Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1 Origins to 1939: Volume 1

Government officials often branded First Nations parents as being ignorant, superstitious, selfish, and uninterested in their children’s future or education. For example, in 1884, Indian Commissioner (and future Indian Affairs minister) Edgar Dewdney argued that “owing to his peculiar nature, being a creature of the present moment and failing to witness immediate results to his own benefit, as well as prompted, in many instances, by a selfish desire to retain constantly about him the slight labour which his children may afford him,” an Aboriginal parent “fails to insist on their attendance at school.”2

But the questions posed to Semmens paint a much different picture. Parents worried that their children would not return to them after their schooling was over. They suspected that residential schooling was intended to obliterate their language and culture. They feared that their children were being prepared for a market economy in which human life was just another commodity and their children would be used as free labour. And they viewed with distrust any government statements intended to allay their fears. They suspected that the government and the churches would not live up to the “beautiful language” of the promises they made when trying to recruit children, as they already had previous experience of Treaty promises being broken. The parental concerns were well founded. The government and church leaders who established the industrial schools expected that students would not return home, would forget their language, adopt new cultural values, and become integrated into a new economy. The regimentation and discipline of the capitalist work world meant it was far different from the highly autonomous world in which Aboriginal people had lived for thousands of years, so much so that it might well feel like a form of slavery. Parents also realized that the type of educational and spiritual transformation being proposed by the federal government would separate them from their children, not only for the period of time they were in school, but also quite possibly for eternity. James Smart, the Indian Affairs deputy minister, conceded as much in 1897 when he wrote, “Among those who have not renounced paganism, the belief prevails that the children will be educated into other creeds, which will affect their existence in a future state, and separate them from their parents in the great hereafter.”³

This was not very different from the views of the government and church leaders who believed that those who were converted would go to heaven, while those who remained pagan would go to hell.

Parents, not surprisingly, wanted their children to be recognizable to them in this world as well as the next. Some missionaries and government officials were prepared to acknowledge this desire. In 1887, the principal of the Qu’Appelle school in what is now Saskatchewan noted he had not been able to recruit a single student from some reserves. Joseph Hugonnard wrote, “The Indians are afraid that their children after leaving the school will not go back to the reserves, and that they will stray away from them; they also do not wish their children to acquire the habits of the white people.”⁴ Father E. Claude, principal of the High River school in what is now Alberta, concluded after his failed recruiting drive that parents did not wish to see their children “resemble the white people.”⁵ The following year, Indian agent R. H. Pidcock wrote that because “parents see in education the downfall of all their most cherished customs,” the Alert Bay, British Columbia, boarding school was not well attended.⁶

Lazare John attended the Fort St. James, British Columbia, school for one year. During that year, his mother had moved from the family’s home community of Stoney Creek to Fort St. James to be near her son. However, according to the memoirs of Lazare’s wife, Mary John, “He was so unhappy away from Stoney Creek that he and his mother returned to our village after one year, and Lazare was never sent to school again.”⁸

As a result, recruitment was a persistent problem for residential schools. In his annual report for 1884, Indian Commissioner Dewdney acknowledged that

no little difficulty is met with in prevailing upon Indians to part with their children; and even after the latter have been cared for in the kindest manner, some parents, prompted by unaccountable freaks of the most childish nature, demand a return of their children to their own shanties to suffer from cold and hunger.⁹

Parental resistance to industrial schools was so strong that it actually contributed to the failure and eventual closure of most of the industrial schools on the Prairies. From 1884 onwards, the government put in place an increasingly restrictive set of laws and regulations regarding enrolment and discharge. Many school and government officials were either not well versed in the laws and regulations governing enrolment, or disregarded them. It is clear that, on occasion, officials exceeded the authority granted them by the Indian Act and related regulations.

Regulating attendance: 1884–1893

In 1884, the Indian Act was amended to give First Nations band councils responsibility for “the attendance at school of children between the ages of six and fifteen years.”¹³ This was the first reference to school attendance in the Indian Act. At the time, only four provinces—Ontario, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island—had any compulsory education laws. The Ontario law of the day required that children between the ages of seven and twelve attend school for at least four months a year. British Columbia’s law required six months of attendance, and Prince Edward Island’s required twelve weeks.¹⁴

Almost immediately after the industrial schools were established, principals began calling on the government to institute some form of compulsory enrolment. It took Qu’Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard a year to recruit the thirty students he was initially authorized to enrol.15 As early as 1885, High River school principal Albert Lacombe urged Indian Affairs “to bring pressure in some way to bear upon those Indians who refuse their children, as by threatening to deprive them of their rations.”¹⁶ In 1886, Hugonnard reported that a recent recruiting expedition to three reserves had netted him only the promise of two new students. “The objections of the Indians are that they do not like to send their children away nor to have them attended to by a doctor, nor to let them work, and also to their taking the habits of the white people.”¹⁷

In 1888, Robert Ashton, the principal of the Mohawk Institute, reported that in the previous year, twenty-one boys and twenty girls had left the institution. The average length of attendance had been two and three-quarter years for boys and two and one-quarter years for girls. In light of the fact that most students were leaving school long before they could derive “much lasting advantage from the course of training provided,” Ashton recommended that the government require parents to commit their children to the school for specific periods of time.¹⁸

When he was Indian commissioner, Edgar Dewdney thought that compulsory attendance was inevitable, but recommended it not be introduced immediately. “As Indians become amenable to restraints on their reserves,” he wrote, “attendance should be made compulsory.”¹⁹ Hayter Reed, his successor as Indian commissioner, was also initially cautious. In 1889, he said, “The time is approaching, when pressure will doubtless have to be brought to bear upon Indian parents to compel them to send their children to school, but this must be done with great caution, and very gradually.” He noted that he had, in certain circumstances—Battleford, for example—“given instruction to Agents to bring pressure to bear, and I will act in the same direction wherever and whenever I feel satisfied that to do so will be attended with good results.”²⁰ By 1892, he had become much more aggressive, recommending that the government enact legislation that would require “children being retained in Industrial Schools pending the Department’s pleasure.” Deputy Minister Lawrence Vankoughnet rejected that idea; he did not think

the Indians of the North West are sufficiently advanced in civilization to render such drastic measures advisable, as respects the control by the Dep’t—which it actually would be—of their children. As you are aware, Indians are particularly sensitive in respect to their children and the Dep’t is preparing them gradually for the more stringent measure of compulsory education by endeavouring to induce the Chiefs and Headmen of the different Bands to co-operate with the Indian Agent for the passage of rules and regulations under the Indian Act rendering attendance at the schools compulsory on the part of Indian parents.²¹

The only real question under debate was when—not if—parents would be compelled to send their children to residential schools.

Compulsion and the disruption of First Nations government

Efforts to force First Nations children to attend residential schools also led the federal government to interfere directly with First Nations governments. The cases of Wahpeemakwa (White Bear) and Ahchacoosahcootakoopits (Star Blanket), in what is now Saskatchewan, stand as examples of the government’s willingness to disrupt and ignore First Nations government.²⁴

In the 1880s, Wahpeemakwa was the chief of a Saulteaux-Cree band in the Moose Mountain area of Saskatchewan. Under his leadership, the band members limited the role of missionaries, and many refused to send their children to school, particularly to the residential schools. An Anglican attempt to establish a school on the reserve failed in 1885. Although Indian Affairs removed Wahpeemakwa from his position as chief in 1889, he remained an influential figure. Indian agent David Halpin reported in 1897:

It is very difficult to get the parents to allow the children to be sent away to school, more especially those Indians who are in any way connected with the deposed chief White Bear and his sons, who will have nothing to do with anything in the shape of education, and who try to live as they did before treaty was made with the North-west Indians, and they will hardly allow any one to talk on the subject of education to them and simply say that their ‘God’ did not intend them to be educated like white people; they will not allow that there would be any benefit to be derived from having their children taught, and say they would much prefer to see their little ones dead than at school.²⁵

Ahchacoosahcootakoopits, or Star Blanket, was the chief of the Star Blanket Band in the File Hills area of southern Saskatchewan. He should not be confused with another chief known as Star Blanket or Ahtahkakoop (Atakakup). Ahchacoosahcootakoopits was the son of Wapiimoosetoosus, one of the Cree chiefs who signed Treaty 4. He had been part of the 1884 movement to seek Treaty improvements, and was arrested but never charged after the 1885 North-West Rebellion.²⁹ Star Blanket opposed Indian agent efforts to repress the Sun Dance, to amalgamate four bands in the File Hills area, and to send children to residential schools. As a result, the federal government deposed him, giving as its grounds his “incompetency.” The band refused to accept the government decision and refused to co-operate with the Indian agent. In 1895, Star Blanket was restored to office. At the same time, he agreed to allow one of his sons to attend the residential school in Regina under the conditions that his hair not be cut, and that he would be exempted from religious studies, military drill, or the brass band. In 1898, the federal government once more threatened to depose him for not sending more of his children to residential school.³⁰ So intense was the conflict between the government and Star Blanket that, in 1898, the federal deputy minister of Indian Affairs thought it significant enough to relate in his annual report that “Star Blanket, who so long persistently opposed sending children from his band to school, has during the last month, allowed three to go, two to Qu’Appelle, and one to the boarding school here.”³¹ Star Blanket successfully resisted government efforts to have the band surrender some of its land for the File Hills Colony that Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham was developing for former residential school students.³²

Into the early twentieth century, Star Blanket continued to campaign to have the government live up to its Treaty commitments. His 1912 letter to the Duke of Connaught, then governor general, gives eloquent expression to his sense of betrayal.

