William Robinson, Chief Shingwauk, and Chief Nebenaigoching, 1850.
Photographs from the Robinson-Huron Treaty, Chief Shingwaukonse collection, 2011-017-001 (001), Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre, Algoma University.
The history of the purpose, funding, and operation of Canada’s residential school system can be told using the documents created by that system. However, the residential school experience itself can be best understood through the voices of Aboriginal people. As part of its work, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has collected statements from over 6,500 former students. These statements form the basis of a separate part of this report. Given the age of these survivors, their accounts describe the residential school experience for the period from 1940 to 1997.
There is no comparable collection of statements from former students from the years prior to the Second World War. A much smaller group of former students have left a record of their impressions, usually in the form of memoirs, magazine articles, biographies, and, in one case, a novel. Some of these works are well known; others have fallen out of print, and some were never published. Their authors are often among the more successful students. Several writers went on to become political activists, teachers, or church and community leaders. In some cases, their memoirs were collaborative efforts, so their voices are heard in filtered form. But, in spite of the filters, these writings provide an understanding of the early residential school experience that can be gained in no other way. Through them, many of the dominant themes of the residential school story emerge: the loneliness, the isolation, the hunger, the homelessness, the hard work, the harsh discipline, the imposition of an alien language and culture, and the poor health, disease, and death that haunted many schools. The writings also provide a reminder that Aboriginal leaders wanted to see their children gain the skills they would need to ensure survival of their communities. Those leaders also quickly recognized the failures of the residential school system and drew public attention to their concerns. Not all experiences were negative. Several of the writers went on to careers in religious ministry. Others had successful careers that built on the skills they acquired in school.
None of these memoirs dealt directly with the issue of sexual abuse of students, but that does not mean that such abuse did not take place during this period. Subsequent chapters will describe cases of abuse that took place in the system’s earliest years of operation. Some of these memoirs were written at a time when it was socially unacceptable to write about the sexual abuse of children. At that time and since, those who were abused or witnessed such abuse often felt too ashamed or intimidated to speak of their experiences.
In the 1830s, Chief Shingwaukonse travelled from Garden River in northern Ontario to Toronto to ask Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Colborne which of the various Christian denominations his Ojibway people should adopt. Colborne, an Anglican, recommended the Church of England.1 Shingwaukonse accepted this advice, and, for many years, a series of Anglican missionaries ministered to his community. In the 1860s, the last missionary was withdrawn from the region to go work with the Mohawk. The Ojibway then were served by a travelling Church Missionary Society missionary, E. F. Wilson. Shingwauk, who was Shingwaukonse’s son, resolved in 1871—without consulting with his council—to accompany Wilson on a journey to Toronto to meet with the “Great Black-Coat,” as he referred to the Anglican Bishop, and to ask him “why indeed are my poor brethren left so long in ignorance and darkness.”2 He was seeking not only a permanent mission, but also a boarding school. The seventy-year-old Shingwauk told Rev. S. Givins and Rev. F. O’Meara, who had responsibility for missionary work, that the Ojibway of Lake Superior had “pleaded in vain for teachers to be sent to them.” They recognized the strength of the European settlers and the English Queen, and had concluded that they could not “keep back her power, any more than we can stop the sun.” Before his death, he said, he longed to see a “big teaching wigwam built at Garden River, where the children from the Great Chippeway Lake [Lake Superior] would be received, and clothed, and fed, and taught how to read and how to write; and how to farm and build houses, and making clothing: so that by and bye [sic] they might go back and teach their own people.” This way, all the Ojibway would “enjoy the blessings of Christianity.”3 After the meeting, he visited a newspaper office, where he was shown a recently developed piece of technology that was used for folding printed papers. “I thought then, ‘Ah, that is how it is with the English nation, every day they get more wise; every day they find out something new. The Great Spirit blesses them, and teaches them all these things because they are Christians.’”4
The Anglicans responded positively. For the rest of the visit, Shingwauk and Wilson visited local churches and the homes of wealthy Torontonians, collecting funds for the proposed mission and school at Sault Ste. Marie. Some gave $10 apiece; “some would not give us any at all.” A large public meeting raised only $21, an amount Shingwauk found disheartening.5 He travelled on to St. Catharines, Hamilton, and Brantford, where he spoke to several meetings, but succeeded in raising only $300.6 Shingwauk concluded his account of his journey with a vow that, if he could not raise what was needed in Canada, he would “go to the far distant land across the sea, and talk to the son of our Great Mother, the Prince of Wales, who became my friend when he gave me my medal, and I believe will still befriend me if I tell him what my people need.”7
Shingwauk did not make that trip, but in 1872, his brother Buhkwujjene (sometimes given as Buhgwajjene) accompanied Wilson on a fundraising trip to England, where they raised 740 pounds. With this money, Wilson planned to construct a school that could accommodate thirty boarding students—boys and girls. There were sixty acres (24.3 hectares) of farmland available to the school, much of which had been cleared by local First Nations men. Wilson’s initial plan was to educate the students at a day school that had been built with the money Shingwauk had raised, including a contribution of $36 from the Garden River Ojibway. In addition to farming, the boys were to be taught boot making and carpentry. An appeal to Canadian Anglicans stated that the salaries of the school staff were “provided for through the liberality of English friends.” Contributions still were needed to pay for the support of the children.8
The campaign succeeded. In 1873, the Shingwauk Home opened at Garden River, near Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. It was destroyed by fire within the week. In a letter to Indian Affairs, Chief Buhkwujjene declared himself “depressed, for all the children that was in the Institution are extremely poor.”9 A new school opened in 1876 and remained in operation until 1970. The efforts of Shingwauk and Buhkwujjene to establish a “big teaching wigwam” are a reminder that despite the conflicts and disappointments that would arise in the future, from the outset of the residential school system, some Aboriginal leaders and parents were committed to ensuring that their children received the schooling they would need to make an ongoing contribution to the life of their communities.
Charles Nowell, as he later came to be known, was born in 1870 in Fort Rupert, British Columbia. The name given him at birth was Tlalis (Stranded Whale). His father was Malitsas, a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation (the name is given as Kweka in a memoir he prepared with anthropologist Clellan S. Ford). When he was young, Nowell
used to sleep sometimes beside my father. When I lie in bed beside him, he talked to me about our ancestors. He told me about my grandfather and his father and his father, and what they did, and about how our ancestors knew about the flood. He told me the story of one clan of the Kwekas: how the ancestor of this clan knew there was going to be a flood, and how he built a house made out of clay where he is going to live under the water while the flood is on.10
He also was told creation stories and of the Potlatches that had been given by his ancestors. Giving Potlatches, his father instructed him, was the only way to maintain his good name. To this end, he must not spend his money foolishly, but, instead, save, lend, and continue the Potlatch tradition.11
However, his mother died while he was young and his father began to lose his eyesight. Under these conditions, his brother arranged for him to be admitted in 1876 to the mission boarding school run by the Anglican James Hall at Alert Bay. He was a reluctant recruit.
