Before the 1950s there was little in the way of formal education for Aboriginal people in any part of the Canadian North. What did exist had been created by missionaries. Small residential schools operated in Carcross and Whitehorse in the Yukon, in three communities in the Mackenzie River Valley in the western Northwest Territories, and in small communities along the shore of Labrador. These mission schools had long histories: the Catholic school in Fort Providence was founded in 1867, and the Moravians’ educational activity in Labrador dated back to the late eighteenth century.
In the 1950s, in the wake of significant oil and mineral finds in the Northwest Territories, the federal government sought to assert its political authority over the Canadian North. A significant element in this assertion was the establishment of a series of student hostels and associated day schools. These changes marked the end of the mission period of residential schooling in the North, and the dawn of an age of governmental control.
The federal government chose to employ this residential school model in the North at the same time that it was committed to closing its southern residential schools. By this time, the government was also well aware of the many problems associated with residential schooling. The student experience of residential schooling in the North resembled that of Aboriginal students in all other parts of the country. Students were separated, often by great distances, from family, language, community, and culture. The education they received failed to prepare them to succeed either in the wage economy or in a return to life on the land. The students were not adequately supervised, were placed at risk at a vulnerable point in their lives, were subject to bullying, and, most seriously, were easy targets for sexual predators.
The pace and impact of this change varied across the North. In areas such as the Yukon and the Mackenzie Valley region of the western Northwest Territories, there was considerable continuity between the new policies and the old. New institutions were being constructed, but while they were owned by the government, church officials retained responsibility for the day-to-day management of the facilities. Most of the children who went to these schools were likely to be the children of parents who had attended residential school themselves.1
The situation was very different in the eastern Arctic and northern Québec (contemporary Nunavut and Nunavik). In these regions, the introduction of residential schooling was part of a series of dramatic and traumatic changes. This was in the homeland of most of Canada’s Inuit population. The hostel and school system was imposed on them with no consultation, by people who did not speak their language. Few parents had any experience of schools, and the residences were often located thousands of kilometres from their homes. They had no opportunity to see where their children would be living or to keep in contact with them once they left. The building of a series of small hostels in communities in the eastern Arctic and northern Québec hastened the process by which the Inuit shifted from a world of close to one thousand migratory communities to inhabiting fewer than one hundred year-round settlements. Government planners had expected that families would place their children in the hostels and still spend part of the year on the land themselves. Instead, families settled in communities year-round to be near their children. Other government policies, particularly those related to family allowances, housing, and health care, accelerated this process.2
For the Inuit students who were sent out of their home regions, almost every aspect of life was different and strange—and all too often traumatic. At the same time, the region was dealing with the impact of a widespread tuberculosis epidemic. A third of the Inuit population is thought to have been infected with tuberculosis in the 1950s. A common form of treatment was removal to sanatoria in southern Canada: in 1956 the largest concentration of Inuit people in the entire country was the 332 Inuit in the Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton, Ontario. In that year over 1,500 Inuit were undergoing often lengthy treatment for tuberculosis.3 In Labrador (contemporary Nunatsiavut) the federal government sought to avoid responsibility for Aboriginal people. As a result, it did not extend the hostel and day school model in this region. The Newfoundland government also neglected the region. As a result, the missionary era of residential schooling continued into the 1970s in Labrador.
There are two distinct periods to the era of governmental control in most of northern Canada. Before 1969, the federal government oversaw the educational system for Aboriginal people in the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Arctic Québec. It was then that the hostel and day school system was established. During this period, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories were governed by southerners who had been appointed by the federal government. In 1969 much of the responsibility for Aboriginal education was transferred to the territorial governments. In northern Québec during the 1970s, responsibility for education was transferred to an Aboriginal school board as a result of the 1975 James Bay Agreement. Local control of education in communities with large Aboriginal populations contributed to the eventual demise of residential schooling in the post-1969 era.