Table 13.4. Program of studies for Indian schools, 1894.
Residential schools were intended to be far more than simple educational institutions. But, as their name makes clear, they were schools, and it is appropriate to assess their educational record. The government and churches had goals for education in the schools, although in large measure they were poorly defined. During the debate over the establishment of the schools, Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald said he expected the industrial schools would produce “native teachers, and perhaps native clergymen, and men who will not only be able to read and write, but who will learn trades. The Indians are more apt to take to trades such as carpentry, blacksmithing, & etc. than to the cultivation of the soil.”1
Deputy Minister Lawrence Vankoughnet wrote in 1884 that the purpose of the schools was to impart
a practical knowledge of husbandry [farming] and mechanical trades. The principals are to charge themselves with the duty of seeing that the intention of the Department in this respect is fully carried out, as well as that the children are instructed in the art of reading and speaking the English language, and in the elementary studies generally pursued at school.2
The 1892 government order that placed a number of existing industrial schools on the per capita funding system mentioned education only in passing: managers of government-funded schools were required to “keep the schools at a certain standard of instruction.”3 That standard was never defined.
To meet these limited objectives, the schools were given total control over the students for twenty-four hours a day, for at least ten months of the year—and often longer. Despite this level of control, during this period (from 1867 to 1939), only a small fraction of the students ever finished the six grades (or “standards,” as they were initially called) the schools offered. The amount of vocational training offered was minimal. Many observers, including government officials, came to the conclusion that, rather than preparing students for adulthood, the system was leaving them unprepared for the future. This was such a common concern that government officials actually developed their own word for it—wondering whether the schools were “unfitting” students for the lives they would lead.
It is clear that even by the standards of the period in which they operated, residential schools failed to provide students with an adequate education and the promised vocational training. The government and the churches failed the students at the policy level, the funding level, and at the classroom level. Government officials were well aware of these failures throughout the history of the system.
The following conclusions are undeniable:
•The federal government did not establish a clear set of goals for education in the residential schools.
•The residential school curriculum was in essence an elementary school curriculum, reflecting a belief that Aboriginal people were intellectually inferior.
•The government never developed or enforced a system-wide policy on teacher qualification.
•The teaching staff was under-qualified, poorly paid, and overworked.
•The curriculum was not relevant to the children’s experiences, interests, or needs. As a result, few of them ever completed their schooling.
•Students left the schools lacking the skills to succeed in their home communities or to succeed in the broader labour market.
Most of the residential schools operated on what was referred to as the “half-day system.” Under this system, students were in class for half the day and in vocational training for the other half. In some ways, the term half-day system is misleading, since it masks the amount of work that students did in residential schools. Often, as many students, teachers, and inspectors observed, the time allocated for vocational training was actually spent in highly repetitive labour that provided little in the way of training. Rather, it served to maintain the school operations. Above and beyond the half-day that students spent in vocational training, it was not uncommon for them to also do chores both before and after school. As a result, students often spent more than half a day working for the school.
While it was referred to as the “half-day system,” it is important to note that it was not a formally established system with rules or regulations. Some schools did not use the half-day system, and those that did use it implemented it on their own terms. In 1922, Indian Affairs recommended that the Chapleau, Ontario, school implement the half-day system. In his letter of instruction, Russell Ferrier, the Indian Affairs superintendent of Indian Education, informed the Chapleau principal that “in most schools it is used the year round.” In providing a sample timetable, Ferrier acknowledged “there are many variations from this routine; but, as near as I can remember, it is the general plan in use.” In other words, thirty-nine years after the opening of the first industrial schools in the West, Indian Affairs did not have a formal description of the half-day system: in order to describe the so-called system, the department’s senior education official could refer to only what he had observed in other schools.4
Table 13.1. High River school summer schedule, 1887.
| Rising | 5:30 o’clock. |
| Prayers and mass | 6:00 o’clock. |
| Making beds, cleaning for inspection | 6:30 o’clock. |
| Breakfast | 7:00 o’clock. |
| Fatigue, trade instruction | 7:30 o’clock. |
| School | 9:00 o’clock. |
| Recreation | 11:30 o’clock. |
| Falling in, getting ready for dinner | 11:45 o’clock. |
| Dinner, recreation | 12:00 o’clock. |
| School and trade instruction | 1:00 o’clock. |
| Singing class | 3:30 o’clock. |
| Fatigue | 4:00 o’clock. |
| Falling in, getting ready for supper | 5:45 o’clock. |
| Supper, recreation | 6:00 o’clock. |
| Prayer, falling in, going to dormitory | 8:00 o’clock. |
| Lights out | 8:30 o’clock. |
Source: Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1887, 180–181.
According to Ferrier’s description, the principal of a 100-student school would divide students into three groups: 35 older boys and girls who would work in the morning, 35 older boys and girls who would work in the afternoon, and 30 younger students who would be “in school and at play” all day.5
Timetables from Indian Affairs annual reports of the 1880s and 1890s show that school life was highly regimented, generally starting as early as 5:30 a.m. and running to 8:30 p.m. Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney believed that such a highly structured life would play an important role in “civilizing” a student. As he put it in 1889:
The value of time is practically exemplified to him in the class room, at recreation, or in any fatigue work which he may be required to perform, by the recurrence every day of the hour at which each duty has to commence and again of the time by which it should be completed. The importance to an Indian child of such instruction cannot be overestimated, as innate in him, inherited from his parents, is an utter disregard of time, and ignorance of its value.6
“Fatigue duty” is a military term for non-military duties to which a soldier might be assigned—often as a punishment. In residential schools, that same term was used, generally referring to chores assigned to the children. Table 13.1 shows the schedule by which students at the High River school in what is now Alberta were regulated in 1887.
In the winter, the day started an hour later, with school commencing at 8:30 a.m., evening prayer at 7:30 p.m., and lights out at 8:00 p.m.7
While the half-day system was supposed to apply only to the older students, the reality was that at most schools during this period, every student worked. At High River, students who were not learning a trade could count on two hours a day of fatigue duty in the winter and four hours in the summer. According to Principal E. Claude, “To these youngest ones pertained the weeding of the garden and the house work on their side of the school, and I must say, that this summer none denied our watchword, ‘No idleness here,’ as all work was exclusively done by the pupils.”8
Table 13.2 reproduces the schedule in force at the Qu’Appelle school in 1893.
Table 13.2. Qu’Appelle school schedule, 1893.
| Pupils rise | 5.30 |
| Chapel | 6.00 |
| Bedmaking, washing, milking and pumping | 6.30 to 7.15 |
| Inspection of pupils in the school rooms to see if they are clean and properly dressed, their condition, health & c., a note being taken of those requiring attention, if of clothes, this is done by the sister directly after dinner | 7.15 to 7.30 |
| Breakfast | 7.30 |
| Fatigue for small boys | 8.00 to 9.00 |
| Trade boys go to work | 8.00 |
| School with 15 minutes recess | 9.00 to 12.00 |
| Prepare for dinner | 12.00 to 12.10 |
| Dinner | 12.10 to 12.40 |
| Recreation | 12.40 to 2.00 |
| School and Trades | 2.00 to 4.00 |
| Fatigue, such as milking, carrying coal, ashes, filling tanks, wood boxes, pumping, sweeping | 4.45 to 6.00 |
| Prepare for supper | 6.00 to 6.10 |
| Supper | 6.10 to 6.40 |
| Recreation | 6.40 to 8.00 |
| Prayer and retire | 8.00 |
Source: Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1893, 173–174.