We have waited patiently for many years for a chance to speak to some one who would carry a message to the Government and our white brothers in the east. The first part of our message Great Chief is one of Good wishes and peace to yourself first and then to the Government. For as I was born with two legs and as these two legs have not yet quarreled, so I wish to live in peace with the white people. When I was in middle life the Government of the Great White Mother sent some wise men to ask us to give them much land. A large camp of Indians was made near Qu’Appelle and there the Government and Indians after much talking signed a treaty, on paper and much was promised as well. One of these papers has been carefully kept by us, and by it we Indians gave to the Government a large piece of land and held back for ourselves some small pieces as Reserves. In the treaty we made then the Government promised to make a School for every band of Indians on their own Reserve, but instead little children are torn from their mothers’ arms or homes by the police or Government Agents and taking [sic] sometimes hundreds of miles to large Schools perhaps to take sick and die when their family cannot see them. The little Ants which live in the earth love their young ones and wish to have them in their homes. Surely us red men are not smaller than these Ants.33

Indian Affairs official Martin Benson prepared a disingenuous response to this letter. He acknowledged that Treaty 4 did oblige the government to “maintain a school in the reserve,” but then said that the educational needs of the children on Star Blanket’s reserve were being met by the Qu’Appelle industrial school and a boarding school “in the immediate vicinity of the reserve.”³⁴

The Indian Act amendments and regulations of 1894

In 1893, Lawrence Vankoughnet was forced into retirement and Hayter Reed was elevated to the position of deputy minister of Indian Affairs. Reed was then able to put his more aggressive policies into practice. In 1894, he reported that parental opposition to sending their children to boarding schools had decreased to the point where the government felt justified in the introduction, “without fear of exciting undue hostility, of measures for securing compulsory attendance at schools.”³⁵ In that year, the Indian Act was amended to authorize the government to make regulations “to secure the compulsory attendance of children at school.” These regulations could be applied to “the Indians of any province or of any named band.” The amendments also authorized the government to establish “an industrial school or a boarding school for Indians.” (The schools were, of course, already in existence.) The government was also authorized to commit to these schools “children of Indian blood under the age of sixteen years.” Once committed, they could be kept there until they reached the age of eighteen.³⁶

Under the authority of this amendment, the government adopted its first school-related regulations, the Regulations Relating to the Education of Indian Children. These regulations stated: “All Indian children between the ages of seven and sixteen shall attend a day school on the reserve on which they reside for the full term during which the school is open each year.” Exemptions were allowed if the child was being instructed elsewhere, if the child was sick or otherwise unable to attend school, if there was no school within two miles (3.2 kilometres) for children under ten years old, or within three miles (4.8 kilometres) for children over ten, if the child had been excused from attending school to assist in farm or domestic work at home, or if the child had already passed a high school entrance examination.

Most of the regulations dealt with day school attendance. However, if an Indian agent or justice of the peace thought that any “Indian child between six and sixteen years of age is not being properly cared for or educated, and that the parent, guardian or other person having charge or control of such child, is unfit or unwilling to provide for the child’s education,” he could issue an order to place the child “in an industrial or boarding school, in which there may be a vacancy for such child.” In Manitoba and the North-West Territories, such an order could be issued without the need to give any notice to the “parent, guardian or other person having charge or control of such child.” In the rest of the country, prior notice was required and, if the parents requested, an inquiry could be held before the child’s committal. Under these orders, a child could be committed to residential schools until the age of eighteen.

If a child placed in the school under these regulations left a residential school without permission, or did not return at a promised time, school officials could get a warrant from an Indian agent or a justice of the peace authorizing them (or a police officer, truant officer, or employee of the school or Indian Affairs) to “search for and take such child back to the school in which it had been previously placed.” With a warrant, one could enter—by force if need be—any house, building, or place named in the warrant and remove the child. Even without a warrant, Indian Affairs employees and constables had the authority to arrest a student in the act of escaping from a residential school and return the child to the school.³⁸

The regulations specifically identified twenty-three industrial residential schools: four in Ontario,³⁹ four in Manitoba,⁴⁰ four in what is now Saskatchewan,⁴¹ four in what is now Alberta,⁴² and seven in British Columbia.⁴³ The regulations also specified eighteen boarding schools: three in Manitoba,⁴⁴ seven in what is now Saskatchewan,⁴⁵ six in what is now Alberta,⁴⁶ and two in British Columbia.⁴⁷ The decision to list the specific schools created enforcement problems in later years as some schools closed and new ones were not specifically listed in the regulations.

In 1895, Regulation 12 was amended. Previously, it had authorized the search for, and return of, any student who had been placed in the school; that is, children who, Indian Affairs had concluded, were not “being properly cared for or educated.” It was amended to allow for the return to the school of all truant students, including those who had been voluntarily placed in the school.⁴⁸ Enrolment—at least on paper—was still voluntary; discharge would be much more difficult to obtain.

When parents in northern Manitoba resisted sending their children to the Methodist industrial school in Brandon, Reed instructed the school’s principal to call the parents’ attention to Indian Act provisions “for the compulsory education of Indian children.” He said that although the department was reluctant to enforce the regulations, it would do so unless parents demonstrated “their willingness to have their children educated.” He suggested the parents could take comfort from the fact that, although students would not be allowed to leave at their own will once they were admitted, their parents would be allowed to visit them at school.⁵⁰

Threats were part of the government arsenal. In 1895, when members of the Arrows Band in what is now Saskatchewan refused to send their children away to boarding school, the Indian agent told them

if they would not let them go willingly that in all probability the Department would take them by force and send them to whatever school was thought best. The consequence was that when paying Treaty there on the 22nd inst. the Indians offered me all their children if I would place them in the Duck Lake Boarding School.⁵¹

The government followed up on its threats. In 1896, an Indian agent asked if it was necessary to conduct a trial before returning a child to the school. Reed argued that the regulation allowed a child to be returned to a school on the basis of a warrant issued in relation to the regulation.⁵²

Reed was far from satisfied with the results of the campaign of enforcement he had initiated. His 1896 annual report contained a warning: “In some localities persuasive powers have failed to obtain such an attendance as the number of children would warrant, so it may yet become incumbent upon the department to adopt more stringent measures to secure increased attendance.”⁵³ Through his campaign against day schools, he also worked to limit parental options.

The campaign against day schools

Treaties 1 through 6 had committed the government to establishing on-reserve schools, and the later Treaties had stipulated the provision of teachers once reserves had been established. None of them made any mention of residential schools.⁵⁶ However, the federal government was slow to establish day schools. In 1885, Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney favoured delaying the opening of a school on a reserve until it was apparent there would be a regular attendance of at least twenty students. Children from reserves without schools were to be sent to “Industrial Schools, in the success of which I have every confidence.”⁵⁷ While it is apparent that many parents were not prepared to force their children to attend day school, it was also recognized at the time that the schools provided a very poor quality of education. In an effort to improve the quality of the teachers being recruited, Dewdney recommended in 1885 that the day school salary be increased from $300 to $500 a year.⁵⁸ It appears there was little progress on this front: in 1908, Indian Affairs Deputy Minister Frank Pedley recommended that the salaries at Indian Affairs schools in eastern Canada be between $300 and $500.⁵⁹

Reed continued with his campaign to close down established schools. In 1894, he told the principal of the Gordon’s residential school in what is now Saskatchewan to recruit students from the day school on the Gordon’s Reserve. “By this means,” Reed wrote, “it may be possible to close up some day schools, and devote the funds which would otherwise be expended on them to increasing the number of pupils at the Boarding School.”⁶⁰ The opening of the Anglican boarding school on the Blood Reserve in what is now Alberta had an impact on the three Anglican day schools that were operating on the same reserve by the 1890s. By 1895, one of the day schools had closed and, in another, enrolment had dropped by a third. In some years, the average attendance was six students. By 1904, only one of the three schools was operating.⁶¹

The impact of Reed’s campaign to close day schools was apparent in the annual reports of many Indian agents during this period. Again and again, the agents noted there were no school-aged children and no day schools in many of the communities they visited. In 1898, Indian agent J. B. Lash’s report on the situation at Piapot’s Reserve said, “The industrial schools at Qu’Appelle and Regina have a number of pupils from this reserve, and there are very few children of school age left on the reserve.”⁶² He made similar observations about the Muscowpetung and Pasqua (given in the report as Pasquah) reserves.⁶³ That same year, in the report on the Sarcee Reserve, Indian agent A. J. McNeill wrote that “all of school age are now either in the Calgary Industrial or boarding school on the reserve.”⁶⁴ The report of E. J. Bangs for the Stony Reserve, home of the McDougall Orphanage (an early boarding school), noted that the two day schools were “practically closed.”65 In British Columbia, a report on the Ewawoos, Texas Lake, and Ohamil bands noted that most of the children were attending the Mission or Yale boarding schools.⁶⁶

The impact of the day school policy can be detected in the following 1909 reports on conditions on the Ochapowace, One Arrow, and Beardy’s and Okemassis bands: “Most of the children in this band of school age attend boarding school”; “There is no day school on this reserve. The children of school age are sent to the Duck Lake boarding school”; and, “There is no day school on these reserves, the children of school age being sent either to the Duck Lake boarding school or the Regina industrial school.”⁶⁷

Even after Reed left office in 1897, the lack of day schools in the West left parents with limited options. In 1913, R. B. Heron, the principal of the File Hills school, supported a request from parents for a new day school for children from the Pasqua, Muscowpetung, and Piapot reserves (all reserves that Indian agent Lash had earlier noted as being devoid of school-aged children). The parents said File Hills was too far from their reserves. As a result, at least thirty children were not being sent to school. Heron wrote to his superiors in Toronto that if the Presbyterians did not establish a day school that would allow it to “get these 30 children (and there are many more will [sic] be of school age in a short time), most of them will be drafted into the nearest school—the R.C. school at Lebret [the Qu’Appelle school].”⁶⁸ The inspector of Indian agencies at the time, W. M. Graham, opposed the move. Instead of building a day school, he thought, the department should simply force the parents to send their children to File Hills. There would be, he said, “no evil consequences if the act were put into force.”⁶⁹ After the 1918 closure of a day school on the Quamichan Reserve in British Columbia, families had little alternative but to send their children to the Kuper Island residential school.⁷⁰

Policy change under the Liberals

Hayter Reed was dismissed as deputy minister after the Liberal victory in the 1896 federal election. His replacement, James Smart, backed away from Reed’s approach to compulsory enrolment. In 1898, he wrote that “the Department’s policy is as long as possible to refrain from compulsory measures, and try the effect of moral suasion and an appeal to self-interest.”⁷¹ The Liberals were looking for ways to cut Indian Affairs spending—they viewed industrial schools as being costly failures and recognized that day schools were much less expensive to operate. Forcing more children to attend residential schools would only increase government costs.