It was hard. I cried for nearly a week. Mr. and Mrs. Hall did all they could to make me forget my feelings, but it was very hard to forget it, for I had never been away from my parents while they were living, and I never was away from my brother.… While I was in school the first week, they tried to teach me how to write and spell, but I couldn’t do anything for I didn’t want to learn. I only wanted to get back to my home.12
At the school, he was given a new name. “Mr. Hall gave me my name when he baptized me. I got the name Nowell because a Sunday school teacher in England wanted Mr. Hall to give me his name, and they say that he was my godfather when I was baptized, and he used to send me presents every Christmas.”13
Initially, he was the only male student and he boarded, along with the girls, in the missionary’s home. It was only after he had been there for several years that a dormitory was built and more boys were enrolled in the school, a development that eased his loneliness. Once, when asked to assist in cleaning the toilet, he swore at the missionary’s wife. When he resisted being punished for this, he was beaten on his back and shoulders and locked away in a small room without food. He escaped by jumping out a window and running to his grandfather’s cabin, with Rev. Hall in close pursuit. When told that Hall wanted to beat Charles, his grandfather grabbed a piece of the wood he had been unloading from a canoe and warned the missionary he had better leave if he himself did not wish to be beaten. His grandfather let Charles live at his house for a week. The boy was persuaded to return to school only after the grandfather met with the missionary and the Indian agent, and extracted a promise that corporal punishment would be administered only in response to very serious disobedience. Charles also explained that he had been brought up not to cry, no matter how badly he had been hurt. That was why he had not cried when he had been beaten. This stoicism had served only to further enrage the missionary, making the initial beating worse. After that meeting, according to his memoir, when Charles fell afoul of the rules, the principal would call him into his office, explain that his feelings had been hurt by Charles’s behaviour, and then let him go.14 Despite their initial conflicts, Charles came to have fond memories of Rev. Hall, recording that he spoke Aboriginal languages, and ate and fed the children “Indian food” at the school. And, when Charles’s brother fetched him away from the school to visit their ailing father before he died, Hall raised no objections.15
Charles came down with whooping cough at Alert Bay when he was about fourteen. Although his situation was dire, he was nursed back to health by a fellow student, Maggie, with whom he was in love. When she, in turn, fell ill, Charles was allowed to sit by her and, upon her death, allowed to stand vigil over her.16
He later went to the Anglican school at Metlakatla. There, he was caught writing love letters to a young girl who lived in a nearby village. When the principal, Bishop William Ridley, confronted Charles with the existence of the letters, Charles maintained that he loved the girl and wished to marry her. Ridley told Charles he was sending him home, since he was only causing trouble for the school.17
In his memoirs, Daniel Kennedy, an Assiniboine man, recounted, “In 1886, at the age of twelve years, I was lassoed, roped and taken to the Government School at Lebret. Six months after I enrolled, I discovered to my chagrin that I had lost my name and an English name had been tagged on me in exchange.”18 Until he went to school, his name had been Ochankuga’he, meaning “pathmaker.” The name honoured a trek his grandfather had led through a Prairie blizzard.19 The new name, Daniel Kennedy, referred to the Old Testament’s Daniel of the lion’s den.20 The school interpreter later told Kennedy, “When you were brought here, for purposes of enrolment, you were asked to give your name and when you did, the Principal remarked that there were no letters in the alphabet to spell this little heathen’s name and no civilized tongue could pronounce it. ‘We are going to civilize him, so we will give him a civilized name,’ and that was how you acquired this brand new whiteman’s name.”21
Kennedy lost more than his name on that first day.
In keeping with the promise to civilize the little pagan, they went to work and cut off my braids, which, incidentally, according to the Assiniboine traditional custom, was a token of mourning—the closer the relative, the closer the cut. After my haircut, I wondered in silence if my mother had died, as they had cut my hair close to the scalp. I looked in the mirror to see what I looked like. A Hallowe’en pumpkin stared back at me and that did it. If this was civilization, I didn’t want any part of it. I ran away from school, but I was captured and brought back. I made two more attempts, but with no better luck. Realizing that there was no escape, I resigned myself to the task of learning the three Rs.22
For Kennedy, even the architecture of the school was foreign and forbidding. He asked readers to “visualize for yourselves the difficulties encountered by an Indian boy who had never seen the inside of a house; who had lived in buffalo skin teepees in winter and summer; who grew up with a bow and arrow.”23
Kennedy was a successful student who came to enjoy positive relations with Qu’Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard. In Kennedy’s opinion, Hugonnard’s “genial and engaging personality won for him a host of friends in all ranks of our Canadian nation. His tact and diplomacy commanded the respect and admiration of all who came in contact with him.”24 He also credited Hugonnard and High River principal Albert Lacombe with making it possible for him and a number of other students to pursue their education after leaving residential school. Kennedy, for example, attended St. Boniface College.25 He did not, however, become a priest. By 1899, he was back in the Northwest, serving as an assistant to an Indian Affairs farming instructor.26 By 1901, he was an interpreter and general assistant for the Assiniboine Indian agency.27 Two years later, he received an engineering certificate.28
In 1906, Kennedy sought assistance from Wolseley, Saskatchewan, lawyer Levi Thompson to petition Ottawa to allow members of the Assiniboine agency to have a holiday for a sports day and promenade. At the same time, he promised they would not participate in Sun Dances. Local Indian Affairs officials and the principal of the Qu’Appelle school feared that the proposed promenade would turn into a dance. Despite their concerns, Indian Affairs granted the application.29
In 1893, six-year-old Mike Mountain Horse, a member of the Blood (Kainai) First Nation in what is now southern Alberta, was enrolled in the Anglican boarding school on the Blood Reserve. His brother Fred was already attending the school and was there to provide guidance on his first day.
My Indian clothes, consisting of blanket, breech cloth, leggings, shirt and moccasins, were removed. Then my brother took me into another room where I was placed in a steaming brown fibre paper tub full of water. Yelling blue murder, I started to jump out, but my brother held on to me and I was well scrubbed and placed before a heater to dry. Next came Mr. Swainson [the principal] with a pair of shears. I was again placed in a chair. Zip went one of my long braids to the floor: the same with the other side. A trim was given as a finish to my haircut. My brother again took me in charge. “Don’t cry any more,” he said. “You are going to get nice clothes.” Mrs. Swainson then came into the room with a bundle of clothes for me: knee pants, blouse to match with a wide lace collar, a wee cap with an emblem sewn in front, and shoes. Thus attired I strutted about like a young peacock before the other pupils.30
The education at the school was conducted in English, but, Mountain Horse recalled, the church services were held in Siksika (Blackfoot). To encourage students to learn English, the principal offered to honour any request for a gift that was written in English. To test the system, Mountain Horse requested, and received, a pound of butter and a can of milk. It was, he discovered, more butter than he had use for, and he threw it out.31
Although one of the key goals of the school was to convert the students to the Christian faith, Mountain Horse wrote that “the powerful sway of the new was not sufficient to entirely dethrone the many spirits to whom we had previously made our offerings.”32 In the end, however, he said, “The majority of the Indian youth have no alternative than to embrace the religion of the white man as taught in their schools.”33
Mountain Horse went on to attend the Calgary industrial school.34 After graduating, he went to work for the Mounted Police, served in the First World War, returned to work for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, wrote the manuscript of his book on the Bloods, and ended his career as a railway labourer.35
In the early decades of the twentieth century, First Nations people began to organize nationally to advance their political rights. One of the first national leaders to emerge was Frederick O. Loft, a Mohawk from the Six Nations Reserve. Loft served in the First World War as a lieutenant, despite being fifty-two years old when war broke out. A graduate of the Ontario Business College, he spent much of his working life as a clerk in the Ontario Asylum for the Insane.36 In 1918, he helped found the League of Indians of Canada, which was inspired in part by the historic Iroquois League, which bound together five—and, later, six—First Nations in the eastern part of the continent. According to an early League of Indians circular,
The first Aim of the League then is to claim and protect the rights of all Indians in Canada by legitimate and just means; second, absolute control in retaining possession or dispensation of our lands; that all questions and matters relative to individual and national wellbeing of Indians shall rest with the people and their dealings with the Government shall be by and through their respective band Councils at all times.37
Indian Affairs aggressively worked to undermine the league. Deputy Indian Affairs Minister Duncan Campbell Scott viewed Loft as a subversive and forbade his department to co-operate with him.38
In 1909—a decade before the league was established—Loft wrote a series of articles for Saturday Night magazine that were highly critical of Canada’s Aboriginal policies. He took particular aim at residential schooling. His starting position was that Aboriginal people should not be viewed as “a wilful antagonist or oppositionist to the effort that has been and is being made to school him.”39 He wrote:
The Indian child has been carried to school, at once alienating it from parental and home affection and ties. Under such circumstances, is it possible, I would ask, for him to be expected to learn what is taught when the mind must be burdened with loneliness and a desire to be home, perhaps constantly planning a means of stealing away at the first opportunity? This is not so serious as the fact that children are housed in a congested state that is often unsanitary and comfortless. These schools prove veritable death-traps for them, for they are, it is contended, peculiarly susceptible to the dreaded disease phthysis [tuberculosis].40
Loft knew what he was talking about. He had spent a year at the Mohawk Institute in the 1870s.