Sundays were not much different from other days. They started with breakfast, then fatigue duty, followed by dressing for church, church parade, church service, dinner, a doctor’s inspection, and then recreation until 2:30 p.m., when the children went to prayers. These were followed with chores, followed by an hour-long lecture from the principal at 5:00 p.m. on morals and religion.9
At the Wikwemikong, Ontario, school in the 1890s, boys in Standard 5 took manual training from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. and from 3:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., while boys in standards 3 and 4 took training from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and from 4:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. In addition, all the students at the school spent “a few hours daily” on such chores as “sweeping, scrubbing, sawing and splitting wood, dairying, gardening, stock-feeding, helping in the kitchen, in the mill, on the farm, & c.” The principal claimed, “They like these various occupations and become quite industrious.”10 In 1907, the Wikwemikong principal used nearly identical language to report that, in addition to the vocational training students received, “all the pupils are employed about two hours daily each, according to sex and ability, at various kinds of labour, such as sweeping, scrubbing, sawing and splitting fire-wood, dairying, gardening, feeding stock, helping in the kitchen and on the farm.”11
At the Shingwauk Home in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in 1884, the working hours for the boys were from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m., from 7:30 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., and from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Boys were required to wear tin badges on their arms while they were working. Students wearing such badges were not allowed to play. Those boys who were undergoing apprenticeship training worked ten hours a day and then attended classes in the evening.12
Middlechurch, Manitoba, principal W. A. Burman wrote in 1893:
The rule of half day classwork has been carried out as far as practicable, though, owing to the lack of larger children for necessary work, some of these have frequently had to work at their various occupations full time. It has, however, the advantage of preparing them gradually for the kind of life they must expect in the near future.13
By the end of the nineteenth century, this regime was universal in the industrial schools. In his 1898 annual report, the Battleford principal wrote, “All pupils, excepting the smallest or most backward, attend on the ‘half-time’ system.”14 At the High River school that year, “all boys do farm work, even the apprentices in different shops not only work on the school farm, but go out to work for the farmers during haying and harvesting.”15 At the Alert Bay, British Columbia, school, “all the boys work as usual from two to three hours daily.”16 At Williams Lake, British Columbia, “with the exception of the small boys all take lessons in farming and gardening, learn to milk and work at the hay.”17
Table 13.3. Standard courses of study, Manitoba and the North-West Territories, 1889.
| Branch. | Standard 1. | Standard 2. |
| Reading and recitation in. | Alphabet and tablets. | First half of First Reader. |
| Spelling. | Simplest words. | Words in first half of First Reader. |
| Writing. | Elementary strokes on slates. | On slates. To transcribe letters and simple words from print or black-board. |
| Dictation. | Letters and short words. | |
| Arithmetic. | Figures–to count Addition and Subtraction (mental) of units. | Tables 2 to 5 times, mental exercise in addition and subtraction. |
| Object lessons with English conversation. | Explanation of all common objects; verb acting; instructive movements and conversation. | |
| English study and Grammar. | To name common objects, learn names of days, weeks, months, &c., &c. | To name common objects, and make simple statements intelligibly. |
| Geography. | Verbal instruction in facts necessary to understanding thoroughly geographical ‘definitions.’ | |
| Vocal music. | Simple Hymns and Songs. | |
| Religious instruction. | Scripture Reading; Ten Commandments; Lord’s Prayer; Life of Christ, &c., &c. | |
Source: Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1889, 171.
Some students did nothing but work. In June 1898, the principal of the Calgary industrial school, which had opened the year before, reported that the school had been without a teacher until April. This, he suggested, was in reality an advantage, since “it has enabled us with few hands to give more time to outdoor occupation and so get things in order much more expeditiously than we could have done had more time been spent in the study rooms.”18 One boy, Nelson Peters, ran away from the Mount Elgin school in Muncey, Ontario, so often that the principal concluded that the costs involved in returning him were too high. He initially planned on discharging the boy, but then proposed that he “stay and work in the fields with a team and not go to school.” The boy agreed, and stayed at the school for at least another two years without attending class.19
The half-day system contributed directly to the educational inadequacy of the residential school system. Throughout this period, non-Aboriginal students attended schools that provided them with academic training on a full-time basis. A 1921 timetable for a one-room public school shows classes starting at 9:00 a.m. and running to 4:00 p.m., with two fifteen-minute recesses and an hour-long lunch break. The students ranged from grades One to Eight. The older students had as much academic class time as the younger students.20 In British Columbia, Indian Commissioner D. M. MacKay noted in 1939 that at one residential school he visited, “I inclined to believe that there is too much non-educational production labour.” In his opinion: “Where the children have such a long day and work on the half day plan with considerable heavy productive work, the tendency would be to reduce the efficiency of the school as an educational institution. This is probably true in most of our residential schools in British Columbia.”21
Whether in class, in the field, or even in the community, it was a regimented life that many students came to hate. Margaret Stonechild, who attended residential schools in Manitoba and Saskatchewan in the 1930s, grew tired of the constant regimentation. “‘Line up here, line up there.’ ‘Oh, here comes the cows,’ we heard people saying and laughing because we were all in a line, marching into church in Brandon.”22
When the industrial schools were established in the 1880s, the instructions provided to principals gave little guidance about either curriculum or teacher qualification. Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney’s 1883 letter to Battleford principal Thomas Clarke stipulated that the staff should include a principal, a farming instructor, and “a woman to act as Matron as well as to do the cooking.” No mention was made of hiring any additional teachers.23 The rules and regulations that Deputy Minister Lawrence Vankoughnet issued for the Cranbrook, British Columbia, school in 1889 made no reference to either the hiring of staff or to goals for education, other than to say that the principal “should give instruction, with such assistance as he may employ for that purpose, to the pupils in the ordinary branches of education.” The school foreman, who was to “take charge of the boys at outside work,” was to be expected to teach whichever trades in which he was skilled.24 The 1894 Regulations Relating to the Education of Indian Children dealt almost solely with matters of attendance: no mention was made of education standards or of teacher standards.25 Under these conditions, curriculum was left in the hands of church-appointed principals.
