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

The federal day schools

Large and small hostels were built near federal day schools. They were funded by the federal government, and operated in concert with the day schools. In each community, the hostel and the school were intended to form a two-part complex or campus that provided what one observer called a “total educational experience” comprising classroom learning and residence life.1 In this model, the classroom learning would provide the theoretical lessons about modernity and life in Canada, and the hostel would make these lessons concrete. As one government-appointed expert observed of the hostel-school relationship in 1965, “A good hostel environment ... can complement the social teachings of the school and give reality to what in the school can be mere theoretical exercise [sic] in idealism.”²

The federal day schools were a key part of the hostel program. For the most part, the federal schools emphasized two central elements: English-language training, and the values, skills, and knowledge embedded in the curriculum of southern Canadian schools. Thus, for students sitting in these classrooms, the school day was quite literally marked by exposure to the language and images of elsewhere.

Curriculum

In his 1947 presentation to the Special Joint Committee of Parliament studying the Indian Act, J. W. McKinnon, who had been appointed inspector of schools for the Northwest Territories in 1946, said:

Ultimately we must have our own curriculum for the schools in the Northwest Territories. Since this area has problems that are particularly its own, we cannot meet the educational needs of its residents by adhering to curricula prepared for entirely different localities and transplanted there. So far as the Indian children are concerned, they must be educated for better living, taught how to save money, how to follow clean health habits, how to make better homes, and how to secure their livelihood other than by fishing and hunting. The aim must be to make the Indian self-supporting with an adequate standard of living.³

Despite this early recognition of the need for a northern curriculum, the schools continued to use southern curricula. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s there was no centralized push from officials in Ottawa to adapt curriculum in a thorough manner. While Jean Lesage and his successors continued to promise the creation of a more appropriate northern curriculum, through the period from 1955 to the 1970s, Inuit and other northern students were almost exclusively taught a curriculum developed for southern schools, and using southern materials. Between 1958 and 1965, every annual report of the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources promised that a “special curriculum” was being “developed” for the North but explained that in the short term the department would continue to use a southern curriculum, taught in English in its northern schools.4

In the early 1960s, the American anthropologist Richard King taught at the Carcross, Yukon, school for a year as part of a research project. In the book that he wrote based on this experience, he noted that neither the British Columbia Programme of Studies for Elementary Schools nor the Yukon Manual for Teachers contained “any reference to Indian children or Indian schools.” No teacher at the school had received any special training in how to teach Aboriginal children.⁵ Record keeping was minimal.

None of the prescribed diagnostic or achievement tests had been given to the children at any level. Indeed, the information on students’ permanent record cards was scanty and confusing. Many children had completed grades with satisfactory marks, but had then been overlooked and required to repeat that grade the following year. Other children had been at the school one or two years before any card was made or any record kept of their attendance. Still others had unexplained gaps of a year in their record cards.⁶

The only record that existed for one girl, who had been in the school for eight years, was “one sheet of grade scores.”⁷

Staff turnover in the schools was very high. At the Carcross school in the year that King taught, there were five teachers; only one had been at the school for more than one year.⁸ Teachers had little training as to what to expect when they came north. Ivan Mouat, a long-time education official in the Northwest Territories, wrote in 1970:

Teacher turnover is a problem in the Arctic District. Rarely a teacher stays more than two years in a settlement and many stay only one year. There have been cases where a teacher refused to leave the aircraft when it reached the isolated centre; the local school did not open until a replacement had been recruited. Some, who have not been able to endure the isolation, have had to be removed. The policy now is to send in two teachers to a new school whether the enrolment warrants it or not.⁹

Students were taught the Alberta curriculum in the Mackenzie District, the Manitoba curriculum in the Keewatin District, the Ontario curriculum in the eastern Arctic, and the Québec Protestant curriculum in Arctic Québec (Nunavik).10 As late as 1987, the educational consultant Roger LeFrancois told a territorial commission studying First Nations education, “The British Columbia curriculum is administered in Yukon. The orientation of the curriculum is largely urban, middle class and caucasian.” Where more versatile materials and programs had been developed, they were mostly being made available in larger centres, not in those where First Nations people formed a large part of the population.¹¹

The schoolbooks that the students read usually featured issues and examples more appropriate to living in a southern, urban setting. Ann Meldrum, a school principal in Kangirsuk (Payne Bay), Québec, reported in 1960 that “the only books and workbooks, in any quantity, are the Dick and Jane series.”¹² Compounding this southern approach and content was the emphasis teachers placed on the connection to the British Commonwealth and monarch, and to the Canadian nation. For Inuit children, many of whom had grown up in remote camps or locations along the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, the focus on foreign knowledge and concepts of nationhood in the classroom was clearly out of step with their experience and background.