I can frankly say that another serious evil is the false economy that is practised in denying the children a satisfactory measure of diet, and that in the midst of plenty produced on the farm and garden by the labor of the boys. I recall the times when working in the fields I was actually too hungry to be able to walk, let alone work. When parents visited the child, invariably the first question was, Did you bring anything to eat? In winter the rooms and beds were so cold that it took half the night before I got warm enough to fall asleep. What chance of life has a child under such conditions? When these conditions at the boarding schools and institutes become known to the parents it is no wonder they hesitate to send their children back after a vacation. If a child is forced to return, the chances are he will in time make good his escape, and perhaps not return to the home. In such a case, it is not going far from the mark to say that schooling with him becomes extremely distasteful.41
Loft was not impressed by the vocational training offered at the residential schools, either. He observed, “As for the various trades that are supposed to be taught in them, I am convinced, from what I have observed myself, a pupil would be many years becoming a full-fledged craftsman.”42 Loft was not surprised to discover that very few young Aboriginal students followed the trades in which they had been supposedly trained. He observed that one of the major problems with the approach was that many students were trained for trades for which they had no inclination. Indeed, the training, he said, started before the students were of an age to demonstrate an inclination for any specific trade.43
Loft recommended that the government follow contemporary American policy to “do away with the institutes and boarding schools [in the United States] by degrees and replace them by the spread of the day school. This is a policy of carrying education to the Indian instead of carrying him to it.”44 The day school, he wrote, “must be the outpost of Indian civilization of the young, while the ingenuous, tactful and painstaking official will be able at all times—if so disposed—to create a useful and lasting influence among the adults.”45 Loft used the Six Nations of Tuscarora as an example of the degree of interest that Aboriginal people took in education. When the Six Nations took over the schools on its reserve from the New England Company, it increased salaries, hired qualified teachers, and implemented the Ontario curriculum. Similar advances could be made elsewhere if the government would “give the Indian a little more latitude beyond feeling he is an infant, subject to the orders of petty and crude officialdom at Ottawa.”46 Loft also opposed church involvement in the schools, calling on the government either to cast aside its dependence on the churches and assume complete control of First Nations education, or to “pull up stakes and quit the job.” Among the first things Indian Affairs would have to do, he wrote, would be to hire a “recognized educationist.”47
Peter Kelly was born in 1885 in Skidegate, on Haida Gwaii, British Columbia. Although his parents had converted to Methodism shortly before his birth, and were discouraged by the local missionary from telling traditional stories, Kelly grew up hearing the Haida legends from his family, and was able to retell them in his old age.48 As a boy, Kelly resolved to be true to both his religion and his Aboriginal ancestry, a particularly difficult endeavour at a time when missionaries saw their task as one of stamping out Aboriginal cultural observance.49 His first schooling was at the Skidegate Methodist mission day school, where a series of missionary women taught about thirty children ranging in age from “toddlers up to the late teens.” The school was a lean-to that had been built onto the missionary’s home. As was the case in many day schools, attendance was erratic, particularly when families had to leave the community to fish or collect berries. By his own estimate, Kelly figured he attended the school a total of less than one year over a six-year period.50
In 1897, his mother and stepfather attended a Methodist revival meeting in Mission City on the Fraser River. There, they were persuaded to send their son to the Coqualeetza Institute in Chilliwack, British Columbia.51 However, first they kept him at home for another three years, preparing him to follow in his stepfather’s trade as a boat builder.52 In 1900, he and another boy became the first two Haida students at Coqualeetza.
He had positive memories of the school principal, Rev. Joseph Hall, but he also recalled being chastised for whistling while he was completing farm chores on a Sunday. To the missionaries, whistling on the Lord’s Day amounted to doing the Devil’s work. On another occasion, his use of the sort of language he learned while working on fishing boats led a teacher to threaten to wash his mouth out with soap. The principal prevented the teacher from making good on his threat.
It was quickly recognized that Kelly was an excellent student. As a result, soon he was exempted from the rigours of the half-day system.53 At the end of three years, he and one other student were the first Coqualeetza students to write and pass the provincial high school entrance examinations.54 Rather than attending high school, however, he returned to Skidegate, where he became a day school teacher. He held that position for five years. He later served as a lay preacher in the Methodist Church, a United Church minister, president of the Allied Tribes of British Columbia, and president of the Conference of the United Church in British Columbia.55
In 1876, Chief Peyasiw-awasis (Thunderchild), along with Mistahimaskwa (Big Bear) and a number of other chiefs, rejected Treaty 6, which covered parts of central Alberta and Saskatchewan. However, after the collapse of the buffalo hunt, he signed the Treaty in 1879. He was a strong advocate of First Nations’ Treaty rights and traditional cultural practices. He was against having a Roman Catholic school on his reserve, and eventually led a movement to tear the school down. He was not an opponent of schooling, but wanted it to be within First Nations control. Under government pressure, he allowed the Catholics to re-establish the school. He was jailed in 1897 for participating in a give-away dance. In later years, the government threatened to depose him for his support of traditional practices.
Thunderchild’s Band originally was located on good farmland west of Battleford in what is now Saskatchewan. To make the land available to Euro-Canadian settlers, early in the twentieth century, the federal government began to pressure the band to agree to relocate. The pressure created divisions in the band, which eventually agreed to be relocated to Brightsand Lake, Saskatchewan, in 1909. This relocation left the band without a day school.
In 1910, Chief Peyasiw-awasis requested that the government live up to its Treaty obligations and build a school on the reserve.56 Thirteen years later, there was still no school. That led Thunderchild to write a lengthy letter to Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott.
My people find it very hard to part with their children to have them go to school. It is not that they do not desire to have them educated but they are not favourable to Boarding Schools and I must give you their reasons so that you do not think this is some idle fancy.
I am not going to touch on the side of sentiment, that part of it you will readily understand, knowing the Indian as you do.
Then we found that the continual supervision in everyday work meant the killing of all initiative in the pupils. They came back with good records, knowing English well and other things taught to them but they were neither white men nor Indians. They don’t seem to know how to make the start. They had lost the ordinary Indian mode of livelihood and were unable to do as the white man did. They were victims of their educational opportunity.