However, in 1889, Indian Affairs published in its annual report the “Standard Courses of Study for Manitoba and the North-West Territories” (Table 13.3). It was an elementary school curriculum, with five standards through which industrial school students were expected to progress. The curriculum (which includes typographical mistakes from the original) was dominated by the “Four Rs”: reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. Music was taught, but the emphasis was on hymn singing.26
In 1894, Indian Affairs published its “Programme of Studies for Indian Schools,” which apparently applied to all its schools across the country (see Table 13.4). The program was issued in the same year that the government adopted its first formal regulations for Indian education. Together, the program and the regulations represented the government’s first attempts to impose a degree of order on the network of boarding and industrial schools that existed across the country. According to the program, a teacher was required to follow it “as far as the circumstances of his school permit.”27 While changes could, theoretically, be made only with government permission, inspection, particularly in the West, was limited and lax.28
With its heavy emphasis on the Four Rs, the program did not differ significantly from what was being taught in public schools at that time. Despite the fact that in Standard 3, students were supposed to be taught “Stories of Indians of Canada and their civilization,” it is highly unlikely that public schools in Canada were providing any real instruction on the topic of Aboriginal culture or accomplishment. Well into the twentieth century, Canadian textbooks, when they spoke of Aboriginal people at all, spoke of them largely in negative and stereotypical terms. A 1928 textbook, A First Book of Canadian History, described them as being “of a somewhat primitive type. They had not learnt the art of making metal tools and utensils, but made use only of stone hatchets, flint arrow heads, and clay pottery. They had no knowledge even of such a simple invention as the wheel.” The book’s many stereotyped portrayals of Aboriginal people included a quotation from the French explorer Jacques Cartier that told students, “They can with truth be called savages, as there are no people poorer than these in the world; and I believe they do not possess anything to the value of five pennies, apart from their canoes or nets.… They are great thieves, and will steal all they can.” Another textbook, Building the Canadian Nation, from 1942, described the hardships that missionaries underwent working with “wandering tribes who lived from hand to mouth in a condition of filth and often of privation almost beyond description.” According to that book, “The Indian was attached to his superstitions, to his belief in magic, to his feasts and ceremonials which were often no better than wild orgies.”29 Based on their training or the available texts, residential school teachers would have been hard-pressed to give meaningful instruction on “Indian civilization” or the “Stories of the Indians of Canada.”
The program stressed, “Every effort must be made to induce pupils to speak English, and to teach them to understand it.” Teachers were encouraged to allow students to restate concepts in their own language—providing the teacher spoke that language. Great stress was laid on the need to teach children to “read loudly and distinctly,” and, in coming years, inspectors would lament the quality of the students’ spoken English. It is also worth noting that instruction was to be direct, making use of the “voice and blackboard,” with “the unnecessary use of text books to be avoided.” While much may be said of the value of direct and interactive teaching, the downplaying of the use of textbooks reflected a belief that the schools needed to provide only limited academic training.30 In this way, the program appears to reflect the views of Andsell Macrae and Hayter Reed. In 1886, as the first Indian Affairs school inspector, Macrae stressed the need to teach students “the lessons of life,” not the “knowledge of books.”31 While he was Indian commissioner, Reed had been impressed by the way much of the education at the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, was carried out by way of object lessons, with little use being made of books.32
Source: Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1894, 246–249.
In the nineteenth century, very few students ever made it to standards 5 or 6. Table 13.5 shows the residential school grade distribution for 1898. Of the 1,454 students enrolled in these schools, 992 (68%) were in the first three standards. Only 39 (2.6%) had made it to Standard 6.33
Table 13.5. Grade distribution, twenty-one Canadian residential schools, 1898.
| Standard | Standard 1 | Standard 2 | Standard 3 | Standard 4 | Standard 5 | Standard 6 |
| Number of students | 370 | 265 | 357 | 234 | 189 | 39 |
Source: Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1898, 256–356.
From the outset, it was apparent to some principals and teachers that the curriculum was not relevant to the lives or experiences of the students. In 1903, the principal of the Anglican boarding schools on the Blackfoot Reserve in what is now Alberta reported, “We feel the need of a reader for the older children more adapted to the needs of their future lives than the general Canadian reader now in use.”34 The Middlechurch principal, W. A. Burman, drew the government’s attention to the same issue:
The study of English has received special attention, but I have felt, with, I have no doubt, all others engaged in such work, the need of readers specially adapted to the use of these children. There is much in those now in use, to discourage the pupils in their efforts to overcome the difficulties of the English tongue. Many of the subjects treated of in these books cannot be understood without a wider knowledge of the world than Indians of any age are likely to have.35
Individual teachers also recognized how foreign the curriculum was to many students. Margaret Butcher realized when she was teaching the Biblical story of the Good Shepherd to her students at the Kitamaat, British Columbia, school that “not one child had ever seen a sheep.”36 After a visit to the Hobbema, Alberta, school in 1926, an inspector noted, “Care must be taken, however, to see that the child’s earliest vocabulary will appeal to his innate interests—a subject which requires special study in its application to Indian pupils who have no knowledge of the English language before they enter school.”37
The federal curriculum appears to have remained in place until the 1920s. In 1920, Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott wrote, “Our aim is to have the course in our Indian schools conform as closely as possible to the curriculum in the public schools of the districts in which they are situated.” To achieve that goal, he commenced negotiations with governments in the prairie provinces to pay provincial inspectors to inspect Indian Affairs schools.38 The following year’s annual report stated, “The course of study is that prescribed for the provincial, public and separate schools and is strictly followed.”39
In 1880, Sir John A. Macdonald, who was both prime minister and minister of Indian Affairs, wrote in a memorandum to Cabinet that “all Teachers of Indian Schools in the North West Territories and elsewhere, whether appointed by religious denominations or by the Department be required to hold certificates of competency and character and to fyle [sic] the same in the Department.”40 However, during this period (from 1867 to 1939), the government never adopted a regulation that would actually require that teachers at Indian Affairs schools meet the level of qualification set down in Macdonald’s memorandum. This was in large measure due to the government’s unwillingness to meet the cost of hiring qualified teachers.
Problems in recruiting qualified teachers were not restricted solely to residential schools. In the late nineteenth century, teacher qualification requirements, particularly for elementary school teachers, were minimal in all Canadian schools. According to education historian Robert M. Stamp:
In the years immediately following Confederation a young girl still in her teens or a discharged non-commissioned officer who could find nothing better to do could almost always find a job “keeping” a one-room school. With little training behind them such teachers could resort to little more than an insistence on rote memorization of material with frequent applications of the rod if the pupil’s memory was less than perfect.41
In 1885, just 285 of the 446 teachers in Manitoba’s Protestant schools (at the time, the province had both a Protestant and Catholic school system) had some training. Much of this was limited to attendance at four-week sessions at normal institutes (teacher training schools). These sessions were intended to provide unqualified teachers with a measure of training.42
Rural communities had particular difficulty recruiting qualified teachers. A 1913 survey concluded that 93% of the unqualified teachers working in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario were teaching in rural schools. The reasons for this are not hard to discern: by 1900, the wages paid to teachers in urban schools were three times higher than those paid to rural teachers. Not surprisingly, every year, a quarter of the rural teachers left their positions.43 The problem persisted: into the 1940s, the Manitoba government continued to issue “special authorities” that allowed untrained teachers to work in the province’s public schools.44
The hiring of residential school teachers was left to the churches, as Martin Benson, an official of the Indian Affairs Schools Branch, observed in his 1897 report on industrial schools. Benson believed that the policy of allowing the churches to hire staff without the department’s approval had “led to very unsatisfactory results and seriously interfered with the educational policy of the Department.” To address this, he wrote, Indian Affairs had begun to require, where practicable, that the teachers have a provincially recognized teacher’s certificate. The rule was not obligatory because of the difficulty in getting qualified teachers “who are willing to accept the remuneration offered for the work required.”45 Those whom the churches were able to recruit were “not as a rule well fitted for the work of teaching, not so much from want of scholarship as from the lack of ability to adapt their instruction to the children’s needs.”46
A decade later, the churches were still in control of hiring. In 1909, British Columbia Indian agent A. W. Neill discovered by accident that the principal of the Alberni boarding school in his agency had resigned and that his successor had already been appointed. In a letter of complaint to his superiors, Neill stated it was his understanding that no school staff member could be appointed without government approval. It was his opinion that this rule was a “dead letter.” He wrote that, instead, “the various churches appoint principals and teachers without any reference to the Dept.” Once a new staff member was in place, the school asked him, as Indian agent, to “report the fact to the Dept., which sends a formal approval.” Neill felt that Indian Affairs was being embarrassed into accepting whomever the churches appointed, since “it would be extremely difficult for the Dept. to object to a man after he brought his family perhaps a couple of thousand miles.” He thought Indian Affairs should be vetting appointments before they were in the field.