While Northern Affairs did little to develop a northern curriculum, it did focus on the provision of vocational training. Schools at Yellowknife and Churchill were given a special mandate to fill this need, with the former offering vocational training to Inuit and First Nations people from the western Arctic, and Churchill serving Inuit in the East and in northern Québec.¹³ Among the vocational training available at Akaitcho Hall in Yellowknife were courses in building construction, full-time mechanics, heavy-duty equipment operation, home economics, and trades required for employment with the Northern Canada Power Commission Project.¹⁴

According to the Northern Affairs annual report for 1966–67 at the Churchill Vocational School:

The senior boys built and completely finished a five-room house during the year, including the electrical, plumbing and heating installations. All the pupils spend one-half of their time studying the academic subjects related to their prevocational training. The laboratories for the girls’ program are located in the classroom wing. The girls’ program includes typing, office practice, food preparation, child care, dress-making, beauty culture and home management courses. In order to provide realistic work experience, arrangements were made through the co-operation of the Manitoba Hospital Commission and the cnib Catering Services to have all the senior girls given on-the-job training as hospital ward aides and as food services assistants.¹⁵

At Inuvik, with two residences that had a total capacity of 500, vocational training was limited to home economics for girls and shop-work for boys.¹⁶

Attendance

Even the school year was out of step with life in the North. From 1960 the Northern Affairs policy was to vary the school year if there was agreement from local leaders, the principal, and the area administrator. As the director of the Northern Administration Branch noted, “Many of our smaller schools and some of our medium sized ones suffer seriously from poor attendance in May and June because of children accompanying parents on hunting and fishing trips for periods of up to two to three months.” In Deline (Fort Franklin), in an attempt to address the issue, the school was closed in 1960 from mid-May or early June to early August. It also closed from November 4 to January 2. By 1963 it was operating on a traditional school schedule: according to the principal, it was no longer the case that entire families went on the spring hunt, while in the fall fewer boys were accompanying their fathers trapping.

However, the director wrote, it was very difficult to get families to bring their children to school immediately upon their return to the community at the end of the spring hunt. “They regard the summer months as a period of freedom and many have made it quite clear that they do not wish their children to attend school in August.” It was also very hard to conduct classes during periods of near twenty-four hours of daylight, when “communities are active on a twenty-four hour basis.” One year two teachers at Uluqsaqtuua (Holman Island) travelled with families on the spring hunt. At Chesterfield Inlet the holidays were from May 15 to August 15 to allow students to get home before the spring breakup.17

Language of instruction

English was the language of education. In 1965, in response to Catholic criticism of the prominence that English played in Inuit education, senior Northern Affairs official R. A. J. Phillips explained, “We have far too few teachers with a command of the Eskimo language to make it possible to teach the language, and we still must wait several years before there is a body of Eskimos who have had sufficient education to pursue teaching careers.” It was also argued that denial of knowledge of one of the country’s national languages would relegate coming generations of Inuit to second-class citizenship.¹⁸

In 1959 E. W. Lyall, a Hudson’s Bay Company official at Taloyoak (Spence Bay) in the Northwest Territories, wrote to Northern Affairs official J. V. Jacobson on behalf of parents attending school in Inuvik.

I believe the regulations at the School in Inuvik is that none of the children are allowed to talk, read, or write in their own language; this I think is shocking, in the first place it would be an awful crime if the Eskimo lost their very fine art of writing, in the Second place the parents of these children would always like to hear from their Son or daughter, how will they be able to do this if they forget how to write or read in Eskimo?