Residential school principals, who still struggled to fill their schools, opposed the new approach. Principal Hugonnard at Qu’Appelle said:

In 1898, the principal of the Anglican boarding schools on the Blackfoot Reserve complained:

We have at present on the rolls twenty-nine boys and eleven girls. With accommodation for so many more children it is sad to see that so many are allowed to grow up under the influence of camp life without any of the benefits of these institutions. Unfortunately the Indians of ‘treaty seven’ are for the most part strangely prejudiced against education.⁷³

The following year, Battleford principal Edward Matheson chided the government for not enforcing the existing attendance regulations: “The policy of the department—that of insisting on the education of the children—is the proper one. But one thing remains, and that is to put the policy into force. Until this is done the full results desired cannot be shown [emphasis in original].”⁷⁴

In 1902, Red Deer principal C. E. Somerset wrote, “There has been an average attendance of sixty-two during the year, although the number authorized by the department is eighty. I shall be glad if some means can be devised whereby parents will be persuaded to allow their children to be sent to this school.”⁷⁵

At Qu’Appelle, Hugonnard took matters into his own hands. In 1901, he was accused of “stealing” boys of the She-Sheep’s Band and taking them to school by force. The mother of two of the boys, known as the “Widow Penna,” told Indian agent Magnus Begg, “The Rev. gentlemen and the two police-men overtook her about 25 miles from Qu’Appelle and 40 miles from the Reserve, and without speaking to her, told the police to put the boys in the waggon [sic], she said the eldest boy clung to her but they pulled him away.”⁷⁶

When Begg told her she could visit her boys at the school, she said the “distance was too long, the snow too deep, and she was sick and wanted her children back.” Other band members told Begg that “there would be trouble” as a result of Hugonnard’s treatment of the boys. He took this to mean that the police would have difficulty in retrieving runaways from the school. When band members asked if Hugonnard’s actions were legal or approved by the Indian commissioner, Begg told them he did not know. In a letter to Indian Commissioner David Laird, he noted that under Section 9 of the 1894 regulations, “a child may be committed by a Justice of the Peace or an Indian Agent without giving notice. The Rev. Father Hugonnard is neither, but of course I did not read this part of the section to the Indians.”⁷⁷

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, there were still many parts of western Canada where a significant number of Aboriginal children were not in school. In 1910, for example, of 213 school-aged children in the Duck Lake Agency, only 133 were enrolled in school. The figures for the Carlton Agency were 107 of 200; for the Onion Lake Agency, 57 of 190; and 92 of 131 in the Pelly Agency.⁸⁰ When parents did opt to send their children to a residential school, it is clear that they preferred the smaller boarding schools that were located on or close to reserves. The enrolment rate in the boarding schools and industrial schools reported on by David Laird, the Indian commissioner for Manitoba and the North-West Territories in the 1902–03 school year, provides a clear demonstration of this preference. The thirty-six boarding schools that provided complete attendance information to Indian Affairs for that year had a total pupilage of 1,255—and, at the end of the year, they had an enrolment of 1,274. In other words, they had enrolled slightly more than 100% of the students they were allowed. The ten industrial schools had a total pupilage of 1,140, but only 977 students (or 86% of their authorized enrolment).⁸¹

While parents clearly preferred boarding schools as an alternative to the more distant industrial schools, they also resisted the boarding schools. In 1906, J. R. Matheson, the principal of the Anglican boarding school at Onion Lake, lamented:

The teacher or Missionary is entirely powerless in the matter of persuading or forcing the parents to send their children to school. The Indians either simply laugh or point blank refuse, or in some instances take the children away or coax them to run away after they have been in the school for some time, and all efforts to get them back are utterly futile.

He wrote that schools were languishing because government officials were “afraid to enforce the law, or there is no law for them to enforce. Which is it?”⁸²

Limitations with the existing regulations also were becoming apparent. In 1903, J. A. J. McKenna, the assistant Indian commissioner of the North-West Territories, wrote to the department:

He pointed out that at least fourteen schools were not listed in the regulations and were therefore in the same situation.⁸⁴

The Liberals resisted church requests to tighten up their laws on recruitment. In 1904, Indian Commissioner David Laird responded negatively to requests that the government force parents to send their children to residential schools.⁸⁵ In 1908, the government adopted a new set of regulations that addressed the ambiguities in the 1894 regulations. The 1908 Regulations Relating to the Education of Indian Children stated, “All Indian children between the ages of six and fifteen shall attend a day school on the reserve on which they reside.” This change, to “six and fifteen” from the “seven and sixteen” in the previous regulations, now brought the regulations into agreement with the provisions in the Indian Act about attendance. Truant officers were no longer granted “police powers” (it had been determined that the Indian Act did not provide the authority to grant such powers). Rather than listing the schools, the regulations stated that all boarding schools and industrial schools receiving per capita grants for the education of “Indian children” were designated as industrial and boarding schools for the purposes of the regulations. The rest of the provisions remained essentially unchanged.⁸⁶ Smart’s successor as deputy minister, Frank Pedley, wrote that “no rule should be adopted which would provide for the arbitrary separation of parents and children.”⁸⁷

As in other matters, Indian Affairs was slow to develop an age policy for industrial and boarding schools. Industrial schools had been intended to teach older students the skills that they would need to survive in the Euro-Canadian economy. It was expected that as the students learned these skills, they would make their own schools self-supporting. Implicitly and explicitly, this would require students who were old enough to have the strength and interest to undergo such training. But parental resistance to sending children to schools, coupled with the financial enticement of the per capita funding system, led the school principals to also recruit students who were too young for industrial training. Even though he was supposed to be operating an industrial school that trained students for entering the workforce, in 1885, High River principal Albert Lacombe sought government permission to limit his enrolment to children younger than nine years of age.⁸⁸ In his 1887 annual report, Qu’Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard actually opposed recruiting older students. The younger ones were more obedient and apt to learn. However, he noted, “we need to have some of the older boys to learn the trades and work on the farm.”89

Under the Liberals, a policy slowly began to emerge. In August 1898, J. D. McLean wrote in response to an inquiry about the age limits for boarding schools that “the Department does not consider it advisable to make any hard and fast rule as to the age at which pupils should be admitted to such schools.” However, under “ordinary circumstances,” he said, “no pupils should be taken into such schools under the age of 8 years or over that of 14.” At the age of fourteen, McLean thought, the students should “be sufficiently advanced to enter an Industrial school.”⁹⁰ By 1900, a policy had been developed: the minimum age for admission to boarding schools was to be seven, and age ten for industrial schools. The government acknowledged that it might make exceptions and allow for the enrolment of students younger than those ages, but in such cases, the schools would receive only half the per capita grant.⁹¹ This measure was meant to discourage industrial school principals from enrolling students whom the department deemed to be too young. It also meant that in cases where younger students were enrolled, the school had less money to feed, clothe, house, and educate the students. In 1911, the policy was changed to make seven the minimum age for admission to both industrial schools and boarding schools.⁹² The full grant would be paid for all students whose enrolment had been authorized by the federal government.⁹³

The churches urged the federal government to continue with Reed’s policy of closing day schools—particularly church-supported day schools. Indian Affairs official Martin Benson concluded that the churches were simply attempting to shift their mission-related costs onto the federal government. In commenting on a 1901 Methodist proposal for the establishment of a boarding school in northwestern British Columbia, he noted that in that region of the province, there were five professional teachers, seven Aboriginal teachers, eighteen missionary teachers, and twenty-five “missionary ladies,” all working out of thirty-three churches and seventeen school houses. This, he said, was likely to be a drain on the resources of the various missionary societies, so he was not surprised that they were anxious to be relieved of these costs “by the establishment of boarding schools which would provide for their maintenance by the Government.” But, he said, “the Department should not be asked to break up the Indian home such as it is and the Regulations for compulsory attendance were not passed for their purpose.”⁹⁴

As noted in the previous chapter, by 1908, the Liberals were considering a radical policy change that would close many industrial and boarding schools and replace them with improved day schools. Although that policy was abandoned, the churches and the government were still in conflict over the issue of enrolment. In 1909, the Anglican Synod recommended, “All Government donations in excess of Treaty obligations should be withheld from such parents as refuse to send their children to school.”⁹⁷ The following year, Indian Affairs departmental secretary J. D. McLean told Edmonton-area Indian agent U. Verreau that “it is not the policy of the Department to use compulsion for the purpose of placing children in industrial or boarding schools, except in cases provided for in the Regulations relating to the Education of Indian Children.” McLean argued that, with great effort on the part of staff and missionaries, parental apathy could be overcome to “persuade the Indians to avail themselves of the opportunities offered by these schools.”⁹⁸

Rev. M. C. Gandier, the principal of the Gleichen, Alberta, school, reported in 1913 that the school had opened the year before with accommodation for forty students and an enrolment of just thirteen. “Compulsion,” he wrote, “has to be used to get the parents to bring their children to the school.⁹⁹ This view was supported by British Columbia Indian agent Thomas Deasy, who also wrote that “we shall never make the Indian realize the importance of education until we take hold of him and compel attendance at school.” Left at home, he thought, children fell under the influence of the older members of the community, who were

imbued with their old customs and habits; they realize little the necessity for morality or compliance with our laws and customs. Their forefathers lived without the assistance of the whites, and the Indian has nothing in common with us. Some of the older men consider their ways best, and there is a something underlying the character, habits and traits of the Indian that it will be hard to eliminate.¹⁰⁰

The Indian Affairs annual report for 1906 notes that in the Kwawkewlth Agency, “a few parents were fined for not sending their children to school.”¹⁰⁴ That same year, Laird, responding to a situation at Onion Lake where the school-aged children of twelve families receiving government relief were not attending school, sought and received authorization from Ottawa to

withhold rations from such parents for the children at home who are fit to attend school, but are not sent thereto. This is a hardship of which they could relieve themselves by complying with the wish of the Department and sending their children to the school of their choice where they would be fed and clothed.¹⁰⁵

Admission and discharge policy

As parents were to discover to their sorrow, once they enrolled their child in a residential school, there was no question that the child’s continued residence at the school was anything other than compulsory. It was departmental policy that no child could be discharged without departmental approval—even if the parents had enrolled the child voluntarily. The government had no legislative basis for this policy.

As early as 1891, it was government policy to require parental consent for admission to residential school whenever the parents of one faith wanted to have their child educated at a school operated by a different church.¹⁰⁶ Samuel Lucas, the Indian agent on the Sarcee Reserve in what is now Alberta, reported in 1893 that “eight parents or guardians have signed an agreement to give up their children for an indefinite time.”¹⁰⁷ In 1895, A. E. Forget, then the assistant Indian commissioner for the Northwest, issued a circular to all industrial school principals and Indian agents, instructing them that “in all cases of pupils admitted into Boarding and Industrial Schools it is desired that a written application for such admission be taken from the parents by the Agents, Principal, or other official to whom the application is made.” Ottawa would provide blank application forms for this purpose.¹⁰⁸

The form in use in 1900 stipulated that the parent was making application for admission “for such term as the Department of Indian Affairs may deem proper.” The form also still required parents to consent to the provision that the “principal or head teacher of the institution for the time being shall be the guardian of the said child.”¹¹²

Sometimes, parents persuaded the school principal to discharge their child in spite of the regulation. In August 1894, Whitefish Lake Chief James Seenum (also known as Pakan) called on the Red Deer school to try to take his son out of the school. Principal John Nelson initially said no, the boy could not be discharged without the permission of the department. Nelson later wrote that if Seenum had “manifested an arrogant spirit I might have easily resisted his entreaties, but he seemed almost heart broken and wept when he realized the unfavourable prospect of securing his son’s discharge.” The principal was so moved that he told Seenum that although he could not discharge the boy, he “would not say he should not take him,” adding that such a measure would likely displease the government. Seenum took the hint and left the school with his son.¹¹³ Chief Henry Prince of the St. Peter’s Reserve in Manitoba was not so fortunate. When he removed his son from the St. Boniface school in 1895, the school officials had a police constable seek the boy’s return. Prince resisted their efforts, and was charged and convicted for interfering in police work.¹¹⁴