Given the fact that principals played a central role in the success or failure of a school, Neill also recommended that principals be required not only to have “some college training,” but also to “possess the equivalent of a first class teacher’s certificate and to have had some previous experience among Indians.” Since the incoming principal of the Alberni school, W. A. Hendry, possessed such qualifications, it was a favourable moment, Neill thought, for the department to “announce that its rule must in future be adhered to.”47 The British Columbia Indian superintendent, A. W. Vowell, thought Neill’s recommendations regarding qualifications were excellent, save for the fact that they would “further increase the difficulty said to be experienced in securing suitable teachers.” If stricter requirements were placed on the churches in regard to teacher qualifications, Vowell wrote, the government could expect the churches to apply for “larger grants.” And, as Vowell understood it, Indian Affairs “is not at present disposed to entertain requests for increased grants to Indian boarding and industrial schools.”48 Hendry lasted less than a year as Alberni principal. When his replacement, H. B. Currie, arrived in 1910, Indian agent Neill was once more disheartened. He reported that although Currie and his wife were fine people, “they have absolutely no experience in this work, have no knowledge of school management, or of nursing, or of handling Indians; they do not appear to have even been fully informed of the conditions under which they will have to work.”49
The 1910 contract between the federal government and the churches, which had established a per capita funding agreement for three different classes and locations of boarding schools, and established the respective responsibilities of government and the churches for the schools, also sidestepped the question of teacher qualification. The school managers, according to the contract, were not to
employ, except for a period not exceeding six months, any teacher or instructor until evidence satisfactory to the Superintendent General has been submitted to him that such teacher or instructor is able to converse with the pupils under his charge in English and is able to speak and write the English language fluently and correctly and possess such other qualifications as in the opinion of the Superintendent General may be necessary.
The contract also required that the schools provide “teachers and officers qualified to give the pupils religious instruction at proper times.”50 These were minimal requirements that would allow for the continued hiring of untrained teachers.
The schools had a great deal of trouble recruiting staff even though formal requirements were not in place. After his 1908 tour of schools and reserves in western Canada, Indian Affairs inspector F. H. Paget reported that at the Battleford, Saskatchewan, school, “Frequent changes in the staff at this school has not been to its advantage.” The problem was not with the principal, but with the fact that “more profitable employment is available in the District and, furthermore, the salaries paid are not as high as are paid in other public institutions.”51 At the Anglican school on the Blood Reserve in Alberta, there were four vacant staff positions. Paget observed, “Great difficulty is experienced in retaining an efficient staff upon the small salaries which are offered and until our schools can offer as high salaries as are paid at other Public Institutions this difficulty will not disappear.”52
Publicly, the government tried to minimize this ongoing problem. In his 1914 annual report, Duncan Campbell Scott claimed:
Whenever possible the services of teachers with professional qualifications are secured for the Indian schools, and in the older settled portions of the different provinces a large percentage of our teachers are so qualified. On the more remote reserves, however, it has been found difficult to secure teachers with certificates. The salaries offered to teachers in these localities are thought to be liberal, and residences are provided, but this hardly compensates for the isolation and lack of society. Many of our teachers who have not professional qualifications have had long experience, and a number of them are meeting with considerable success.53
He repeated this message, often with no changes, in the next eight annual reports.54 In 1923, after an actual increase in funding, Scott reported, “Salary schedules have been raised and the services of better qualified teachers are being secured.”55 In his report for the following year, Scott sounded less confident, saying there had been “a determined effort to secure the services of better qualified academic and vocational instructors for the boarding schools.”56 One year later, he reported, “Better trained teachers are being engaged and more classroom, vocational and recreational equipment is being supplied in an effort to make the instruction more attractive.”57
Despite Scott’s optimistic reports, in reality, progress in hiring qualified teachers for both residential and day schools remained slow. An inspection of the Roman Catholic school on the Blood Reserve in Alberta in 1914 noted that neither of the school’s teachers held teaching certificates.58 Nine years later, Indian Affairs secretary J. D. McLean informed the principal of the same school that the provincial inspector “has reported so unfavourably concerning the instruction and teaching ability” of the school’s two teachers that he had to ask that they be replaced.59 In 1925, McLean wrote the principal again, saying that the inspector had given an unfavourable report on the English-language skills of one of the teachers and that “I shall be pleased if you will arrange in the immediate future for a better qualified instruction.”60
In 1922, the Anglican Indian and Eskimo Commission acknowledged that in the past, it had accepted as teachers “any Christian men or women who expressed a willingness to serve in that capacity, whether they possessed suitable qualifications or not.” The new policy was not to accept anyone whose “literacy standing would not satisfy the requirements of one or other of the Departments of education in the provinces throughout the Dominion.”61
Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham frequently raised concerns about the qualifications of both the vocational instructors and the classroom teachers. In 1923, he wrote to Scott, “A large percentage of the ex-pupils on leaving many of our Industrial and Boarding schools to-day know little or nothing about the care of stock and do not display as much intelligence along the lines as do many Indians who have never attended school.”
