing importance because the local rcmp inspector believed most of the children were not destitute and had declined to sign the forms.¹⁷ The federal government agreed to subsidize the Inuit students, but only on a temporary basis.¹⁸ To get around the stalemate, by the end of 1932 the rcmp inspector was striking out the words “destitute or neglected” when signing the application forms of certain students.¹⁹ In 1933 the federal policy was to pay $200 a year for the “maintenance and education of each Eskimo, destitute white or halfbreed child.”²⁰ By then, the Department of the Interior was supporting seventy-seven students at five schools: twenty-nine at Shingle Point, twenty-five at Aklavik, three at Fort Providence, four at Hay River, and sixteen at Fort Resolution.²¹

In 1923 the Department of the Interior spent $3,000 a year on education in the Northwest Territories; by 1928 the figure was $3,460. ²² In the face of constant lobbying by O. S. Finnie, director of the federal Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch, by 1931 the government grant for education in the territory was $12,787.50. The money was to be divided among eight day and residential schools.²³ In his history of Inuit administration in Canada, the anthropologist Diamond Jenness praised Finnie for attempting to force the federal government into recognizing its responsibilities to the Inuit for education, health, and welfare. Jenness believed that Canada sought to shuffle these responsibilities “on the traders and missionaries, neither of whom possessed the means to carry them out.”²⁴ However, in a budget-cutting measure, the Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch was dissolved in 1931, Finnie was pensioned off, and most of his staff were dismissed. According to Jenness, Finnie carried with him “recollections he would gladly have forgotten. He knew full well that the schools he had been subsidizing in the Arctic were religious kindergartens that hardly deserved the names of schools.”²⁵ At the same time, the federal government’s already limited health care spending, along with that for Arctic patrols, was curtailed. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the police would be the main instrument and image of the federal government’s presence in the North.²⁶

As it had in the nineteenth century, religious rivalry drove expansion of the system. In 1902, alarmed by the Anglicans’ intention to establish a school at Fort Resolution, Bishop Breynat succeeded in winning a commitment from the Sisters of Charity to provide sisters to staff a Catholic school in the community. They arrived in June of 1903. After being initially housed in a storehouse, they moved into a convent by August, along with five First Nations students.27 The boarding school opened with these students, whose parents were returning to the land for the winter.²⁸

In 1923 the Anglicans made a proposal to the Roman Catholics under which the Anglicans would withdraw from the First Nations settlements along the Mackenzie, while the Catholics would not conduct missionary work among the Inuit.²⁹ The Catholics rejected these overtures and established not only a hospital but also a boarding school in Aklavik, in what one Oblate described as a war for the Inuit.³⁰ The Catholics, however, had difficulty recruiting Inuit students for this new school. In early 1926, the principal, Sister McQuillan, had expressed her

confidence that our Lord will send some Eskimos to complete the decoration. It appears all the protestants here want to put in their children as boarders. Many of them naturally feel sore at our being here, but cannot help admiring our life of sacrifice. Father Superior says he is surprised at their sympathy towards us, it is altogether beyond his expectations as he dreaded the thought of coming among these protestants so bigoted.³¹

Relations became more strained that summer when the Anglican minister prohibited Inuit from visiting the Catholic convent.³² In 1929, there were only two Inuit children in a school with an enrolment of twenty-eight.³³

The ongoing interchurch rivalry led a frustrated O. S. Finnie to write in 1928 that “the greatest problem we have is that of creating, if possible, a division of the territory as between the Missionaries of the Church of England and those of the Church of Rome. We are all agreed that better results will be accomplished if these Missionaries work separately rather than both in the same settlements or localities.”³⁴ In response, Minister of the Interior Charles Stewart proposed that the Anglicans cede the First Nations of the Northwest Territories to the Catholics, while the Inuit would be left to the Anglicans. Catholic Bishop Gabriel Breynat responded that while it might seem “friendly” to reach an agreement with the Anglicans, he answered to a higher power and was obliged to observe “the directives imparted to me by our ecclesiastical superior in Rome.”³⁵

By the late 1920s, Inuit parents were increasingly unwilling to send their children to the Anglican boarding school in distant Hay River for years at a time. In response, the Anglicans promised to build a more northerly school.³⁶ In 1928 they proposed turning buildings abandoned by a San Francisco trading company and the Hudson’s Bay Company at Shingle Point into a residential school. A dozen Inuit children at Hay River would be transferred to the new school in addition to other children in the Shingle Point area.³⁷ In agreeing to provide financial support to the Shingle Point project, W. W. Cory, the territorial commissioner, noted that the federal government had also concluded that “something should be done in the way of education of the Eskimo children. The white race is now mixing with them freely and the natives must have some measure of education to enable them to better carry on their commercial pursuits with them.”38