In some cases, Indian Affairs refused to discharge children who had been voluntarily enrolled until they turned eighteen. In 1903, when the government refused to discharge two brothers who were over fifteen, the students ran away from the Middlechurch school. They were apprehended and returned to the school on the basis of a warrant issued under the 1894 regulations. Their father, William Cameron, went to court and got a writ of habeas corpus. Normally, such a writ requires that the person under arrest be brought before a court. According to Martin Benson, Judge Richards of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench found on the father’s behalf, and wrote, “The regulations for the detention of children until they reach the age of 18 years do not apply to children who have been voluntarily placed in the school and that to such children the parents have a right to get them out of the school at any time they wish to demand them.”¹¹⁵

For their part, the churches thought the discharge policy was not strict enough. Principal Father Hugonnard thought that eighteen was too low a discharge age, and that “many who go back to pure Indian surroundings will be liable to lose many of the benefits of the education they have received.” He believed students should be discharged only “when the character is sufficiently formed, and when there is reasonable hope of the ex-pupil not lapsing into an uncivilized mode of life.”¹¹⁸ In 1904, Dr. Sutherland, the general secretary of the Methodist Missionary Society, lobbied the federal government to increase the discharge age from eighteen to twenty-one.¹¹⁹

In the early twentieth century, British Columbia Indian agent A. W. Neill observed that school-discharge policies effectively discouraged parents from enrolling their children. While many wanted to see their children get some schooling, he wrote in 1906, parents “think the time is too long to be separated from them. They would agree to part with them for, say five years, but think that to put a child into the school at seven or eight years of age, and not get it out again until it is eighteen years old is too long.”¹²⁰ He made the same point five years later, observing that

the system of keeping the children in until they are 18 years of age is against the success of the school. It makes parents reluctant to sign them in, it leads to trouble in the maintenance of order and discipline in the school, and too often tends to lower the vitality of the pupils, so that the health of ex-pupils is often found to be undermined.¹²¹

Neill’s reports not only highlight parental resistance to enrolling their children, but they also demonstrate the degree to which the government and the schools ignored the legal rights of parents when it came to discharging students. Until 1908, the federal school regulations set the maximum age for compulsory school attendance for Aboriginal children at sixteen. In that year, the age was lowered to fifteen.¹²² While the regulation allowed the government to commit a child to a residential school until the age of eighteen, that was only in situations where it had been concluded that the child was being neglected or was not being properly educated. These conditions would not apply when parents were voluntarily enrolling a child. Yet, it is clear from Neill’s letters that British Columbia schools and Indian Affairs had taken the position that even voluntarily enrolled children would not be discharged until they were eighteen.¹²³

Parental resistance and the demise of industrial schools

The Anglicans opened the Battleford industrial school in December 1883.124 The next year, school inspector T. P. Wadsworth described the school classroom as “cheerless,” largely lacking in furniture and what there was of it was not “of a proper kind.”¹²⁵ By January of 1885, there were local news reports of boys attempting to run away from the school.¹²⁶ The staff abandoned the school during the North-West Rebellion, and the students dispersed. It was not until October 1886 that Principal Thomas Clarke was able to reoccupy the school, which had been used as a barracks by the military.¹²⁷ Recruiting remained difficult. That year, Onion Lake Indian agent G. G. Mann reported that, despite his numerous requests, parents had refused to send their children to Battleford because they “did not like the way the boys were treated that had been sent there & that one died soon after & the other had been expelled on account of being a bad boy.”¹²⁸ By July 1887, the enrolment was forty-four—thirty-two boys and twelve girls. Clarke attributed the increase to the efforts of Assistant Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed, Major Cotton of the North-West Mounted Police, and the Indian agents at Prince Albert and Onion Lake.¹²⁹

In 1891, enrolment increased to 120, a figure that held into the mid-1890s.130 But, by the beginning of the twentieth century, enrolment had gone into a decline from which it would never recover. In 1901, Principal Edward Matheson reported that “the difficulty here is to get all the pupils we want.”¹³¹ The following year, he complained about the opposition to the school from First Nations communities, where “many of the old people are still bitterly opposed to any change from former customs, and so constantly work against all progress on the part of the rising generation in the direction of civilization and its methods.”¹³² In 1907, Matheson blamed his school’s poor enrolment on the lacklustre efforts of local Indian agents, who would neither recruit students nor allow him to visit reserves.¹³³ That year, he had 59 pupils enrolled in a school with a capacity for 150.¹³⁴

Things did not improve in subsequent years. In 1911, Inspector W. J. Chisholm reported:

The reluctance of the Indians to allow their children to be taken away from home is no less than in former years. Of the pupils admitted the majority come from Montreal Lake, which is more than two hundred miles distant; and the change from the freedom and relaxation of their northern home to the confinement and discipline of residential school life is most trying to their frail constitutions.¹³⁵

In 1912, Duncan Campbell Scott, by then the Indian Affairs superintendent of Indian Education, had concluded that the Battleford school had outlived its usefulness. Enrolment had dropped to thirty-five, and the school deficit had climbed to over $2,000. He recommended that the school be closed, with the students being sent to a day school to be constructed at the Red Pheasant Reserve, or to a boarding school to be constructed at The Pas, Manitoba.¹³⁶ The Battleford school was closed on May 31, 1914.¹³⁷

High River

The St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic school at High River in what is now Alberta closed in 1922. Its history had been one of near-continuous rejection by First Nations parents and children. The school had opened in October 1884, a year after the Battleford school. The November school diary of that year noted that the eight Blackfoot boys recruited appeared to be “too big and too well acquainted with the Indian fashion to remain in an institution like this.” Later that month, three of the boys left with a group of adult First Nations people who had been visiting the school. In January 1885, an interpreter, Jean L’Heureux (who was eventually forced to resign in the wake of allegations of sexual abuse), brought in nine boys from the Blood and Peigan reserves. The school diarist observed, “Three of them are very big, and not likely to remain here.”¹³⁸ By the end of the year, the school had recruited ten boys.¹³⁹ In later years, Oblate Albert Lacombe undertook fruitless recruiting trips to the Sarcee, Blood, and Peigan reserves.140 In his 1885–86 annual report, Lacombe lamented that “we have not succeeded in retaining the boys at this school, and I may say they have nearly all deserted. Most of the boys were compelled to leave the school by their parents or guardians, while a few of the older ones, by making themselves so extremely unmanageable and rebellious, forced us to send them away.”¹⁴¹

When the North-West Rebellion broke out in the spring of 1885, there were only five students at the school. This number quickly dwindled to one as parents withdrew their children. Post-Rebellion efforts to rebuild enrolment were ineffectual. In September 1885, the one student recruited in the previous month was withdrawn by his mother. At the urging of the local Indian agent, the school accepted as a student “an insane Indian hunted by the police for threatening the Rev. Mr. Sims, minister of the Church of England.”¹⁴² The acting principal, E. Claude, explained that the plan was to recruit two of the man’s children as students. “No idea can be formed of the trouble I had, for three days, to obtain these children although the parents were expected to be rationed and to remain here.” The father eventually became angry with Claude and left the school with his children.¹⁴³

In February 1886, Assistant Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed informed Claude that all he needed to do was to send an order to the Indian agent at the Blood Reserve and children would be dispatched to the school. The order was issued, but the only message back from the agent was that “no one could be found who liked to come to the school.” Claude often tried to convince First Nations families travelling by the school to leave their children with him. The parents would stay for a few days, accept Claude’s food, and leave with their children. In the fall of 1887, letters to three Indian agents among the Blackfoot produced no new students.¹⁴⁴

In 1887, the school had an enrolment of thirty, only two of whom were from Blackfoot reserves.¹⁴⁵ The following year, a local First Nations leader, Chief Alexander, refused to help recruit students for the High River school, but promised support if a residential school were built on his reserve.¹⁴⁶ Chief Alexander’s request was a common one. Many Aboriginal leaders were not opposed to schools, or even residential schools, just as long as they were not in distant locations. When Lacombe and Claude went on another recruiting trip through the Peigan and Blood reserves in 1887, Lacombe reported, “We received only four children. Always the same excuses and same reasons.” Despite this, he proposed that the federal government support the Oblates in establishing a residential school on the Blood Reserve. Pointing to the Anglican and Methodist presence on the reserve, he commented, “I think we have a right as any one to have our share in the schools of that reserve.”¹⁴⁷

Those parents who did enrol their children in the school had trouble getting them out. In 1906, an Indian agent wrote to High River principal Naessens that Chief Little Plume had been “bothering me for some time over the discharge of his adopted son Thomas Charlie.” The agent noted that the boy was now eighteen years old and asked the principal to please let him know what was being done about his discharge.¹⁵²

In 1917, Indian agent W. J. Dilworth reported that no Blood children had been sent to the High River school in the past two years. Parents were angered by the fact that the school’s new principal, George Nordmann, was not honouring commitments that his predecessor had made as to the age at which children would be allowed to leave the school. The level of hostility was so great that Dilworth predicted that no one on the reserve would willingly send their child to the school.¹⁵³

The federal government wanted to close the school. Instead, the Oblates appointed a new principal, Alfred Demers, who, they believed, could turn the troubled institution around. But in 1922, Demers asked to be relieved of his work, due to his declining health. Over the previous three years, according to his superiors, Demers had “travelled all over the country, visiting all the Indian reserves, in order to get pupils. All his efforts have not met with the success they so well deserved.” The Oblates concluded, “Indians seem to be more and more opposed to the idea of sending their children to Dunbow [High River] and to-day there are only about forty students in a school capable of accommodating a hundred.” They recommended that the Bishop of Calgary, J. T. McNally, approach the federal government to arrange the closure of the school.¹⁵⁴ The school was closed in the fall of 1922, and its equipment was given to the principal of the Catholic boarding school on the Hobbema Reserve.¹⁵⁵

St. Boniface

The Roman Catholic school in St. Boniface, Manitoba, opened in 1889 under Oblate management.¹⁵⁶ By 1893, Sister Hamel, the principal, was reporting:

The difficulty in that respect comes from the parents, who, though pleased with the institution, seem unable to control their inclination for unrestricted liberty and their unreasonable fondness of having their children with them. A good deal has been done towards overcoming this inclination, but there is still room for improvement.157