We have men at the head of some our important institutions at which they are supposed to teach practical farming, care of live stock, etc. who do not know the first things about these essential branches of the work; men who could not begin to make a living at farming and who, nevertheless have the responsibility of training our Indian youth in these important matters.62
In a second letter that year, Graham wrote:
In these three provinces [Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta] many of our schools are staffed by persons who are not qualified to teach or instruct our Indian children in the various departments over which they have charge. A great many of our teachers would not be allowed to teach in an ordinary country school. In support of this statement I need only refer you to the reports you have received from the various Inspectors of the Department of Education in these provinces. Have not these reports shown that in many cases the teaching and methods in our schools are very poor?63
According to Graham,
the teachers at the Old Sun’s School are not qualified in so far as that they have not received Normal training. The reports of the Provincial School Inspectors on Indian schools have been in the majority of cases unsatisfactory, and these gentlemen have invariably stressed the necessity for employing as teachers in our schools only men and women who have received Normal training.64
The problems were not limited to small and remote mission schools. The quality of teaching at the Qu’Appelle school, one of the largest and oldest industrial schools in the West, was a source of constant irritation to Graham. In 1922, he reported to Ottawa that, in the opinion of a school inspector, the teacher of the boys’ senior classroom at the school was “an absolute failure, lazy and to use his own words, unfit to occupy the position he holds.” The teacher was reported to have “a very poor pronunciation,” spoke “poor English,” and had “no certificates.” The brass band and the Boy Scouts had ceased to function as a result of his lack of attention. It was recommended that he be dismissed.65 At the same time, the school had also promised to remove a female teacher who had been judged to be unsatisfactory.66 At the end of the year, Graham remained frustrated:
The whole trouble here is that the parents of these children are demanding better care for their children and a better education and training. This school is not what it should be. The Department have [sic] been informed of this. I had reason to believe that a change would be made, but this has not taken place, and there will alway [sic] be dissatisfaction about getting children to attend this school, especially those of graduates. I am at a loss to know why the Department have [sic] not taken action on the reports that have been sent in by the Inspectors. This school is far from what it should be.67
In 1925, the provincial inspector recommended that all four teachers at the Qu’Appelle school take normal school courses.68 Four years later, the school received a more positive assessment:
The teachers of this school are not trained in teaching according to the methods employed at the Provincial Normal School: by years of experience the lady teachers have worked out their own methods for the instruction of the Indian child and these are successful in a large measure. The male teachers are better qualified academically and are employing satisfactory methods.69
But, in 1932, there was only one teacher at the Qu’Appelle school who had a teaching certificate, and she, according to Sister Pulvermacher, was “too tired to teach.”70 A 1936 report on the Qu’Appelle school observed:
In the rooms taught by the sisters the problem was the same as it has ever been during the past eight years; there should be greater variety of exercises to take the place of the unchanging rotations of activities. A stronger appeal should be made to the children to get them to think independently and with some degree of consistently [sic].71
When, in 1923, the chief inspector of schools for the Department of Education in Saskatchewan, J. H. McKechnie, advised Indian Affairs that “certified teachers, only, be engaged in the future for Indian work,” he was informed by Russell T. Ferrier, the superintendent of Indian Education, that “it is the aim of this Department to gradually employ better qualified teachers.” Ferrier had to acknowledge that many of the churches often nominated “missionary teachers.” He suggested this subsidization of local missionary work could be seen as an overall benefit, since “the general good influence on the reserve of these Christian workers often offsets any loss in classroom efficiency.” He said, “When Parliament is fully seized with the importance of educating our wards, we will be able to offer larger salaries to prospective teachers and we can then demand properly certificated workers.”72 In short, the children were still being taught by unqualified teachers because the government was not prepared to offer competitive salaries.
In the opinion of the people the government paid to inspect the schools, this lack of qualifications had an impact on the quality of the education provided. Inspector R. H. Cairns believed there should be at least “one Normal trained teacher” at each residential school. He wrote, “Practically all teachers who have not had Normal School training are seriously handicapped in the classroom.” His observations were prompted by a 1925 visit to the Cranbrook school, where neither of the two teachers, both in their early twenties, had a teacher’s certificate.73 A 1926 inspection of the Sandy Bay, Manitoba, school found two teachers with seventy students. Neither teacher had any professional qualification to teach. The inspector said, “The methods employed by these teachers is [sic] not up-to-date when compared with our public school standards. The methods employed to teach these non-English-speaking pupils could be improved.”74 That same year, Duncan Campbell Scott wrote to Roman Catholic Archbishop Alfred Sinnott in Winnipeg, “It is my policy to only recognize qualified teachers for all class-room work, that is teachers who are the holders of Provincial certificates. We are meeting with a fair measure of success I am glad to say, and I think the quality of our teachers has been much improved.”75 The facts suggest that Scott was overly optimistic. Two years later, following a visit to the school at Round Lake, Saskatchewan, an inspector observed, “The junior classroom work should be under a qualified teacher instead of that it is under a mere lad and I understand that this is the first school he has taught in.”76 Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham recommended that a teacher at the Roman Catholic school in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, be dismissed in 1931 because she was not qualified. He wrote, “We are doing our best to keep the teaching staff at our various schools up to date, but when cases such as this creep in we cannot make any headway.”77
The Indian Affairs Schools Branch maintained that the principals and the staff were “appointed by the church authorities, subject to the approval of the Department as to qualifications.”78 In reality, the system tended to operate in the manner that Neill had described back in 1910: the churches hired staff and the government then rubber-stamped their selections. In 1922, Graham informed the field secretary of the Anglican Missionary Society that while he would allow the former farm instructor at the Gleichen, Alberta, school to live in a cottage at the Elkhorn, Manitoba, school, that was no guarantee that Indian Affairs would approve the man’s appointment as farm instructor at Elkhorn. The field secretary, T. B. R. Westgate, informed Graham that, in his opinion, “the only officer over whom the Department have [sic] control is the Principal.” Graham said this flew in the face of a pamphlet on the operation of the schools that had been issued in May 1921.79
For their part, the churches’ key requirement for staff during this period was religious commitment. A 1936 United Church document on First Nations education policy stated that the staff of all United Church schools should be composed of people who had a “Christian motive, or, in other words, a missionary purpose coupled with skill in some particular field to teach his specialty to the Indians.” Staff members were expected to be “closely related to and actively interested in the work of the nearest United Church” and be acquainted with, and sympathetic to, “the religious education programme of the United Church.” Having laid out these fairly specific requirements, the policy document added that “some minimum educational qualifications for staff members should be outlined.”80
In 1939, the Oblates’ Committee on Indian Missions endorsed the principle that residential school staff “should be duly qualified.” The committee recommended that “teaching nuns who do not have the required qualifications, complete the pedagogical education through summer courses.”81 That such an endorsement was seen as necessary in 1939, and that such training was still required, clearly reflects the fact that, despite stated hiring expectations for teacher qualification, the federal government failed to ensure that all residential school teachers were properly qualified.