Shingle Point was never intended to be a permanent school. In the mid-1930s the Anglicans closed Shingle Point and Hay River, consolidating their residential school operations in Aklavik. The school they opened there in 1936 could accommodate 100 pupils. Indian Affairs had agreed to support thirty-five pupils while the government of the Northwest Territories was required to support forty-three (most of whom were expected to be Inuit).³⁹

Tensions between the Anglican and Catholic principals in Aklavik ebbed and flowed. In 1941 a Mines and Resources employee sought instruction on how to handle a request signed by parents, but submitted by the Anglican bishop, seeking to have a student transferred from the Roman Catholic school in Aklavik to the Anglican school in the same community. The government employee did not know what the policy was for such transfers and feared they would “probably cause friction between the two schools.”⁴⁰ In this case, an instruction was given not to approve the transfer unless there were extenuating circumstances.⁴¹ A decade later, there were a dozen Anglican students living at the Roman Catholic school in Aklavik. In response to a query from the Anglican Church on this matter, Indian Affairs pointed out that none of these children were ‘Indian,’ and the department was not paying for their support.⁴² In 1956, the Anglican school at Aklavik was so full that an agreement was reached for twenty-eight Anglican children to be lodged and educated at the Roman Catholic school, although they attended church at the Anglican mission.⁴³

The educational aims of the mission schools in the North in the twentieth century remained modest. In 1939, Bishop Breynat wrote,

I confess I do not see need for masters graduates in the north, where we keep the children a short time, just enough to teach them to read and write. Otherwise they become unfitted for the lives they are to lead. The situation is different in the south, and the Indians no longer live for hunting and fishing. I have always insisted that, in the reports of the County [sic] with the Government in Ottawa, we insist on the distinction, which must be maintained between the north and south. We can not and should not be treated the same way.⁴⁴

Anglican Bishop Isaac Stringer took a position that was similar to Breynat’s, arguing that in the Northwest Territories, First Nations students should receive just enough schooling to allow them to read and write a letter and to handle the arithmetical calculations that a trader would be required to carry out.⁴⁵

to teach the boys the outdoor work and occasionally we are able to give them lessons in carpentering, iron repairing, and in building. The girls are taught to be thorough and clean housekeepers, and also to sew, mend and knit. In short, we aim to make each child a clean, thorough, industrious and practically useful person.⁴⁷

An Indian agent’s report from Fort Resolution seventeen years later reveals little difference from the earlier Hay River curriculum:

The girls were being taught the usual household duties of sewing and mending, cooking &c. The boys do the chores and gardening, and are also taught to make snow-shoes, do a small amount of trapping, &c. I saw samples of the work done in the class-room, and as far as I could judge, it was fairly done. Of course these children are not kept in school for very many years, and the highest standing they attain is Grade V.⁴⁸

In 1947, territorial school inspector J. W. McKinnon reported that parents of children at Fort Resolution felt they “were not learning very much by attendance. While such statements are not uncommon wherever a school is functioning, I do feel that a good deal of such criticism could be mitigated by making the instruction in each class more practical.” He also described the classrooms as “small and unhealthy.” The inspector reported that the school needed a supply of basic readers. By that time there were seventy-eight residential students and forty-seven day students.⁴⁹ In that year, McKinnon was also calling for the creation of more day schools, arguing that they had a positive impact on family life.⁵⁰

A 1952 inspection report of the Anglican school in Aklavik noted that the school was “quite short of reading material for the primary grades.” There was a film projector for showing National Film Board productions, but the radio was in poor condition and the record player broken. Some rooms were not adequately lit, waste materials in the school dugout constituted “a serious fire hazard,” and the playground equipment was limited to four swings.⁵¹

The schools were often understaffed. In 1954 at Fort Resolution, four teachers taught 144 students. As an inspector noted, “This is much too heavy an enrollment for four teachers, especially considering the language difficulties of the lower grade children.”⁵³ Three years later, the Anglican school at Aklavik had four teachers and 111 students. One teacher was teaching forty-five students in Grades Two, Three, Four, and Five.⁵⁴ In 1952 the salaries for the three teachers at the Anglican school in Aklavik ranged from $80 to $85 a month. Their transportation from the South to Aklavik was paid, and at the end of four years they received six months’ holiday with pay. One of the teachers lacked any professional qualifications, and the inspector concluded, “An upward revision of the salary schedule is strongly recommended if the Mission is to obtain experienced and qualified teachers.”⁵⁵

But for parents who wished to see their children educated, there were few options other than residential schools. R. A. J. Phillips, who served as the director of northern administration in the Department of Northern Affairs, provided this bleak overview of the schooling available to students in the Canadian North in 1950:

Eight different authorities operated schools in the North. The Department of Northern Affairs provided only three classrooms. Though it paid grants to other agencies to run classes, the classroom standards were uneven. Some schools operated only four hours a day, four days a week. One teacher in three held no teaching certificate of any kind. Only 117 of the Eskimos got full-time schooling. There was no vocational education of any kind, no adult education, and no teaching for the growing ranks of hospital patients.⁵⁶

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French was the language of instruction at the Roman Catholic boarding schools in the Northwest Territories. It could hardly have been otherwise. The vast majority of the eighty-three nuns who worked in the Mackenzie Valley from 1867 to 1919 were of francophone ancestry.⁵⁷ The same would be true of the Oblates. Into the 1940s, if they spoke a second language, it was likely to be an Aboriginal one.⁵⁸ While the Oblates had been encouraged to learn Aboriginal languages, the Sisters of Charity were neither encouraged nor given the opportunities to become fluent in the languages their students spoke. Not surprisingly, communication between pupils and teachers was difficult: both were struggling to learn a foreign language in a strange and alien context.59 Northwest Territories school inspector J. W. McKinnon reported that as late as 1946 the classes at Fort Providence were being taught in French and that the students wrote their compositions in French. In 1950 the entire school staff was still made up of French speakers; however, they assured McKinnon that all instruction was now in English.⁶⁰ In 1956, the poet Frank Scott travelled down the Mackenzie River with Pierre Trudeau, when the future prime minister was still a relatively unknown lawyer.⁶¹ Scott wrote a poem about their visit to the Fort Providence school:

Welcomed us in French.
Priests from France, nuns from Quebec,
Taught Slavies (who still speak Indian)
Grades I to VIII, in broken English.⁶²

The missionaries always recognized that by learning Aboriginal languages and translating religious texts into those languages they were facilitating their ability to make Aboriginal converts. To this end catechism was taught in Dene at Fort Resolution well into the 1920s.⁶³ Bishop Breynat campaigned, unsuccessfully, in 1935 to be allowed to introduce Aboriginal languages in the schools to ensure that they did not disappear. With more success, he also advocated training students in hunting and fishing.⁶⁴ From the students’ perspective the schools often appeared to be unrelenting in their hostility to Aboriginal languages. Jane S. Charlie has strong memories of being spanked for speaking her own language while attending the Anglican All Saints School in Aklavik. Because she never learned to speak English well, she felt that other students were able to blame her for their own misdemeanours.⁶⁵ When Lillian Elias, an Inuit child, was told not to speak her own language on her arrival at the Aklavik Roman Catholic school, she fought back: “Because they didn’t want me to speak it I thought to myself, ‘You’re not going to keep me from speaking my language,’ and so I really picked right back up when I got out of there.”⁶⁶ For speaking his own language at the Fort Providence school, Samuel Gargan recalled having his head forcibly submerged in a bucket of water. As a result, he said, his ears were constantly running—a problem, he said, that was never treated. “I was subject to physical pain on my hands, fingers repeatedly being whacked with a scissors, my ears were pulled, and knuckle whacked on top of the head, hair was pulled and kicked.”⁶⁷

The loss of language skills created real anxieties for the students when they returned to their home communities. Margaret Oldenburg was a researcher who travelled through northern Canada in the 1940s and 1950s, collecting botanical samples for the University of Minnesota.68 In a 1946 letter to a colleague, she recounted that she had travelled to “Cambridge [Bay] with some girls going home from school at Aklavik and the two older ones wept most of the time because they had not seen their family in so long it was like going to strangers and they couldn’t talk Eskimo adequately. Did you know that the children at the Anglican school are forbidden to talk Eskimo?”⁶⁹

Parents often felt the students were overworked. In 1952, a federal official reported, “During my last trip around Great Slave Lake in September and October 1951, I was told by at least three different native Indians that during their last two years at Mission Residential School they were employed continuously by the Missions without pay or other remuneration, on work projects such as cleaning hen houses, feeding cattle and maintenance projects in and about Mission establishments, instead of receiving class room instruction.”⁷⁰ Each fall a barge would arrive in Aklavik loaded with logs for the school furnace. The students would form a long chain leading from the barge to the furnace room and, with the assistance of the school staff, unload the barge.⁷¹

Samuel Gargan was admitted to the Sacred Heart School in Fort Providence in March 1955. He was six years old and, because of an ankle injury, he had a cast on one leg. Although the cast was eventually removed, he experienced pain in that leg throughout his years at the school. Despite this he was expected to participate in all physical activities. “I would haul, stock pile, load and unload wood, chop urine and human waste from the outside toilet, wash and wax floors and clean up.” He was constantly limping but not given any respite. If he complained, “I would be locked up in the boy’s closet room.”⁷²

