The opening of the Battleford industrial school in 1883 marked a turning point in Canada’s direct involvement in residential schooling for Aboriginal people. Prior to that, the federal government had provided only small grants to boarding schools in Ontario and the Northwest that had been founded and operated by Christian missionary organizations. By 1884, there were three industrial schools in operation: Battleford, High River, and Qu’Appelle. Recruiting students had been difficult at High River. As a result, according to the Indian Affairs annual report, there were only twenty-seven students at the three schools.1 In addition to the industrial schools, there were approximately 140 day schools, with a total enrolment of 4,011 students and an average attendance of 2,206. There were also eight boarding schools with an enrolment of 335.2
The Battleford, High River, and Qu’Appelle schools were based in large measure on the 1879 government-commissioned report of Nicholas Flood Davin. Unlike the church-run boarding schools, which provided a limited education with a heavy dose of religious instruction, the industrial schools were intended to prepare First Nations people for integration into Canadian society. Generally, industrial schools were larger than boarding schools, were located in urban areas, and were expected to provide industrial training, and, although church-managed, they usually required federal approval prior to construction. The boarding schools were smaller institutions, were located on or near reserves, and provided a more limited education. They were built usually as church initiatives.
The limits of this residential schooling were apparent from the outset. Recruitment was difficult, conditions in the schools were dismal, student death rates were high, and educational outcomes were disappointing. The federal government, alarmed by rising costs, considered winding the system down in the early twentieth century. This plan was blocked by the churches, which viewed residential schools as crucial weapons in the inter-denominational battle for converts they were waging with one another. Although this report refers to the “residential school system,” the word system is largely a term of convenience. The federal government never established or operated an integrated or coherent system for the education of Aboriginal people. The various church groups ran what amounted to independent systems that were funded by the federal government.
A 1910 agreement between the government and churches did provide an infusion of funds and established standards for the boarding school buildings. Yet, within a few years after the agreement, the schools were languishing once again. Funding rates were so inadequate that the government was regularly obliged to cover school deficits. Educational goals were downgraded as most of the industrial schools were closed. Those that remained adopted the more modest educational goals of the boarding schools. The number of these residential schools funded by Indian Affairs on a regular per capita basis continued to increase until the system reached a pre–Second World War peak of eighty in 1930.3 The problems that had plagued the system from the outset were only intensified during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the government instituted severe cuts to school grants. The system went into further decline, repairs were neglected, and several schools burned down.
In the nineteenth century, department officials such as Edgar Dewdney had thought it “highly desirable, if it were practicable, to obtain entire possession of all Indian children after they attain to the age of seven or eight years, and keep them at schools of the industrial type until they have had a thorough course of instruction.” By the end of the 1930s, however, bureaucrats recognized that the First Nations population was growing at far too fast a rate to accommodate all First Nations children in increasingly costly residential schools. In 1938, R. A. Hoey, the superintendent of Welfare and Training for Indian Affairs, concluded, “The old idea of providing a course of instruction designed to transform the Indian into a White Man has failed. Existing economic conditions suggest for a great many years an overwhelming majority of our residential school graduates must return to their reserves and make a living there.”4
Although they would have to wait until peacetime, by the start of the Second World War, government officials had accepted Hoey’s verdict. The future, as they saw it, lay in the long-rejected day schools. However, it would take another fifty years to fully dismantle the residential school system.
It had been an era of expansion followed by stagnation. The churches had been allowed to drive and direct the expansion of schools. The government, having initially underestimated the cost of the system, never provided the schools with a level of funding that would allow them to meet student needs. Under the per capita funding system that was adopted, the government and the churches were able to blame each other for the system’s failings. As a result, no one took responsibility for those failings. No effort ever was made to involve parents in the system. To ensure that children were enrolled and stayed in schools, the government used compulsory attendance to recruit and retain students.
In an 1888 parliamentary debate over the provision of $14,000 for the construction of two additional industrial schools in Manitoba, Sir Richard Cartwright, a member of the Liberal opposition, inquired as to the purpose of the schools. Prime Minister (and Indian Affairs minister) Sir John A. Macdonald told him:
General industrial purposes. It is found that the common schools are of comparatively little value. The young Indian learns to read and write, and then goes back to his tribe, and again becomes a savage. The object is to get the young men and the children severed from the tribe as much as possible, and civilise them and give them a trade. There is also provision made for girls.
When Cartwright asked if the students went back to their reserve after graduation, Macdonald said, “No, we endeavor to discountenance that as much as possible.” Graduates, he said, could get homesteads, and “if they can get white women or educated Indian women as wives, they sever themselves from their tribes.”5
The following year, in his annual report, Minister of Indian Affairs Edgar Dewdney wrote:
The boarding school dissociates the Indian child from the deleterious home influences to which he would be otherwise subjected. It reclaims him from the uncivilized state in which he has been brought up. It brings him into contact from day to day with all that tends to effect a change in his views and habits of life. By precept and example he is taught to endeavour to excel in what will be most useful to him.6
This view was shared by bureaucrats and missionaries. In 1894, Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs Hayter Reed wrote:
Experience has proved that the industrial and boarding schools are productive of the best results in Indian education. At the ordinary day school the children are under the influence of their teacher for only a short time each day and after school hours they merge again with the life of the reserve. It can readily be seen that, no matter how earnest a teacher may be, his control over his pupils must be very limited under such conditions. But in the boarding or industrial schools the pupils are removed for a long period from the leadings of this uncivilized life and receive constant care and attention. It is therefore in the interest of the Indians that these institutions should be kept in an efficient state as it is in their success that the solution of the Indian problem lies.7
Father Joseph Hugonnard, the first principal of the Qu’Appelle school, wrote that “if it were difficult or impossible to civilize and convert the savages born and bred with paganism, there was a way to civilize and Christianize their children, especially if one could get them out of that pagan environment and place them and teach them in a school with the goal of making them into good citizens and good Christians.”8
Edward Matheson, the Anglican principal of the Battleford school, wrote in 1899:
The boarding or industrial school system—away from the reserves, if possible—is the sure way to solve the long debated “Indian Problem”. It is the way to civilize the Indian and merge him into the corporate life of the country—his true and proper destiny. He has given ample proof of this where he has had a fair opportunity. Most of those educated in these schools do not wish to return to reserve life, but to strike out amongst the settlers and make their own way.9
In a similar vein, the Reverend Alexander Sutherland, general secretary of the Methodist Church of Canada’s Missionary Department, wrote:
Experience convinces us that the only way in which the Indian of the Country can be permanently elevated and thoroughly civilized is by removing the children from the surroundings of Indian home life, and keeping them separated long enough to form those habits of order, industry, and systematic effort, which they will never learn at home.
He thought the girls should be kept at school for five years and the boys for six years, during which time they would not go home. “The return of the children to their homes, even temporarily, has a bad effect.”10
These statements from government and church officials make it abundantly clear that the overall purpose of residential schooling was to separate children from their parents and their culture so they could be ‘civilized’ and ‘Christianized.’ Once so transformed, they could be enfranchised. They would no longer be “Indians,” either culturally or legally, and would have no special claim on the state for support. It was expected they would be self-supporting because the schools would have instilled in them an industrial work discipline. But, other than these overall goals, there was little unanimity, less policy, and scant regulation.
At some points, day schools were envisioned as potential feeder schools to the residential schools. At other times, they were seen as failures that had to be abolished. And, at still other times, day schools were heralded as replacements for failed residential schools. As for the role of the churches, they were sometimes viewed as being essential to the system because they provided cheap labour and moral salvation. However, they also were viewed as being disruptive and competitive institutions that used education funding to further their own missionary ambitions. There was little clarity on essential questions: should schools be located close to reserves to encourage enrolment, or in urban locations into which graduates would relocate? What skills were students to be provided with: were they being trained to take up skilled trades, or were a little literacy and some basic farming skills sufficient? Few of these issues ever were resolved in a coherent manner. On occasion, the government shifted from one position to another. And, at times, it embraced one policy even as it continued to implement a contradictory one.
It was not until 1894 that the government adopted any regulations under the Indian Act for First Nations education—and these dealt solely with attendance. Issues such as training, housing, health, discipline, food, and clothing were most commonly addressed on an uncoordinated, case-by-case, basis. Even then, as late as 1897, Martin Benson could write, “No regulations have been adopted or issued by the Department applicable to all its schools, as had been done by the Provincial Governments.”11 Indian Affairs never developed anything approaching the education acts and regulations by which provincial governments administered public schools.
It was Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney who supplied Thomas Clarke with the directions (described in an earlier chapter of this volume) for the operation of the Battleford industrial school in 1883. However, the following year, it was Deputy Minister Lawrence Vankoughnet who sent out directions to the principals of the newly opened Qu’Appelle and High River schools. According to Vankoughnet’s memorandum, the principals were to make monthly reports and keep a school diary. They also were responsible for selecting the employees, who would then have to be appointed by Indian Affairs. The object of the schools was to give the students “a practical knowledge of husbandry and mechanical trades.” Attention was to be directed to teaching students to read, write, and speak English, and “all the regulations of the establishment shall be framed with a view to secure these important results.” The principals were informed that Indian Commissioner Dewdney had control over, and responsibility for, major modifications to the building and the supply of farm implements, tools, and furniture.12
Vankoughnet never sent Dewdney a copy of these instructions. When Dewdney accidentally came upon them a year later, he angrily wrote to Vankoughnet to point out that the document would “have been a good guide to me in assisting to organize the Schools at High River and Qu’Appelle had I received it before.”13
In October 1889, prior to the establishment of a number of Oblate-run industrial schools in British Columbia, Vankoughnet sent Paul Durieu, Bishop of New Westminster, an eight-page “digest of the views of the Department in respect to the manner in which” the schools were to be operated.14 This document was far more detailed than the ones issued at the opening of the three schools in the North-West (Battleford, Qu’Appelle, and High River), and described the responsibilities of the staff, set the class hours, outlined the chores that students should be doing, and, in general terms, provided expectations in regard to food, clothing, sanitation, and accommodation. There was even a prohibition against students speaking to each other after they had gone to bed.15
Policy, in short, was being developed on a school-by-school basis, with no over-arching set of guidelines. Newly appointed principals often were unaware of instructions that had been sent to their predecessors. The government had little ability to determine if these policies were being implemented. In 1885, the federal government had entered into agreements with the provincial governments of Ontario, Québec, and the Maritimes to have provincial government inspectors inspect Indian Affairs schools (both residential and day schools).16 On Dewdney’s recommendation, J. A. Macrae, a long-time Indian Affairs employee, was appointed inspector of industrial schools in 1886.17 The government subsequently hired inspectors for the schools in British Columbia and New Brunswick. For the most part, inspections of schools on the Prairies were carried out by departmental officials, who, as Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott observed, had no “pedagogical qualifications, and whose examination of the classroom work is, of necessity, very perfunctory.”18 It was not until 1894 that the department had a three-person Schools Branch.19
As early as 1897, Schools Branch employee Martin Benson expressed reservations about having the schools inspected by Indian Affairs officials, who, he believed, were “opposed to make an adverse report on a school if there is any way of avoiding it, it being more than likely that such action would bring them into collision with the Missionaries and interfere with their authority among the Indians.” The department’s inspectors, he believed, devoted too much attention to “inventories, statements, returns, accounts, &c, and pass lightly over such high matters as the general progress, management and results obtained.” There was, he said, “no one in the Department who has ever seen more than a few of our principal schools or knows how they are carrying on the work best suited to the wants of the Indians.”20 The Red Deer school went three years without inspection, and the Elkhorn school went uninspected for seventeen months.21 In commenting on a rash of fires at Mount Elgin in 1903, Benson wrote, “It has been years since an inspection was made of this school.”22 Three years later, he commented that the school at Île-à-la-Crosse “is so remote that it is not visited by any of our Agents or Inspectors.”23 He was still drawing attention to the problem a decade later. In response to a September 1915 request for information on the Portage la Prairie school in Manitoba, he wrote that “there has been no inspection of this school since April, 1914.”24 It was seven more years before the federal government arranged in 1922 to have all the residential and day schools in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta inspected by provincial school inspectors.25
Inspectors had little authority to order improvements. When J. A. J. McKenna was hired as the inspector of Roman Catholic Indian schools in 1909, he was instructed “not to authorize any works or any changes in the management which would involve an increase in expenditure.” Such proposed changes should be made in the form of a recommendation. He was also not to “give the Principals of Schools, or those interested in them, to understand that your reports will follow certain lines.” His reports should “leave the Department as free as possible to consider whatever recommendations you may see fit to make.”26 Provincial inspectors were reminded that the teachers were not responsible to them and that hiring and dismissal rested with Indian Affairs and the churches. They were urged to comment on the qualifications of teachers, the progress of pupils, and the condition of facilities.27
Earlier, in his 1889 instructions to Bishop Durieu, Vankoughnet had written, “Obedience to rules and good behavior should be enforced, but corporal punishment should only be resorted to in extreme cases. In ordinary cases the penalty might be solitary confinement for such time as the offence may warrant, or deprivation of certain articles of food allowed to other pupils.”28 This vague approach to discipline opened the door to the physical abuse of students. When, in 1895, Indian agent D. L. Clink returned a runaway boy to the Red Deer industrial school, the principal, John Nelson, told the agent he no longer wanted the boy. According to Clink’s report, Nelson told him he “could leave him if it was the instruction of the Department, but he would make him toe the mark, that he had been severe with him before but he would be more severe now.” Clink was worried that if he “left the boy he would be abused.” As a result, Clink took the boy away from the school. He also reported that one boy had a large bump on his head after being hit by a teacher with a stick for looking at a scrapbook against the teacher’s orders. When Clink inquired into this and other cases, Nelson told him to mind his own business, adding, “We run this school.” Clink recommended that the teacher who had struck the student be dismissed and brought up on charges, since “his actions in this and other cases would not be tolerated in a white school for a single day in any part of Canada.” Despite the beatings and floggings, he said, there was very little order at the school, with “the big boys and girls roaming around together apparently unrestrained.”29
Clink’s reports led Indian Affairs Deputy Minister Hayter Reed to recognize the need for a policy on corporal punishment. His response, however, left that need largely unmet. In 1895, he told his staff:
Instructions should be given, if not already sent, to the Principals of the various schools, that children are not to be whipped by anyone save the Principal, and even when such a course is necessary, great discretion should be used and they should not be struck on the head, or punished so severely that bodily harm might ensue. The practice of corporal punishment is considered unnecessary as a general measure of discipline and should only be resorted to for very grave offences and as a deterrent example.30
The fact that Reed, the former Indian commissioner for the North-West Territories and Manitoba, was uncertain whether regulations governing corporal punishment existed speaks volumes. His instructions—by not defining “grave offences”—did little to curb the physical abuse of students. School and department staff often ignored the limits that he did place on abuse. It is doubtful they were even aware of them. In 1920, Canon S. Gould, the general secretary of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, wrote to Deputy Minister Scott, “Is corporal punishment for disciplinary purposes recognized, or permitted in the Indian Boarding schools?” He noted that whether or not it was permitted, he imagined that it was applied in every boarding school in the country.31
There was no meaningful policy on teacher qualifications. An 1884 agreement between the federal government and the provincial government of Ontario for the provincial inspection of Indian schools stated that teachers were expected to have certificates from the “County or District Board of Examiners.” The examiners could exercise discretion in granting certificates, but “for some time to come … the standard of ‘High School Entrance’ will be quite as high as is attainable.”32 The Indian Affairs annual report for 1914 acknowledged that “whenever possible the services of teachers with professional qualifications are secured for the Indian schools,” but the reality was that, in many locations, “it has been found difficult to secure teachers with certificates.”33 No meaningful policy regarding teacher qualifications was put in place or enforced until the 1950s.