The sense of ownership and the desire to increase what is owned is a thing that should be developed in childhood stage. All this is lost to the child in the Boarding School while there he works at cows, horses, cleans rooms, plows and helps in harvest but he feels that he is getting nothing in return. I myself know he is actually working for himself, but he does not see it that way. He has no chance therefor to couple work with its reward. This teaches him to look upon work as a drudgery and in many cases this idea pervades through life.57
He wrote that if there were a day school on the reserve, parents would “have the children in our care which is natural.” They would learn to read and write at school, and learn from their parents “the way of rustling around for a living.” Living among their own belongings would teach them to care for them. If boys, for example, had their own cows or horses, they would “develop a sense of ownership and that means a great deal.” As well, Thunderchild wrote, the student would be “growing up and developing in his own natural elements.”58
Thunderchild knew he was asking the government to make an exception to existing policy. Such an exception was justified, he suggested, because he was “the last of the old chiefs who took part in the first treaty. To me there personally was promised a school in my Reserve if I and my people desired it.” Having this Treaty promised fulfilled would “give to my grand children at least one heritage which would be of real and lasting value to them and my one remaining and consuming ambition. If I can do this item I can leave the world in peace.”59 Thunderchild did not persuade Duncan Campbell Scott. Instead, Thunderchild built the school with his own band’s funds, essentially shaming the government into paying for the teacher.60
Edward Ahenakew was born in 1885 and raised on the Plains Cree reserve of Ah-tah-ka-koop in what is now Saskatchewan. He attended Emmanuel College, the Anglican boarding school at Prince Albert, then worked as a teacher and was ordained as an Anglican priest. He spent much of his life ministering to Aboriginal people. He was also active in the growing Aboriginal political movement, serving as the Alberta and Saskatchewan president of the League of Indians of Canada. In 1923, while recovering from an illness that had forced him to drop out of medical school, he wrote an unfinished manuscript that would not be published for another fifty years.61
His book is made up of two sections: the first part is the memoirs of Chief Peyasiwawasis as told to Ahenakew; the second part consists of the memoirs of Old Keyam, a fictional character created by Ahenakew. A boarding school graduate, Old Keyam, who was once energetic, had “suddenly slackened all efforts” and taken on a name that means “What does it matter?” or “I do not care!”62
Although the book does not discuss Old Keyam’s boarding school experience, it is rich with his observations on the impact of residential school education. Nearly a century ago, Ahenakew was documenting what has come to be termed the residential school system’s “legacy.” On returning to his home community from school, he said that a former residential school student “is in a totally false position. He does not fit into the Indian life, nor does he find that he can associate with the whites. He is forced to act a part. He is now one thing, now another, and that alone can brand him as an erratic and unreliable fellow” who sits on the fence dividing the white and Aboriginal worlds, but belongs to neither. He thought the residential school might make sense in certain remote areas, but “for most Indian children, I hold that boarding schools are unnatural, that they are contrary to our whole way of life.”63
He said that, thanks to their highly regimented life, former students were like old-style cars that required cranking before they would start. The residential schools, he said, have taken from their students “all the initiative there may be in an Indian. He will work only when he feels like it. He will never take advice from his elders amongst us.” He described the File Hills Colony, which had been established in southern Saskatchewan for former students, as a tribute to its founder, Indian Commissioner W. A. Graham, but also as a continuance of the residential school model of telling First Nations people what to do.64
In some cases, the return to the reserve had an even more tragic outcome. Old Keyam said, “Again and again I have seen children come home from boarding schools only to die, having lost during their time at school all the natural joys of association with their own families, victims of an educational policy, well-meant but not over-wise.”65
Old Keyam contemplated taking responsibility for Indian education away from the churches, whose only merit was in the fact that they “voluntarily undertook work that no one else was willing to do.” He suggested that poor day school attendance—the perennial justification for residential schooling—could be best addressed by making each reserve a school district and giving it the resources to hire qualified teachers.66 Old Keyam was also critical of the quality of the education offered at day schools, asking why First Nations people should be saddled with unqualified teachers. “The Indian has paid more than any school tax. The Treaty stands as witness to that.”67
Ahenakew devoted much of his life to teaching. Writing in his own voice, he said of the day school on Little Pine Reserve in 1921, “I had never seen a more desolate looking place.” It was “the pitiful ruin of a government educational enterprise—the result of inefficiency, indifference, and want of inspiration.” Working with the residents and Archdeacon John Mackay, he managed to get the school reopened. He played a similar role on Thunderchild’s reserve, working with the elderly chief to open the day school on the reserve in 1923.68
Joseph Dion was raised on the Onion Lake Reserve in the 1890s. At first, he went to the day school, but, not long after he started attending, the school burned down. Referring to the school policy of assigning each student a number, Dion wrote, “They gave me No. 7 as my brand, so I was one of the very first in the Onion Lake R.C. Boarding School. William Smith was the first to enter, hence his number was one. Maggie Delaney, who later married a clerk of the Hudson’s Bay store, A. L. N. Martineau, was the first girl to be enrolled.”69
He had vivid memories of the work done by the staff. Sister St. Olivier, for example, not only did the cooking, but also was in charge of seeing that the cows were milked, the chickens fed, and the supplies purchased.
The baking alone was quite a chore. The homemade oven had to be fired a long time before it was ready, then all the coals and ashes raked out, and the pans of dough hauled at least 200 feet from the kitchen where the setting and kneading had been done. Oh, yes, the cook had to run to the church three times a day to ring the bell; and this was at seven o’clock, at twelve and six sharp.70
Classes were held in a log house that was over ninety metres from the boarding house. In Dion’s recollection, Brother Vermet, the priest in charge of the dormitory, often threatened to use his thick leather belt on the boys, but, in the end, always let them off with a scolding. When the boys were not in class, they spent much of their time sawing and splitting firewood. “This was carried by the armful to the kitchen and sister’s house, to the school and bakery.”71 The only holiday he could recall was Dominion Day, when the students were allowed to go home from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.72
Disease cast a long shadow over his school days. Four of his siblings died of diphtheria. Dion attributed his survival to the care he received from the sisters in the school.
They pulled us successfully through several epidemics like measles, chicken pox and scarlet fever, but they were practically helpless against the scourge of TB.
The nine years of my happy school life were marred by the occasional death among the children. I began to notice early in life that the disease of the lungs, the Indian term for TB, was making inroads in the ranks of our young people. My schoolmates and I were not long in concluding that the lung sickness was fatal, hence as soon as we saw or heard of someone spitting blood, we immediately branded him for the grave. He had consumption: he had to die.73
His good friend Lazare was one of the students so stricken.
His bed in our dormitory was next to mine and I could hear him at all times of the night coughing and tossing around while he gasped for breath, yet he never whimpered. As the boy got worse and weaker the sisters moved him to their own house where one of them watched over him continually. How those nuns could ever stand the ordeal is beyond belief for there were but a very few of them and each one had a very heavy list of daily duties to perform. At his request I was permitted to visit the boy occasionally. He was no longer afraid: in fact he spoke quite freely about going, if only he could see mommy and dad before he left.74
Dion left the school at the age of fifteen with a Grade Eight education.75 He later became a day school teacher at Kehiwin’s Reserve. The school was little more than a shack, sixteen by eighteen feet (4.8 by 5.5 metres) in diameter.76 The federal government provided next to nothing in the way of supplies.