In 1925 the anthropologist Diamond Jenness recommended sending single youth between the ages of sixteen and twenty to the Halifax naval college. Jenness believed there were employment opportunities for the Inuit in navigation, mechanics, carpentry, metalwork, first aid, and telegraphy. While Jenness felt that this training “wherever possible, should be given in the north,” he also felt that “any training that is of much value can only be given in the south.”⁷³ To his lasting dismay, the project went nowhere.⁷⁴

Some students, however, did go south for education. In 1927 A. L. Fleming, the Anglican archdeacon of the Arctic, was asked by John Ell Oudlanak (also written as Oudlynnock) if he would take his son from Southampton Island in the Northwest Territories so he could be educated in the South.75 Fleming noted that Oudlanak spoke very good English; along with his mother, he had travelled extensively with the cartographer and ethnologist George Comer.⁷⁶ Fleming consulted about the proposal with one of O. S. Finnie’s assistants, who said that, since the Inuit were not wards of the state, there would be no problem with his “trying the experiment.” Thinking that a single boy might be lonely, Fleming wrote to Oudlanak to ask that two boys be sent. With the assistance of the Hudson’s Bay Company, ten-year-old Benjamin Oudlanak and Samuel Pudlutt of Kimmirut (Lake Harbour) on Baffin Island travelled to Lakefield, Ontario, where they were enrolled in the local school. Oudlanak’s father made a financial contribution to his son’s education, while Fleming assumed the cost of Pudlutt’s schooling. Finnie had never been informed of the initiative and learned about it from the newspapers. He sought details from Fleming. In concluding his response, Fleming wrote, “The idea is not to educate these boys and send them back to the simple primitive Eskimo life, but to send them back for all practical purposes as white men.”⁷⁷ The experience proved gruelling for the boys: they returned to the North after a year in which they endured influenza, pneumonia, measles, and tonsillitis.⁷⁸

The discipline at the schools was harsh and, for Aboriginal children, unlike anything they had previously experienced. Bill Erasmus’s great-aunt attended Fort Providence school after her mother died. She lived with Erasmus when he was a young man and told him of her life at the school. One story that stuck out was the treatment given one student who regularly wet her bed. “They’d get a tub of cold water, either cold water or very, very hot water, and make her sit in it, and they would hold her down, and they could hear the girl screaming and in pain.”⁷⁹

Rita Arey’s father, Arthur Furlong, attended the Anglican All Saints School in Aklavik. He told her of how he had once placed his younger brother Fred on the swing in the school playground only to find himself surrounded by older boys who wanted to pick on his brother. The two boys defended themselves until a priest broke up the melee. To Furlong’s surprise, the priest then made young Fred take off his winter mittens and punch the swing’s pole until his knuckles bled. This, he said, would teach him not to fight.⁸⁰

Food was often scarce and disease and death common in the northern mission schools. Many former students recalled difficulties in adapting to new foods. Children who were used to eating raw and frozen meat had to make an even more difficult transition. The difficulties in importing southern food and the limitations of farming in the North made the northern schools more dependent on local hunters for supplies than were the schools in the South.

Farming was always chancy, but Hay River, due to its location, fared better than most. It is in the most southerly part of the Northwest Territories, and is known today as “the garden capital of the North.” By the time the Hay River school closed in 1936, it had a 1.6-hectare garden capable of producing 400 bushels of potatoes and ninety bushels of other vegetables.⁸³ But in 1911 conditions were different. The school had two cows, one bull, three calves, and a horse, although the horse wandered off and never returned.⁸⁴ In 1929 Bishop A. L. Fleming asked the federal government to provide the Shingle Point school with a supply of pemmican (dried meat and berries). Although the church was sending its own food supplies from the South, Fleming thought that pemmican “would be much better for the students, and be more like their regular native diet.”⁸⁵ Due to a shortage of hay, two farm animals had to be slaughtered in 1932.⁸⁶

A failed hunt could bring about a crisis. The February 5, 1910, entry in the Fort Providence school journal reports, “We are rationing bread, one piece three times a day.” ⁸⁷ {Nous sommes à la ration pour le pain: un morceau 3 fois par jour.} The journal entry for February 18, 1917, reads, “Our hunters return empty handed. No more meat! What are we going to do?” Ten days later, hunters killed 130 caribou.⁸⁸ Despite this reprieve, food shortages arose again the following fall. In September the sisters reported that much of the meat from the previous winter had begun to spoil. The garden produced “small and few potatoes,” the chickens were killed for lack of feed, and food was being rationed. By October 3, 1917, prayers were being said to St. Joseph for abundant fishing, “as our children are suffering from hunger.” Ten days later fishermen brought in 8,000 fish.⁸⁹ In November 1927 Bishop Breynat telegraphed an urgent message to Ottawa, reporting that the fall fishery had failed at Fort Resolution, as had the school’s potato crop. He was “fearing serious shortness of food for school and staff” and requesting permission to kill moose or buffalo if no caribou appeared by Christmas.90