It appears that, at times, no one had a clear idea what the official policy was on any matter. In 1922, an Indian agent in Hagersville, Ontario, wrote to headquarters, inquiring if there had been any changes in the regulations regarding education since the adoption of a set of education regulations in 1908. His question suggests he was completely unaware of major changes to the Indian Act regarding education that had supplanted previous regulations in 1920.34 The government’s general lack of policy seems to have been summed up in a 1928 letter from Russell T. Ferrier, then superintendent of education and a former senior official in the Methodist Missionary Society. Sister Mary Gilbert of the Grouard school in Alberta had written him to ask for “regulations concerning the education of Indian children.” Ferrier replied, “The only printed matter in this connection is the Indian Act, Section 9 to 11A inclusive.”35
Government officials were not unaware of the lack of policy direction or its implications. By the late 1880s, senior Indian Affairs officials had concluded that there were system-wide problems with First Nations education. An 1886 report from Indian Affairs school inspector J. A. Macrae painted a picture of schooling that was unsupervised, poorly attended, poorly taught, and highly dependent on meaningless memory work. Due to problems in recruiting students, many schools had been “idle or only partially effective.” He attributed the lack of attendance in part to “the Indians’ mode of existence, and lack of clothing for the children,” but it was also due, he wrote, to “Indian prejudice or folly, and lack of exertion on the part of Teachers.” When students did attend, they were subjected to “old fashioned methods of teaching—useless so far as Indian schools are concerned.” In Macrae’s opinion, one sign of inappropriate teaching methods was the use of textbooks. “Elementary teaching of Indian children may, and should be done, for the most part, without text books.” There was too much memorization and recitation of lessons “without being understood,” and not enough “active explanation and direct teaching.” This was not surprising, since, he thought, “injudicious and incompetent Teachers have been great obstacles to the success of our school-work.” Some were “illiterate persons, ignorant of the first elements of teaching, and powerless to impart any ideas that they may have possessed regarding the most simple subjects.” There was no systematic recording of student progress, making comparison of a school at different times, or between schools, next to impossible.
To Macrae, parental attitudes existed only in the negative. Indeed, they were the first item on his list of obstacles to be overcome. Parents, he thought, particularly those “who have not accepted the Christian faith,” were unwilling to send their children to school out of “an instinctive dislike to their offspring losing Indian habits, and becoming Christianized, from personal dislike to, or lack of confidence in a school Teacher—or from a selfish apathy.” Macrae also foresaw conflict with the church-run schools: “Unless a proper control is obtained over such schools, it may be difficult to exact from the Teachers the duties required of them, or to oblige them to adopt such regulations and keep such records as may be desired by the Department.”36
The following year (1887), Deputy Minister Vankoughnet had concluded there was a need for improvement in the education of “Indian children.” In a lengthy memorandum to Sir John A. Macdonald, he said it was a difficult and complicated subject.
The success that has attended the efforts made in the past to accomplish satisfactory results has not been such as to impress one with the idea that the present system is sufficient or by any means perfect, and yet there is difficulty in coming to a conclusion as to the exact changes which should be made in order to improve on the same, and even where changes are most manifestly deserving of adoption they involve an expense to meet which the Department at the present time has not the means at its disposal.
This could well serve as a summary of the eternal dilemma of Indian Affairs and education: the current policy was not working. In large measure, department officials were not sure what would work; and, in those cases where the needed changes were obvious, there was no funding available.
Vankoughnet identified three major challenges: how to improve the quality of the teaching, how to get children to attend, and how to ensure that, after graduation, students made the best use of what they had been taught. It was a tacit admission that the schools were not providing a good education, that parents did not want their children to attend, and that there appeared to be little benefit to students derived from having attended. Education was supposed to lead to the “intellectual emancipation of the Indian,” but Vankoughnet thought the government’s actual education program was often doing more harm than good. He had no response to what he recognized as the very valid objections of Canada’s west-coast parents who argued that “if their boys did not accompany them in their fishing and sealing expeditions, they would fail to acquire a knowledge of industries so essential for their maintenance in the future.”37
Both J. A. Macrae, the school inspector, and Hayter Reed (then the Indian commissioner for the North-West Territories and Manitoba) looked south for solutions. They had visited and had been highly impressed with the industrial school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It was run directly by the us government as opposed to a missionary society, was located far from the communities from which its students came, and enforced the use of English. Reed noted that the students at Carlisle came from a wide variety of Aboriginal nations and spoke forty different dialects, making “it comparatively easy to put down entirely the use of native tongues.” According to Reed, “So much importance is attached to the use of the English tongue alone, that all orders, and explanations of the subjects of instruction, from the very first, are given in English, repeated again and again, if necessary, with patience. No books in the Indian tongue … are allowed.”
Reed returned from his time at Carlisle convinced that students should not be allowed to go back to their home communities, even at holiday time or when they graduated. “Every effort should be directed against anything established to keep fresh in the memories of children habits and associations which it is one of the main objects of industrial institutions to obliterate.” He did not favour letting industrial school graduates return to their reserves, “since it is only too probable that instead of their presence ameliorating the condition of their tribe, they themselves might rapidly retrograde.” He approved of the lack of church involvement in the operation of the Carlisle school and the instruction in a range of trades. Students not only supplied most of the school’s needs, but they also produced wagons and harnesses on contract for the United States government. For this work, the boys were paid twenty-five cents a day, and the money was banked on their behalf.
Macrae and Reed were both taken with the “outing system,” under which students were placed with local families after spending a year and a half at the school. Reed felt this system not only reduced school costs, but also helped to “sever all connection between them and the members of the bands to which they belong.”38
Macrae, Vankoughnet, and Reed each developed their own—at times conflicting, at times overlapping—visions for reform. Macrae and Reed, influenced by the Carlisle example, favoured the creation of large industrial schools that would be located at a distance from First Nations communities. The graduates of these schools were not expected to return to reserves. All three men called for a lessening of church involvement in the schools.
Macrae’s 1886 plan for Manitoba and the North-West Territories proposed the establishment of a three-tiered system. Children would be taught to read and obey rules at day schools. From there, they would be sent to small boarding schools that would serve as “stepping stones” to industrial schools. Because the boarding schools would be located on reserves, parents would be able to visit their children and see that they were being “clothed, fed, and taught.” This, he said, would overcome their objections to sending their children to an industrial school. The industrial schools, which, he claimed, would be the principal means of “bringing Indian children under influences favourable to their proper development,” were to be located in or near “centres of civilization,” so the students could easily observe “the life of the white man.” A second reason for “removing Industrial schools from Indian Country is that it is unlikely that any Tribe or Tribes would give trouble of a serious nature to the Government whose members had children completely under Government control.”
Overall, he proposed a system of 212 day schools with 25 pupils each, 14 reserve boarding schools with 50 pupils each, and 4 industrial schools with 500 pupils each—this was at a time when there were fewer than 200 Indian schools of any type in all of Canada. He projected a total annual cost of $362,000: $106,000 for the day schools, $56,000 for the boarding schools, and $200,000 for the industrial schools.
It was essential, he thought, that Indian Affairs, rather than the churches, should have “control of the schools in all essential points.” This would include approval of the hiring of staff, the description of the duties of teachers, teacher salaries, and the school regulations. School administrators should be required to make regular reports, the schools should be open to government inspection, and students should be subjected to regular examination. The ad hoc nature of the existing system can be seen in Macrae’s insistence that “the observance of regulations, the manner of making returns, the forms of keeping records, the means of encouraging attendance, &c, so far as these can be made general, should be common to all.”
The work should be done quickly, since “how much may be saved by hastening the moment at which the country is to be relieved of the burden of maintaining the Tribes.” A gradual approach to civilization could result in a “constant retrogression” and the “education of the Indian will never become an accomplished fact, and the money put into the enterprise will be wasted.”39
In 1887, Vankoughnet recommended increasing the number of day schools so that no student lived more than two miles (three kilometres) away from a school. He also recommended doubling salaries, as current day school salaries were too low to attract “a partially educated or ordinarily competent teacher.” Poor day school attendance was the result of “indifference of the parents in the matter of the education of their children and the absence of the exercise by the parents of proper authority over them to compel attendance.” He suggested that a midday meal for students would make day schools more attractive to them and their parents.
Where day schooling was not feasible, the gap could be filled with boarding schools. He also wanted to see an increase in the number of industrial schools and in the number of students they could accommodate. Each reserve would be associated with a specific industrial school, and students from the reserve could go to that school and no other. Such a proposal was not compatible with the government’s partnership with the churches, who opposed any measure that might see Catholic students attending a Protestant-run school, or vice versa.
Vankoughnet called for an $892,620 capital investment in schools, with over $600,000 of that to be spent west of Ontario. He also called for an increase of $545,000 a year in operating costs, over half of that to be spent in the West. The payoff, he argued, would be in turning the descendants of people who were “a source of expense, into profitable citizens.”40 In 1878–79, federal spending on First Nations education was $16,000. By 1888–89, it was $172,960, and by 1908–09, it was $445,237, a far cry from the scale of the operating budget advocated by Vankoughnet.41
Other than a decision to provide a midday meal for day school students in Manitoba and the North-West, none of Vankoughnet’s recommendations were implemented.42
In 1890, Reed, then the Indian commissioner for the North-West Territories and Manitoba, produced his own set of recommendations for school policy. Reed wished to see residential schooling become the norm for First Nations children: “All Day schools should, as much as possible, be displaced by Boarding Schools, and … both should be closed when sufficient accommodation for children exists in higher Institutions.” Industrial school students were to be recruited from those boarding school students who had “given the greatest satisfaction in other schools, and so proved themselves most worthy of the higher advantages.”
Reed believed that industrial schools should not be located close to reserves because “the more remote from the Institution and distant from each other are the points from which the pupils are collected, the better for their success.” To prevent students from returning to their home reserves “to deteriorate,” he recommended that new reserves for graduates be established near the schools, and be under the supervision of the principal. (An unknown official in Ottawa wrote “Impracticable” in the margin next to this recommendation.) Reed repeated his belief that it would have been better if the churches had not been involved in the establishment of the schools. He acknowledged that “no hope need be entertained of the various denominations relinquishing the hold they already have upon the rising generation through such schools,” but he recommended that, in the future, any residential schools that were to be supported solely by the government should be non-sectarian. Reed also recommended that the industrial schools develop an outing policy under which students would be ‘farmed out’ to settler families for several months at a time.43
None of these schemes—each of which was designed by a senior Indian Affairs official—were implemented. The system that came into being, in fact, bore little resemblance to that envisioned by Indian Affairs officials. The federal government was unwilling to make the sorts of investments the recommendations entailed. It had come to believe that the churches represented a source of cost savings, since they could provide staff members who were prepared to work for less than the market rate. The government also believed that by relying on the labour of the students, the schools could become largely self-supporting. As a result, there was no centralized control, distinctions between boarding and industrial schools quickly became blurred, a consistent day schools policy was never developed, and scarce resources were wasted by a system that was becoming ever more dependent on child labour. In this policy vacuum, the churches seized the initiative and shaped the growth of residential schooling.