I for one think there should be something done about this, as you know in 1953 I sent three of my children to the Anglican School in Aklavik. When they came home none of them could speak Eskimo at all. Two years ago I sent another of my boys to Aklavik to School he had a wonderful command of the Eskimo language and could write it fluently his mother who speaks only in Eskimo made him promise to keep writing her every chance he got, for a year he was writing her all the time, you can imagine how pleased she was in getting a letter which she could understand, but last winter he wrote her a letter in Eskimo so badly written she could not make head or tail of half the letter, on the end of his letter he wrote, “I am forgetting how to write in Eskimo now as we are only taught English.” She was heart broken.

A Northern Affairs official responded that he could “well understand that the teachers at Inuvik in their attempt to familiarize the Eskimo pupils with the English language are discouraging them from speaking Eskimo at the school.” He added that he disapproved of any school policy that prevented them from communicating with their parents in their own language at home. It was recommended that someone be hired to provide students with “training in the use of the Eskimo language and to ensure that they write regular letters to their home in the Eskimo language.”²⁰ Some schools made modest efforts at providing some education in Aboriginal languages. At Chesterfield Inlet in 1959, Northern Affairs gave approval for the hiring of Rosalie Iguptak to teach syllabics at Turquetil Hall one hour a day, five days a week.²¹

Some teachers did try to adapt the English-language southern curriculum for their Inuit students. For example, a teacher at the federal day school at Taloyoak helped her students create a booklet of stories written by students about their community, and a teacher in Arctic Bay wrote and sang songs about the local landscape.²² Even in this adapted form, however, English was the dominant language, while the form of the songs and the stories remained Euro-Canadian: songs were sung in English and accompanied by guitar, and local stories were written in English and bound in books.²³

In 1967 the Oblate missionary J. M. Rouselière wrote that a recent visit to the North had done nothing to

dispel my impression that no place is envisaged in the schools for the Eskimo language, even if Mackenzie teachers have just received instructions to encourage native assistants to speak Eskimo to beginners. Last winter in a Pelly Bay school, I myself heard an Eskimo assistant, a young woman, tell children who were talking together: ‘Don’t speak Eskimo here!’ … and this was not in class time.24

In 1967, R. A. J. Phillips, the former director of the Northern Administration Branch, defended the schools’ language policies against charges of “cultural genocide.” Northern Affairs, he wrote, regarded itself as “the most effective protector of the Eskimo cultural tradition. It is prepared to use the local language in the lower grades, but as a matter both of principle and practicality it is heavily committed to English. It is a matter of principle because a liberal education can be achieved only by the use of a major language.”²⁵

Although many students who attended hostels said that they were allowed to speak Aboriginal languages in the hostels, there was a report in 1963 that one student from Snare Lake had had her mouth taped shut for speaking Dogrib at Grollier Hall.²⁶

Margaret Leishman, who lived in both Lapointe Hall and Grollier Hall, had strong memories of students being punished for speaking Aboriginal languages.

I excelled in school so that I didn’t have to bother with them, you know, and I saw a lot of my schoolmates getting ... Whenever we spoke Slavey language, we did that all the time anyways, but when we were caught, you know, they were punished for speaking their language, because we need to communicate with each other. Because in our tradition, that’s how we communicate to meet our needs and there, you didn’t ... you were not allowed to do that. So that was really, really hard for us, and I saw a lot of my friends being punished, you know, especially by the Sisters where they take a stick or ruler and they just hit them over the head and things like that. Again, I saw a lot of ... I saw a lot of things in the residential school and my sisters and my brothers did too, you know.²⁷

In 1964, Northern Affairs reviewed its language policy for the hostels. Up until that point the policy had been “to encourage and promote the use of English in pupil residences and in as many out-of-school situations as possible.” The policy document noted that “native languages are still widely used in residences” and that children are encouraged to write their parents, usually making use of their “native language.” While there was no plan to ban Aboriginal languages in the residences, the policy decision was to “continue our present policy of encouraging a wider use of English outside of the classroom rather than planning a program for wider use of the native languages.” There was, however, an expectation that in coming years, Aboriginal languages would be taught in the schools.²⁸