Limited funding meant that unqualified teachers were hired. It also meant that those teachers, many of whom were quite young, had very heavy workloads. Throughout this period, inspectors regularly made comments on the high student-to-teacher ratios in the schools. Qu’Appelle school principal Joseph Hugonnard’s 1894 report observed, “For the boys there are two teachers, who on alternate days remain with them from a quarter past six in the morning till eight in the evening; making a very long and arduous day.”82 At Mount Elgin in 1898, “two second-class professional teachers have handled an average of over one hundred pupils successfully.”83 In the same year at the Shingwauk Home, two teachers taught seventy-three students.84 The Middlechurch school had only two teachers.85
At the Pine Creek, Manitoba, school in 1911, the boys and girls were taught separately, with one teacher taking all the girls and the other teacher taking all the boys. As result, one had a class of twenty-six, while the other had almost twice as many: forty-nine. An inspector suggested that the classes be mixed, with one teacher taking the lower grades and the other taking the higher grades.86 In 1925, two teachers at the same school were responsible for 103 students: sixty in one class, forty-three in the other. The teacher for the senior class was eighteen years old, and had some experience working in a rural orphanage, but no teaching qualifications. Each of the women, who were nuns, was paid $120 a year.87
At the Qu’Appelle school in 1911, Sister McGurk had seventy-five girls in the junior classroom. The inspector of Roman Catholic schools reported to Ottawa that this was an “almost impossible” situation. Indian Affairs secretary J. D. McLean instructed the school to add a second teacher.88 Inspector R. H. Cairns was concerned by the fact that, in 1915, Coqualeetza Institute (in Chilliwack, British Columbia) principal George Raley refused to turn down any application for admission, advising that “Raley will need to be restrained or he will overcrowd his school.” Cairns also noted that “100 pupils is [sic] all that the two teachers can manage with efficiency.” At the time of Cairns’s report, there were 120 students enrolled in the school.89
At the Mount Elgin school in 1915, there were two teachers and an authorized enrolment of 125.90 Eleven years later, it was even worse; in the spring of 1926, two teachers were responsible for 140 pupils. A provincial inspector said there was a need for at least three teachers, and noted that “there have been too frequent changes of teachers” during the previous year.91 At the end of December 1927, the same inspector observed, “I think there are relatively too many pupils for each teacher. Two teachers cannot efficiently manage and teach 148 pupils.”92 One year later, two teachers were still responsible for 148 pupils. The inspector repeated, yet again, his recommendation that an additional teacher be hired, pointing out that many of the students “come here without a speaking knowledge of the English language.”93
A 1922 school inspector’s report curtly noted that the children at the Roman Catholic school in Kenora, Ontario, “need the attention of two teachers.”94 In 1928, there were sixty students in the junior classroom at the Alberni, British Columbia, school. The principal recommended hiring an additional teacher. Inspector R. H. Cairns thought the junior students should be put on the half-day system. He said, “Indian pupils will not do good work and maintain their health and strength if they are kept indoors too much.” If the students were kept in class for five or six hours a day, he said, the school death rate was likely to increase, and he noted there had been four deaths in the previous year.95 As late as 1931, Indian Affairs gave orders to the principal of the Shingwauk Home to institute the half-day system to reduce crowding in classrooms.96
Given the low pay and high workloads that characterized the life of a residential school teacher, staff turnover rates were high. When the teacher at the Calgary industrial school resigned in October 1903, the school recruited a new teacher. But, before he took up the position, he accepted “a more lucrative post in the Western Canada College.” The principal filled in as teacher until February, but admitted that, given his other responsibilities, this “was not completely satisfactory.” When a new teacher was finally recruited after five months, he had to be let go, since he was “not being quite up to our standard.”97
The 1903 Indian Affairs annual report observed that at the Red Deer school in what is now Alberta:
During the three and a half years preceding the inspection there had been seven different teachers employed, some of them well qualified for their work, but others very poorly adapted, at least for their particular duties here. The consequence was that the class work was somewhat disorganized, though the examination revealed in the case of some of the senior pupils the results of efficient teaching at an earlier stage.98
According to the Indian Affairs annual report for 1909, at the Battleford school:
During the preceding 18 months there had been four teachers in charge of the classes for short intervals, two of them having professional qualification, the other two none. The salary paid was $50 a month, with board and lodging, which is as high as the revenue of the school would admit of; but in spite of this it was found impossible, to retain the services of a well qualified teacher.99
In 1916, frequent changes in staff at the Presbyterian school in Shoal Lake, Ontario, were viewed as having a negative impact on student achievement. According to the Indian Affairs departmental secretary, the school returns showed that “there are twenty-seven pupils in the first standards who have been two years and over in the school. Three of these pupils have been six years in the first standard, two five years, three four years, eleven three years, and eight two years.” It was, the secretary observed, “most unsatisfactory.”100
Two young women—one twenty years of age, and one eighteen years of age—were in charge of eighty-eight students at the Anglican school in Onion Lake, Saskatchewan, in 1928.101 Two years later, both of them were gone, replaced by two other women in their mid-twenties, one of whom, according to the inspector, was “fresh from Normal school.”102 In a report on the Anglican school in The Pas, Manitoba, in the late 1920s, an inspector noted that, with the exception of the matron, the entire staff was new.103
It should not be surprising that schools operated by churches placed a heavy emphasis on religious training. In the minds of some principals, religious training was the most valuable training the schools provided. In 1903, Brandon, Manitoba, principal T. Ferrier wrote that “while it is very important that the Indian child should be educated, it is of more importance that he should build up a good clean character.” Such a heavy emphasis was required, in Ferrier’s opinion, to “counteract the evil tendencies of the Indian nature.”104 Under the heading of “Moral and Religious Training,” A. E. Wilson, the principal at Elkhorn, wrote in the 1910 Indian Affairs annual report that “more attention is paid to this part of our pupils’ education than any other, and the results show that we are not working in vain.”105 Certainly, a great deal of time was devoted to religious study and service. In 1889 at the Battleford school, every day the students would “read the Bible, catechism, the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, and attend morning and evening prayers. On the Lord’s Day they attend morning and evening divine services and Sunday school in the afternoon.”106
At the Methodist school in Brandon in 1900, there were “religious exercises every morning and evening. The additional services on the Sabbath are morning song service, Sabbath school in the afternoon and regular evening service.”107 The Anglicans followed a similar regime. At their school in Middlechurch in 1901, prayers were
held morning and evening in the dining-room and religious instruction is given in the school-rooms daily. All the pupils attend St. Paul’s church every Sunday at 11 a.m. and at 7. p.m. Sunday school is held in the school at 2:30 p.m. every Sunday, where each member of the staff teaches a class and the Rev. R. C. Johnstone, incumbent of the parish, teaches the Bible class.108
In the same year, the principal at the Roman Catholic school in St. Boniface, Manitoba, reported, “Religious instruction is given everyday in school, also morning and evening prayers; on Sundays the pupils go twice to church, and the principal has Sunday school during the afternoon.”109 Louise Moine recalled that religious instruction and observation were a constant part of life at the Qu’Appelle school in the early twentieth century: “From the time we got out of bed at the sound of the bell, we went down on our knees to pray. After we had washed and dressed, we headed for the chapel to attend Low mass which was always held at 7 a.m.”110
Biblical studies also featured in the school curriculum, as evidenced by these questions that appeared in an 1887 examination given students at the Shingwauk Home in Ontario:
Why was it wrong of David to number the people?