Despite the lack of policy, or perhaps because of it, the system grew dramatically between 1883 and 1930. Less than fifteen years after the opening of the first western Canadian industrial school in Battleford in 1883, there were 15 industrial schools, 34 boarding schools (as compared to 8 in 1884), and 239 day schools (up from approximately 140).44 The average industrial school enrolment in 1890 was forty-eight students, while the average boarding school enrolment that year was ten.45 (Reporting on the number of each type of school in operation at any given time is complicated. In some annual reports, the Shingwauk, Wikwemikong, Mohawk Institute, and Mount Elgin schools in Ontario were counted as industrial schools, but, in other years, they were counted as boarding schools. Furthermore, in some years, the boys’ and girls’ schools at Wikwemikong were counted as one school, and, in other years, as two schools. Similarly, the Shingwauk Home for boys and the Wawanosh Home for girls, both in Sault Ste. Marie, were sometimes counted as one school, sometimes as two. As a result of such inconsistencies, the 1890 Indian Affairs annual report states that there were nineteen industrial schools in operation, while the later 1896 report sets the number lower, at fifteen.)46
Tables 11.1 and 11.2 provide an overview of Indian Affairs education statistics for the 1895–96 school year. In that year, there were no industrial or boarding schools in the Maritimes or Québec. Virtually all the expansion took place west of Lake Superior—further evidence that the federal government conceived of the schools as effective instruments in the colonization of the western territories acquired after Confederation. Four of the industrial schools were in Manitoba, five were in present-day Alberta and Saskatchewan (then the North-West Territories), and six in British Columbia. Nineteen of the boarding schools were in present-day Alberta and Saskatchewan.47 Most students were enrolled in day schools: 7,112. The industrial school enrolment was 1,280, while the boarding school enrolment was 1,322. The day schools had an average attendance of only 44%. At industrial schools, this figure was 87%, and, for boarding schools, it was 85%.48
Table 11.1. 1895–96 First Nations education statistics: number of schools, enrolment, and attendance.
| Province | No. of Schools | Enrolment | Average Attendance | ||
| Boys | Girls | Total | |||
| Industrial | |||||
| British Columbia | 6 | 162 | 110 | 272 | 232 |
| Manitoba | 4 | 196 | 144 | 340 | 297 |
| North-West Territories | 5 | 382 | 286 | 668 | 586 |
| Totals | 15 | 740 | 540 | 1,280 | 1,115 |
| Boarding | |||||
| Ontario | 6 | 246 | 171 | 417 | 362 |
| British Columbia | 5 | 86 | 151 | 237 | 203 |
| Manitoba | 3 | 18 | 35 | 53 | 46 |
| North-West Territories | 19 | 337 | 256 | 593 | 503 |
| Outside Treaty | 1 | 12 | 10 | 22 | 16 |
| Totals | 34 | 699 | 623 | 1,322 | 1,130 |
| Day | |||||
| Ontario | 77 | 1,326 | 1,111 | 2,437 | 1,148 |
| Québec | 20 | 388 | 389 | 777 | 361 |
| Nova Scotia | 8 | 83 | 64 | 147 | 57 |
| New Brunswick | 5 | 65 | 52 | 117 | 61 |
| Prince Edward Island | 1 | 22 | 11 | 33 | 13 |
| British Columbia | 23 | 428 | 400 | 828 | 293 |
| Manitoba | 48 | 757 | 708 | 1,465 | 561 |
| North-West Territories | 47 | 498 | 454 | 952 | 415 |
| Outside Treaty | 10 | 155 | 201 | 256 | 222 |
| Totals | 239 | 3,722 | 3,390 | 7,112 | 3,131 |
Source: Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1896, xxxvi.
Table 11.2. 1895–96 First Nations education statistics: number of schools, enrolment, and attendance.
| Kind of School | No. of Schools | Total Enrolment | Average Attendance |
| Training or Industrial | 15 | 1,280 | 1,115 |
| Boarding | 34 | 1,322 | 1,130 |
| Day | 239 | 7,112 | 3,131 |
| Totals | 288 | 9,714 | 5,376 |
Source: Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1896, xxxvii.
As noted, the system hit a pre-war peak of eighty schools in 1930.49 By the end of the 1930s, there were seventy-nine residential schools with a total enrolment of 9,027 and an average attendance of 8,643. The 288 day schools had a total enrolment of 9,369 and an average attendance of 6,417. By then, the government was spending $1,547,252 on residential school operations, versus $404,821 on day school operations.50
With the exception of the three original industrial schools (Qu’Appelle, Battleford, and High River), most of the schools were funded on the basis of what was termed a “per capita grant”: an annual amount the government would pay for each pupil in attendance at the school.51 (There were anomalies: in 1893, the boarding school on the Blackfoot Reserve was “allowed food and clothing” in place of a financial grant.)52 The government also placed a cap on the number of students it would support in each school—this figure was known as the “pupilage.” The pupilage was intended both to limit the government’s financial obligation and to protect students against overcrowding. Because most schools barely met their costs even when they had full enrolments, there was fierce competition among principals for students. Further, the per capita system provided a financial incentive for principals to ignore instructions to refuse admission to students who were not in good health.
Although the government had the authority to decide if it would fund a residential school, the reality is that the dramatic expansion in the number of schools was undertaken partly in response to a government plan, but was driven in large measure by competition among the churches.
The 1883 decision to turn the management of the industrial schools proposed for Qu’Appelle, High River, and Battleford over to the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches prompted Methodist missionary John McDougall to seek government support for his orphanage in Morley, in what is now Alberta. He promised to provide the same level of training as did the industrial schools in exchange for a sliding per capita grant: $150 each for the first fifteen students, $100 for the next fifteen, and $75 for any additional students. This, he said, would work out to about half the rate the government would be paying to educate students at Battleford.53 Although Indian Commissioner Dewdney delayed approval of McDougall’s proposal, he said he could see no reason why the Methodists should not receive the same sort of assistance as other denominations received.54
The government constantly struggled, and failed, to assert control over the churches’ expansionary drive to increase the number of schools they operated. At various times, each denomination established boarding schools without government support or approval, and then lobbied later for per capita funding. When they discovered that the per capita grant they received was too low, they sought to have their schools reclassified as industrial schools to receive money at a higher rate. Building on their network of missions in the Northwest, the Catholics quickly came to dominate the field, usually operating twice as many schools as did the Protestant denominations. The Anglicans were the most successful of the Protestants. The Methodists and the Presbyterians, who were the last to enter the field, operated a much smaller number of schools. Each faith, in its turn, claimed government discrimination against it. Competition for converts meant that churches sought to establish schools in the same locations as their rivals—leading to internal divisions within communities and expensive duplication of services. Table 11.3 indicates the number of schools operated by each denomination in the 1923–24 school year.
Table 11.3. Residential schools by faith in 1923–24.
| Church | Number of schools |
| Roman Catholic | 39 |
| Church of England | 21 |
| Methodist | 6 |
| Presbyterian | 7 |
Source: Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1924, 16.
The 1883 announcement of plans for the Roman Catholic school at High River met with opposition from local Protestants. Alexander Begg, a prominent Alberta rancher, complained that with Father Albert Lacombe as principal, the students would be taught in French and raised as Catholics. This was unfair, he said, to the English-speaking people of the district, who would have to teach the students English before they “could be serviceable as servants,” and was considered by the Protestants to be “unjust to the Indians and the country.” Failure to address his concerns would result, he predicted, in a big storm led by the Protestants.55
That storm never erupted, but, three years later, in 1886, the Church of England began lobbying for an industrial school in Manitoba. To support their claim to manage the new school, the Anglicans argued that their missionaries had done more for First Nations education in Manitoba than all the other denominations combined.56 In 1887, the department offered to build the Anglicans two industrial schools in Manitoba, each at a cost of $2,500, with an additional grant of $50 per student. The Anglicans responded that the money was not sufficient, making it clear that while they were prepared to run the school, they did not expect to contribute to its construction or operation. In the face of church lobbying, in 1888, the government authorized $27,000 for the construction of two Anglican schools in Manitoba: one at Middlechurch (often known as Rupert’s Land or St. Paul’s) and the other at Elkhorn. Although they were industrial schools, the federal government declined to cover all their costs, approving instead a student grant of $100 per capita.57
Not all Christian churches favoured government support of church-run residential schools. In 1892, the Baptist Ministerial Association of Toronto stepped into the residential school debate. The Baptists stated that although they had no problem with efforts to civilize and convert “the Indian tribes of Canada,” and had indeed carried out missionary work in Ontario and Manitoba, the government funding of church schools was “a violation of the fundamental principle of absolute separation of Church and State, which has been agreed on, tacitly at least, as one of the corner stones of our constitutional system.” The Baptists observed that the government system was inherently contradictory. After all, the Methodists both believed and taught that Catholic beliefs were “based on deadly error and tend directly to foster ignorance, superstition, and moral and spiritual darkness,” while the Catholics thought much the same about the Protestants. “And yet the Government hopes to christianize the Indians by taxing Methodists for the propagation of Roman Catholic teachings and Roman Catholics for the propagation of Methodism, and Baptists and many others who are neither Methodists nor Roman Catholics for the propagation of both.”58 The only government response was that to adopt the Baptist recommendations “would be subversive of the present policy of the Indian Department with respect to the question of Indian education in the North West.”59
Each church used the funding that another received to justify its own demands. In 1900, the Methodists proposed the establishment of boarding schools in the Battle River and Saddle Lake regions of what is now Alberta. This would entail closing five day schools, including some that Indian Affairs official Martin Benson believed to be doing good work. He said, “The fact of the Roman Catholics having boarding schools in each of these Agencies is enough to make the Methodists ask for the same consideration.”60
Many schools that had been built without government approval later demanded government support, both per capita payments and reimbursement for construction costs. In 1893, Roman Catholic Bishop Paul Durieu sought per capita funding for the school in Mission, British Columbia, which had been established by the Oblates in 1862. After British Columbia entered Confederation, the federal government provided the school with an annual grant of $500, which was increased to $1,000 in 1882. That grant covered school costs, but the church paid for the students’ room and board. Durieu was seeking a per capita grant of $100 for a proposed pupilage of sixty.61
In 1895, Father E. M. Bunoz, the principal of the Mission school, petitioned to have his school reclassified as an industrial school, thereby having its grant increased from $60 to $130 per student.62 Ten years later, the Methodist Missionary Society sought permission to amalgamate its boys’ boarding school and its girls’ boarding school in Port Simpson into a single industrial school, a measure intended to increase the per capita grant. Benson opposed the measure as being unnecessary, arguing that the local First Nations made a good living from fishing. “Any trades instruction they might receive in such a school would never enable them to compete with white mechanics. The whole object of the petition, as I see it, is to obtain more money.”63
The boarding school on the Thunderchild Reserve in what is now Saskatchewan stood as another example of this process. In assessing a 1904 church request for assistance, Benson wrote, “There was never any good reason for the establishment of the school in the first place, which was started contrary to the expressed wish of the Department.”64 The school was built with a capacity for thirty students, although the government’s initial pupilage was only fifteen students. Roman Catholic Bishop Pascal argued that if the pupilage were increased, it would be possible to close a day school, thus saving money for the federal government. Benson commented, “The Sweet Grass [day] school is poorly attended but it is as much the fault of the missionary as any one. The Bishop evidently wishes to use the plea of inefficiency of the day school to attain his ends. They have also a day school on Thunderchild’s Reserve, which they are endeavoring to freeze out.”65
The chief inspector of Indian agencies in Winnipeg, Glen Campbell, termed the competition between church schools “a curse to the Department and the Indians.” In 1912, he reported that the recently opened Anglican school at Gleichen, Alberta (often referred to as the “Old Sun’s school”), had five to six staff and only seven students. “This is absolutely ridiculous and more so when one realizes that other churches will ask for the same consideration as the English Church on the same reserve.”66 In the following year, Indian Affairs received a letter from Bishop Grouard informing them that the “Roman Catholic Church have built a second school in the Lesser Slave Lake district.” Grouard was seeking a grant for the school.67 Because the church had not requested assistance in building the school, Duncan Campbell Scott recommended it be given per capita funding for twenty-five students.68
The Anglicans even competed with themselves. In 1898, the Anglican boarding school on the Peigan Reserve lost its “most advanced pupils to the industrial school” in Calgary, reducing the Peigan school enrolment to twenty-eight.69 The following year, Deputy Minister James Smart complained that, as part of a recruiting campaign, the principal of the Anglican school in Elkhorn, Manitoba, was spreading criticism of the Anglican Middlechurch school. According to Smart, the principal coupled his criticisms with offers of payments to parents if they agreed to send their children to his school.70
In 1908, Regina Presbyterian Rev. E. A. Henry responded to Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham’s criticism of the Presbyterian Church’s school in Regina by accusing Graham of being a poor Presbyterian. Henry said that Graham took no interest in the church’s missionary work and had not “darkened the door” of the local church in the past decade.71
The churches monitored the treatment that other churches received from government, searching for signs of favouritism. In the face of budget cuts in 1891, the Roman Catholic Bishop of St. Albert complained that the government was favouring the Protestants, noting, “I have seen at a distance from Regina a splendid establishment which is being erected for a Presbyterian Industrial School,” yet he doubted that there were “twenty Presbyterian Indians in the North West.” Established Roman Catholic schools were being left “in want,” and he suspected that the “sole cause of the parsimony” was the fact that the schools were operated by the Catholics. In response, the government noted that between 1884 and 1890, $216,982 had been spent on three Roman Catholic industrial schools in Manitoba and the North-West, compared to $192,102 on four Protestant schools.72
In 1897, Paul Durieu, the Roman Catholic Bishop of New Westminster, complained that the Roman Catholics were not receiving an adequate share of school funding. Using the 1896 annual report of the department, he showed there were 12,628 Catholic Indians in British Columbia and 6,769 Protestant Indians. However, the Catholic school grant was $29,000 and the Protestant grant was $22,000. In his opinion, although Catholics counted for 2,708 of the 2,953 Indians in the Fraser Valley, they received less than half of the federal education funding.73 Twenty-five years later, the principal of the Mission school sought to be paid for inspecting the construction of a new barn at his school, citing as precedent the government’s decision to pay the principal of the Methodist Coqualeetza Institute in Chilliwack, British Columbia, for inspecting a portion of a new building at that school.74 In 1926, the Anglicans complained that the clothing cupboards at the new Anglican school on the Blood Reserve in Alberta lacked the top shelf that had been included in the new Catholic school on the same reserve. Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham said the shelf had been added at the Catholic school as an afterthought, and predicted, “If we have to supply every school in the country with exactly the same accommodation and equipment, our troubles are only beginning.”75 These conflicts were never-ending: when members of the Indian and Eskimo Commission of the Missionary Society of the Anglican Church in Canada met with the minister of Indian Affairs in the spring of 1938, high on their list of concerns was “the injustice of limiting the Church of England in the Province of Saskatchewan to three Residential Schools for 3904 Anglican Indians while nine Schools of this class were provided for 5637 Roman Catholic Indians.”76
The federal government attempted to limit the conflict. In the 1890s, Hayter Reed issued a reminder to all employees that Indian Affairs insisted “upon strict neutrality being maintained by its Officers and Employees with regard to religious matters.” He also stated that care was to be taken to ensure that parents of one denomination were not pressured to send their children to the school of a different denomination. Furthermore, parental consent, preferably in writing, was required before children were to be sent to a school operated by a denomination other than the one to which the parents belonged.77
The federal government sought to establish zones of influence for each faith. In 1892, Reed opposed the construction of a Roman Catholic industrial school near Prince Albert, pointing out that such a location would “place the Institution in immediate communication with several Protestant reserves.” In the past, he said, he had successfully discouraged the Anglicans from establishing a school at Duck Lake and the Methodists from opening one at Fort Alexander, both of which were viewed as being located in areas of Roman Catholic influence.78 However, the policy of attempting to establish zones of interest ran in direct opposition to the government’s practice, dating from at least 1891, of sending children of Protestant parents to Protestant schools, and the children of Catholic parents to Catholic schools.79 While it was common for churches to view some areas as their own, neither the Protestants nor the Catholics were prepared to abandon any territory. The result was the clustering of Protestant and Catholic schools, often only a few kilometres from each other, such as in southwestern Alberta, southeastern Saskatchewan, and northwestern Ontario. In 1927, Indian Affairs was concerned by Catholic missionary activity on the east coast of Hudson Bay, an area that had been, to that point, largely an Anglican preserve. In a letter to church authorities, the department, expressing concerns about controlling costs of education, warned that “denominations should respect the zones of interest which have been established and not encroach upon them by the extension of missionary effort upon which a demand for separate educational institutions might be afterwards based.” The department would not “recognize requests for aid to educational institutions unless by pre-arrangement.”80 This, however, generally proved to be an empty threat.