R. G. Williamson, a member of the Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly, raised concerns about the lack of Inuit language training at the Churchill Vocational Centre (cvc) in 1970. He said he had been told that an Inuit language program conducted by Roger Briggs, an Anglican minister, for forty minutes a week for six weeks the previous year was not being offered in the current school year.29 The matter was referred to Ralph Ritcey, who at that point was the superintendent of vocational education for Northern Affairs. According to Ritcey, Briggs had conducted classes at the cvc in the 1968–69 school year for a brief period. Furthermore, attendance had been voluntary. In the face of Williamson’s criticism, Ritcey said Northern Affairs was prepared to allow Briggs to offer the classes again—so long as they were held in the evening and attendance remained voluntary.³⁰ Northern Affairs official Ivan Mouat observed that Ritcey’s answer was not likely to satisfy Williamson.³¹ In April 1970, the Northwest Territories director of education, B. C. Gillie, announced that an “Eskimo Language Reading Program would be initiated” at the cvc the following September.³² Although it was not possible to meet that deadline, S. T. Mallon of the Eskimo Language School in Rankin Inlet was hired to develop an Inuit program for the cvc in 1971.³³ A former cvc student was hired to teach Inuktitut; Jose Kusugak went on to become a manager for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and president of the national Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. Eva Aariak, a future premier of Nunavut, was one of Kusugak’s language students. She recalled Kusugak

always connected with his class through jokes, puzzles, or some other activity entirely unrelated to the lesson at hand. He taught us the new standardized ici (Inuit Cultural Institute) writing system and I credit Jose as one of the key individuals who inspired my love of Inuit language and culture.³⁴

Partly in response to Aboriginal organizations, the Northwest Territories government did make room in its curriculum for students to learn and practise traditional hunting and land skills. Although these reforms were modest, they were enough to incite complaints from the federal government that officials in the Northwest Territories were allowing “training for a life of leisure” in their schools.³⁵

Staff

In 1974 Bryan Pearson, member of the Legislative Assembly for Iqaluit (Frobisher Bay), proposed, somewhat facetiously, that the education system in the North could be improved by firing half the teachers at once and replacing them with people from the communities. This prompted an editorial comment by the Inuit cartoonist and writer Allootook Ipellie:

I think this would be one of the grandest miracles the North could ever experience, if it were to happen … I would support Mr. Pearson’s statement, if he could give the department of education in the NWT more time to convert the Inuit to positions of full-time teachers … I am sure Mr. Pearson is a lot smarter than his statement would suggest.

After reflecting on the importance of Inuit teachers as role models, and also on the need to ensure that Inuit really wanted those jobs, Ipellie went on:

If the majority of the teachers in the North were Inuit, Inuit children would relate to them and react to them in a more positive way. Instead of thinking that they could never become better than their white teachers, Inuit children would start to think that, if an Inuk could do that, they could do it too. This would also help to create a better relationship between the young and the old, not only in the schools but in the whole community. There is no doubt that there would be many other benefits resulting from this venture.36

Parents often felt alienated from the school staff and administrators. Inuit parents in Cambridge Bay took their concerns about the poor relations between the school and the community to local welfare officials and a missionary rather than to school officials in 1970. They felt the school was not sufficiently challenging, that discipline was too lax, and that the staff members took insufficient interest in either the students or the community. N. J. Macpherson, the superintendent of education, instructed the staff members to review the list of complaints and “take steps to improve any phase of the school operation that is in need of such improvement.”³⁷

In 1979 two members of the Legislative Assembly, Ipeelee Kilabuk and Piita Irniq (a former residential school student), stressed that the maintenance of Inuit culture required Inuit teachers. This would require hiring Inuit and Dene, preferably Elders, as full-time teachers in selected communities. Deputy Commissioner John Parker replied that quite clearly the administration might have to respond by cutting other programs or laying off other teachers.³⁸

The operation of the schools was marked by conflicts over the religious faith of staff members. In 1966, for example, the Anglicans complained about a Northern Affairs decision to hire a non-Protestant, in this case a member of the Baha’i faith, to teach at Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake). Northern Affairs official C. M. Bolger responded:

It is the Department’s policy to employ only Roman Catholic teachers in those classrooms which have a majority of Roman Catholic children enrolled. Roman Catholic principals are employed in those schools where the majority of the total enrolment is of that faith. Teachers of religious denominations other than Roman Catholic are employed in classrooms where the majority of the children enrolled are Protestant. Similarly, principals adhering to faiths other than Roman Catholic are hired for schools where the majority of the total enrolment is Protestant.³⁹