Indian Affairs inspector Albert Betournay reported as early as 1896, “It has always been found very difficult to recruit pupils” for the St. Boniface school.¹⁵⁸ By 1902, it was clear to the Oblates that the St. Boniface school needed to be replaced by schools that were on reserves. Oblate official J. P. Magnan wrote, “I have frequently given instructions to our Rev. Fathers Missionaries [sic] on the Reserves, to induce the Indians to send their children to that school, and I can attest that they have done all they could reasonably do under the present circumstances; but it has been to no avail.”¹⁵⁹ The school was closed in the spring of 1905. In exchange for closing the school, that same year the Oblates opened two boarding schools in Manitoba (at Sandy Bay and Fort Alexander) and one in northwestern Ontario (at Fort Frances).¹⁶⁰

Aside from the Battleford, High River, and St. Boniface schools, three other prairie industrial schools (Middlechurch, Calgary, and Regina) closed in rapid succession during this period. In the 1890s, the Middlechurch school in Manitoba had experienced difficulty in recruiting students from distant locations because government policies made it impossible for the students to return to their homes for vacations.¹⁶¹ By 1900, the school was at its full capacity of 125 and was actually turning students away.¹⁶² By 1903, however, the school was in decline, with average attendance down to eighty.¹⁶³ The school burned down in 1906 and was not rebuilt.¹⁶⁴ At the end of the 1905 school year, enrolment at the Calgary industrial school was down to twenty-seven. Principal George Hogbin blamed the parents and “the fact that those responsible for the boarding schools do not appear to use all the influence they might to secure the transfer of the older (and probably most promising and bright) pupils, as they arrive at the usual age.”¹⁶⁵ The school closed by the end of 1907.¹⁶⁶

In 1896, the Indian agent at Birtle, J. A. Markle, wrote that the parents of his agency objected to sending their children to the distant Regina school, since “they cannot hope to see them in the event of the serious illness of those near and dear to them.” To address this need, he proposed an increase in the pupilage of the Birtle school.¹⁶⁷ In 1897, the Regina school had a capacity of 100 and an average attendance of 50.¹⁶⁸ In 1905, the principal reported that there were “very few available children” on local reserves, and noted “it will be more difficult to get recruits from more distant reserves.”¹⁶⁹ A few years later, an attempt to increase the number of children enrolled in the school failed because “the parents will not send them.”¹⁷⁰ Declining enrolments and poor management led to the school’s closure in 1910.¹⁷¹

Red Deer

The Methodist industrial school in Red Deer opened in 1893 and closed in 1919. Throughout its history, it was largely shunned by First Nations people.172 Principal John Nelson initially had no trouble recruiting fifty-two pupils, more than the school’s allowed maximum. However, he found that some of the students “were too old, and with habits formed, aspirations well defined, fresh from the free and untrammelled life of the reserve, the association with younger children must necessarily produce an undesirable effect.” As a result, these boys were discharged.¹⁷³ Nelson’s successor as Red Deer principal, C. E. Somerset, had great difficulty in recruiting students of any age. He conducted an unsuccessful recruiting expedition in 1897 that led him to conclude that parents “prefer to keep the children around their own homes.”¹⁷⁴

Somerset’s successor as principal, Arthur Barner, felt that nothing less than house-to-house recruiting was needed if he were to fill the school. He spent much of the fall and early winter of 1908 visiting families on the White Whale Lake, Saddle Lake, Whitefish, and Goodfish and Battle River reserves.¹⁷⁵ He had limited success: the following school year opened with only forty-three students. Barner wrote, “It has been said that Alberta has the poorest class of Canadian Indians. I can well believe it, for ignorance and dirt they would be hard to beat. I can truly say that no amount of money no matter how great would hire me to spend another week as I spent the one referred to.”¹⁷⁶ In 1909, W. E. S. James, a Protestant missionary in the area, reported that on the Paul’s Reserve, he was able to recruit only three of forty school-aged children for the school. He said the parents wished to send their children to the school, but “the grand-mothers refuse to let them go.”¹⁷⁷

Chiefs who might have been expected to support the Methodist-run Red Deer industrial school, such as Methodist Chief Samson of Hobbema, had opposed the school’s construction because of its distance from their reserves. Instead, Samson lobbied for an on-reserve boarding school.¹⁷⁸ To Barner’s dismay, both the Hobbema and Morley reserves boycotted the Red Deer school.¹⁷⁹

Even though Barner had led the charge to halt the attempt to close industrial schools in 1909, he also expressed deep reservations about the industrial school’s prospects, concluding that such a school was “at least a generation ahead of its time.” He had become a convert to the construction of smaller boarding schools closer to First Nations communities. In a confidential letter to Methodist officials, he gave voice to an even more heretical idea:

There is another thing I think should be done if any change is to be made, viz. have some kind of consultation with the Indians concerned, no matter what the scheme may be, try to secure their co-operation. I believe this can be accomplished by some wise agent clothed with authority. There is a feeling abroad among our Indians that they would like to have something to say about the education of their children and I believe more will be accomplished by confidence and co-operation than any kind of compulsion.180

Conflicts between parents, principals, and Indian agents continued into the second decade of the twentieth century. In 1913, Whitefish Lake Chief James Seenum once more came into conflict with the Red Deer school administrators when he refused to return his daughter to the school. He said that when he had enrolled her in the school, he and Barner had reached an understanding that she would attend for only one year. The year was up and he needed her at home because his wife was ill. Seenum’s letter to the local Indian agent on the issue ended with a request to “try and come over before you send the police after me.”¹⁸¹ The following year, a new Red Deer principal, J. F. Woodsworth, wrote letters to parents who had not sent their children back to school after the summer vacation that informed them that if the children were not returned within a week, “I shall send a policeman to bring them.”¹⁸² Later that month, he issued a warrant for the arrest of fifteen runaway students.¹⁸³ By 1919, the school was in state of crisis brought on by chronic underfunding and a devastating bout of influenza.¹⁸⁴ In recommending a permanent closure of the school, Woodsworth observed that “it has been in the wrong place from the first, being too far from the homes of the Indian.” He noted that the enrolment problem stemmed from the government’s failure to act on a recommendation made ten years previously to close the school and build boarding schools on the reserves.¹⁸⁵ But the placing of the schools at a distance from the reserves had not been an accident or an error; it was a deliberate policy decision.

Shingwauk and Elkhorn

The Shingwauk Home in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, sought to expand into western Canada in the 1880s in the hope of addressing its inability to recruit students locally. In 1884, E. F. Wilson, the school principal, said:

It is annoying and discouraging to have good buildings and good teachers, and all in excellent working order, and yet only half the proper number of pupils, and to know that in many cases it is not the pupils themselves who are to blame, but the parents, who often retain their children, and prevent their completing their education, in order to satisfy their own selfish ends.¹⁸⁶

I have been 20 years now labouring as a missionary among the Indians, and my institution has been 13 years in operation. I may say that it has been a time of almost constant trial and anxiety owing (1) to the difficulty of getting the pupils we wanted; (2) our inability to detain them for a proper period owing to the unreasonable and unreasoning action of parents and other relations.¹⁸⁷

After touring the residential schools in the United States, Wilson concluded that industrial schools “should be as far as possible removed from the Reserves.” Therefore, he recommended in 1887 that the Shingwauk Home take in students from western Canada.¹⁹⁰ The following year, he opened a second school in Elkhorn, Manitoba. It was intended to be the first of a set of feeder schools for Shingwauk. “As we gain the confidence of the Indians,” he hoped to “gradually draft our Western pupils” to Shingwauk.¹⁹¹ Parents had little interest in sending their children to the Elkhorn school, let alone to Ontario. In 1889, Wilson acknowledged that the attendance at the Elkhorn school “has been small and fluctuating.” Four of the eight students enrolled in the school had run away.¹⁹² In 1910, the school had an attendance of sixty-four.¹⁹³ By 1918, the federal government decided to close the Elkhorn school. Although average attendance was ninety-six in 1915, it had fallen to forty-two by 1917. The industrial school had been trying to recruit students from as far west as Battleford, Saskatchewan, and as far east as northwestern Ontario. In making the decision, the federal government acknowledged that “Indians are averse to allow their children to attend school at such a distance from their homes. Educational facilities are available on all the reserves in which pupils are enrolled; boarding schools are in some places adjacent and in others day schools are in operation on the reserves.”¹⁹⁴

By refusing to enrol their children in the industrial schools on the Prairies, parents not only undermined the federal government’s assimilation policies, but they also deprived the schools of revenue and free labour. As a result, the industrial schools ran significant deficits, and overworked and underfed the children they did recruit. This led other parents to withdraw their children from the schools.

Resistance in British Columbia

Indian Affairs officials proved to be overly optimistic in their estimations as to how easy it would be to recruit students for industrial schools in British Columbia. In 1881, Indian agent Henry Cornwall reported, “A boarding school for children of both sexes at Kamloops is greatly desired by all the Indians.” He predicted that 300 students could be recruited within a fifty-mile (80.4-kilometre) radius.¹⁹⁵ But in 1892, there were only thirteen students at the Kamloops industrial school. According to Indian agent J. W. Mackay, “The Indians have taken their children away one by one.” The parents said the principal, Michael Hagan, made “them work too hard clearing land. They are further of the opinion that they would prefer having their children occupied in learning useful trades, when not at their lessons: as they can pick up the art of clearing brushy land at their own homes.”196

Metlakatla principal John Scott had trouble keeping students for any length of time. In 1892, he reported that ten students were now back living with their parents. Most of them were under the age of twelve when they had been withdrawn from the school, usually “because they were needed at home, others through anxiety on the part of parents. That anxiety arose from their sons being far from home during the prevalence here, about a year ago, of the influenza epidemic.”¹⁹⁷

Despite predictions that “there will be no difficulty in filling” a proposed industrial school at Alert Bay, British Columbia, parents were unwilling to enrol their children when the school opened in 1894. Principal A. W. Corker reported:

One boy was admitted from the Tanakdakw tribe, a bright little fellow, and was my only pupil for the first quarter. The beginning of the next quarter, eight boys were admitted. Two have since gone out to the fishing, and two were taken away by their parents because the old people reproached them for putting their children in the school.