Six reversible heavy cardboard charts, four by two feet in size graced three walls of the buildings. These charts, sent to us by the Sisters at Onion Lake, proved to be our pictorial mainstay for several years. A few picture books completed the outfit. Nine pamphlets containing instructions to teachers advised in part that all pupils were to be registered, ages given, and number of days attendance of each pupil recorded. There was, however, no register, nor writing paper and pencils for use of the teacher.77
After three years, he quit in frustration, although he went back to teaching in 1921.78
Enos Montour attended the Mount Elgin Institute near Muncey, Ontario, from 1910 to 1914.79 Many years later, he wrote a lightly fictionalized account of his time at the school. He titled it Brown Tom’s School Days, a play on Thomas Hughes’s 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days, itself a lightly fictionalized account of Hughes’s own days at a British boarding school. Montour’s manuscript paints an affectionate, but not uncritical, portrait of Mount Elgin, opening with a conversation between Brown Tom and a fellow student on the eve of their graduation from the school. Tom tells his friend, “I’ll kinda hate to leave this old place. It’s been rough but kind underneath. I think they meant well by us, don’t you? But I sure hated it, that first night four years ago. I was that lonely I coulda howled to the moon.”80
In those early days, the “old familiar Reserve world had disappeared.” The new students were “looked upon as curious and their homesickness not sympathized with in the least,” and “electric lights, ringing bells and strict discipline intensified this unwelcome strangeness.”81 Tom quickly found a friend with whom he would hunt and fish, dig for apples under the snow in the winter, and go swimming in summer.82 They would eventually tease the new boys of later years, telling them to just wait until they got to try the “Mush ’n’ Milk” and that the lights dimmed in the evening because the room had become too warm.83
Other students, Tom notes, went beyond this gentle teasing in their treatment of younger students, “forever making the lives of the more retiring ones miserable. Their influence was felt in strange and differing ways. These bullies were very jealous and tenacious of their power. As for the timid souls, they simply submitted and by doing so, survived.”84
The students at the school came from a variety of backgrounds. Some were the children of people Tom called “squatters,” who lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Others were the children of comparatively well-to-do high-steel workers. The parents of other students were successful farmers who wanted their children to have better education. And, there were “waifs and strays, orphaned children sent here for shelter. Though they shared the regular life and diet of the school, their lot was made harder due to the lack of those softening influences that letters from home, and a little spending money from time to time can bring.”85
Tom’s parents were squatters; their home was rundown and drafty. But he loved it, noting that only on the reserve could he and his friends “really be themselves. Among the Anglo-Saxon people they were tense and on guard. They could return here when the outside world had become too cruel and unfriendly. Here they came to people who accepted them without lengthy explanations. Here they found that response from fellow-creatures so essential to human happiness.”86
Tom described himself as a citizen of three worlds. First was the reserve, “warm, secure, and not too sanitary…. It was the one whose influence was indelibly stamped on his psychic life.” The second, the “White man’s world,” through which he only passed, was “strange and challenging.” Although its residents meant well, they could never understand him. Third, there was the school, which placed “his romantic soul in the strait-jacket of the daily grind. It was neither Indian nor white. It was half n’ half—like milk and water.” He might live in the school and do his school work, but his “soul would go on dreaming as it had done on those warm April evenings on the Reserve.”87
Food looms large in Brown Tom’s School Days, particularly the “Loaf ’n’ Lard” feasts the boys would organize for themselves. Money earned by doing garden work would buy the ingredients for the “gundgeon,” or pan bread, which was the centerpiece of the meal. To purchase the ingredients, although sometimes they received permission, most often the boys would have to sneak into town.88 After it was prepared:
Little was said until only the crumbs remained of the long awaited meal. Usually the Loaf was consumed without benefit of knife. It was simply broken in two and it disappeared by the removal first of the soft centre. The outer crust was left to the last, and in rare cases, where it was not wholly consumed, it would be preserved as delectable medium of Barter. In most cases, while one boy finished the remaining crumbs, the other carefully licked off the remaining evidence of Lard, still clinging to the paper wrapper.89
Montour described the food supply as “plenty, but it was not enough.”90 The boys “were always hungry. Grub was the beginning and end of all conversations. This was of course, more true of the pre-High School years. They were not really undernourished or ill-fed. They had simply a seemingly unlimited capacity for food—and they were quite omnivorous.”91 Much of the bullying took place over food, as the smaller boys often sold their food in advance. Using language evocative of the Biblical story of the hunter Esau, who was forced to sell his birthright for a bowl of lentils (pottage), Montour described the boys as “Little Indian Esaus,” who were “forever selling their Food-Right for a mess of potage [sic]. The ‘Thursday cookies’ were bartered for a juicy apple in mid-afternoon, or for bits of Candy, with accretions from overall pockets.”92 At mealtimes, a student might receive a secret message reminding him of the need to pay a food debt.93
Romances developed between the girls who were charged with milking the cows and the boys who were charged with guarding them. Love notes were hidden between two slices of bread that a kitchen worker might pass to a loved one.94
Charles Nowell, his wife, and mother-in-law. When he first arrived at the Alert Bay, British Columbia, school, Nowell recalled that he “cried for nearly a week.”
Royal British Columbia Museum, British Columbia Archives, PN00994.
Frederick O. Loft, former residential school student and founder of the League of Indians of Canada.
Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN 3629837.
Mike Mountain Horse. In his memoir of his time at the Anglican school on the Blood Reserve in southern Alberta, he wrote of how upon arrival, “My Indian clothes, consisting of blanket, breech cloth, leggings, shirt and moccasins, were removed.”
Glenbow Archives, NB-44-92.
Chief Peyasiw-awasis, ca. 1920. Peyasiw-awasis (Thunderchild) called on the federal government to establish day schools on reserves so that parents would “have the children in our care which is natural.”
Saskatchewan Archives Board, R-A17725
Edward Ahenakew, a former residential school student, wrote, “Again and again I have seen children come home from boarding schools only to die, having lost during their time at school all the natural joys of association with their own families, victims of an educational policy, well-meant but not over-wise.”
Saskatchewan Archives Board, R-B11359.
Joseph Dion recalled that at the Roman Catholic school in Onion Lake, he and his classmates, “were not long in concluding that the lung sickness was fatal, hence as soon as we saw or heard of someone spitting blood, we immediately branded him for the grave. He had consumption: he had to die.”
Glenbow Archives, NA-2815-1
Enos Montour ended his lightly fictionalized memoir of life at the Mohawk Institute by asking if this had “all been a mistake? Had these gifts not only served to unfit them for the old Reserve life without being able to promise them very much out in the great big Anglo-Saxon world? Had it been for better or worse?”
The United Church of Canada Archives, 76.001 P4091.
Eleanor Brass recalled that the dinners at the File Hills, Saskatchewan, school consisted “of watery soup with no flavour, and never any meat.”
Courtesy of Regina Leader-Post (Photographer: Roy Antal).
While at the Lytton, British Columbia, school, Simon Baker led a successful protest to get students more food. He told the principal if the boys were going to be worked like men, they should be fed like men.
University of British Columbia Archives, UBC 35.1/152-7.
John Tootoosis said that at the Delmas, Saskatchewan, school, “They washed away practically everything from our minds, all the things an Indian needed to help himself, to think the way a human person should in order to survive.”
Saskatchewan Archives Board, R-A7662.
George Manuel said that at the Kamloops, British Columbia, school, “Every Indian student smelled of hunger.”
University of British Columbia Archives, George Manuel, UBC 1.1/16108.
At the Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, school, the teachers relied on “orders, threats and ridicule,” coupled with regular pokes in the ribs and knocks on the knuckles, administered with a wooden pointer. As a result, Isabelle Knockwood grew up in “perpetual fear of saying and doing anything.”
Courtesy of St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Mary John said that at the Fraser Lake, British Columbia, school, “The boys were thrashed for speaking to the girls, and the girls were thrashed for writing notes to the boys.”
Northern BC Archives UNBC, Bridget Moran fonds, Accession #2008.3.1.22.6.
Montour described most of the boys as being healthy. “But occasionally the silent killer TB showed up amongst the enrolment. Some quiet, inoffensive lad would grow unusually quiet and listless.”95 In the manuscript, he left a description of a friend’s death. “As his creeping, insidious disease came over him, he began to lose interest in all boyish activity. He coughed frequently and his energy was sapped away. His chums tried to interest him in their games and outings, but he only smiled wanly and told them to leave him out. He didn’t feel like it.” Eventually, the boy was taken from the school. “An emptiness remained where the gentle boy had lived with his pals.”96
Montour remained a member of the Methodist Church and, later, the United Church. As a student, he said, he submitted to the government’s religious program in the same way he accepted “the handouts of clothing, food and shelter.” But, he said, he “sometimes wondered if the Longhouse religion back home wasn’t as satisfying as this.”97 He recognized that each missionary
discouraged the Longhouse religion and the use of native language. They were being weaned away from the native culture, as though it had no spiritual or aesthetic value. They would have been shocked to hear a native teacher speak of a song in the Mohawk language as ‘the sweetest music this side of Heaven’. Indian languages were not heard about the Institution. Occasionally Indian might be spoken in a low voice or some naughty uncouth native word might be used by the younger chaps.98
Montour ended the manuscript with Tom’s graduating and having to decide whether he would take the road leading to the reserve or the road to the “great Anglo-Saxon world of competition and continuous struggle.”99 As Tom pondered these choices, the author suggests that teachers were silently asking themselves if this had “all been a mistake? Had these gifts not only served to unfit them for the old Reserve life without being able to promise them very much out in the great big Anglo-Saxon world? Had it been for better or worse?”100 It is a devastating ending to a gentle book.