A former Hay River residential school student recalled that in the years following the First World War, he “didn’t see jam from the time I got off the boat to the time I got back on to come back down.”⁹¹ Another recalled a constant diet of fish: “They would boil it up real good until the meat falls away, the bones and scales all floating around, then mix in flour and serve it up. I won’t use flour for my dogs because there’s not much good in it.”⁹² Another former student recalled, “We had meat once a year, on Christmas day. One time they butchered a cow, hung it to bleed, and some boys rushed out when no one was looking and ripped the fat right off it. There was lots of bacon in the store-room, but it wasn’t for the kids.”⁹³ The picture painted by these former students is no different from the one that A. J. Vale, Hay River school principal from 1907 to 1927, left in his memoirs. He wrote that, due to high freight costs, “we had to try to live, as much as possible, on country produce.” This was largely fish and potatoes. “Many a time we had them three times a day. No eggs, oranges or the like were to be obtained. In fact, for five years at a stretch I did not even see any and only a limited amount of canned food was put up in those days.”⁹⁴

An analysis of the Hay River diet of the 1920s undertaken in the 1970s by the anthropologist Shepard Krech concluded that

protein intake was exceptional; vitamin a, niacin, ascorbic acid and phosphorus were present in abundance; and thiamine and riboflavin levels were adequate. However, calorie and iron intakes were very marginal. Calcium levels were extremely low. A poor fishery year would have resulted in a significant deficit of calories. A poor harvest may have produced iron deficiency and affected calcium and carbohydrate intake.⁹⁵

An ongoing problem in the Northwest Territories in the first half of the twentieth century was the absence of medical examinations before students were admitted to school. In 1916 three children who had been recently transferred from Fort Good Hope to Fort Resolution fell ill shortly after their arrival. They had been admitted without having undergone the required medical inspection on the grounds “that they were orphans and had to be provided for in some way.” Two died, leading Indian Affairs official H. J. Bury to recommend “the regulation covering the admission of children to these boarding schools be more rigidly enforced.”⁹⁶

In the fall of 1923 a typhoid outbreak at Fort Providence killed five students. The government doctor was not able to visit the school during the outbreak for lack of a boat. Writing in February, Dr. C. Bourget reported that “a few of the convalescents are so badly affected that their complete recovery is problematic.” He concluded that the disease had been brought to the school by recently enrolled students, and had spread through defects in the school’s drainage.⁹⁷

The Northwest Territories Council was told in 1939 that it was common practice for missionaries “to bring children in to the schools and later to ask the local doctor to examine them and complete the certificate of health.” In an effort to force schools to have students examined before admission, one northern doctor recommended that the government date the start of payment of the per capita from the date of the student’s examination.¹⁰⁰

A tour of the western Arctic in 1944 led Dr. George Wherrett, a prominent public-health physician, to conclude,

Only in the minority of instances, however, is there a regular examination of all children on admission and no x-ray surveys are carried out. In some schools, immunization and vaccination are practised; in others, not at all. One cannot stress too strongly the importance of all these procedures ... In practically every school visited ... cases of tuberculosis develop during the term, resulting fatally.¹⁰¹

Until the end of the mission era, federal officials were not able to exercise meaningful control over the way the schools admitted students. In 1955 L. A. C. O. Hunt, a district administrator in the Northwest Territories, noted that “it would be highly desirable to scrutinize all Applications for Admission to residential schools well in advance of the entry of the child.” Instead, he said, government officials were “often faced with these ‘fait accompli.’” Hunt was citing a case in which Roman Catholic authorities had flown a young boy from Coppermine to Aklavik and enrolled him in the school, which Hunt believed to be already overcrowded, without government approval.¹⁰²

This lack of inspection meant the schools were prey to regular outbreaks of infectious illness. In 1913 Sister McQuirk, principal of the Fort Providence school, reported that while student health had been improving, “we had to deplore the death of 9 of our younger pupils, this winter, by a malignant attack of influenza, which nothing could check. Their constitutions are so weak that we keep continually dosing them with iron and cod liver oil to keep them in a normal state.”¹⁰³

In September 1919, forty-seven students at Fort Providence came down with whooping cough, forcing a cancellation of classes. Poor health at the school continued into October with an outbreak of dysentery. The school journal reported on October 11 that “Samuel took his last breath”; on October 13 that “Caroline died this morning at 2 o’clock”; on October 21–22 that “Charles lost his little Jean”; and on October 29 that “this morning at one o’clock poor Isidore peacefully left for heaven.”104 The following year influenza (referred to in the records as “la grippe”) broke out in August. In September typhoid fever was so severe that classes were cancelled. Two more students were dead by the end of the month.¹⁰⁵