There was no trades training for those boys who did enrol. Instead, they were put to work “clearing land, and extracting stumps.”¹⁹⁸

This sort of opposition did not dissipate quickly. In 1907, Indian Affairs reported that local parents were so resistant to sending their children to the Alert Bay industrial school that “about half the boys are taken in from the Northwest Coast agency. There has been a Girls’ Home or boarding school, which, however, has been closed for some time for want of attendance.”¹⁹⁹

Principal Nicolas Coccola was well aware of the degree of parental resistance to an industrial school at Cranbrook in the Kootenays. He said that on the night before the school opened in 1890, parents were on the verge “of breaking out into war with the whites, [because they] objected to send their children.”²⁰⁰ In his memoirs, he boasted about the measures he took to get all the children into the school without securing parental approval. After a large church service, he had all the children in the congregation line up, making sure he placed the children whose parents supported the industrial school at the head of the line. Then, all the children, including those whose parents did not wish to enrol their children, were marched to the school, where “the Sisters were on the porch to receive the children who entered and closed the doors. [I] told the crowd to go back to camp and so the school opened with 20 children.”²⁰¹ By the following year, Coccola was able to boast that the school was filled to capacity and that the parents “seem now highly pleased, and come and offer their children.”²⁰² If this was the case, it was a temporary phenomenon: in 1922, Coccola complained of having spent the month of September “collecting children from the different camps for the school, the parents doing nothing towards the education unless coaxed and threatened.”203 Five years later, when he was principal of the Fraser Lake school, he issued a similar report: “As usual we had to go around to the camps to gather them, the generality of parents do not appreciate yet the advantage of education, they would rather keep their children with them.”²⁰⁴

Before the First World War, the federal government closed only one industrial school in British Columbia—the short-lived school at Metlaktala (1889 to 1908).²⁰⁵ Historian Jennifer Pettit has suggested that the British Columbia industrial schools, which focused more on farming and gardening and less on trades training than did other industrial schools, had somewhat more success in recruiting students than the prairie schools because there were fewer boarding schools in British Columbia than on the Prairies. As a result, the industrial schools faced less competition from schools that were closer to home. Also, the British Columbia industrial schools usually were located relatively close to the home communities of the students. This eliminated one of the major parental complaints about industrial schools.²⁰⁶

However, it is also clear that parents even in British Columbia preferred boarding schools to industrial schools. In 1914, the council of the Massett Band of the Queen Charlotte Agency petitioned the federal government for a boarding school. The council members wrote that there were over 100 school-aged children whom they wished to be “taught in a way that would be credible to us and to the young under our care.” Because they spent much of the year at fishing camps, their children could not attend day school. While some parents sent their children to the more distant Coqualeetza Institute in Chilliwack, most were unwilling to send their children to boarding schools on the mainland, since “we, sometimes, want to see our children, and the expense of sending them to outside schools is great.”²⁰⁷

While parental resistance contributed to the closing of the industrial schools, it also led the government to adopt an ever more compulsory approach to enforcing attendance at the remaining residential schools. These measures were adopted following the appointment of Duncan Campbell Scott as deputy minister of Indian Affairs.

The appointment of Duncan Campbell Scott

In 1913, Duncan Campbell Scott replaced Pedley as deputy minister of Indian Affairs. Scott, who had joined the department as a bookkeeper in 1879, would continue in his position as deputy minister until his retirement in 1932. As deputy minister, he worked with six different ministers and exercised considerable control over the development of Indian Affairs policy. For example, in testimony before a House of Commons committee in 1920, Scott acknowledged that Indian Affairs ministers—who also doubled as Department of the Interior ministers—usually had little time to devote to the portfolio. As he put it, it was “really difficult for any Minister to sit down and grasp the complicated nature of the Indian business.”208 Scott played a leading role in developing policies to suppress Aboriginal culture, to make it easier for the government to gain control over Aboriginal land, and to implement more compulsory measures in relation to school attendance. He pushed aside those who advocated a more aggressive—and therefore more costly—approach to the treatment of tuberculosis among Aboriginal people. He was also responsible for the 1910 contract, which provided for the largest increase in residential school funding prior to the Second World War. Scott had the confidence and support of his ministers and Parliament throughout his long career. It is important to recognize that this confidence was in large measure due to the fact that the policies he implemented were completely in keeping with Canada’s historic approach to Aboriginal people.

In 1912, the police were used fifteen times to force students to attend the Qu’Appelle school.²⁰⁹ In 1914, Scott sent a circular to all Indian agents, pointing out that the government had the power under the Regulations Relating to the Education of Indian Children to place children “who are not being properly cared for or educated” into residential schools. He instructed them to bring all such cases in their agency to the attention of the department. He also reminded them, “When recruiting, orphan children and children neglected by their parents should have the preference.” At the end of each quarter-year, agents were expected to submit a list of all school-aged children in their agency who were not attending school, along with an explanation for the child’s absence.²¹⁰

In 1914, Indian agent W. J. Dilworth reported he had sent a parent from the Blood Reserve in Alberta to jail for ten days for taking his son out of a residential school without permission.²¹¹ Department secretary J. D. McLean supported Dilworth’s position, urging him to remind school principals they should not make promises to parents that implied they would be allowed take their children out of school after they had been admitted. McLean noted that “the printed form of admission distinctly states that the child is to remain in the school for such time as the Department may deem fit and that the principal or the head teacher of the institution for the time being shall be the guardian of said child.”²¹² In an effort to improve enrolment at the High River school and at the Anglican and Roman Catholic schools in Cardston, Alberta, Dilworth announced that “children of school age that are not attending school without a reasonable excuse shall receive no free ration at the ration house.”²¹³ In 1915, parents refused to return children to the Norway House, Manitoba, school at the start of the school year because of complaints over the school’s lack of food and poor quality of clothing in the previous year. Methodist Church representative T. Ferrier reminded Chief Berens, “These children can be taken back to the school by the Department, in spite of whether the parents are willing or not now that they have been entered as pupils of the school.”²¹⁴

The Indian Act amendments of 1920

In 1919, the churches intensified their pressure for enforcement of compulsory attendance. In apparent response, Assistant Deputy Minister A. F. MacKenzie sent out a circular to Indian Affairs staff, stating that parents who did not send their children to school “shall not be regarded as being eligible for relief or other assistance from the Department.”²¹⁶ In 1920, the Anglican Church complained that the Indian agent did not provide support to the church in its efforts to recruit students to its boarding school in The Pas. In one instance, T. B. R. Westgate, the field secretary for the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, said that students were not delivered to the school until five months after their admittance had been approved. In another case, two boys had been placed in the schools “because they were a nuisance on the reserve.”²¹⁷ This continuing pressure from the churches, coupled with the growing realization that the government lacked the legislative authority for its current discharge policy, led to a complete rewrite of the education section of the Indian Act in 1920. Under the new provisions:

10. (1) Every Indian child between the ages of seven and fifteen years who is physically able shall attend such day, industrial or boarding school as may be designated by the Superintendent General for the full periods during which such school is open each year. Provided, however, that such school shall be the nearest available school of the kind required, and that no Protestant child shall be assigned to a Roman Catholic school or a school conducted under Roman Catholic auspices, and no Roman Catholic child shall be assigned to a Protestant school or a school conducted under Protestant auspices.

(2) The Superintendent General may appoint any officer or person to be a truant officer to enforce the attendance of Indian children at school, and for such purpose a truant officer shall be vested with the powers of a peace officer, and shall have authority to enter any place where he has reason to believe there are Indian children between the ages of seven and fifteen years, and when requested by the Indian agent, a school teacher or the chief of a band shall examine into any case of truancy, shall warn the truants, their parents or guardians or the person with whom any Indian child resides, of the consequences of truancy, and notify the parent, guardian or such person in writing to cause the child to attend school.

(3) Any parent, guardian or person with whom an Indian child is residing who fails to cause such child, being between the ages aforesaid, to attend school as required by this section after having received three days notice so to do by a truant officer shall, on the complaint of the truant officer, be liable on summary conviction before a justice of the peace or Indian agent to a fine of not more than two dollars and costs, or imprisonment for a period not exceeding ten days or both, and such child may be arrested without a warrant and conveyed to school by the truant officer: Provided that no parent or other person shall be liable to such penalties if such child, (a) is unable to attend school by reason of sickness or other unavoidable cause; (b) has passed the entrance examination for high schools; or, (c) has been excused in writing by the Indian agent or teacher for temporary absence to assist in husbandry or urgent and necessary household duties.218

It should be noted that the 1920 amendment did not make residential schooling compulsory for all First Nations children. The provision stipulated that students “shall attend such day, industrial or boarding school” (italics added). Indeed, the federal government never constructed a sufficient number of residential schools to accommodate all First Nations children. Where, in the past, the federal government could commit a child to residential school only if it judged that she or he was not “being properly cared for or educated,” the new amendment gave it the authority to compel any First Nations student to attend residential school. It also made it legal to keep the child in that school until they turned fifteen. (However, the department was to take the position that the Act gave it the right to keep children in school until they turned sixteen.)²¹⁹

Scott recognized that the amendments had significantly increased the government’s power of compulsion. In his annual report, he wrote:

Prior to the passing of these amendments the Act did not give the Governor in Council power to make regulations enforcing the residence and attendance of Indian children at residential schools, as the department could only commit to a residential school when a day school is provided, and the child does not attend. The recent amendments give the department control and remove from the Indian parent the responsibility for the care and education of his child, and the best interests of the Indians are promoted and fully protected. The clauses apply to every Indian child over the age of seven and under the age of fifteen.220

The schools as child welfare institutions

The enrolment difficulties that the schools experienced would have been more severe were it not for the fact that they also served as what would now be described as “child-welfare” institutions. Writing in 1883, Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald predicted that until parents overcame their opposition to industrial schools, enrolment would depend largely on “orphans and children who have no natural protectors.”²²¹ In reality, orphans and the children of parents who could not afford to care for them constituted a considerable portion of the schools’ enrolment not only throughout this period (1867 to 1939), but also throughout the 130-year history of the system.