Simon Baker was born in 1911 in British Columbia. His mother, Susan Capilano, had been taken out of residential school by her parents after a year or two of schooling because she was continually punished for speaking Squamish.101 As a young boy, he was sent to the Anglican school in Lytton, British Columbia. He later recorded,
We were the first ones to arrive. I can always remember seeing this great big building. I couldn’t figure it out. We all felt a bit excited. We were taken into the building and shown around. So we were all taken downstairs and they gave us school clothing. They took our own clothes and put them away and that was the last time we saw our clothes.
That first night, he and his brother Joe slept on the floor because they were not used to sleeping on beds.102 In his discussion of the school in his memoirs, Baker was measured in his comments, at one point observing, “I guess we were satisfied to have a bed, a place to eat, a place for recreation, a field outside to play in.”103
But the overall atmosphere of the school was repressive and regimented: “We were just told what to do all the time. In fact, we had to answer to bells all the time like well-trained rats. A bell would ring to wake us, another bell for chores, bell for meals, for chapel, for school, for study time, for bedtime.”104 The teachers might not have been mean, but, when he was thirteen, he and his friends witnessed the beating of a fellow student at the hands of the farm supervisor. The boys had been working in the barn when one boy decided to urinate in the loft rather than climb down and use the out-house. The urine leaked through the floor onto the farm supervisor. Enraged, he beat the boy with a leather strap. Baker wrote, “Maybe he did a naughty thing, but he never should have gotten a licking like that.” Angered and frightened, the five boys jumped the train to Vancouver that night. Baker and his friends made it back to his grandmother, who helped them get to Squamish, where they hid out in the bush. Eventually, a police officer found them and made them return to school.105 He and his friends ran away a second time, and were returned by the same police officer. He said they were not punished for running away, but were made to “obey more rules.”106
Baker also recalled being beaten up by older boys at the school “for something they said I did wrong. I never knew what that was most of the time. I never gave up, though, because my brother Joe used to help me out.”107
In his opinion, the students were underfed and overworked. They were also not always able to enjoy the fruits of their own labour. Rather than being consumed by students, butter from the creamery was sold, along with the vegetables and fruit the school farm produced to help the school cover its costs.108 Baker convinced the other boys at the school that the only way they could improve their rations was to threaten a strike. Acting as the students’ representative, Baker told the principal that they were being worked like men, so they should be fed like men. And, if the students did not get an improvement in diet, they would steal the food. The principal complimented Baker on his honesty and agreed to their demands.109
Baker’s stay at the school, like that of so many other students, was marked by tragedy. Another brother, Jim, died of spinal meningitis at the Lytton school.
I used to hear him crying at night. I asked the principal to take him to the hospital. He didn’t. After about two weeks, my brother was in so much pain, he was going out of his mind. I pleaded with the principal for days to take him to a doctor. “For god’s sake, you better do something for my brother.” They finally took him to the small hospital in Lytton. Each day I would ask how he was doing and they’d say he’s doing all right. On the third day, on a Sunday night, the principal’s wife came in, spoke to her husband and they called me into the office. There they told me that my brother had just passed away. I went to the hospital with the principal. There lay my brother Jim in a room that was like a morgue.110
The school provided a coffin, but, since it was too short, it was necessary to break his knees to fit him into the coffin. When his grandmother came up to collect the body, she made the school order a new coffin.111
Baker left the Lytton school at age fifteen, having completed Grade Eight. “I knew there was nothing to stay home for and I wanted to be with the boys at the school, my bed and the three meals a day that I was used to.” He told his grandmother that he wanted to continue his education, but she said, “Son, I don’t want you to go to white man’s school because I have been teaching you our way of living and I want you to be the leader of our family here on the Capilano reserve.” Although Baker was frustrated by his grandmother’s decision, he decided not to oppose her.112
Eleanor Brass was born in Saskatchewan in 1905, the daughter of Fred Dieter and Marybelle Cote. Both of them had attended residential schools in their youth. According to family lore, both the Roman Catholic priest and the Presbyterian principal gave Fred’s parents money to convince them to send him to their respective schools. Eventually, he went to the Presbyterian school at File Hills because it was closer to his parents. Marybelle had been educated at the Presbyterian school at Kamsack. Both of them also attended the Regina industrial school.113
Eleanor’s father’s experiences at the Regina school became part of family legend. He passed on stories of swimming, skating, lacrosse, soccer, and baseball (which lagged far behind soccer in popularity). The school organized brass bands, as well as dances, discussion groups, and debates. Some of the school’s graduates were sent to the Hampton Institute in Virginia for further training in missionary and medical work. In her memoirs, Brass wrote that “those of us who are descendants of the pupils often wonder why this technical school and others like it were not kept open.”114
Her parents were married at the File Hills boarding school. Principal Kate Gillespie and her sister Janet Gillespie, the school matron, made the wedding arrangements and baked the wedding cake. The married couple then moved to a property Dieter had been farming on the Peepeekisis Reserve, a reserve that would form the nucleus of the File Hills Colony for former residential school students.115
Although his accounts of his experiences in boarding and residential schools had been positive, Fred Dieter wanted his own children sent to “the white day school.” However, in 1911, the local Indian agent informed him that his daughter Eleanor and her seven-year-old sister would have to attend the File Hills school, just over nineteen kilometres from the Dieter farm.