Church-led expansion also meant that schools were established in remote northern locations where Aboriginal economies were flourishing. Many government officials believed that, because of the separation from their families while they attended school, the children who graduated from such schools lacked the skills they would need to support themselves by living off the land. When one such school burned down in 1927, Indian Affairs Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott noted he had never been a “whole-hearted supporter” of residential schools in northern Canada. “It seemed to me very doubtful whether the separation of Indian children from their parents who are gaining their livelihood in the aboriginal fashion was really conducive to their welfare, and I should like to give very serious consideration to the whole problem before any further schools are constructed.”81 Despite his reservations, the school was rebuilt.82
The government also could not stop the expansion of the school system into northern Québec. The Anglicans began lobbying in 1922 for support to turn their day school in Fort George, Québec, into a residential school.83 Their appeals were turned down by federal officials who appeared to believe Fort George was in Ontario.84 The Oblates opened a school in Fort George in the fall of 1931, recruiting many students from Anglican families.85 In the face of this challenge, the Anglicans opened a boarding school in the community in 1932.86 Two years later, the federal government began funding the Anglican school.87 By 1937, a Catholic boarding school in the community was receiving federal funding.88
Just as the government struggled—and failed—to control the growth of the school system, it also was not able to properly fund it. In his 1883 instructions to Battleford principal Thomas Clarke, Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney had stressed that “the strictest economy must be practised in all particulars.”89 From the outset of the system, the government was under the spell of two delusions. The first was that the schools would be relatively inexpensive to build. In 1883, Dewdney had estimated that the construction costs for the High River and Qu’Appelle schools would be $6,000 each.90 The winning bid for the construction of the High River school was $7,720.91 By September 1884, the total construction costs of the two schools had reached $29,920.92
The second, more long-lasting, delusion was that the schools would be inexpensive to operate because the churches and the students would be a source of cheap labour. In announcing the construction of the three initial industrial schools, Edgar Dewdney said that although the starting costs would be high, he could see no reason why the schools would not be largely self-supporting in a few years, due to the skills in farming, raising stock, and trades that were being taught to the students.93 Deputy Minister Vankoughnet, in support of the Anglican proposal for two industrial schools in Manitoba, enthused to Prime Minister Macdonald:
It would be well to give a Grant of money annually to each school established by any Denomination for the industrial training of Indian children. This system prevails in Ontario, and it has been found to work very satisfactorily. It costs the Government less than the whole maintenance of the School would cost and it enlists the sympathies and assistance of the religious denominations in the education and industrial training of the Indian children.94
The missionaries and the students were indeed a source of cheap labour—but the government was never happy with the quality of the teaching and, no matter how hard students worked, their labour never made the schools self-supporting.
The two types of residential schools were funded at different levels. Until the beginning of the 1890s, the boarding schools were funded at a rate of between $50 and $60 per month.95 Although three of the major schools in Ontario (Shingwauk in Sault Ste. Marie, Wikwemikong on Manitoulin Island, and Mount Elgin in Muncey) were often referred to as “industrial schools,” they were funded at the boarding school rate. According to Indian Affairs annual reports, the fourth major Ontario school, the Mohawk Institute, did not receive federal funding until 1892.96 Boarding school rates increased slightly in that year, and ranged from $50 to $72 per capita.97
As noted earlier, the federal government covered all the costs associated with the operation of the first three industrial schools (Battleford, Qu’Appelle, and High River). In 1891, the industrial school per capita rates for British Columbia and Manitoba were $130 and $100, respectively.98 Other industrial schools were funded on a per capita basis, although this varied from year to year. In 1891, the Kamloops, Cranbrook, Kuper Island, Middlechurch, St. Boniface, and Elkhorn schools (along with the three initial industrial schools) were being funded on a per capita basis.99 By the following year, Indian Affairs was paying all expenses for the Kamloops and Cranbrook schools, along with schools at Regina and Metlakatla, and the three original schools.100
The government was alarmed by the costs of operating the three industrial schools it had established in the North-West Territories. To control those costs, Indian Affairs instructed principals to cut salaries in 1888 and again in 1891.101 Dewdney, who became minister of Indian Affairs in 1891, continued to underestimate how much it would cost to operate the schools. In his opinion, industrial spending was “unnecessarily high.” If the schools were to continue to operate, costs would have to be “defined within the narrowest limits consistent with efficiency,” and the schools would have to graduate more pupils.102 The spending cuts did not take into account the actual cost of running the schools. According to an internal government memorandum in 1891, the total per capita costs at the Kamloops and Kuper Island schools in British Columbia were $153.40 and $157.69, respectively—while the per capita grant was $130.103
The cuts of 1889 and 1891 were not enough to reduce spending to the level Dewdney thought appropriate. By 1892, the respective costs of the Qu’Appelle, Battleford, and High River schools, if converted to per capita rates, were $134.67, $175.45, and $185.55, respectively.104 At that time, none of these three schools were particularly successful. During the 1885 North-West Rebellion, all the students left the Battleford and High River schools, and the principals had great difficulty in recruiting replacements. As Hayter Reed, then Indian commissioner, noted, “It had been necessary in some instances to take pupils irrespective of their suitability in point of health and age.”105
An 1892 assessment of the three schools showed that of the 664 students who had been admitted since the schools had opened less than a decade earlier, 81 were dead. Of the 198 students who had been discharged, 85 were viewed as not having spent enough time in school to demonstrate any results; of the rest, 96 were judged as doing either “very well” or “fairly well.” Four were “doing badly.”106
In his 1892 annual report, Reed defended the industrial schools, saying that “results need not be expected until after such institutions have been in operation for some few years, and it is entirely in the faith of deferred results that the cost of the preliminary years is undertaken.”107 The department, however, was planning to reduce its level of investment in students. A federal Order-in-Council (an order approved by the federal Cabinet, which, once approved by the governor general, has force of law), adopted in the fall of 1892, placed these three schools on the per capita system. The new rates for Qu’Appelle, Battleford, and High River were $115, $140, and $130 a year (reductions of 15%, 20%, and 30%), respectively. The newly constructed Regina school was given a per capita grant of $120.
Under the Order-in-Council, which was applied to all industrial schools, repair was to be a shared responsibility: the government was to supply the material; the churches, the labour.108 The government was also to supply the books, maps, and globes. From the annual per capita grant, the churches were to pay for maintenance, salaries, and expenses. The government would authorize the school’s pupilage.
The churches were obliged to follow “the rules of the Indian Department as laid down from time to time and to keep the schools at a certain standard of instruction, dietary and domestic comfort, and … the Inspectors and Officers of the Indian Department may at any time inspect and report upon the Institutions.” No child was to be admitted to the school without the department’s approval. The system was to go into effect in July 1893.109 By 1895, the Battleford and Middlechurch schools were the only ones having all their expenses paid, although, in subsequent years, the federal government would cover all costs for the start-up years of a new industrial school.110
By ending its brief experiment with providing full funding to industrial schools, the federal government was in large measure seeking to absolve itself of responsibility for the operation of residential schooling. It would provide set amounts of funding, which it would arbitrarily increase or decrease in response to its own fiscal needs. It would be up to the churches (often with the assistance of student labour) to feed, clothe, educate, and train their students on the basis of the per capita grant. Failures were generally ascribed to poor management and a lack of zeal. A low per capita grant contributed to the schools’ inability to recruit their full pupilage. But, if they did not recruit their full pupilage, they did not receive their full grant—even though they had to pay all their operating costs. To make up the difference, staff and students would have to ‘do without.’ To recruit a full pupilage, schools might recruit students who were too young or too sick. A wide age range among students diluted the schools’ ability to provide a meaningful education, and many of the students were simply too young for trades training. The presence of children with infectious diseases often had tragic implications. These were the implications of the per capita model.
Table 11.4. Outcome for High River, Battleford, and Qu’Appelle schools from opening, as reported in Indian Affairs annual report for 1892.
| Schools | No. admitted | Dead | Transferred | Discharged | Not traceable |
| High River | |||||
| Girls | 38 | 4 | 14 | 1 | |
| Boys | 118 | 6 | 1 | 65 | 7 |
| Total | 156 | 10 | 1 | 79 | 8 |
| Battleford | |||||
| Girls | 56 | 7 | 3 | ||
| Boys | 100 | 12 | 1 | 22 | 4 |
| Total | 156 | 19 | 1 | 25 | 4 |
| Qu’Appelle | |||||
| Girls | 175 | 25 | 1 | 35 | |
| Boys | 177 | 27 | 7 | 59 | 1 |
| Total | 352 | 52 | 8 | 94 | 1 |
| Total for all schools | 664 | 81 | 10 | 198 | 13 |
Source: Canada, Annual Report for the Department of Indian Affairs, 1892, 53.