In 1893, Mohawk Institute principal Robert Ashton pointed out that the general education progress at the school was being lowered by “the admission of orphans and neglected children, who are generally quite ignorant on admission; but as this class is admitted for long terms the decrease of numbers in the higher classes will be only temporary.”²²² A decade later, the enrolment of the Shingwauk Home was fifty-seven. Principal G. Ley King reported that “nineteen are motherless, nine fatherless and seventeen have neither father nor mother.” In other words, of the fifty-seven students enrolled, only twelve had both parents living.²²³ Children were also taken from parents who were deemed to be unfit. In 1911, for example, Indian Affairs placed two ten-year-old girls in British Columbia’s Coqualeetza Institute. According to Indian Affairs, “Their mothers, notoriously bad women, were unfit to have charge of them. Aided by some Indians and bad white men, they fled from place to place, to prevent the girls being placed in school. The girls are now doing exceptionally well, being quite contented and happy, and the Indians are quite reconciled.”²²⁴

In view of the number of Indian children made orphans by the recent epidemic of influenza, who will have to be provided for, it is the wish of the Department that no children whose parents are alive should be admitted to residential schools, unless under very exceptional circumstances, as long as there are orphans of this class to fill the vacancies.²²⁵

By 1924, this temporary measure was official policy. According to that year’s annual report, “Orphans, children of destitute parents and those living some distance from day schools on the reserves are given the preference, when the number of vacancies is limited.”²²⁶ In 1921, 112 of the 129 students at the Mohawk Institute were under the category of “orphaned and neglected.”227 Basil Johnston, who entered the Spanish, Ontario, boys’ school in the late 1930s, recalled that most of that school’s students “came from broken homes; some were orphans, having lost one or both parents; others were committed to the institution as punishment for some misdemeanor; and a few were enrolled by their parents in order to receive some education and training.”²²⁸ Other students were taken in because they were in poor health. In 1909, W. McWhinney, the principal of the Presbyterian school at Kamsack, Saskatchewan, wrote of how, in the school’s early years, many of the students who had been recruited “should never have entered school.” Many of these students died.²²⁹

In other cases, parents enrolled their children in the schools out of financial desperation. Charles Constant of the James Smith’s Band in Saskatchewan applied to have his eleven- and thirteen-year-old daughters admitted to the Anglican school at Onion Lake in 1929, even though there was a day school near to his home. As he explained to the Indian agent, “I am poor, hard up and cannot feed my children properly and I think it will be better for my older girls to be in a boarding school.”²³⁰ Seven years later, a Chilcotin father wrote to his children attending the Cariboo school at 145 Station, British Columbia, “I didn’t make much money this year, just enough to buy grub to live on. You are lucky to be in school where you get plenty to eat. If you were home you would be hungry many days.”²³¹

By the 1930s, the schools were part of a far-reaching system by which the federal government sought to regulate Aboriginal life. In 1935, E. A. W. R. McKenzie recommended that the daughter of a relationship between a member of the Kahkewistahaw Band and a “French half-breed” be admitted to a residential school. In this case, the girl’s mother had died and the father had remarried and “relinquished all claim to the child,” who was being raised by her maternal grandmother. The agent recommended that the girl be admitted to the Grayson, Saskatchewan, residential school.²³² In 1936, G. A. Dodds recommended that a six-year-old child be admitted to the File Hills, Saskatchewan, school, arguing, “There are four children to this family and the father has no great store of energy or ambition, that I feel it would be a kindness to the child to admit her to the school.”²³³ In 1936, Indian agent F. J. Clarke sought to have four children who were attending the Peguis Centre day school in Manitoba transferred to the Brandon residential school. He explained that there were seven children in the family and the “father has not been able to support the family properly. The Principal of the school had to outfit these four boys with clothing before they could go to the school.”²³⁴ In April 1938, Indian agent W. B. Murray sought to have a four-year-old girl admitted to the Morley, Alberta, school. He wrote that “her Mother died leaving 7 children. The oldest child is discharged from school, 4 are now in school, a baby has been given in adoption, and the father, from the wish to keep the family together as much as possible, asks to have this child in school.”²³⁵

The Shubenacadie school was established specifically to serve as a child-welfare facility.236 In the spring of 1937, the father of two children attending the Shubenacadie school wrote to his seventeen-year-old daughter, saying that “he hoped she would not be coming home as they were starving” in their home community in Restigouche, Québec.²³⁷ As a result, a decision was made to delay the children’s discharge from the school for at least a year.²³⁸ In 1938, Richibucto, New Brunswick, Indian agent Charles Hudson recommended that a girl whose foster father was “inclined to ill use her” be admitted to the Shubenacadie school.²³⁹

Some children from Summerside, Prince Edward Island, were sent to Shubenacadie in 1939 because their “parents were very poor, and of a roaming nature.”²⁴⁰ That same year, some parents tried unsuccessfully to have their children admitted to residential school. Indian agent Hudson recommended against admitting a Richibucto woman’s children to Shubenacadie. He said that although the woman was a widow, her children were well-cared-for and attending a local day school. According to Hudson, “She wishes to marry a very much no good Indian and he does not want her children around.”²⁴¹ At the same time that Indian Affairs was rejecting this woman, a different Indian agent was recommending that two children who were “wandering about the reserve from one home to another” be admitted to Shubenacadie.²⁴²

Indian agents were also consulted when children were discharged. In 1937, when two students were of age to be discharged from the Chapleau, Ontario, school, the Indian agent consulted with their mother, who said she was “not actually able to take care of these two children being hardly able to feed the rest of the family with the relief allowed.” As a result, she asked that they be kept in the school, and the Indian agent concurred with her request.²⁴³

The use of inducements

Faced with parental hostility, principals offered parents incentives to enrol their children. This practice, generally frowned upon by government, was followed no matter what the decade and no matter which political party was in power. Principal E. F. Wilson lamented his efforts to recruit students for his new school in Elkhorn, Manitoba. In 1888, he said that “it is almost impossible to get [children] except by bribes of money or presents, a system to which I utterly object—indeed I always tell the Indians that the thanks must be on their side not on mine if I take their children to my schools.”²⁴⁴

Indian Commissioner David Laird reported in 1902 that the Indian agent for the Cowessess Reserve believed “it has been a rule with the Roman Catholic Schools to be generous to the parents of pupils they may get.” Laird added, “This ‘generous’ practice is not confined to R.C. Schools, and I have had occasion within the last year to censure what appeared more like a payment for pupils than mere generosity.”²⁴⁶

In examining an allegation that the Brandon school principal was paying parents to send their children to the school, Indian Affairs official Martin Benson wrote that it was likely the principal was providing parents with gifts of clothing “to induce them to part with their children as it is said to be pretty generally the practice in the West to fill up the schools by this means. The denominational schools have clothing sent them, and I have learned from outside sources that they use it for this purpose, as the Indians will not give up their children voluntarily.”²⁴⁷

In the following decade, W. J. Dilworth, the Indian agent on the Blood Reserve in Alberta, sought to end what he saw as a practice “to literally buy children into school. One principal here no longer [sic] than last spring told me that he is always asked by the parent to give him $5.00 for the child. He said that he would loan the parent $5.00 expecting never to have it returned and it never is.”²⁴⁸

The practice continued into the 1930s. When Indian Affairs attempted to resolve a conflict between the principals of the Anglican and Catholic schools on the Blood Reserve in Alberta in 1933, it was revealed that the Catholic principal, E. Ruaux, had paid the parents $10 for a saddle and $5 for delivering their son to the school. The $5, they said, was not a bribe, but had been given to them to alleviate their poverty. Indian Affairs, which had originally ruled that the boy should go to the Anglican school, allowed the boy to continue to attend the Catholic school, but determined that, in the future, Ruaux was not to make “clothing, gifts, nor funds for the purchase of same” prior to the admission of a student.²⁴⁹ In February 1935, J. H. O. Allard, the principal of the Thunderchild school in Delmas, Saskatchewan, offered parents between $1 and $3 to offset the cost of bringing their children to school.²⁵⁰ By August, he reported, “Our savages did not need coaxing to come for the promised three dollars. Last year at the same time, we had 12 entries; this year, we have 60, including five new recruits.”²⁵¹

The degree to which the schools were successful in employing financial inducements is a sign of the widespread poverty among Aboriginal people, a condition that was largely the result of the federal government’s failure to live up to what were supposed to be legally binding Treaty commitments.

“Virtually being kept a prisoner”: Coercion from 1920 to 1940

Although students could be withdrawn from school once they reached the age of sixteen, in the 1920s, the government policy was to encourage parents to keep their children in school until they turned eighteen. Russell T. Ferrier, the director of education for the department, wrote, “Indian Agents, principals and others interested in Indian education are urged to make every possible endeavor to persuade parents to leave their children in school for a longer period than prescribed by the Act.”²⁵³

In a 1927 letter to an Indian agent, Ferrier wrote that “you will realize that the majority of residential school pupils will considerably benefit by remaining in such schools until they are eighteen years of age or even older—this is especially true of the girls for reasons which will readily suggest themselves to you.”²⁵⁴ Departmental secretary J. D. McLean maintained the same approach, instructing the principal of the Presbyterian school in Kenora, Ontario, to ensure that “every effort is bent to have those who should remain longer stay until they are 18 years of age.” If parents were to request the discharge of students who were sixteen or seventeen, McLean advised the principal to tell them that “the matter will have to be referred to the Department.”²⁵⁵

Meanwhile, the churches continued to believe that attendance regulations were not being enforced with sufficient vigour. At their 1925 convention, the principals of Catholic residential schools passed a resolution that, since some parents “show negligence or repugnance to send their children to school or encourage truancy,” the federal government be requested to enforce the compulsory attendance provisions of the Indian Act. They maintained their opposition to day schools, asking that none be constructed “within the recruiting grounds of a residential school.”²⁵⁹ Fifteen months later, in 1927, all Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers and constables were appointed truant officers.²⁶⁰ From then on, the RCMP was with increasing regularity called upon to return runaway students and to compel parents to send their children to residential schools.²⁶¹ In 1928, an Indian agent had a parent from the Blood Reserve jailed for refusing to send his children to school.²⁶² The Indian Act was amended in 1933 to incorporate the appointment of Mounted Police officers as truant officers, reflecting their 1927 appointment.²⁶³

In 1930, the Indian Act was amended to increase the discharge age from fifteen to sixteen. The minister was allowed to order that a child be kept in school until he or she turned eighteen if it was thought “it would be detrimental to any particular Indian child to have it discharged from school on attaining the full age of sixteen years.” In this case, the government was legalizing its existing practice. As Scott wrote in the 1931 annual report, “The usual practice at Indian residential schools is to encourage pupils to remain until they are 17 or 18.”²⁶⁴ Departmental director of education Ferrier struck a different, more moderate, note and explained to T. B. R. Westgate of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, “It is not intended that compulsion to the 18^th birthday be applied to all Indian children or even to a large number.” Instead, he said, it was to be used only “when home conditions very strongly suggested such action.”²⁶⁵

Coercive measures were used throughout the 1930s to compel attendance. In 1931, Mrs. John Chakita (alternately Tchakta) visited the Thunderchild school in Delmas, Saskatchewan, and, against the desire of both the principal and the sisters, removed her daughter Mary, who, she said, was suffering from poor health at the school.²⁶⁶ The local Indian agent chastised the principal and ordered him to seek the girl’s return.²⁶⁷ When the principal’s efforts failed, the Indian agent, S. L. Macdonald, obtained a court summons ordering the mother to return the girl to school.268 The following year, the Indian agent sent a letter to a member of the Moosomin Band that said, “The Principal of the Delmas School has made a complaint that you have not returned your boy to the School.” The father was told, “Please see that this boy is taken back to the school at once, as if it is found necessary to use the Police, you will be liable as well as have to pay the expenses of the action.”²⁶⁹ In October 1937, the police visited the Poundmaker Reserve on behalf of the school, and told the parents of seven children who had not returned to school the previous month to send their children to school. Within five days, all the children were back in school.²⁷⁰