This failed to satisfy Anglican Bishop Donald Marsh, who wrote, “Many years ago, when we discussed the question of the religious affiliations of teachers and principals, it was agreed upon and understood that teachers must be first of all Anglican, and if sufficient Anglicans did not offer for service in the Arctic then those accepted must be of the major religious denominations in Canada.” It was his expectation that such individuals would be Protestant. Members of the Baha’i faith, he said, were not Christian and should not be considered Protestant. Since “the Eskimo people are almost entirely Anglican,” he argued that their teachers should be so as well. Non-Anglicans, particularly non-Christians, might “introduce their own peculiar beliefs into their teaching in school, or open up rival Sunday Schools which create as you can imagine, uncertainty and distress in the minds of the pupils, their parents and the clergy concerned.”40 Without acknowledging it, he was of course describing exactly the same process that Anglican missionaries had followed when they set about converting Inuit and other Aboriginal people away from their own spiritual practices.

For its part, the Catholic hierarchy remained suspicious of and hostile toward Northern Affairs. In 1961, Father André Renaud, director general of the Oblate Indian and Eskimo Commission, said senior administrators were not only secular Protestants but often openly anti-Catholic. In the case of education, he said, “Thanks to the virtual elimination of Catholics from top posts, the education section of the northern affairs department is a veritable Orangeman’s paradise.”⁴¹

Educational outcomes

Overall, educational outcomes were disappointing in both the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. The Roman Catholic hostel in Whitehorse (later named Coudert Hall) opened its doors in the fall of 1961. The following year, the residence’s principal, the Reverend Eugene Cullinane, wrote a disheartening assessment of the attempt to integrate the students into the Whitehorse school system. After three months of school it had become apparent that most of the students, who were enrolled in Grades Eight through Twelve, were failing. “The deteriorating academic situation presented a very grave threat to the very stability and life in our new hostel, causing us much concern. By mid-year the great majority of our students were in a state of pronounced frustration from their inability to cope with the academic program.” An emergency tutoring program was put in place and many of the students were placed one grade back. This led to some improvements among the younger students. The older ones, however, were “full of misery, discontent[,] hostility”; many asked to be allowed to return home and others simply ran away. When they turned sixteen, fourteen students left. One was taken home by her parents “in a state of near collapse from nervous tension.” Of the forty-five students who had started at the school, he expected only eighteen would return the following year. Sixty per cent of his enrolment had dropped out.

Cullinane then went on to assess the impact of the previous twenty years of educational work. Despite what he termed “the honest and sincere efforts” of the government and the churches, “a candid and unbiased appraisal of results thus far achieved reveals comparative failure.” The lot of First Nations people in the Yukon during that period, he wrote, has not improved; “it has worsened.”

The schools had left their students unprepared for life. “Reared in a well ordered severely disciplined residential school from the age of 6 to 16, they know no other way of life—neither that of their ancestors nor that of the White Man, and they have no skill or trade to make it possible for them to earn a living in either. They hang suspended somewhere between these two worlds in a void that is filled with little else than emotional turbulence.”

To prepare for the coming year, Cullinane directed his staff to spend the summer “living in the Indian villages so as to get to know the natives better,” while during the school year, staff members were to take correspondence courses in cultural anthropology.

As for the education offered, he said that it was apparent that “only a small percentage of our Indian youth of both sexes is capable at present of being integrated into the White Man’s schools, colleges and professional training.” A larger group, but still a minority, should be given vocational training. But the majority should be given a trade school education: a hands-on apprenticeship with “a minimum of academic education of any kind.” Finally, “a specially designed curriculum and environment should be provided for the great majority of our Yukon Indian girls to indoctrinate them in the age-old arts and science which pertain to the establishment and care of a home and to develop in them that emotional stability and maturity so necessary for a successful marriage and a stable home.” Cullinane judged the school’s failure to be particularly severe in the case of women: “Physically and sexually mature, but emotionally still very young children, they will be exploited, victimized, desecrated and demoralized by the depraved, psychotic, predatory type of White Man that the Yukon always seems to attract. This is integration at its worst.”42