In April 1943 another flu epidemic hit the Fort Providence school. Several sisters and all the students were afflicted, leading to a cancellation of classes.¹⁰⁶ In early December of the next year, three-quarters of the students were struck down with whooping cough.¹⁰⁷ This was followed by an outbreak of mumps, keeping children out of class until the beginning of February 1945.¹⁰⁸ At the beginning of April 1950, twenty-six students at Fort Providence were in bed with measles.¹⁰⁹ Further outbreaks of measles hit the school in October 1952 and the spring of 1957.¹¹⁰ An outbreak of the Asian influenza epidemic of 1958 left all the children in bed.¹¹¹

At Fort Resolution the situation was similar. The school journal for 1903 to 1942 reports outbreaks of influenza in 1917, 1921, 1930 (twice in one year), 1932, 1933, 1936, 1937, 1940, and 1941; whooping cough in 1920 and 1941; diphtheria in 1923; chicken pox in January 1926, 1936, and 1938; diarrhea in 1926; and measles in 1935.¹¹² On July 25, 1920, the Fort Resolution school journal bleakly observed, “We are obliged to return to their families several children who have been weakened by illness.”¹¹³ Between December 3, 1912, and February 24, 1941, the Fort Resolution school journal recorded fifty-six deaths, including one elder, two former students, and three members of religious orders. There was an average of over two deaths a year during this twenty-year period.¹¹⁴

In nearby Hay River, the run of epidemics was similar to Fort Resolution’s. There were outbreaks of measles in 1902,¹¹⁵ diphtheria in 1917,¹¹⁶ influenza in 1930,¹¹⁷ chicken pox and influenza in 1935,¹¹⁸ and influenza again in 1936.¹¹⁹ A 1906 an outbreak of measles had reduced attendance at Hay River to thirty boarding students and eleven day students, with very irregular attendance, according to the principal.¹²⁰ Bishop Isaac Stringer wrote in June 1910, “No deaths have occurred in the school during the last two years—up to March 1910 which is the date of the latest news received.”¹²¹ In later years, the school had a very heavy death toll. At least thirty-two deaths were reported between 1917 and 1937; ten of these occurred in 1930.¹²² The situation was sufficiently dire that Duncan Campbell Scott threatened to close the school.¹²³

In 1936 Shingle Point teacher Mabel Jones wrote of how Mabel Martin fell ill on December 11, 1935, and died a month and a half later:

Children were subject to accidental death as well. On August 24, 1939, Joseph Sakaluk, a ten-year-old Inuit boy attending the Roman Catholic school in Aklavik, slipped away and sought to join a group of older boys who had been allowed to go for a walk. He was not warmly dressed, the weather was wet, the terrain full of muskeg. He never caught up with the boys. When he was discovered missing, the Mounted Police organized a search. In the afternoon of the following day, his body was found in a thick willow grove—one the searchers had passed by on several occasions. He had died of a combination of exhaustion and exposure.¹²⁵

Health and safety were closely linked to building conditions. In some cases, the schools were simply too crowded. Mabel Jones gave this description of life in the Shingle Point school in 1933:

Our school is more crowded than ever this year. I have twenty girls in the space which last year seemed overfull with eighteen. But they are such nice children that now I would be sorry to part with any one of them. Now that Walter will not be with us again, the boys’ house will contain the same as last year, namely sixteen when Moses returns. This however is one too many for present accommodations and an extra bunk is to be provided this year. You know of course that the children sleep two in a bed and I have three girls in one at present, and in the boys’ House the same situation will obtain when the sixteen are there.¹²⁶

A 1911 inspection of the Hay River school concluded that the first two floors of the school building were “not all that might be desired” since the “ceilings of the first two stories are low, the lighting is insufficient and ventilation poor.” The third floor was seen as having “extremely good” lighting and ventilation and higher ceilings.¹²⁷ A new school was built in 1917,¹²⁸ but by 1924 it was in a state of collapse since the sediment deposit it was built on was caving in. Walls were bulging out, the floors were no longer level, doors and windows no longer fit their frames, and the chimneys were on the verge of falling down.¹²⁹ To address these issues, a wing of the school was removed, renovated, and reopened as a federal hospital, a short distance from the school.¹³⁰ By 1934 it was recognized that the Hay River school was overcrowded, hard to supply with food or medical attention, and lacking a good water supply. These problems led Indian Affairs to support the relocation of the school to a larger facility in Aklavik, about a thousand kilometres farther north.131

The Roman Catholic school at Aklavik was short forty desks in 1931.¹³² Two years later the same school was so lacking in supplies and basic furnishings that twenty-eight students were sleeping on the floor.¹³³ In response to the principal’s request, the government authorized the purchase of two dozen additional beds.¹³⁴