Brass herself painted very positive memories of the first principal she had there, the Reverend H. C. Sweet, whose name, she felt, suited him.116 His replacement was, to Brass’s mind, “more like a hardened dictator,” and, under his administration, the strap was in constant use. After being caught passing notes through the windows of the school hospital to fellow students who were being held in quarantine, Brass was locked in a room with nothing to eat for a day and no access to a toilet. When released, she was slapped by the matron for wetting herself, put to bed, and strapped across her back. Brass’s cries were so loud they reached the boys in their dormitory, who called out to the matron to stop.117
One of her fellow students, Chief Pasqua’s twelve-year-old son, who could speak no English, found the school very alienating and ran away, only to be brought back, stripped, made to lay face down on the bed, and beaten.118 On one occasion, one of Eleanor Brass’s cousins and a friend ran away from the school. They too were strapped on their return. “Their hands were swollen and they looked like boxing mitts and their arms had huge welts. Then the principal chained my cousin’s ankles together so that whenever she tried to walk she fell down.” Fred Dieter, having caught sight of the poor shackled girl on a visit to the school, bounded up the stairs to the principal’s office, grabbed him, and ordered him, “Take those chains off that child.” He left with the warning that the principal was lucky he was getting off with a good shaking: “These are children, not criminals, and I don’t ever want to see cruelty like this again.”119
Brass’s mother spoke Saulteaux and her father spoke Cree, but they chose to speak English at home, in large measure because they feared that their children “would be held back in school if they spoke nothing but Indian languages.”120 The children were not allowed to speak Aboriginal languages at the school. At the same time, Brass recalled, “The principal’s wife told us girls who were brought up in File Hills Colony that we were no good because we couldn’t speak Cree.”121 The children tried to teach each other what they knew about Aboriginal culture. Sometimes, they would sneak off to the lake and, using a pail as a drum, hold secret powwows, always aware of the fact that they could be strapped if they were caught.122
During the winter months, parents were not allowed to visit the school. Eleanor said that was “when we went through a lot of abuse and torture.”123 The lack of access could hurt in several ways. For instance, Brass was made to wear shoes that were too large for her. She was sure that if her parents had known of her need for proper shoes, they would have provided them.124
Brass recalled that her first teacher at File Hills spent much of her time telling the children about hell and how they would end up there if they did not behave. A second, younger, teacher was more popular with the students, but she did not last. Neither teacher taught the children very much academically. In her final years at the school, as Eleanor was getting ready to go to a “white school,” a Miss Hewett took an interest in her: “She pushed me right along in my classes and even gave me extra lessons so I wouldn’t be too far behind when I entered the white school.”125
According to Brass, the dinners at File Hills consisted “of watery soup with no flavour, and never any meat.” One winter, it seemed they ate fish every day.126 Porridge at the school was either burnt or half-cooked, but students were punished for not eating their food.127 Once, the students came across barrels of apples in the school attic. Over time, the students worked their way through the apples. When the deed was discovered, they were sent to bed without a meal and, over a period of days, the children were called down to the principal’s office one by one and strapped. When it came to her turn, Brass recalled, her cries were met only with the sarcastic comment that “the Cotes are good singers,” a mocking reference to the fact that her mother and sister were well known for their singing voices.128 In fair weather, the boys would trap gophers and squirrels, and roast them over open fires to supplement their meagre diets. Sometimes, they would share these treats with the girls at the school.129
At File Hills, the students would go for walks for exercise, even in winter. Brass said the clothing was not warm enough. The three- to five-kilometre walks were particularly hard on the youngest students: “The tiny children would cry and wet their under-clothes which would soon be frozen stiff, and they would be spanked for it.”130
She had two tragic memories from her time at the school. One autumn, Archie Feather fell through the ice on the local lake and drowned. She also recalled that a seventeen-year-old boy from the Carlyle Reserve hanged himself in the barn. “The poor youth was in some kind of trouble which wasn’t so terrible but apparently it seemed that way to him. The staff could make it seem that way for they were always ready to deal out punishment.” The young man was buried on the Peepeekisis Reserve, and his family came to visit his grave every summer.131
Her father took her out of the school in 1917 and enrolled her in the local school in Abernathy, Saskatchewan. It was a terrible experience for her, marked with racism. Later, Brass attended high school in Canora, and stayed at a boarding home run by the Presbyterian Church, where she made close friends with two young Scottish girls.132 Some of her brothers went to the Brandon residential school, where “the principal was very domineering and the children were afraid of him. My brothers said after they left school and happened to meet this principal they still feared him.”133
After she had left the school, her brothers also attended File Hills. They all had a rough time. In her opinion, one brother, Russell, died of neglect. Their father had tried sending them to the village school in Lorlie, Saskatchewan, but had to send them to the boarding school when the discrimination the children experienced in the school culminated in the school board’s refusing to accept Aboriginal students.134
In 1912, twelve-year-old John Tootoosis Jr. and his younger brother Tom were herding their family’s sheep on the Poundmaker Reserve in Saskatchewan, when they caught sight of a wagon outside their parents’ home. A priest was in earnest discussion with their father, who was far from impressed by residential schooling, though he could see the value in formal education. Former students, alienated from their families and their traditions, were already referred to on the reserve as “the crazy schoolers.” In the end, their father’s concern that the boys learn to read, write, and figure won out. He told them to eat a quick meal and put on their warm clothing; they were being sent forty kilometres away to the Delmas boarding school (also called the Thunderchild school).135 The boys enjoyed the wagon ride, but were surprised and overwhelmed by the nuns who met them on their arrival. In coming days, they discovered they would be punished for speaking Cree and risked further punishments for making mistakes in English. Many students retreated into themselves, but John Tootoosis became adversarial. In his mind, there was too much religion, too much work, a limited and inedible diet, and not enough education. He survived, in part because of the time he spent with his family in the summers. But, just when he was looking forward to further education, he was told that, at age sixteen, the government was not going to pay for any additional education for him. He returned to the reserve and, with his father’s support, slowly began to work his way back into the life of the community.136
After leaving residential school, John discovered to his frustration that his English was not serviceable. Having been taught by native French speakers at the Delmas school, he could not understand the English that was spoken in Prairie communities, and his English was burdened with both a Cree and a French accent.137
In language strikingly similar to that of Edward Ahenakew, Tootoosis gave an early critique of the residential school legacy. He said that
when an Indian comes out of these places it is like being put between two walls in a room and left hanging in the middle. On one side are all the things he learned from his people and their way of life that was being wiped out, and on the other side are the whiteman’s ways which he could never fully understand since he never had the right amount of education and could not be part of it. There he is, hanging in the middle of two cultures and he is not a whiteman and he is not an Indian.
They washed away practically everything from our minds, all the things an Indian needed to help himself, to think the way a human person should in order to survive.138
George Manuel, the future founder of the National Indian Brotherhood, carried three strong memories from his years at the Kamloops, British Columbia, residential school in the 1920s. These were: “hunger; speaking English; and being called a heathen because of my grandfather.”139
The memories of hunger dominated. He was hungry from his first day at the school until he left two and a half years later after being diagnosed with tubercular osteomyelitis (a bone infection). He was not alone: “Every Indian student smelled of hunger.”140 To feed themselves, students learned how to break into the locked vegetable bins and then surreptitiously cook pilfered potatoes in fires built to dispose of weeds.141 When they could find nothing else, they would eat dandelion roots, rosebuds, and even leaves.142 His parents were able to make the journey to the school only twice a year: once at Easter and once at Christmas. “When they came they brought deer meat and bannock and other real food you could get full on.”143
Manuel had little regard for the vocational training provided at the schools, feeling that the students were not being given even the skills they would need to succeed as farmers. Most of the boys’ time was spent performing the daily round of farm chores, using antiquated equipment that would not be found on any working farm of the day.144 His real schooling did not begin until he was hospitalized. There, the nurses not only supplied him with the sort of books he had never seen in school, but they also taught him how to read.145
Much of the students’ resistance to what was being done to them involved attempts to circumvent the rules or, more distressingly, to bully younger students. This changed at Kamloops when a group of students witnessed an older First Nations man, Alex Thomas, berating a teacher for overworking the boys. His action inspired the boys. “A teacher would raise his yardstick to strike a student. The student would grab the stick from the teacher’s hand and the rest of the class was instantly on top of the man. It was a crude and juvenile way of returning the violence to its source. But it was not submission.”146
The harsh discipline of the schools had left students unwilling to work unless they were threatened. As a result, according to Manuel, they were also unwilling to work on their return to their home communities. “We came home to relatives who had never struck a child in their lives. These people, our mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles and grandparents, failed to present themselves as a threat, when that was the only thing we had been taught to understand. Worse than that, they spoke an uncivilized and savage language and were filled with superstition.”147
In the fall of 1920, when she was seven, Mary John was told by her mother she was going to have to go to school. She and three other children from Stoney Creek, a Carrier community in the interior of British Columbia, were loaded in a stranger’s wagon, and they set off for residential school. She was excited, particularly since her mother had given her twenty-five cents to buy candy, but the excitement was tempered by the fact that her grandmother had cried at her departure. The wagoner travelled first to the nearby town of Vanderhoof, where he stopped to pick up two nuns, and then headed north. The trip took two days, and the travellers spent their nights in a tent. Finally, they arrived at Fort St. James, the site of a Roman Catholic boarding school.148
Before going to residential school, Mary had been living with her family. She had learned to run a small trapline, and to skin and stretch the pelts of the animals she caught. Much of her time was spent taking care of younger siblings while her mother and older sister dried and smoked fish and meat, and participating in the annual round of hunting, fishing, trapping, and harvesting berries.149
The meals at residential school came as a shock. They were dull and monotonous: a regular diet of porridge interspersed with boiled barley and beans, and bread covered with lard. Weeks might go by without any sight of fish or meat; sugar and jam were reserved for special occasions.150 Students who stole food or spoke their traditional languages were whipped. “The boys were thrashed for speaking to the girls, and the girls were thrashed for writing notes to the boys.”151 Her return home at the end of the school year was the scene of an emotional reunion: “Everyone cried when the wagon stopped and we were on Stoney Creek land once more. My mother and grandmother, Bella and Mark—everyone cried at the sight of us, two little girls, now eight years old, who had been away so long.”152
In 1922, the students from the aging Fort St. James school were moved to the newly opened Lejac school at Fraser Lake, British Columbia.