What three things happened on Mount Moriah?111
Many of the schools also organized their students into church-sponsored organizations. At the Anglican Battleford school, for example, students were recruited into the King’s Daughters and the King’s Sons.112 Catholic students were recruited into organizations such as the Croisés.113 The United Church expected teachers to organize branches of the Canadian Girls in Training and Trail Rangers.114
In keeping with missionary practice, it was not unusual for religious instruction to be provided in Aboriginal languages. At the Roman Catholic school in Fort Albany, Ontario, Principal L. Carrierre reported in 1910 that “an hour of religious teaching is also given in their own language.” It was not clear from his report if this was on a daily or weekly basis.115 Qu’Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard, who often taught religious classes in Cree, reported in 1907, “On Sunday and every day during the winter months I hold a class for the whole school, when I give religious instruction for one hour after class.”116
In the opinion of some Indian Affairs officials, religious education was given too much prominence in the schools. In a letter to the department, Indian agent W. J. Dilworth reported that, as far as he could tell, “the prime object of our schools at present seems to be the making of as many adherents as possible to the religious body under whose auspices the school is conducted.” As a result, the teaching of English, homemaking, childcare, sewing, gardening, farming, dairying, raising cattle, carpentry, and machine use and repairs was “sadly neglected.”117 Indian agent G. H. Gooderham reported in August 1923 that parents had complained to him that their children were getting too much religious training at the Cluny, Alberta, school, adding that they were complaining about the religion classes being taught in their “native tongue.” The principal countered that “no religious training is given in school hours and that the children get religious exercises only in the early morning and for a half hour at noon. He did, however, talk partly in Blackfoot as many could not understand English.”118 Discipline was strict in religious studies classes. Of her catechism class at the Qu’Appelle school, Louise Moine recalled that if a student could not answer the question put to them during the question period, Father Kalmes “would make the pupil kneel, with arms outstretched, till the end of class. Father Kalmes was as miserable as they come.”119
Students had differing memories of the role that religious training played in the schools. For some, it was their greatest legacy. Elsie Ross, who attended the File Hills, Saskatchewan, school during this period, recalled, “We did very good ground work in religion and Christian belief. Mr. Rhodes was our instructor and principal. He was very good at teaching us religion. I am eternally grateful for that because I have a firm standing in Christian beliefs to this day. That was good.”120 Bernard Pinay, another File Hills student, felt that “religion was never driven to us. If we wanted to go to church, usually they had it on a Sunday, we could make an excuse and they wouldn’t say nothing.”121 However, Mildred Riley, who attended the Mount Elgin school in the 1930s, recalled going to church “an awful lot. You couldn’t get out of going—it was compulsory to go.” She vowed to herself that once she left the school, “I ain’t never going to church again.”122
In 1923, former Regina industrial school principal R. B. Heron read a paper to a meeting of the Regina Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church that was highly critical of the residential school system. He told the church leaders:
Indian children are compelled to leave their homes at the age of seven—to remain in school, with only an occasional holiday, until they are eighteen. The parents have no voice in the selection of teachers nor in the selection of the course of study the children are to pursue, nor in the number of hours they attend the class-room.
He noted that parents generally were anxious to have their children educated, but they complained that their children “are not kept regularly in the class-room; that they are kept out at work that produces revenue for the School that when they return to the Reserves they have not enough education to enable them to transact ordinary business—scarcely enough to enable them to write a legible letter.” He said, “The classroom standing of many of the graduates of the schools would indicate that the parents have considerable ground for complaint.” In his opinion, First Nations people were “capable of holding their own in class-room and College halls,” pointing to one former, unnamed, student who had been a gold medallist at the University of Manitoba. This student was, however, the rare exception, since the residential schools did not, in his opinion, allow most students to fulfill their potential. Few former students, for example, were capable of translating from Cree into English or vice versa. He ended with a story about one former student, who, when working as a church interpreter, rendered the Biblical passage “It is I; be not afraid” as “Hit him in the eye, don’t be afraid.”123
Heron’s speech described a system that separated parents and children, denied parents any role or say in the establishment and operation of the system, and provided their children with an inferior education.124 This sort of criticism did not go unanswered. The principal of the Presbyterian school in Birtle, Manitoba, R. E. Pitts, defended the schools. In doing so, he mounted an attack on the character of First Nations people. Heron, he said, was merely giving voice to what Pitts described as “the Indian complaint. Nothing would please the Indian better than to sit down and have the White man feed, clothe, and wait on him. If we did this work for the children in the school we would be making them worse Indians and unfitting them still more for the conditions of civilized life.” He stressed the role that the school played in instilling the students with “energy, perseverance, self-control, morals, and religion.” He said that Heron’s complaints about the lack of parental involvement in the system were “far-fetched.” He also said that the “parents of white children” were not allowed to “choose their teachers,” either.125 This was a misleading argument: Euro-Canadian parents could, for example, vote for the provincial politicians who established province-wide policies for education, and they voted for local school boards that built and operated the local schools. Although they might come into conflict with provincial departments of education, local, community-controlled school boards were already central components of the Canadian school system.126 Aboriginal people were denied the opportunity to play similar roles in the education of their children.
Heron’s speech may have been one of the more public attacks on the quality of education provided in residential schools, but he was not saying anything that was unknown to government officials. A Saskatchewan Indian agent observed that at the Battleford school, students were simply performing repetitive drills. According to his 1909 report,
in their attempts to keep up with their class-mates and to please their teacher they were still occasionally found to repeat, and frequently to write in their desk exercises statements that were quite meaningless, and which revealed a mere attempt at imitation rather than reasoning, a fault, however, which may be observed in some degree in all schools.127
Indian agent W. J. Dilworth echoed these comments in 1915. He reported that an inspection of the Roman Catholic school on the Blood Reserve had left him “disappointed in the class of instruction given and being given in the subjects reading, arithmetic and spelling. The children’s work was merely memory work and did not appear to be developing any deductive power, altogether too parrot like and lacking expression. The English spoken is not clear.”128
An inspection of the Anglican school in The Pas, Manitoba, in the late 1920s concluded that although some of the students were ‘fair’ at certain subjects, “in reading, they appeared hopeless.”129 Similar sentiments are found in a 1932 inspector’s report on the Grayson, Saskatchewan, school. According to the inspector, H. L. Winter:
The methods employed by these teachers do not impress me very favorably, and they stress the fact the children ‘do not want to learn’.… I should say this was “cause and effect”. The teaching as I saw it today was merely a question of memorizing and repeating a mass of, to the children, “meaningless” facts. There was no evidence of anything in the way of “motivation” or “self-activity”—the key-words in education today.