Clean water and proper sanitation were critical to maintaining student health. An engineer’s report on the Fort Resolution school in 1938 concluded that the water from Great Slave Lake “used in the school for all purposes without any boiling” was dangerous due to the possibility of the lake’s being polluted. The open-pit privies were “in bad conditions, poorly lighted, unscreened, with dirty seats and floors. Many flies were noted in the vicinity.”¹³⁵ In 1945 the Indian agent J. H. Riopel judged the toilets at Fort Resolution to be “unfit and unsanitary.”¹³⁶

By the 1940s the school buildings were all in need of repair. The Fort Resolution school was described in 1947 as “outdated, dilapidated, and a potential fire hazard.”¹³⁷ Six years later a new report concluded that the schools at Fort Resolution and Fort Providence were “substandard with respect to size, shape, lighting, and ventilation.”¹³⁸ A report the following year described Fort Resolution as “badly out of date and ... in fact, a fire hazard.”¹³⁹

There were close brushes with fire at the Anglican Hay River school: the henhouse burned down in 1907,¹⁴⁰ the laundry caught fire in 1931, the roof in 1935.¹⁴¹ In August 1943, fire destroyed the boys’ wash house at the Fort Providence school.¹⁴² The Fort Resolution school was nearly destroyed by fire when the plant that produced the acetylene gas used to light the school exploded in early 1936.¹⁴³ Although there were no fatalities, two people were badly burned.¹⁴⁴ Fires broke out at Fort Resolution in 1923, 1929, and 1933. In these cases there was no loss of life. However, in 1924 sparks from a garbage fire set the dress of a girl named Yvette Walters on fire. She later died from the burns.¹⁴⁵

For its part, Indian Affairs viewed the northern mission schools essentially as homes for orphans and neglected children. In 1921 Indian Affairs Secretary J. D. McLean gave this instruction to the Fort Simpson Indian agent, T. W. Harris: “Impress upon all the Indians in your agency the necessity of sending children, especially orphan and neglected children, to school.” He added that Harris should tell parents that the compulsory attendance provisions adopted the previous year were now in force. This was in fact a bluff, since in his next line McLean admitted that “the Department does not desire to enforce these in outlying districts”—which meant the North.¹⁴⁸ Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, there were always far more school-age Aboriginal children in the northern region than there were places for them in school.

In some cases, parents took their children from the school against the wishes of the principal. In 1913, when a mother removed her daughter from the Fort Resolution school, the Mounted Police were called in and the mother surrendered the girl to the school.¹⁴⁹

Students believed that if their parents interceded, their treatment at school might improve. Bill Erasmus’s father was a student at Fort Resolution. He disliked the school and wanted to return home. He judged the school’s disciplinary process to be cruel and unwarranted, and the food “very bad.” According to the stories he told his son:

In the fall time of the year the fish run, and they would gather these fish by the thousands, and we call them stick fish, where, where you put a stick through, through the fish, and then you hang ’em, and you can dry them, and then you preserve, they’re preserved, so then you use them in the wintertime. And what has happened is if they didn’t preserve them right, or if they didn’t catch them right, or stockpile them, they would rot, and some of those fish were rotting, but they would still feed them to the kids, and they were forced to eat that. And he’d say they couldn’t leave the table unless they ate it, and sometimes they, they’d have to stay there, you know, if someone was stubborn, or just couldn’t force it down, they would make them stay all day, or however long it took to eat it.

In 1937 the Mounted Police reported that Treaty members at Fort Resolution were refusing to accept their annual payments, to protest school conditions. According to Acting Sergeant G. T. Makinson:

The Chief complained about the R.C. Mission School, they say that the Indian children when they go to school have to work too hard. Sometimes they work sawing wood from morning until night and that a large number get sick and die. When they go to school we have them well clothed, and when they come back to us they have hardly any clothes on and are half starved. When they are at school it is like the children are living in hell, that is why we sometimes have to take our children away.¹⁵¹

In 1941 only forty-five students were enrolled in the Fort Providence Roman Catholic school, which had an authorized attendance of 100.¹⁵² The following year the rcmp conducted a survey of school attendance in the Mackenzie District. It found that in Fort Smith and Hay River, 50% of school-age children, mostly boys, were not attending school. While the government was now making greater use of the compulsory attendance provisions of the Indian Act, the police acknowledged that the “Indians have devised various means of defeating the regulations.”¹⁵³ Another rcmp report from that year questioned whether the force should be acting as truant officers.¹⁵⁴

In 1945, when lobbying for federal support for a proposed Anglican day school at Fort McPherson, the Anglican missionary A. S. Dewdney wrote that a number of families were prepared to settle at Fort McPherson if there were a local school. These families were not willing, however, “to send their children to a residential school.”¹⁵⁵ Their objection was not to school, but to boarding schools.