In another assessment from that period, Cullinane wrote that he expected the dropout rate for sixteen-year-olds would be 100% despite the fact that “weak and emotionally insecure teachers” had been replaced by “more stable and effective ones.” Integration, which he viewed as being implemented at a revolutionary pace, was to blame. Moving students from “an almost totally Yukon-Indian environment (of the village and residential school), based de facto on a segregationist policy, and then suddenly after 13 or 14 years plunging him into a White Man’s world and schools in an attempt at integration—this violates all elemental biological and physical laws.” It was his opinion that “current procedures actually induce in our students personality disorientation and neurotic illness leading to alcoholism and so called juvenile delinquency.”⁴³

In 1963, D. W. Hepburn, the former principal of the federal school in Inuvik, published an article with the ominous headline “Northern Education: Façade for Failure.” He argued that the education being provided in the new federal schools was “hopelessly inadequate. The reasons for this failure are clear: the aims of education set forth by the Department are thoroughly confused, the curriculum is inappropriate, and many current practices of the system are not only ill-conceived but actually harmful.”⁴⁵

Department officials contended the schools were designed to allow students “to become efficient in [English], without losing their own cultural and linguistic tradition.” But, Hepburn wrote, “no provision whatever is made in the curriculum to encourage retention of native language, culture or skills.” Although 60% of the students at the Inuvik school were in the first three grades, few teachers had any background in primary education and “almost none has any special training in native education, and will receive none from the Department.”⁴⁶ In the process, the schools were producing individuals who “lack not only the skills required for most permanent wage employment but also those necessary for the traditional economy.”⁴⁷

Former students in their statements to the trc have confirmed the accuracy of Hepburn’s prediction that students would lack the skills needed to follow a traditional lifestyle. Petah Inukpuk, who went to one of the hostels in Inuvik, explained that before going to school he had been a nomadic hunter, who, even at the age of five, had his own dog team and was able to hunt seal.⁴⁸ He spoke proudly of these years. Going to the hostel and school at Inuvik ended this lifestyle, creating a gap between himself and his own past, and between himself and his parents. As he stated, after finishing school “I began from scratch as if I had no knowledge whatsoever of anything.”⁴⁹ More than anything else, the experience of residential schooling was this experience of being forced—in a very short period of time—to separate from one way of living and become rapidly acculturated through the hostel into another.⁵⁰

In 1970, after the hostel system had been in operation for a decade, the number of Northwest Territories students in high schools was just 1,800, even though high school at the time included Grades Seven and Eight. Just over a third of these (644) were in the highest grades, Ten to Twelve. In the eastern Arctic just fourteen students were enrolled in Grades Nine to Twelve.⁵¹ A 1971 review of Grollier Hall (Inuvik) enrolment statistics concluded that of the fifty senior boys who enrolled in the school each year, three would be expelled, nine would leave of their own choice, and thirty-eight would complete the year. Of them, about twenty-four would return the following year.52 In later years, there were some positive signs: in the second semester of the 1986–87 school year, the pass rate for students at Akaitcho Hall (Yellowknife) was 88%.⁵³ For the first semester of the following year, it was 78%.⁵⁴ Other results were less heartening: in 1990–91 thirty-eight students from the Kitikmeot region (formerly known as the central Arctic) dropped out of Akaitcho Hall.⁵⁵ There were 12,000 students enrolled in Northwest Territories schools in 1980, but only 192 graduated in that year.⁵⁶ In 1988, Aboriginal students accounted for 70% of high school enrolment in the Northwest Territories but only 31% of graduates.⁵⁷

Many students could not identify with the content of the classroom materials. For instance, Lillian Elias remembers, “When I looked at Dick and Jane I thought Dick and Jane were in heaven when I saw all the green grass. That’s how much I knew about Dick and Jane.”⁵⁸ However, others felt being in the classroom was a rewarding experience. Paul Quassa commented that the Chesterfield Inlet school, although extremely strict, was successful: “Looking at the way the education system was set up, it really worked. We were taught well.”⁵⁹ Piita Irniq agreed: “The education system that we got was top notch at Chesterfield Inlet,” despite the abuses that he and many other students reported from their time at that facility.⁶⁰ Eddie Dillon, who attended Sir Alexander Mackenzie School while living at Stringer Hall in Inuvik, was thankful for the education he received in the 1960s. In his testimony to the trc, he made a point of thanking both his parents and the “government of Canada” for giving him a chance to get an education—something he would not have had in his own settlement.⁶¹