Everyone raced to be the first into the building and once in, we ran from room to room, turning water taps on and off and flushing the toilets. We peeked into the sewing room and the chapel. The hospital—that was a slight disappointment, with its bare walls, its few cots, and large cupboards. We very soon learned to call it the infirmary. But everything else was so new, so big. Shouts of, “Come here! Look at this!” sounded through the building.153
The excitement soon wore thin. On her second day at the school, a boy was whipped in front of the whole school for wetting his bed. Shortly after that, a girl was whipped for dropping a note by a boy’s desk. Mary recalled that before the first week was out, three boys had run away.154
Despite it all, she liked to learn and wished she were being taught more. Shy, submissive, and fearful of punishment, she spoke her own language only in whispers and never stole anything other than the sugar in the bottom of the nuns’ teacups when she was cleaning up after their meals. She was blessed with a good voice, and was granted singing lessons when other children were out clearing land for the school farm. As she recalled, she was one of the teachers’ pets.155
But it was never a happy place:
The missionaries and the nuns had to deal with one hundred and eighty Native children who were always hungry, always homesick. The boys were openly rebellious, many of them stealing or running away or getting the girls off in some corner alone with them. Unlike the boys, the female students were seldom openly rebellious. Instead, they were sullen and depressed.156
Although Mary dreaded going back to school at the end of each summer, she saw a benefit in the basic education. She was proud of her ability to speak English, to read and write, and to do arithmetic. Similarly, she valued the sewing, cooking, and other domestic skills she gained in the school.157
In 1927, when Mary was fourteen, she told her parents she did not want to go back to school. Members of her family had used an Aboriginal healer, and she feared that word of this would get back to the school, where, she thought, she might be punished for coming from a pagan family. Her mother, who needed her to help care for her five younger children, relented. Instead of going back to Lejac that fall, she joined her family in its journey to its traditional hunting grounds. They were followed, several days later, by a Mounted Police officer, sent to retrieve Mary. The police officer pointed out that Mary legally should attend school for one more year, but he did not force her parents to send her back with him. Her residential school days were over.158
When she married, Mary’s mother-in-law saw her as ‘useless’ because she did not have the sorts of skills, such as preserving dry fish and meat, preparing hides, or hunting or trapping, that she would have expected in any woman fit to be her son’s wife.159 And, as Mary’s children came of age, she had to send them to the Fraser Lake school. “It was terrible when the children went away. There was a loneliness in me for the whole year. A truck came each September and cleared the reserve of children. And suddenly after a summer of shouts and childish laughter, the village was silent.”160
Isabelle Knockwood first entered residential school at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, on September 1, 1936. Her whole family accompanied her on the walk to school that day. One brother, Henry, had already been attending for four years. But for Isabelle and siblings Joe and Rose Anne, this was the beginning of their residential school lives. They were taken into the school chapel, which, they were informed, was a sacred place. In retrospect, Knockwood said, it was “a place where a lot of children’s prayers didn’t get answered.”161
From there, they went into the parlour. With the assistance of a nun, her mother read and then signed a document that registered the children as students in the school. When a young Aboriginal woman appeared in the parlour, Isabelle’s mother began to speak to her in Mi’kmaq. The girl responded shyly in English. It was then explained that it was not permitted to speak Mi’kmaq in the school.162 Isabelle later discovered that the banned language lived an underground life. Because it was not understood by the nuns, Mi’kmaq provided the students with a tool to mock and ridicule authority. One student at Shubenacadie could send the choir into fits of laughter by fitting Mi’kmaq words to Latin hymns, providing them with new and satiric meaning.163
These, however, were small pleasures. For the students, the school was a cold, sterile, and lonely place, even though it was filled with children. “We didn’t dare hug or kiss each other. The nuns always read something bad into any kind of outward display of affection.”164
Each child pined to return home—and the boys sometimes acted on the impulse, leaving the school and attempting to return to their families. When they were caught and returned to the school, their heads would be shaved. Every time she went into the refectory, Isabelle cast a worried look for her brothers, fearful that they might have undergone such a punishment. “You should have seen the look on the faces of the sisters and cousins of the boys who walked in that refectory with bald heads. It was awful having to watch them holding back the tears and the hurt of not being able to help—or even talk to them.”165 Runaways also might be disciplined by being locked in the closet below the kitchen stairs.166
Isabelle was twelve years old when she was assigned to kitchen duty. Along with an older girl, she “made and dished out the porridge in ten large bowls and lugged the ten-gallon milk cans left at the back door by the barn boys into the kitchen and filled ten larger pitchers with skim milk.”167 She was frightened by the large knives used to slice bread and was too small to be lifting the heavy pots of boiling water used to cook the meals. Injuries were inevitable in such circumstances.
But I had to carry them to the sink and lift them to a height of three feet. I was not tall enough or strong enough to lift the pot and the Sister started yelling at me because she was afraid I’d drop it and burn her. So after a struggle I managed to get the pot on the edge of the sink. Then she lifted the lid and the steam hit my face. I ducked my head and the pot of potatoes slipped. Boiling water spilled over my clothing and shoes. I took off my shoes and could see that blisters had started to form right away. I started to cry. I was sent to the infirmary, bandaged up and sent back.168
Isabelle recalled the sewing room as one of the few safe havens in the school. The two sisters in charge of the room were gentle and patient, and allowed the girls to talk and joke among themselves as long as they were reasonably quiet.169 She also remembered with fondness the Scottish dancing the girls were taught in preparation for an event intended to celebrate the principal’s silver jubilee as a priest.170 But the day she truly looked forward to was Sunday, when her parents visited the school. Her mother would bring homemade pies, and hold and caress her children.171 Parents who visited also questioned how their children were being treated and stood up for them. Consequently, the orphans and those who came from distant communities were more likely to be singled out for poor treatment and abuse.172
The schooling was done by rote and repetition. Rather than motivating students, Knockwood thought, the teachers relied on “orders, threats and ridicule,” coupled with regular pokes in the ribs and knocks on the knuckles, administered with a wooden pointer.173 As a result, she grew up in “perpetual fear of saying and doing anything.”174
When she finished her schooling at Shubenacadie, Isabelle continued to live in the school and attend the local day school. As the only Mi’kmaq girl attending the day school, she felt isolated—and quickly realized that her years at Shubenacadie had not prepared her for high school. But she was committed to continuing her schooling, even if it meant submitting to the residential school’s ongoing control over her life.175 When she and some other students slipped away from the schoolyard one afternoon, they were all strapped on the buttocks. Midway through the beating, Knockwood stood up and announced she had had enough. She put on her coat and left the school. As she was leaving, a girl came up to her with an apology from the teacher—and a reminder that the coat belonged to the school. Reluctantly, Isabelle took off the coat, gave it to the girl, and then followed her back to the school. “I could easily have kept on walking down the hill and never gone back again. Going to the public school had opened up a door, and for the time being, the only way to keep that door ajar was to stay on at the Residential School.”176
Despite Chief Shingwauk’s early hopes, the schools for Aboriginal children did not serve as a “big teaching wigwam” in which students acquired the skills they needed to provide their nations with leadership in a changing world. Although specific teachers were remembered fondly, the overall structure was repressive and the disciplinary code was rigid and harsh. Children were taught to forget their language, to disdain their culture, and to disobey their parents’ teachings. Disease and death were common, the education was of limited value, and vocational training was often little more than the enforced provision of free labour. That was the experience of the students. Yet, such a system was to be established and maintained for five more decades, even in the face of this clear understanding that it was, even by its own standards, a failure.