Parental opposition remained strong into the 1950s. Indian Affairs Superintendent I. F. Kirby reported in 1951 that mission schools were “very reluctant to let the school children go home for the summer holidays for fear they will not come back and if they do they may have to pay for the transportation.” As a result, parents were unwilling to send their children to school. Kirby thought it was bad for parents and children not to send them home, and recommended that Indian Affairs “transport school children to and from school where they live in isolated points.”¹⁵⁶

In another report from that year, L. G. P. Waller, regional inspector of schools for Indian Affairs, noted, “The children who are enrolled are those available when the boat or aeroplane arrives to pick them up.” Recruitment, he said, was being thwarted by the sort of parent who “withholds children who should go to school.” He reported that “few if any Indian children have had continuous schooling from the age of 7 to 15 years with the result that scarcely one has passed beyond the Grade III level and many have remained at the Grade I level.” Waller proposed harsh measures: the government should be taking

Because the northern schools were so distant from children’s home communities, running away was less common than in the South, but it did take place. For example, two young girls ran away from Fort Providence in March 1902. They were found and returned later the same day. A month later, one of the girls made a second unsuccessful attempt to escape. In the school journal, one of the nuns wrote that, while the girl appeared repentant, it was doubtful that she was sincere.¹⁵⁹ The following year a boy ran away from Fort Resolution on the first day of school. According to the school chronicle,

Sister Honorine proceeded with the first article in the program of education in the North, the bathing of the children who arrive filthy teeming with vermin. It was a difficult task because bathing was unknown to them. Having cleaned one, Sister Honorine left him for a moment to fetch a clean shirt and pants. On her return, the little savage was gone, the forest called him too strongly. Fortunately, a brother had seen him and brought him back.¹⁶⁰

The student memoirs discussed in the following chapter provide a glimpse of what the children were running away from.

Aboriginal schoolchildren outside the Fort Providence school in the Northwest Territories, around 1920.

Library and Archives Canada, F. H. Kitto, Canada, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, PA-101548.

Students at the Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories, school, around 1928. In 1913, when a mother removed her daughter from the Fort Resolution school, the North-West Mounted Police were called in and the mother surrendered the girl to the school.

Library and Archives Canada, J. F. Moran, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, PA-102519.

On July 25, 1920, the Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories, school journal bleakly observed, “We are obliged to return to their families several children who have been weakened by illness.”

Canada, Department of Interior, Library and Archives Canada, PA-042133.

The Roman Catholic school and hospital in Aklavik, Northwest Territories.

Northwest Territories Archives, N-1979-050-0042.

Residents and nuns from the Roman Catholic school at Aklavik, Northwest Territories, going for a picnic on a barge with a tugboat.

Northwest Territories Archives, N-1979-051-1191.

Inuit children often stayed at the Anglican school at Aklavik in the Northwest Territories year-round because their homes were too distant from the school.

Indian and Northern Affairs, Library and Archives Canada, Meikle, PA-101771.

Students arriving at the Anglican school at Aklavik, Northwest Territories.

General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, P9901-416.

The Anglican school in Aklavik, Northwest Territories. In 1957, the school at Aklavik had four teachers and 111 students. One teacher was teaching forty-five students in Grades Two, Three, Four, and Five.

General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, P7538-854

The Hay River school in the Northwest Territories. In his memoirs, long-serving Hay River school principal A. J. Vale wrote that at the school, no “eggs, oranges or the like were to be obtained. In fact, for five years at a stretch I did not even see any and only a limited amount of canned food was put up in those days.”

General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, P75-103-S8-260.

A classroom in the Hay River, Northwest Territories, school. A Department of Mines and National Resources memorandum on education in the Northwest Territories concluded that in 1939 the standard of education in the territories was “not generally as high as in the Indian schools throughout the Provinces.”

General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, P7538-136.

Bishop Isaac Stringer and students at the Dawson hostel in the Yukon Territories.

Yukon Archives, 82-332, #28.

The recreation room of the Carcross school in the Yukon Territories.

General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, P7561-110.

The Chooutla school in Carcross, Yukon Territories. School discipline was strict. In 1940, Principal H. C. Grant warned that students who stole from the school “would be laid across the classroom desk in the presence of the whole school, clad only in their night attire, and strapped on a different part of their anatomy than their hands.”

General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, P7538-621.

Métis students at the Anglican hostel in Whitehorse in the Yukon Territories.

General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, P7561-219.

The Whitehorse Baptist residence in the Yukon Territories. For much of its history, the school was located in abandoned military buildings.

Yukon Archives, 80-45 #19.