In 1936, the principal of the Fraser Lake school in British Columbia was reprimanded by Indian Affairs for allowing Chief Maxine George to withdraw his son from the school to do work at home. Indian agent R. H. Moore noted, “In view of the fact that we had to prosecute Maxine to get his boy into the school in the first place as well as many other inconveniences to this Department, I cannot help but feel that it was unwise to allow this boy to return to his parents.”²⁷¹

Indian Affairs found itself locked in a series of conflicts with parents in northern Alberta in the late 1930s. In April 1935, John Gambler and his wife visited their two daughters at the Desmarais, Alberta, school. According to Principal L. Beuglet, Gambler said that he and his wife “were lonesome without their children and wished to bring them back” to their home in Crossing Lake, Alberta. When Beuglet objected, “the parents walked away with their children, threatening to shoot whomsoever would endeavour to stop them from taking their children back home.”²⁷² A local magistrate, who had attempted to stop Gambler from removing his children, said that Gambler had “not actually threatened them but had given them to understand he would use force if necessary to take his children.”²⁷³ Beuglet wanted Indian Affairs to have the RCMP enforce the return of the girls to the school, fearing that if forceful action was not taken, other parents might follow his example.²⁷⁴ Indian Affairs official M. Christianson was, however, reluctant to dispatch the police. The distance that police officers would have to travel was considerable, the roads were poor, and the likelihood of locating Gambler was uncertain. The expense of such an expedition would also be charged back to Indian Affairs. Rather than authorizing a costly police expedition, Christianson wrote to Calling Lake storekeeper J. H. McIntosh, asking him to tell Gambler to return his children to the school. In his letter to McIntosh, Christian wrote, “I wish to bring to your attention that an Indian by the name of Gambler” had gone to the Desmarais school and “took his two daughters out of the school without the permission of the principal.”²⁷⁵ However, this was not the first that McIntosh had heard of this matter. One month earlier, Indian agent N. P. L’Heureux had written a letter to McIntosh, informing him of the events at the school. He then went on to write:

L’Heureux, apparently without the approval of his superiors, was attempting to starve the Gamblers into sending their daughters to school. Gambler, it appears, was not dependent on relief rations. He had not returned his children by February 1, 1938, when L’Heureux wrote the RCMP, asking when a patrol might visit Calling Lake and take the children to the school.²⁷⁷ The RCMP was not prepared to undertake such a mission, which would have involved the leasing of a plane, since Indian Affairs was not prepared to reimburse its costs.²⁷⁸ In July 1938, L’Heureux sent Gambler a letter telling him that if he did not send the two daughters he had withdrawn (by then fourteen and eleven years of age) and two younger daughters to the Desmarais school on September 1, “a charge will be preferred against you under the Indian Act” and his children would be “conveyed to school under escort of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”²⁷⁹ In its review of the records, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has not located any court records to indicate that such prosecution ever took place. However, it was not until October 1940 that Gambler enrolled his two youngest daughters in the Desmarais school.²⁸⁰

L’Heureux used the threat of prosecution against other families in this period. In January 1938, he reported that Agnes Cunningham (also referred to as Mrs. Frank Kissaynees-Cardinal) had been refusing since September to send her daughter, Florence Cardinal, to the Joussard, Alberta, school. In October 1937, she had told L’Heureux that “the reason she would not send her child to school was because ‘they learn nothing in those schools.’” L’Heureux had the RCMP serve her with a notice requiring her to bring her daughter to the school. She ignored it, and a second notice was served on her in December. By January, L’Heureux was seeking permission to have the case taken to court. He also wanted John Felix Beaver brought up on similar charges for failing to enrol a child in school. He argued that if the cases were not prosecuted, other parents would withhold their children from school.²⁸¹ At the end of January, Indian Affairs had decided to prosecute Mrs. Frank Kissaynees-Cardinal and John Felix Beaver.²⁸² The Indian Affairs superintendent of Welfare and Training, R. A. Hoey, advised Alberta government officials that Indian Affairs was “not anxious to register either fines or jail sentences on parents but our primary desire is to have the children given an opportunity of obtaining an education.”²⁸³ While it is not clear if the cases ever went to court, in April 1938, Florence’s father, Frank Cardinal-Kissaynees, who supposedly had favoured her admission to Joussard, signed an application for admission to school.²⁸⁴ L’Heureux also threatened Wanakew Cardinal (also known as Francis) with prosecution in 1938 unless he returned his granddaughter to the Desmarais school. Sergeant D. E. Forsland was unable to locate Cardinal when he attempted to serve him with a notice to return the girl. Forsland noted that, in his opinion, the girl “had been taken out of school under the influences of Jean Baptiste Gambler.”285

By the end of this era, the discharge policy was still solidly in place. On March 16, 1939, acting Indian agent J. D. Caldwell wrote to a parent that unless he returned his child to the Kuper Island school within four days, he would be prosecuted under the Indian Act.²⁸⁶ In July 1939, W. C. Lewies, a lawyer in Chatham, Ontario, wrote to Indian Affairs about the case of Muriel Stonefish, who was a student at Mount Elgin. She had not been allowed to return home for the summer holiday because she had been truant on at least two occasions during the school year. Her mother, Flora Powless, had contacted Lewies to see if he could arrange her discharge from the school. Lewies wrote the department that it was his understanding that the parents had voluntarily placed their daughter in the school. Since there was no order placing Stonefish in the school, Lewies argued that she was “virtually being kept a prisoner at the Mount Elgin Indian Residential School.”²⁸⁷

Residential schools in the broader Indian Affairs agenda

Lewies’s depiction of the student as prisoner is an apt summation of the failure of the previous sixty years of residential school policy. The policy was an overly ambitious, unwelcomed, coercive, inconsistent, and underfunded intrusion into Aboriginal families and culture, and an intrusion that failed.

The compulsory approach to schooling adopted in the Indian Act amendment of 1920 was but one of a series of measures aimed at enforcing the assimilation of Aboriginal people. A 1920 amendment allowed the federal government to strip people of their status under the Indian Act without their permission. The government took this step because the previous policy of voluntary enfranchisement had failed: between 1867 and 1920, in all of Canada, only 162 families, comprising 360 persons, had given up their Indian status through this process.²⁸⁸ First Nations people had a far deeper attachment to their Aboriginal identity than the federal government had realized.

In testimony before a parliamentary committee examining proposed amendments to the Indian Act, Deputy Minister Scott outlined the department’s long-term goals. Having worked for Indian Affairs for thirty years, he expressed those goals in personal terms:

Scott’s testimony is a clear statement of colonial policy. First Nations people were not members of nations with whom Canada had a relationship: they were a problem. In the process of gaining control over Aboriginal land and resources, the Canadian government had assumed a series of obligations to Aboriginal people. In Scott’s mind, the role of Indian Affairs was not to administer these obligations—which, when they were being negotiated, had been described to Aboriginal people as being part of an ongoing, indeed, eternal, relationship—but to terminate them. The best way to do this was to eliminate First Nations identity—in all its legal and cultural forms—thus bringing to an end all obligations. The government now had the power to rob adults of their status and to rob parents of their children.

The fact that the 1920 amendments addressed both enfranchisement and education demonstrates that the ongoing colonization of Aboriginal people was not limited to education. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the Indian Act was repeatedly amended to undermine First Nations’ control of land and cultural identity. Traditional economic pursuits were discouraged through the application of provincial game laws, communal farming was disrupted by the subdivision of land, and the authority of First Nations leaders was undermined. Aboriginal culture and strong collective identity were to be eliminated by government policies designed to “inculcate and foster a spirit of individuality.”²⁹⁰ Some of the important amendments

•established incentives to encourage First Nations people to approve the sale of treaty land (1906);²⁹¹

•allowed for the removal of First Nations people from a reserve that was next to, or within, a town of more than 8,000 people (1911);²⁹²

•allowed for the expropriation of reserve land (1911);²⁹³

•prohibited First Nations people from participating “in any Indian dance outside the bounds of his own reserve” (1914);²⁹⁴

•tightened provisions restricting First Nations people’s ability to sell livestock without government permission (1910, 1914);²⁹⁵

•allowed the government to spend band funds without band permission (1918);²⁹⁶

•allowed Indian Affairs to lease reserve surface rights for mining (1919);²⁹⁷

•prevented anyone from collecting money from Indians for the pursuit of claims against the government without the consent of Indian Affairs (1927);298 and

•allowed the government to apply existing provincial game laws, weed-control laws, and motor vehicle laws to reserves (1936).²⁹⁹

These amendments are examples and do not constitute the full list of measures adopted. The government made continual incremental reductions in band authority and incursions into every aspect of Aboriginal life—including the right to visit pool halls (which was restricted in 1930).³⁰⁰ As Scott’s biographer, Brian Titley, commented:

It would be tedious to recount in detail the various amendments to the Indian Act that were instituted between 1920 and Scott’s retirement [in 1932]. Like those that preceded them, they tended to increase the power of the department while concomitantly, weakening the autonomy of the Indians.³⁰¹

Although the involuntary enfranchisement provision was repealed in 1922, it was revived in slightly different form in 1933 when the minister of Indian Affairs was given the power to enfranchise individuals.³⁰² Women who married individuals without status continued to lose their status with consent.

The Indian Act was not the only piece of government legislation that circumscribed Aboriginal life. In the British Columbia Indian Lands Settlement Act of 1920, the federal government reneged on its commitment to protect Aboriginal land rights in British Columbia.³⁰³ The 1917 Migratory Birds Convention Act undermined Aboriginal hunting rights.³⁰⁴ Aboriginal people also faced numerous barriers to getting the right to vote. For example, the Dominion Franchise Act of 1934 explicitly disqualified Indian persons living on reserves and Inuit people from voting in federal elections.³⁰⁵

Federal policy was contradictory, self-defeating, and destructive. Scott wrote in 1920 that “the ultimate object of our Indian policy is to merge the natives in the citizenship of the country.”³⁰⁶ In daily practice, however, federal policy segregated First Nations people from the rest of the Canadian population, often confining them to remote reserves, which ensured their continued colonization and marginalization. The schools had a mandate to assimilate Aboriginal people, but this always was complicated by government insistence on implementing its policy as cheaply as possible.

CHAPTER 12

The struggle over enrolment: 1867–1939

Regulating attendance: 1884–1893

Compulsion and the disruption of First Nations government

**The Indian Act amendments and regulations of 1894**

The campaign against day schools

Policy change under the Liberals

Admission and discharge policy

Parental resistance and the demise of industrial schools

Battleford

High River

St. Boniface

Red Deer

Shingwauk and Elkhorn

Resistance in British Columbia

The appointment of Duncan Campbell Scott

**The Indian Act amendments of 1920**

The schools as child welfare institutions

The use of inducements

“Virtually being kept a prisoner”: Coercion from 1920 to 1940

Residential schools in the broader Indian Affairs agenda