The limitations of the per capita system were apparent from the outset. By 1893, the Anglicans in Manitoba were ready to turn the Middlechurch school over to the government. The school could only break even with eighty students, but had managed to recruit only forty-three. The General Committee of the Rupert’s Land Indian Industrial School called for the per capita system to be scrapped in favour of a fixed annual grant. The committee also sought a freer hand in the operation of the school, arguing that enrolment and funding were hampered by the department’s arbitrary rules.111 Reed sought to put the blame on the church, saying that other schools, after a short period of time, had been successful in getting parents to acquiesce to the attendance rules. When students were contented, “parents very seldom make any strong effort to take them away.” The teachers at the Middlechurch school, he wrote, did not have the “personal magnetism” necessary to secure the students’ confidence, and therefore had to rely on “a harshness and severity of punishment fatal to the prospects of success.” Reed claimed that, on his visits to the school, the students lacked the “cheerful demeanor and alacrity of friendly response met with in kindred Institutions.”112
This was not the only time Reed attributed the system’s shortcomings to the personalities of the school staff. After a visit to the Battleford school in 1890, Reed wrote that the principal still had much to do if he was to “comply with instructions then issued for the better Government of the Institution.” In particular, he said, “Discipline is not what it should be, neither is proper regard had to making the children speak English. During the whole time of my visit there appeared to be a marked lack of endeavour upon the part of the officials to see that they used English in preference to the vernacular.”113 In 1891, Reed attributed many of the Qu’Appelle school’s problems to a similar lack of firmness.114
| Not in school long enough to show results | Doing very well | Doing fairly well | Doing badly | Schools |
| High River | ||||
| 5 | 4 | 4 | Girls | |
| 44 | 12 | 2 | Boys | |
| 49 | 16 | 6 | Total | |
| Battleford | ||||
| 2 | 1 | Girls | ||
| 5 | 8 | 5 | Boys | |
| 7 | 9 | 5 | Total | |
| Qu’Appelle | ||||
| 14 | 18 | 2 | 1 | Girls |
| 15 | 29 | 11 | 3 | Boys |
| 29 | 47 | 13 | 4 | Total |
| 85 | 72 | 24 | 4 | Total for all schools |
Despite repeated salary reductions, the schools could not survive on the per capita grant. Both the High River and Qu’Appelle schools emerged from the first year on the per capita system with deficits.115 By January 1895, Reed had to acknowledge that the deficits at the Qu’Appelle, High River, and Elkhorn schools had been increasing from month to month, “without any apparent effort having been made to check or diminish them.” The problem was, he wrote, that the churches were paying competitive rates for staff. This was not what the government expected. Echoing Davin and Dewdney, Reed took the position that, since the work was “of a philanthropic and missionary character, and the churches have facilities for obtaining, through various societies, men and women to whom remuneration for such work is a minor consideration, it seems only reasonable that a lower, rather than higher rate, as compared with other services, should obtain.” Reed, who had once opposed church involvement in the school system, was now a convert to the view that the system could succeed as long as church men and women were willing to do the work for less than market rates.116
He also thought the staff was eating too well at the Regina school. Having examined the school expenditures, he had concluded that some food items “might be regarded as luxuries.” He noted that clothing that should have been manufactured in the schools was being purchased. When it came to household items, he said the schools were often “positively extravagant.” Reed instructed Indian Commissioner Amédée Forget to reduce costs at the schools. If all other measures failed, he was to cut wages and lay off staff.117
This tough approach was difficult to implement. In 1896, the St. Boniface school had a $2,500 deficit, which the government covered. The following year, its per capita grant was increased.118 One year later, in January 1898, Indian Affairs informed the principals of industrial schools that it would no longer be providing assistance in paying off the deficits incurred by their schools.119
It is clear that the government had only a limited understanding of the financing of many of the schools. In 1902, four schools in Ontario were receiving per capita grants of $60. The Shingwauk school had a considerable deficit: this was, in Benson’s opinion, because the principal, E. F. Wilson, when establishing the school, had “an eye for the beautiful but none for the practical necessities of the work to be carried on as the greater portion of the 95 acres they own is unproductive.” He did not think the school could count on grants from the Anglican Church, whose members were, according to Benson, “not specially notorious for free giving to missions.” For this reason, he recommended the government cover the school deficit, since “it furnishes the best English and Industrial education of any of the Ontario schools, numbers of boys having passed through and taken up the white man’s burden.”
Benson felt the other three Ontario schools, Mount Elgin in Muncey, the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, and Wikwemikong on Manitoulin Island, were in much better financial shape than Shingwauk. He noted that the Mohawk Institute “has a liberal grant from the New England Company, Mr. Sheppard of Mt. Elgin is an extensive stock dealer and makes it pay, while I have never found the Jesuits, who conduct the Wikwemikong school, to be unable to find money when they want it.”120 A month later, Benson revised his views about Mount Elgin. Principal Sheppard had informed him that, despite his expansion into stock farming, he was not able to make ends meet. Benson also observed that the financial records provided by the school showed no contribution from the Methodist Missionary Society. The principal argued for a doubling of the per capita rate, and while Benson was unenthusiastic about the education provided at the school, he recognized that, without an increase, “financial disaster” was inevitable.121
That same year, Benson found himself compelled to argue for a payment of the full grant to the Regina school, even though the enrolment did not justify such a payment. If the government were to fund the school simply on the basis of enrolment, the school would have a deficit, which, Benson recognized, would eventually end up at the government’s door.122
The drive for economy intensified after 1896, when the Liberal Party under Sir Wilfrid Laurier won the federal election. In opposition, the Liberals had maintained that Indian Affairs was staffed by corrupt, incompetent, and often immoral political appointees. They had also raised questions about the effectiveness of the residential schools.123 In 1895, Liberal MP David Mills argued that, in the absence of a coherent plan, control of the direction of Aboriginal education had been captured by the churches. The time was approaching, he suggested, when the government should consider taking over the industrial schools.124 Liberal MP James McMullen opposed the connection between church and state that the schools represented. In 1893, MP Louis Davis of Prince Edward Island said that if the churches wished to evangelize Aboriginal youth, they should do so at their own expense. He also worried that churches would place religious education ahead of practical education.125
Upon taking office, Laurier appointed Manitoba lawyer and newspaper publisher Clifford Sifton to serve as both minister of the interior and minister of Indian Affairs. Sifton viewed himself as the minister of western development—his major accomplishment was to bring about a dramatic increase in immigration to western Canada.126 Having concluded that “in the organized portion of the country there is no Indian population that may be considered dangerous so far as the peace of the country is concerned,” he reduced the Indian Affairs budget.127 He made his first cut at the top: Hayter Reed was dismissed as deputy minister and was not replaced. Instead, Sifton’s new deputy of the interior, James Smart, also served as the deputy of Indian Affairs.128 Much of the day-to-day operation of Indian Affairs was left in the hands of the department secretary, J. D. McLean.129 Within two years of Sifton’s appointment, fifty-seven of the department’s employees in the North-West either resigned or were dismissed. While many were replaced, overall, the number of department employees declined from 144 to 133 in that period. Departmental salaries were also cut, in some cases by up to 25%.130 Education was not to be spared in this cost-cutting exercise. Sifton announced that spending on education had reached its peak. In the future, he said, the government intended to cut education spending.131
Martin Benson, who had been with Indian Affairs for four years, prepared two devastating critiques of the industrial schools for the new minister in 1897.132 Benson judged the industrial schools’ mandate to be too ambitious, and concluded that the Canadian system had been modelled too closely on the Carlisle school in the United States.133 In Canada, he said, “the education and civilization of the Western Indians is still in its infancy and we should be content to let them creep for a time before they attempt to walk. It is only a few years since they were wild untamed savages, living by the chase, hunting in small bands or families.”
According to Benson, not more than one-half of the 700 male students attending the ten industrial schools in Manitoba and the Northwest had been taught to farm. The other half needed to undergo apprenticeships before they could find work. Where, he asked, would the government find work for 200 apprentices in a year? The churches, he said, “do not bestir themselves, so far as I am aware, to secure employment for ex-pupils.”134 The situation was no better in British Columbia, where, he thought, the schools were both unnecessary and useless, since the First Nations people “are all experts in the industries and pursuits they are engaged in [fishing, mining, raising stock, and railway work] and the time spent in these schools will not help to fit them for their after work.”135
He even drew aim at those former students who were portrayed as doing well. Gilbert Bear, who had been taught the printing trade at the Battleford school, was often cited as an industrial school ‘success story,’ having gone on to work for the Ottawa Citizen. But, according to Benson, Bear was not making enough to pay for his board and clothing, and hated the night-shift hours he worked. When he was fired in a dispute over his hours, Benson helped him get his job back, but said Bear “would rather be back home on the reserve.”136
He accused the industrial schools of “trying to over-run the country with a lot of half-trained and half-educated so-called Industrial pupils. The needs of the country do not call for all the different trades pupils even if they were turned out as finished workmen.” In his opinion, there was no point in teaching printing, shoemaking, and tailoring; it was far better to train the next generation of Aboriginal people to farm. For this, the only trades they needed to learn were carpentry and blacksmithing.137 Benson explicitly compared Ryerson’s proposals of 1847—which stressed agricultural training—with Davin’s more ambitious 1879 report, and concluded that Ryerson’s focus on training farmers was “the one best suited to the present generation of Indians.” In forty years’ time, “more elaborate training might be successful.”138
Benson not only thought the schools’ ambitions were too extravagant, but he also saw little evidence that they were, in fact, industrial schools. Students were admitted to the industrial schools at ages varying from four to twenty. “Once they were admitted, little if any distinction is made among pupils of the same sex as regards food, clothing, study, work, recreation, moral and religious training, rest and sleep.”139 He could not see much difference between the industrial schools and the boarding schools, other than the fact that one class of school was much better funded than the other. In British Columbia, he thought, the industrial school rate of $130 per pupil was overly generous, given the climate and cost of living. In his opinion, there was little difference between the Coqualeetza Institute near Chilliwack, which received the industrial rate of $130, and the St. Mary’s boarding school at Mission, which received the boarding school per capita rate of $60.140
He laid some of the blame for the system’s failure on Indian Affairs staff. Many Indian agents looked upon school-related work “as an extra duty which is performed in a very perfunctory manner.”141 He was even more critical of the churches and school staff, questioning whether a “priest or parson is best fitted by education, training or profession to assume the direct control and management of such institutions.” The schools were further handicapped by frequent changes in staff and “constant bickering and petty jealousies.”142 In recommending that “ignoramuses, idlers, time-killers and salary grabbers should not be employed,” Benson makes it clear he thought they were present, and in significant numbers.143
He also echoed the views of many department staff in his conclusion that, by subsidizing teacher-missionaries, the industrial schools were government-funded extensions of the churches’ missionary work. When the schools were first established, he said, “too much power and control was placed in the hands of the Church authorities, and it will require the exercise of considerable tact to curtail these powers and withdraw some of the concessions made to them.” The churches, he felt, showed too much independence in the hiring of staff: “Teachers, until lately, were removed and replaced without consulting the Department, and complaints of incompetency were made without action being taken by them.”144
Benson did not recommend that the residential school system be abandoned. What was needed, he felt, was a government takeover of the system. He noted that throughout the British Empire, “where a native population still remains, steps have been taken for the establishment of Industrial Training schools, which are supported wholly, or in part, by the Government, and it is now universally conceded that such Institutions afford the best known means of training the aborigines in habits of industry and the formation of character.”145 Canada was still drawing on the experience of the British Empire globally in developing its Canadian residential school policy.
Deputy Minister Smart signalled in his 1897 annual report that the pendulum was now swinging against industrial schools. By then, there were 22 industrial schools, compared with 31 boarding schools and 232 day schools. As for enrolment, industrial schools had 1,877 students, boarding schools had 874, and day schools had 6,877. Smart wrote:
There is a natural tendency to run to extremes, and it seems questionable whether the recognition of the undoubted advantages of boarding and industrial schools has not tended to an undervaluation of day schools on the reserves, which in the older provinces especially have done, and are doing a work by no means to be despised. It is true that the transformation from the natural condition to that of civilization can be more speedily and thoroughly accomplished by means of boarding and industrial schools, but even then it is questionable whether the day school should not provide the initial stage of preparation for the benefits of the boarding and industrial institutions.
There certainly seems reason to pause before further extending these industrial schools, and before doing so the capacity of those already established should be utilized to the extreme limit. Education must be considered with relation to the future of the pupils, and only the certainty of some practical results can justify the large expense entailed upon the country by the maintenance of these schools. To educate children above the possibilities of their station, and create a distaste for what is certain to be their environment in life would be not only a waste of money but doing them an injury instead of conferring a benefit upon them.146
Two years later, in 1899, Sifton announced the government “would not be extending the industrial school system, but where an extension is required, adding to the number of boarding schools.”147 In 1904, he told the House of Commons that while industrial schools would continue to operate, they were no longer the centrepiece of the government’s First Nations education policy.
We have substituted a less elaborate system; a system of what we call boarding schools where a larger number of children can for a shorter time be educated more economically and generally more effectively. What we desire to do is not to give a highly specialized education to half a dozen out of a large band of Indians, but if possible to distribute over the whole band a moderate amount of education and intelligence, so that the general status of the band would be raised.148
In downgrading the industrial schools, Sifton was expressing a belief that First Nations people were not ready to benefit from the types of training these schools were intended to offer. “You cannot take the child of the ordinary prairie Indian, put him in an industrial school, keep him there until he is twenty-one years of age and turn him loose to make his living amongst white men. He has not the physical, mental or moral get-up to enable him to compete. He cannot do it.”149
(In his speeches, Sifton was insistent that, under the Conservatives, students were kept in boarding schools until they were in their early twenties.150 While there may have been examples of this, it does not appear to have been the general practice.)
In a highly critical assessment of the industrial schools on the Prairies, written in 1902, Benson pointed out that since 1882, $2.1 million had been spent on industrial schools in Manitoba and the North-West Territories. This was for four schools in Manitoba (Brandon, 1895; Elkhorn, 1888; Middlechurch, 1890; and St. Boniface, 1889) and six in the North-West Territories (Battleford, 1883; Calgary, 1896; Qu’Appelle, 1884; Red Deer, 1893; Regina, 1891; and High River, 1884). The government also had spent $750,000 on five boarding schools in Manitoba and twenty-nine in the North-West Territories. In addition, $250,000 had been spent on forty-five day schools in Manitoba and thirty-four day schools in the North-West Territories.