In her 1994 report on abuse at the Joseph Bernier School and Turquetil Hall at Chesterfield Inlet, conducted on behalf of the Northwest Territories government, the Yellowknife lawyer Katherine Peterson wrote:

One could make a strong case for the generalized statement that the existence of the residential school in and of itself constituted an abusive experience for the students in that they were removed from familiar settings and placed in an environment which was frightening and detached from their family and culture.⁶²

Specifically, she wrote of the way students were ridiculed for inappropriate use of English or an inability to complete school work; “over zealous discipline”; the arbitrary isolation of siblings of the opposite sex; the underemphasis of Inuit culture and an overemphasis on “western culture and its superiority”; and the separation of young children from their traditional supports and family connections.⁶³ She singled out cultural assimilation for specific comment:

Education about, enhancement of and value accorded to the Inuit culture did not form any significant part of the former students’ experiences at the Chesterfield Inlet school. Rather, the emphasis appeared to be one of promoting the english [sic] language, western culture and [tenets] of the Roman Catholic faith. As a result of this, Inuit children were not only robbed, for a period of time at least, of a sense of value of their culture, they also lost years of ability to experience that culture in their own community settings. In a culture in which the role of family and connection with the land is so prominent it is easy to see why these students experienced such a sense of detachment and loss.64

Peterson noted that some former students did speak positively of their experiences at the school. One, for example, said that he would not have learned to read or write in syllabics had he not attended the school. Others said the school prepared them for positions of responsibility in their communities. The overall assessment, however, was that their time at the school had alienated them from those communities, broken their links to their culture, and diminished their capacity to serve as effective parents.⁶⁵

In their statements some former students also spoke positively of the benefit of learning English.⁶⁶ Former students also remembered the excitement of learning about the wider world outside the Arctic. Students who attended the Churchill school spoke about how they were taught by open-minded teachers who were willing to expose them to the social and political changes taking place across the world in the 1960s.⁶⁷ John Amagoalik wrote that at the Churchill Vocational Centre “we had excellent teachers. To this day we still talk about them ... They treated us as ordinary people. We had never experienced this sort of attitude before and it was, in a way, liberating to be with new teachers that treated you as their equal.”⁶⁸ David Simailak, who attended the Duke of Edinburgh School in Churchill, spoke of how his time at residential school gave him a series of new opportunities. He fondly remembers excelling at math and spelling competitions, and travelling to Montreal for Expo 67.⁶⁹

For some other students, the classroom was enjoyable for another reason altogether. For children who were bullied or who suffered physical or sexual abuse in the hostels, the classroom was a safe haven. Marjorie Ovayuak, who was bullied by older girls at Stringer Hall, saw the classes at the school as her sanctuary: “I was mocked; I was teased; I was picked on ... The hostel was so bad but when I went to school, I was happy ... As long as I was away from Stringer Hall....”⁷⁰

Not all northern students studied in the North. In the late 1950s, the federal government sent fifty-one young Inuit to Leduc, Alberta, for training for jobs on the dew Line.⁷¹ In the 1960s the federal government launched the “experimental Eskimo” program, hand-picking some promising young people to live a middle-class existence and attend school in places as diverse as Petite Riviere, in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia; Winnipeg; and Ottawa.⁷² The experiment was meant both to further the young people’s education and to show skeptics that Inuit students were academically, at least, equal to their non-Inuit contemporaries. Like others who followed them, some were able to thrive both socially and academically, and they acknowledged the benefits of their participation in the program. Because of their immersion in white society, when these students returned home they proved to be indispensable in helping to bridge the gap between the people of their home communities and government authorities.73 Many went on to play leading roles in campaigns for Inuit rights and recognition. Peter Ittinuar, who attended high school in Ottawa for two years, became the first Inuk member of Parliament.⁷⁴ Despite his success, Ittinuar felt that for many the program had mixed results. In his autobiography, Ittinuar wrote that fellow student Zebedee Nungak from Puvirnituq always remarked that “he has never regretted the experience, but he has also never recovered from it.”⁷⁵