Of the total of 2,752 students who had been enrolled since 1883, as of June 30, 1901, almost one-fifth, 506, had died, with another 139 reported to be in poor health. A total of 1,700 students had been “discharged” (the formal term for removing a child from the enrolment record), of whom 86 had transferred to other schools. The government could not report on the condition of another 249. Another 123 were judged to have “turned out badly,” while 599 students were “doing well.” Benson suggested that “doing well” should be interpreted as meaning “not doing badly.” By his count, “the cost of educating Indians who have not died or utterly failed amounts to $4000 a head.” In his opinion, there were enough schools on the Prairies to meet the educational needs of First Nations children. However, the churches continued to lobby for residential schools because “the life of the mission is in most cases dependent on the establishment of the boarding school.” The schools, Benson wrote, should focus on the “improvement, not the transformation of the Indian.” Schools were not providing the “practical lessons in self-support” that were needed.151
Conditions were no better at the boarding schools. As Anglican Church accountant F. Van Thiel wrote in 1899, under the per capita funding system, “it has been the aim of those interested in the work to increase the number of children at the schools not only for the good of Christian work, but also to increase the assets.” Spending under these conditions was limited to the “bare necessities.”152
Benson did recognize the need to increase funding. In 1902, he recommended that the government cover the Shingwauk school’s deficit.153 In the following year, he recommended that the per capita grant for all four Ontario boarding schools (Mount Elgin, the Mohawk Institute, Wikwemikong, and the Shingwauk Home) be increased from $60 to $100.154 Instead, the boarding school grant remained at $60 until 1911, even though Benson wrote of Mount Elgin that “with the increased cost of living a school of this class cannot be carried on with a per capita grant of $60.”155 When evaluating whether the government should pick up the Regina school’s deficit in 1903, Benson wrote that “although the Department has paid deficits for many of the industrial schools in the past, it did so as a matter of grace, and not of right.”156 The following year, he judged the Lestock school in what is now Saskatchewan to be “the most satisfactorily managed” boarding school in the Northwest. Despite this, the school ran a deficit of $1,000.157 Regina principal R. B. Heron concluded in 1905 that the cost of running the school was $11,300, while the per capita for full enrolment would fall significantly short of that at $9,425.158
During the ten years that Sifton served as minister of Indian Affairs (1896 to 1905), there was little growth in the system. Under his successor, Frank Oliver, a campaign led by dominant figures within the Protestant missionary organizations nearly resulted in a significant reduction in the size of the residential school system. Two men played a central role in this campaign: Frank Pedley, who was appointed deputy minister of Indian Affairs in 1902; and Samuel Blake, a prominent Toronto lawyer and member of the evangelical wing of the Anglican Church.159
In his 1904 annual report, Pedley indicated that the government was prepared to re-evaluate the residential schools.
The questions have been raised repeatedly as to whether the existing method of education by day, boarding and industrial school as at present distributed and conducted is the best that can be devised for the education of the Indian youth, and again as to whether the potentialities of these schools are being exhausted.
The many difficulties in the way of providing and inducing parents to accept for their children such educational advantages as may seem best suited for their several environments, their present requirements and future prospects, have been repeatedly pointed out.
The government was planning to go into these “most important questions exhaustively at an early date.” He expected to receive valuable assistance from “the various religious denominations whose experience, co-operation and interest in the work place them in the best possible position to render it.”160
As a leading member of the Toronto legal and political establishment, Blake was well placed to provide the sort of assistance Pedley sought for a campaign to dramatically reduce the number of residential schools and replace them with what were to be termed “Improved Day Schools.”
Blake had come to believe that the residential schools were a drain on church resources. This was of particular significance, since the British-based Church of England had begun the slow process of transferring responsibility for support of its work with Aboriginal people in Canada to the Canadian Anglican Church (also referred to as the “Church of England in Canada”). The British-based Church Missionary Society announced in 1903 that it was phasing out its support for missions in Canada and shifting its work to “the densely populated portions of the Heathen World.”161
A key event in this process was the 1902 establishment of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada (MSCC). The MSCC brought together a variety of Anglican missionary organizations with the intent of assuming responsibility for the work of the British-based Church Missionary Society.162 As a result, the MSCC, which raised most of its money in eastern Canada, was increasingly called upon to provide financial support for residential schools in the West. Blake, who served on the MSCC’s management board, questioned the effectiveness of this spending. In 1902, in his words, he began to “procure such statistics as would throw light upon the correctness of the pleasing reports, almost universally presented for information by the Principals, Missionaries, and others immediately engaged in carrying on the work.”163 In an inflammatory pamphlet entitled Don’t you hear the red man calling?, Blake used capital letters to emphasize his belief that “THERE WAS JUSTLY A GENERAL AND STRONG FEELING OF DISSATISFACTION WITH THE MODE IN WHICH WORK AMONG THE INDIANS OF THE NORTHWEST AND BRITISH COLUMBIA WAS BEING CARRIED ON.”164 The pamphlet also included damning quotes from leading western and northern Canadian Anglicans to support Blake’s case. The Bishop of Qu’Appelle was cited as writing in 1906 that he had “always considered the expense of the boarding schools is much too great for its relative importance to the general work of the diocese.”165 The Bishop of Saskatchewan wrote in the same year, “The present system of management of Indians in the west is wasteful, detrimental to the Indians, and calculated only to find places and jobs.”166 The Bishop of Moosonee wrote of “the appalling death-rate amongst the children,” and recommended that “instead of schools it may be better to establish two small institutions, one west and the other east, for the training of native teachers and Clergy.”167
Blake was a strong supporter of the work of the Indian Affairs chief medical officer, Dr. Peter Bryce, whose 1907 report drew national attention to the high death rates in the schools. (Bryce’s work is discussed in more detail in a subsequent chapter.) To those who said that Bryce’s conclusions were based on brief visits to a limited number of schools, Blake responded, “What could he have found out if his visit had been prolonged?”168 Blake noted that at Emmanuel College residential school in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, nearly one-quarter of the students (32 of 133) who had passed through the school during a seventeen-year period had died.169
Blake said, “The competition of getting in pupils to earn the government grant seems to blind the heads of these institutions and to render them quite callous to the shocking results which flow from this highly improper means of adding to the funds of their institutions.”170 The Bishop of Moosonee confirmed Blake’s view:
I also admit that in a majority of schools unhealthy children have been admitted and allowed to sleep in the same dormitories with healthy ones; also that the dormitories have generally been overcrowded and very imperfectly ventilated. It is also true that in many cases the teachers have been untrained and incompetent.
He did point out that the Indian agents had long been aware of these issues.171
Arguing that students were corrupted by their time in the schools, Blake quoted one unnamed western Canadian lawyer as saying, “When they leave the schools the boys are thieves and the girls are prostitutes.” The lawyer claimed it had recently been discovered that every member of a ring of thirteen cattle thieves was a residential school graduate.172 Blake also judged the schools to be a failure in winning converts to the church: in Algoma Diocese, for example, after eighty years of expensive work, there were, at most, 700 Anglicans—many of whom, he suspected, were Anglican in name only.173
The pamphlet angered many Anglican missionaries and school principals, but Blake was able to gain the support of the leaders of the Presbyterian and Methodist national missionary associations, each of which was facing similar financial pressures. A 1904 Presbyterian inquiry into the relations between the Regina industrial school and the surrounding boarding schools had concluded that the boarding schools were healthier and more popular with parents, and provided students with more attention, while costing only half as much as industrial schools.174
As a result of Blake’s work, the three Protestant churches held several meetings in Winnipeg, followed by a meeting in Toronto in April 1907, at which they agreed to a joint memorandum. Beyond the regular church calls for compulsory education and an extension on the period of time that students could be kept in school, the Protestant churches proposed that the government take over the full cost of funding the schools. Despite this, the churches remained anxious “to continue to co-operate with the Government in the civilization and Christianization of the Indians.”
Since spiritual and moral development were seen as such an important part of the educational work, the churches argued that, even after they had stopped providing any funding for the system, they should be allowed to appoint the teachers, albeit “on terms to be mutually agreed upon.”175 The churches had asked for a salary of $500 a year for day school teachers, up from $300—a rate that had been deemed insufficient two decades earlier. They also wanted to see the per capita grant raised from $60 to $100 for all schools in Ontario, and to $130 for all schools farther west. In addition, the government should be responsible for “the cost of material for the plant,” including plumbing, heating, and other fixtures. The government was also to make the schools sanitary and sufficiently ventilated and to provide needed medical services. Under this arrangement, the churches were prepared to cover deficits.176 A second memorandum recommended that the number of industrial schools be reduced to three.177
The Protestants’ apparent willingness to close schools, coupled with their desire to increase the per capita rates for those schools that would remain open, created an opportunity for Pedley. By 1908, the deputy minister had concluded that, rather than establishing industrial schools in the West in the 1880s, it would have been wiser to have carried out such education on the reserves, providing training to both children and adults (who had been disregarded in the past as being beyond redemption). He had, in fact, begun closing industrial schools. By 1907, he was considering closing the Metlakatla school in British Columbia, had closed the Calgary school in Alberta, and had declined to rebuild the Middlechurch school in Manitoba after it had been destroyed by fire in 1903. All three of those schools had been operated by the Anglican Church. Now, he wanted to close the Presbyterian school in Regina and the Anglican school in Elkhorn, Manitoba. The older students from those schools were to be transferred to the Methodist school in Brandon, which provided agricultural training to students from northern Manitoba. He also proposed closing eleven Protestant boarding schools in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Pedley noted that in British Columbia, the First Nations people were largely self-sufficient. As a result, he felt, “the policy of removing the children from their parents and separating them from the ordinary vocations by which in their future lives they must obtain a living is questionable.” In addition to closing the Metlakatla school, Pedley proposed no increases in the per capita rate or additional capital expenditures for schools in that province.178 (In a subsequent letter, Pedley dropped the Onion Lake and Blood Reserve schools from the list of proposed closures.179)
With the money that would be saved by these closures, he proposed to establish what he termed “an improved type of day school” on the reserves formerly served by the schools that were being closed. These replacement schools would employ a teacher, his wife (who would offer domestic instruction to women on the reserve), and a nurse, and would provide “a nutritious and simple” meal at midday and agricultural training. While a number of existing industrial schools would continue in operation, in the future, residential schooling would be restricted to districts where First Nations people had not settled on reserves. In all, he believed that his proposals would see total education spending rise from $445,337 to $521,768. At $378,860, residential schooling would remain the largest component of this budget.180
Pedley had the support of the new Indian Affairs minister, Frank Oliver, who had succeeded Sifton in 1905. Before becoming minister, Oliver made it clear that he did not view First Nations people as full Canadians. In 1897, he had told Parliament that “we are educating these Indians to compete industrially with our own people, which seems to me a very undesirable use of public money, or else we are not able to educate them to compete, in which case our money is thrown away.”181 Once he became minister, he adopted measures specifically intended to facilitate the surrender of Indian reserve land to non-native settlers. While he said that a First Nations person “should not be deprived of his right without his consent,” if the rights of settlers and First Nations were to come into conflict, he made it clear that “the interests of the whites will have to be provided for.”182 Nonetheless, he had strong reservations about the residential school system. He questioned the policy of separating children from their parents, both as a failure in and of itself, and as a betrayal of a fundamental religious teaching. In a letter to Blake of January 28, 1908, Oliver wrote:
My belief is that the attempt to elevate the Indian by separating the child from his parents and educating him as a white man has turned out to be a deplorable failure. I believe that the best that can be done for the Indian is to accept the family conditions established by Providence, and hope for the elevation of the parents by elevating their children. In other words, that a good day school on a reserve is a better means of improving the conditions of the Indians than the industrial or even the boarding schools.
The mutual love between parent and child is the strongest influence for betterment in the world, when that influence is absolutely cut apart as in the education of Indian children in industrial schools the means taken defeats itself. Children must love and therefore respect parents or they cannot or will not respect themselves. To teach an Indian child that his parents are degraded beyond measure, and that whatever they did or thought was wrong could only result in the child becoming, as the ex-pupils of industrial schools have become, admittedly and unquestionably very much less desirable elements of society than their parents who never saw the schools.
I hope you will excuse me for so speaking but one of the most important commandments laid upon the human by the divine is love and respect by children for parents. It seems strange that in the name of religion a system of education should have been instituted, the foundation principle which not only ignored but contradicted this command.183
Thus, with the minister’s support, it appeared that the plan to scale back the system would succeed. The federal government agreed to the Protestant proposal that an advisory board be established, with two representatives from each of the Protestant churches. Blake, who was a member of a committee investigating the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada’s work among Aboriginal people, served as the chair of the first advisory board.184
In the spring of 1909, Pedley presented the Protestants with a detailed proposal for industrial school closures, coupled with proposals as to how the money saved would be distributed. The $14,000 that would be saved by closing the Presbyterian-run Regina school would allow for the Presbyterian boarding school per capita grant to be increased from $72 to $100, and the pupilage for Presbyterian schools to be increased by ten to fifteen students, depending on the school. The grants to Presbyterian day schools would be increased, and the church would be given responsibility for two, new, “improved type” of day schools.
In exchange for agreeing to the closure of four industrial schools, the Anglicans would see similar per capita and enrolment increases at boarding schools, be allowed to open a new boarding school in The Pas (in what is now Manitoba), and have responsibility for three new day schools. In addition, they would receive funding increases for all thirty-nine Anglican day schools in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta that were deemed to be viable.
Pedley now wished to close the Brandon school. In exchange for agreeing to this, the Methodists would receive an increase in the per capita grant and pupilage at their Norway House school in what is now Manitoba, and be provided with increased support for sixteen day schools. The government also took the position that, in the case of the Methodist school at Red Deer, “it might be better at some not far distant date to close this School and to open a Boarding School” at a location closer to where the students lived.185
A subcommittee of the Protestant advisory board accepted the overall proposal, and commented, “While residential schools may be necessary in some localities and may answer a good purpose for the time being, the Board concurs in the policy of the Department in establishing wherever possible an improved type of Day School.”186
All Pedley needed now was the agreement of the religious orders that ran the Roman Catholic schools. He had already closed the St. Boniface industrial school, while allowing the church to establish three smaller boarding schools in Manitoba and northwestern Ontario.187 In addition, he wanted to close nine Catholic boarding schools in Alberta and Saskatchewan.188 It was Pedley’s suggestion that the Catholics be asked to appoint two representatives to enter into discussions with the government to discuss the proposal. He intended to offer them the same increase in the per capita grant as he had offered the Protestants, along with a reduction in the number of schools.189
The Catholics certainly were experiencing financial problems at some of their schools. In March 1908, for example, Qu’Appelle school principal Joseph Hugonnard, after thanking Oliver for providing $3,000 to help cover the school deficit, pointed out that the additional grant reduced only half the deficit. Without an increase in the per capita grant, he wrote, the deficit would become permanent.190 Despite such problems, the Catholic leadership refused to accept any proposal for an increase in funding that was tied to a decrease in the number of schools.191
A challenge to Pedley’s and Blake’s plans then arose from within the Protestant churches. Led by Calgary Anglican Archdeacon J. W. Tims and Red Deer Methodist school principal Arthur Barner, missionaries in the West inundated Ottawa with letters and petitions supporting residential schooling. Regina school principal R. B. Heron urged Oliver to convene a conference of principals and others involved directly in school work before making any changes.192 His proposal was backed by the principals of the Birtle and Portage la Prairie schools in Manitoba on behalf of the Association of Indian Workers.193 The Catholics also opposed the plan, with Bishop Emile Legal of Alberta calling the day school plan “a fallacy and farce.”194
Tims characterized Blake’s criticisms of residential schools as “grossly unfair.” He said that the calls to amalgamate schools were impractical, the shortcomings of the Calgary school were exaggerated, and the death rates were inflated. He added that a great deal of agricultural training was being carried out, that he knew of no former student who had become a prostitute, and that “the cases of thieving (in each case of horses) are very rare.” He argued that medical problems had been overstated by the government to justify the proposed closure of the schools. “Unless some strong action can be taken,” Tims warned his fellow Anglicans, “the future education of the Indians is to be left in the hands of the Roman Catholics.”195 In January, a convention of Protestant residential school workers in Alberta came out strongly in opposition to the government proposals. After the conference, Red Deer principal Barner wrote to Blake that day schools in Alberta were about as appropriate as it would be for a farmer in northern Alberta to follow the same farming methods as a farmer in central Saskatchewan.196
Blake accused his opponents of being little more than a “handful of men blinded by their local interest.”197 He maintained that since the “members of the Church in the eastern portions of Canada contributed over three-fourths of the funds for missionary purposes, it was but right that they should have a substantial voice in suggesting what ‘re-arrangement or other changes in the field’ should reasonably be made in the interest of the whole Church.”198 His campaign, however, had lost momentum.
In the face of the growing opposition, the government backed down from its plan to reduce the number of industrial and residential schools. Oliver concluded by the summer of 1908 that no major changes would be made without “the acceptance by the Roman Catholic Church of the main features of the proposition and more complete harmony amongst the various local interests of the Protestant churches.”199 The Catholic Church never accepted the government proposal, while the pro-residential school faction had gained dominance within the Protestants. Given the church opposition, the federal government abandoned Pedley’s proposal to dramatically reduce the number of residential schools.
In 1909, Duncan Campbell Scott was appointed to the position of superintendent of Indian Education.200 Shortly after his appointment, Scott began to fashion a new approach to the schooling issue. He began by disavowing the department’s previous goals for First Nations education. In his first report, Scott wrote:
It was never the policy, nor the end and aim of the endeavour to transform an Indian into a white man. Speaking in the widest terms, the provision of education for the Indian is the attempt to develop the great natural intelligence of the race and to fit the Indian for civilized life in his own environment. It includes not only a scholastic education, but instruction in the means of gaining a livelihood from the soil or as a member of an industrial or mercantile community, and the substitution of Christian ideals of conduct and morals for aboriginal concepts of both.201
Scott’s statement that it was never the aim to “transform an Indian into a white man” is at variance with the facts. The government had been, and continued to be, committed to transforming Aboriginal people economically, politically, culturally, and spiritually. The only real change was that the government was now dropping any pretense of providing First Nations children with the sorts of skills that would allow them to move successfully into the broader economy. Scott noted that, while there were two orders of residential schools (industrial and boarding), “the work carried on at each is in all essentials the same. The teaching of trades is no longer generally pursued at the industrial schools; carpentry and agriculture are the chief practical subjects, for the boys, and general housewifery for the girls.”202
He also stressed that the schools were a source of social order, and that “without education and with neglect the Indians would produce an undesirable and often a dangerous element in society.” He claimed that schools were providing a social service.
Not only are our schools every day removing intelligent Indian children from evil surroundings, but they are very often ministering to a class which would be outcasts without such aid; I refer to the illegitimate offspring of white men and Indian women who are thrown upon their mothers for support, and who have no legal status as Indians.203
Scott then set about engineering a set of negotiations that led to a new boarding school funding agreement between the government and the churches in November 1910. The contract provided significant increases in the per capita grant and incentives to improve the quality of the boarding schools. It was based in large measure on the Protestant proposal of 1908—minus any requirement for school closures. A sign of the change in both government and church policy can be detected from the fact that Archdeacon Tims of Calgary was one of the Anglican Church representatives, while his fellow Anglican, Blake, who had advocated for school closures, does not appear to have been present at the meeting.204
In 1910, per capita rates for boarding schools had not been increased since 1891: they were $60 for schools in eastern Canada and $72 for schools in the West and North. The new agreement divided the country into three divisions: Eastern, Western, and Northern. The divisions did not break down along provincial boundaries; for example, Ontario had schools in all three divisions. There was a single per capita rate for the Northern Division schools of $125, but in the Eastern Division, the rates could vary between $80 and $100, and in the West, they could vary between $100 and $125. The difference in the divisional rates was intended to reflect the higher cost of supplies in the West and the North. Although they represented an increase, the new boarding school per capita rates were still below the rates granted to industrial schools under the 1892 Order-in-Council.
The schools themselves were to be divided into three classes: A, B, and C. (See Table 11.5.) Class A schools were church-owned schools in good condition, and would receive the maximum grant for their division. They had to have substantial buildings in a good state of repair, with a full basement, a stone or cement foundation, a plentiful supply of pure water throughout the building, a proper system of sanitation, hospital accommodation for students with infectious diseases or tuberculosis, modern ventilation, adequate space in dormitories and classrooms for the number of students enrolled, modern heating, and a sufficient land base for farming and gardening. Class B schools were government-owned schools. They would have to meet the same requirements as Class A schools, but would receive only the minimum per capita grant for their division. Class C schools were church schools that, while “sanitary and kept in a good state of repair,” did not meet all the requirements of a Class A school. These schools, which were required to have hospital accommodation, modern ventilation, adequate classroom and dormitory space, and an agricultural land base, would receive the minimum per capita grant. Schools that upgraded from Class C to A would receive an increase in funding.
The classification system reflects the poor state of the boarding schools of the day: of the existing sixty-one schools, forty-one were in the lowest class, Class C. Further, the haphazard nature of the expansion of the boarding school system in the West can be seen from the fact that seven of the twelve Class A schools were in Ontario.205 The average per capita grant under this system was $115.206
Table 11.5. Regional breakdown of boarding schools by class, 1910.
| Division | Class A | Class B | Class C |
| Eastern Division (central Ontario) | 6 | 1 | 0 |
| Western Division Ontario | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Northern Division Ontario | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| Manitoba | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Western Division Saskatchewan | 2 | 2 | 7 |
| Northern Division Saskatchewan | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| Western Division Alberta | 1 | 2 | 8 |
| Northern Division (includes schools in northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories) | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| British Columbia | 0 | 0 | 9 |
| Total | 12 | 8 | 41 |
Source: TRC, NRA, Anglican Church of Canada, General Synod Archives, ACC-MSCC-GS 75-103, series 3:1, box 48, file 3, Assistant-Deputy to S. P. Matheson, 25 November 1910. [AAC-090237]
Class A schools were expected to provide 500 cubic feet (14.1 cubic metres) of space per child in each dormitory. On a per-pupil basis, each classroom was to have 16 square feet (1.5 square metres) of floor space and 250 square feet (23.2 square metres) of air space.
Under the provisions of the contract, the churches agreed to “support, maintain, and educate” a specific number of students. They were not to admit any child under the age of seven and required permission from Indian Affairs to keep a child who was over the age of eighteen. No child was to be admitted without the approval of Indian Affairs and a doctor’s examination (“where practicable”). The contract limited the schools to children of specific bands. “Half-breed” children could not be admitted unless a sufficient number of “Indian children” could not be obtained.
The schools also had to be operated according to regulations adopted by the government. The government could determine the number of “teachers, officers, and employees” who were required at the school. Teachers had to be able to “speak and write the English language fluently and correctly and possess such other qualifications as in the opinion of the Superintendent General may be necessary.” There was no similar provision for French in the contract. The teachers and officers had to be qualified to
give the pupils religious instruction at proper times; to instruct the male pupils of the said school in gardening, farming, and care of stock, or such other industries as are suitable to their local requirements; to instruct female pupils in cooking, laundry work, needlework, general housewifery and dairy work, where such dairy work can be carried on; to teach all the pupils in the ordinary branches of an English education; to teach calisthenics, physical drill and fire drill; to teach the effects of alcoholic drinks and narcotics on the human system; and how to live in a healthy manner; to instruct the older advanced pupils in the duties and privileges of British citizenship, explaining to them the fundamental principles of the government of Canada, and training them in such knowledge and appreciation of Canada as will inspire them with respect and affection for the country and its laws.
Despite this long list of required skills, there was no requirement that teachers would have formal training. The contract also allowed Indian Affairs to require the church to remove, “for cause,” any “teacher, officer, employee or pupil.”
Students were to be given sufficient clothing, food, lodging, and accommodation for their “comfort and safety.” With certain exceptions, the churches were to provide tools and equipment. Students and their clothes were to be kept clean and vermin-free, and the schools were to be free from flies, insects, and vermin.
Classes were to be held five days a week and “industrial exercises” were to be held six days a week. There could be no more than one month of vacation, which was to be taken between July 1 and October 1 each year. During that month, children were allowed to visit their homes, but Indian Affairs would “not pay any part of the transportation either going or returning.” The schools were instructed to observe the King’s Birthday, Victoria Day, Dominion Day, and Thanksgiving Day. The churches were to provide reports as required and allow Indian Affairs representatives to conduct “thorough and complete” inspections of the schools. Indian Affairs could also order the churches to make needed changes or alterations to the schools.
The contract placed only three obligations on Indian Affairs: to make quarterly payments based on the school’s enrolment; to provide medicine, schoolbooks, stationery, and school “appliances”; and to maintain any government-owned buildings in good repair and to provide for sanitation and “sanitary appliances.” If the government believed a church was not adhering to the provisions of the contract, the contract could be cancelled with six months’ notice.207
The 1910 contract went into effect on April 11, 1911, and was intended to run for five years.208 In the first few years after the contract was signed, the federal government spent $150,000 a year upgrading many of the Class C schools. This spending ended with the commencement of the First World War in 1914.209 When the contract lapsed in 1916, no effort was made to negotiate a new one.210 However, the government and churches continued to operate as if the contract was still in effect, and, when new schools opened, it was used as the template for an operating agreement between the church organization and the government.
Wartime inflation rapidly reduced the value of the increase in the per capita grant. As early as 1916, a senior Oblate in British Columbia, J. Welch, claimed that the $100 per capita paid to the Mission school was
quite inadequate. We find it impossible to feed, clothe, educate and house a child with this amount, and each year when we have expended on the School the Government allowance, we have to turn for additional help to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, and to the Congregation of Oblates. But this, to my mind, is unfair, for as I have said on a previous occasion it is on the State, and not on the Church, to provide the necessary means for the education of the Indian.211
By the following year, the Anglican school at The Pas had a $5,173 deficit. After blaming the church and the former principal for the problem, Indian Affairs official Martin Benson acknowledged:
The trouble with this school is want of funds. The per capita grant of $110.00 is insufficient. Eighty pupils are provided for which will give them a gross income of $8800 a year. It will require at least $3500 to pay salaries which only leaves $5300. For the year ending December 31, 1916, food and incidental expenses cost $5060.33, and clothing cost $885.34 a year, total of $5945.67. No saving could be made in any of these items and it is quite evident that the school cannot be carried on for $110.212
In response to these rising costs, Duncan Campbell Scott, who had become deputy minister of Indian Affairs in 1913, proposed that the per capita grant be increased by $10. In a 1917 memorandum, he noted, “This grant, owing to the increased cost of food, clothing and wages, is insufficient to meet the cost of the maintenance and management of these schools.” As a result, “with one or two exceptions,” the schools were running deficits. He thought the increase could be funded by not building any new buildings that year and by cutting spending on “house furnishings, implements, provisions, transportation of pupils, etc.”213
While the 1910 contract provided an increase in funding for boarding schools, it provided no increase for industrial schools, which continued to run deficits that the government continued to cover. A 1913 Indian Affairs inspection of the Red Deer school’s books recommended that the government not cover the school’s $2,754.98 deficit, since it “was incurred through want of management and lack of experience.” The farm, for example, which was operating at a loss, was in the hands of a “young Englishman only 22 years old.” In making this recommendation, Martin Benson acknowledged that the Methodists were well aware that the government had covered other school deficits in the past and expected to “receive the same liberal treatment that has been accorded” the Anglican, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic schools.214 Three years later, Benson recommended that the department cover the then $10,000 deficit at the Qu’Appelle school in Saskatchewan, which Principal Hugonnard claimed was the result of fires and increases in the cost of supplies and salaries. Benson noted that the $130 per capita grant being paid the Qu’Appelle school was not enough to cover the cost of running an industrial school in the West.215 In 1918, the Methodists complained that they could not continue to operate their schools on the $130 rate that was provided to industrial schools west of the Great Lakes.216 In 1919, the federal government instituted another increase of $10 in the per capita rate, this time increasing both the industrial and boarding school rates. Another $10 increase was granted in 1921.217
The number of industrial schools continued to decline. The Regina school closed in 1910, the Battleford school in 1914, the Elkhorn school in 1918 (although it would later reopen), the Red Deer school in 1919, and the High River school in 1922.218 By 1922, there were only sixteen industrial schools, and, from 1923 onwards, the department stopped making any distinctions between boarding schools and residential schools.219
In 1921, J. H. Edmison, of the Methodist Board of Home Missions and Social Services, wrote, “During the years of the War we have simply tided things over. In regard to our buildings and equipment in the schools, everything has gone thread-bare.”220 Many boarding schools and industrial schools were running deficits.221
In the 1920s, the federal government began to acquire most of the church-owned boarding schools, although the churches were allowed to continue to operate them. The churches were anxious to be rid of financial liabilities, while the government, which also agreed to cover school capital costs, believed this move would allow the churches to spend more on “better instruction, food and clothing.”222 The government was prepared to pay for church schools that were in good condition, but some schools were in such a state of disrepair that the government argued they had no economic value. For example, it judged the value of ten Anglican-owned schools (out of the total of twenty-one Anglican schools) to be “nil, because of the poor condition of the buildings or their situation.” Similarly, Indian Affairs believed that two Methodist-owned schools (out of a total of seven schools) could be obtained for free. Three of the four Presbyterian-owned schools were deemed to be modern and well designed, while the fourth was “dilapidated, and we would pay nothing to the Church when we decide to rebuild.”223
In cases where the church and government could not reach an agreement, the school remained in church hands and the government made a commitment to provide capital supports.224 By 1934, there were ten church-owned schools (seven of which were in Alberta) for which the government paid capital expenses. At that time, Indian Affairs director Harold McGill lamented that the “lack of written records and agreements makes it very difficult to determine the nature and extent of this responsibility.” In particular, he was frustrated by the fact that churches were undertaking repairs and renovations without getting government approval, and then requesting afterwards that the government cover their costs. In an effort to regain control over departmental spending, McGill announced the government would provide grants towards the cost of buildings only if prior written authority had been granted.225
The fact that schools were penalized if they did not have full enrolment was also an ongoing issue. In 1922, the Manitoba Provincial Council of the Oblates pointed out that never in the history of the Pine Creek school had there been a year in which the church received the full amount that would have been allocated if it had recruited its allotted enrolment.226 In 1938, the Oblates estimated that running a school with a pupilage of less than 125 was economically unsound, based on the current per capita grant, and a figure of 150 was ideal. At the time, only one of the schools it operated (at Qu’Appelle) had a pupilage of over 125. Five of its schools had pupilages of less than 100.227
Between the ongoing need to cover school deficits and the government’s increasingly ad hoc approach to school funding, the classification system developed in the 1910 contract had broken down by the 1920s. In 1924, the federal government did away with the regional divisions and classes, and a per capita rate was set for each school.228 For example, in 1927, there were five different rates for thirteen United Church schools in western Canada: $145, $155, $160, $170, and $175.229 (The United Church had been created in 1925 through a merger of the Methodist Church, the Congregationalist Church, and many Presbyterian congregations. In the process, the United Church assumed responsibility for all Methodist schools and all but two Presbyterian schools.)230 At the same time, there were at least three rates for Catholic schools in Alberta: $140, $155, and $170.231 By 1931, the average grant was $175 (up from $115 in 1911).232
The Shubenacadie school in Nova Scotia did not open until 1930. Pressure for a school in the Maritimes, however, had been mounting for two decades. As early as 1911, the Reverend J. J. Ryan, the provincial superintendent of schools in New Brunswick, lobbied the federal government for an industrial school in the Maritimes.233 In 1924, Indian Superintendent A. J. Boyd recommended that an industrial school be established in a central location in Nova Scotia. He said that such a school should not only teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also provide technical training that would allow students to go on to “become self-sustaining and useful citizens of their country.” He repeated this recommendation in 1925.234 Father F. C. Ryan supported Boyd, saying that without such an industrial school, federal spending on Aboriginal education “seems a huge waste of money.” He believed there were at least 100 “delinquent Indian children, orphans and those who will not go to school” who would benefit from being sent to such a school. Currently, he said, these children “run wild about the shores,” exerting a negative influence on those who were attending school.235
In 1927, Scott concluded that a school with a capacity of 125 students should be established in Nova Scotia. In large measure, the decision was determined by economics, since, according to Scott, Indian Affairs was already paying to house “a large number of children in institutions in Halifax and elsewhere and there are others for whom we are paying board while they reside in foster homes on the reserve.”236 Roman Catholic authorities in Halifax responded positively to the government’s proposal that they manage the school and recommended that the staff be drawn from members of the Sisters of Charity.237
The Shubenacadie school was the only residential school the government operated in the Maritime provinces.238 With its opening, the system hit a peak of eighty schools operating at the same time.239 From then until the 1950s, the opening of new schools would be balanced with closures. In 1931, the residential school enrolment was 7,831 and the average attendance was 6,917. (Enrolment could be higher than attendance at residential schools because enrolment could include enrolled students who had run away, who had not returned from holiday, or who were being treated for illness in hospital.) The average day school enrolment was 8,584 and the average attendance was 5,314.240 At that time, according to Indian Affairs, there were 21,190 First Nations children between the ages of six and fifteen (inclusive), meaning that about 37% of school-aged First Nations children were enrolled in residential school.241 The Roman Catholic Church operated forty-four of the schools; the Anglicans, twenty-one; the United Church, thirteen; and the Presbyterian Church (comprised of those Presbyterian congregations that had rejected the 1925 merger) operated two schools. That year, four new main buildings were constructed at schools in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Construction also had begun on new buildings at Birtle, Manitoba; Lestock and Beauval, Saskatchewan; and in Blue Quills, Alberta.242
This sort of expansion could not be sustained in the face of the international economic depression of the 1930s. In 1932, without any prior consultation, the federal government cut per capita grants by 10%. The cut was imposed in March and made retroactive to January.243 The rate was cut again the following year by another 5%.244 In response to protests, Indian Affairs director Harold McGill wrote that not only would the cuts be maintained, but it also might be necessary to make more cuts in the future. He said, “I can offer no assurance that anything can be done in the way of building new schools or rebuilding those that have been destroyed by fire.”245 The government announced in 1935 that it would be partially reversing the reductions, but, in the face of worsening economic conditions, it cut the per capita grant once more in 1936.246
Table 11.6 outlines the impact of these cuts on the school grants (spending on medical costs and textbooks and other supplies was not cut during this period, but received no increase).
Table 11.6. Residential school funding cuts during the mid-1930s.
| Fiscal year ended | Average attendance | Residential school expenditure | Average per capita | |
| March 31, 1932 | 7,400 | Per Capita | 1,545,513.49 | 214 |
| Medical costs | 20,000 | |||
| Textbooks, supplies, repairs | 19,045 | |||
| March 31, 1933 | 7,613 | Per Capita | 1,320,399.59 | 180 |
| Medical costs | 20,000 | |||
| Textbooks, supplies, repairs | 20,000 | |||
| March 31, 1934 | 7,760 | Per Capita | 1,254,018.63 | 162 |
| Medical costs | 20,000 | |||
| Textbooks, supplies, repairs | 18,295 | |||
| March 31, 1935 | 7,882 | Per Capita | 1,260,823.79 | 165 |
| Medical costs | 20,000 | |||
| Textbooks, supplies, repairs | 19,941 | |||
| March 31, 1936 | 8,061 | Per Capita | 1,492,209.00 | 190 |
| Medical costs | 20,000 | |||
| Textbooks, supplies, repairs | 20,973 | |||
| March 31, 1937 | 8,176 | Per Capita | 1,414,703.20 | 180 |
| Medical costs | 20,000 | |||
| Textbooks, supplies, repairs | 20,000 | |||
Source: TRC, NRA, Library and Archives Canada, RG10, volume 7185, file 1/25-1-7-?, part 1, R. A. Hoey to Dr. McGill, 4 November 1938. [AEMR-120432]
Former Manitoba cabinet minister R. A. Hoey compared these figures to the October 1938 per capita costs for the Manitoba School for the Deaf in Tuxedo ($642.40), and the Manitoba School for Boys in Portage la Prairie ($550), which were more than three times greater than those paid to Aboriginal residential schools. According to Hoey, in British Columbia, the provincial government paid $208 a year to support children under the care of the children’s aid society; in Alberta, the rate was $365 a year; in Saskatchewan, $182; and in Ontario, $274. Meanwhile, in the United States, the annual per capita rate at the Chilocco Indian Residential School in Oklahoma in 1937 was $350. According to the American Child Welfare League, the per capita costs for well-run institutions in that country ranged between $313 and $541, depending on the institution’s size and how well equipped it was.
The Canadian residential school system could operate on such a low per capita grant because of the low wages it paid staff of religious orders, the value of the output of the farms from student labour, the clothing donated by many missionary societies, and the supplementary financial contributions of mission societies. In 1938, for example, the Presbyterian Church contributed an additional $7,745 to the operation of the Birtle school.
In Hoey’s opinion, a fixed per capita grant made no sense, since it gave the government no ability to respond to differences in costs of supplies. In the short term, however, he called for a reversal of the most recent cut. At the same time, he also wanted to transfer more costs to the schools, such as the payment of night watchmen, the freight charges on shipping clothes the churches sent to the schools, and the cost of transporting students to and from the schools. He also believed that a restoration of funding had to be accompanied by an understanding “that the Churches will provide greater facilities for manual training, instruction in handicraft, auto mechanics, weaving, etc.”247 Hoey’s advocacy led to a 5% increase in the per capita grant in the following year.248
There were no nationwide evaluations of the Canadian residential school system during the 1920s or 1930s. However, a 1928 study of Indian boarding schools in the United States by the US Institute for Government Research raised the same concerns that Samuel Blake had identified in his writings on the Canadian system twenty years earlier. The Problem of Indian Administration, more commonly referred to as the “Meriam Report” for its lead author, Dr. Lewis Meriam, painted a devastating picture of the American boarding school system, which had grown to seventy-eight institutions. Buildings were overcrowded, students were underfed and the work they were required to do bordered on child labour, student medical care was minimal, staff did not meet proper qualification standards, discipline was punitive, and the curriculum was outdated.249 Those students receiving vocational training were often being trained for vanishing trades.250 The report questioned whether “much of the work of Indian children in boarding schools would not be prohibited in many states by child labor laws, notably the work in the machine laundries.”251 It recommended an increase in community involvement in all levels of education, more day schools, and better salaries and standards for school staff.252
The report sparked a number of changes. In 1929, us Commissioner Charles Burke issued an order forbidding the flogging of students.253 An increase in boarding school funding in 1930 meant, according to historian Margaret Szasz, that “for the first time children in boarding schools were guaranteed enough food and clothing.”254 There was also a concerted effort to close the schools.
Further American change came in 1933, when John Collier was appointed commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a position he held until 1945. Collier was a social reformer who had organized education and recreation programs for immigrant communities in New York and San Francisco during and immediately after the First World War. Demoralized by the war and the period of political reaction that followed, he travelled to New Mexico, where he was inspired by the tenacious survival of Pueblo culture.255 He was a remarkable choice for the position of commissioner of Indian Affairs: unlike previous commissioners, he disparaged European, not Aboriginal, culture. In a 1934 speech, he called Europeans (a category that, in his mind, included the descendants of Europeans living in the Americas) a “shattered race—psychically, religiously, social and esthetically shattered, dismembered, directionless.”256 Collier launched what was termed the “Indian New Deal.” One of his first measures was to decree that there be “no interference with Indian religious life or ceremonial expression.”257 He also made it clear he would not tolerate corporal punishment in the schools.258
Collier wanted to allow children to be raised in their own community and culture. He also wanted them to gain the skills that would enable them to make a living when they returned to their own communities and reservations.259 Under his administration, initiatives were undertaken to make the curriculum more relevant, to establish community schools, to close residential schools, and to improve the quality of staff.260 Experiments in cross-cultural education were undertaken, and new professionals and new resources were drawn into the school system.261 When a decision was made to offer courses on Aboriginal history, the bureau discovered that it had little information on the topic.262 Efforts were made to recruit and train bilingual teachers and to write and publish bilingual books.263 From 1933 to 1941, the number of day schools increased from 132 to 226 and their enrolment almost tripled.264
Collier also sought to end the boarding school system. During his first year in office, ten boarding schools were shut down or turned into community schools.265 However, he was not able to maintain momentum. The campaign to close boarding schools was slowed by growth in the Native American population and the Depression’s impact on the Bureau of Indian Affairs budget. Without the money to establish the number of additional day schools needed to meet the population growth, the boarding schools continued to operate.266 In 1941, there still were forty-nine boarding schools in the United States.267
In 1934, Canada’s Indian Affairs department prepared a brief comparison of the Canadian and American Indian school systems. The American boarding schools, with an average enrolment of 342, were much larger institutions than their Canadian counterparts, which had an average enrolment of 106. The average enrolment in a us day school was fifty-two, while in Canada, it was thirty-four. In addition to the federal government-run schools, the US also paid for the tuition of 39,061 students in public schools. The Canadian government made no such payments, although it did operate an additional nine “White and Indian Schools.” These day schools had a total enrolment of 175 students. In the US, 33% of the Native American children enrolled in schools were in boarding schools, while in Canada, 40% of First Nations children enrolled in school were attending residential school. The American appropriation for funding this system (both day and residential schools) was $9,103,230, or $133 per student. The Canadian appropriation for the year ending March 31, 1933, was $1,712,233.06, or $96 per student. In other words, even though Canada was making greater use of a more expensive schooling system (residential schools), it was spending seventy-two cents for every dollar the Americans were spending on Aboriginal students.268