He said, “The showing made by all classes was decidedly weak, and below the average of other schools.”130
Slow progress was not uncommon. In his 1928 inspection report on the Christie school on Meares Island, British Columbia, R. H. Cairns wrote, “The educational standing of this school is very low. It will be noticed that there are five boys and one girl in the fifth grade. All other pupils being below that Grade.”131
Inspectors often spoke of the failings of young and inexperienced teachers. At the school in Ahousaht, British Columbia, an inspector wrote in 1914 that the principal’s son was in charge of the classroom and that educational progress was slow. The problem was an ongoing one at the school, which had had four different teachers since 1911.132 A 1933 report on the Norway House school in Manitoba noted, “Miss Smith is doing her first year’s teaching and naturally shows the marks of the amateur.”133
In some cases, it appears that principals and teachers had low expectations of their students. Wikwemikong, Ontario, school principal R. Baudin wrote in 1883, “What we may reasonably expect from the generality of children, is certainly not to make great scholars of them. Good and moral as they may be, they lack great mental capacity.” He did not think it wise to expect them to “be equal in every respect to their white brethren,” but he thought they could become good artists and mechanics. “They can imitate and re-produce in a wonderful manner the work of others.”134 In commenting on the impressive scores students had achieved on an 1891 mathematics test, a later Wikwemikong principal, Dominique duRonquet, wrote that the result was “so much the more worthy of notice as it is well known that Indian children naturally have little taste and aptitude for that branch of learning.”135 In preparing a 1928 report on the Anglican school at Onion Lake, a Saskatchewan government school inspector expressed his belief that “in arithmetic abstract ideas develop slowly in the Indian child.”136 Principal S. R. McVitty wrote in 1928 that at the Mount Elgin school, “classroom work is an important part of our training, but not by any means the most important.” He added, “In the case of the Indian ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing.’”137
There were also many positive assessments of the work being done in residential schools. In 1905, for example, British Columbia inspector A. E. Green wrote, “I am satisfied that the best results of Indian education are obtained from the boarding schools. In travelling, I meet with ex-pupils who are a credit to these institutions.”138 A report on the Anglican school at Onion Lake in 1915 stated, “The pupils have a good practical use of English according to their different grades and give evidence of a fair understanding of what they read.”139 In 1924, Inspector W. M. Veazey gave the Delmas, Saskatchewan, school a very positive assessment. The three teachers were “energetic and untiring in their efforts,” the children were “good at word recognition,” the school was “splendidly equipped,” and, while there was “some difficulty in teaching the English perfectly [sic],” he felt that “practical education was excellent.”140 Two years later, a different inspector of the same school said, “I do not see how the work could be done much, if any, better and the entire staff deserves commendation.” Of the intermediate class, he wrote, “The pupils read fairly and being questioned shewed [sic] a pretty good knowledge of the subject matter. The spelling was almost perfect and I gave the words myself. Few public school pupils could do better.” The major problems he identified were the insufficient use of teaching methods that related to the students’ lives and experiences, and the pupils’ lack of English.141 An inspection from a decade later gave a similarly positive assessment: the rooms were well lit and airy, the teachers showed excellent leadership, and the pupils were orderly, anxious to do well, and thoughtful.142
It is clear from reading these reports that many of the people who worked in the schools were dedicated to teaching. There were also many children who were interested in the work and applied themselves to their lessons. A 1922 report on the Birtle, Manitoba, school observed, “A good tone prevailed in the class rooms, teachers are capable and interested in the work. There is evidently the best spirit of co-operation between teachers and classes.” The inspector was “very much pleased with the progress the children had made.”143 A 1926 report on the Anglican school at Onion Lake described one teacher, Kate Beanland, as “very energetic and is doing good work.” The other teacher, Elizabeth Turner, was “a strong teacher, clear and careful in presentation and maintains a good standard of work.” They were seen to be “well selected for their departments.”144 At the Gordon’s Reserve school in 1926, it was reported that in the senior room, “the different grades compare very favorably with those in similar grades in the public school, but the pupils here are somewhat older for the same grade.” The junior room teacher had no previous teaching experience, and, as a result, “the order is not as good as might be desired.”145
Inspector R. C. Moir was impressed by the work in the Lestock, Saskatchewan, school in the early 1930s. He said, “Written language has reached a very satisfactory standard. Good methods in oral language teaching were observed in the primary room.”146 The following year, he observed, “In drawing and industrial art, writing and written language, high standards of work are expected from the children. I note that increased attention is being given to oral language in all classes and that more time is being spent on effective school work.”147 Inspector G. H. Barry wrote in 1931 that at Kuper Island, British Columbia, the “children show that they have made very good progress in Arithmetic. They like their new work books, and are doing well in Nature. The work books in Reading have been supplied to the Beginners and Grade 1. They are delighted with these books.”148 The report of A. G. Hamilton in 1936 on the Roman Catholic school in Kenora was practically glowing with praise. The children, he wrote, were getting along well in their grade and he was delighted with their reading. “The books are all well kept and the work neatly set down.”149
At times, the schools would draw attention to the careers of successful former students, including the students whose school experiences were outlined in an earlier chapter of this volume. Qu’Appelle graduate Daniel Kennedy, for example, became an interpreter and general assistant for the Assiniboine Indian Agency.150 Joseph Dion, a graduate of the Onion Lake school, taught school for many years in Saskatchewan.151 Many former students went into the church. Coqualeetza graduate Peter Kelly became a Methodist Church minister.152 Emmanuel College graduate Edward Ahenakew became an Anglican minister.153 After attending the Mohawk Institute, Beverly Johnson went to Hellmuth College in London, Ontario, where he excelled at sports and drama. He then went to work for the New York Life Insurance Company in Pennsylvania.154 A graduate of the Mohawk Institute, N. E. Lickers was called to the bar in 1938 and was described by the Brantford Expositor as the “First Ontario Indian Lawyer.”155 In 1904, Calgary principal George Hogbin pointed to a number of successful students, including Jim Starlight, the school’s first student, who was building a house for the local Indian Affairs doctor. Another former student, Joe Mountain Horse, was working as a police translator.156 Duncan Campbell Scott reported in 1914 that
seven pupils of the Mount Elgin industrial school at Muncey tried the entrance examination to the high schools during the past summer, and all were successful, one girl taking first-class honours and standing sixth in the county of Middlesex. A number of Indians are attending colleges and universities throughout the Dominion, and their records are very good.157
Getting support for students to pursue academic studies was always difficult. According to Oliver Martin, who was raised on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario and went on to become an Ontario magistrate, in either 1913 or 1914, Six Nations decided to send two boys to Upper Canada College in hopes that they would go on to receive legal training. The decision was made after the Six Nations council had undergone a series of legal reverses. Although the money would have come from the interest on band money, Indian Affairs refused to authorize the expenditure. Years later, Martin was in Ottawa and asked Duncan Campbell Scott why the request had been denied. According to Martin, Scott told him, “It’s no use sending you Indians to school you just go back to the reserve anyway.”158
In 1930, the Mohawk Institute prepared an eleven-page list of successful former students. Among the men, it included clergy, teachers, and interpreters, as well as carpenters, bookkeepers, and farmers. Among the women were nurses, stenographers, and church organists. There were also teachers listed among the women, including Susan Hardie, who taught at the Mohawk Institute from 1886 to 1936.159
However, the schools’ overall educational record was dismal. Most students did not progress through the system. The problem became apparent within a few years of its inception. In 1889, 2,136 students were enrolled in both residential and day schools in the North-West Territories (which was comprised primarily of modern-day Saskatchewan and Alberta). Table 13.6 shows the grade distribution in the territorial schools for that year (which went up only to Standard 5 at that time). As can be seen, over 50% of the students were in Standard 1.160
Table 13.6. Grade distribution of students in Indian Affairs-funded schools in the North-West Territories, 1889.
Source: Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1889, 170.
The system never managed to improve on this pattern. Table 13.7 shows that during the forty-five-year period from 1894 to 1939, one-third of the students enrolled in the country’s residential schools were in the first grade (or standard). This could be explained partially by the fact that an expanding system would always have a large number of students in the first year. But it is also clear from this table that students were not progressing through the system. In seven of the selected years (1894, 1899, 1904, 1909, 1914, 1919, and 1924), at least 70% of the students were in the first three levels. The enrolled students in the first three levels never fell below 60% in this period. Over time, the schools showed only slight improvement in their ability to advance students through the levels. In 1894, only 1% of the enrolled students were in Standard 6. By 1939, this had risen to 8%. By 1929, several schools were offering grades Seven through Nine, although the number of students studying at these levels combined ranged from 3% to 8% of enrolment. It is clear that most students never got out of the junior grades.
For a comparison, Table 13.8 shows the elementary school grade distribution for the Winnipeg School Board in 1921.
This table shows that the elementary school enrolment in Winnipeg public schools was spread evenly in grades One through Six by 1921. The Grade Six enrolment is 79% of the Grade One enrolment, suggesting that most children in Winnipeg were progressing to Grade Six. By contrast, in 1919 in the residential schools, the Standard 6 enrolment was just 13% of the Standard 1 enrolment.
Table 13.8. Enrolment and grade distribution, Winnipeg School Board, 1921.
Source: Gidney and Millar, How Schools Worked, 24.w
| VII | VIII | IX |
| % of enrolment |
% of enrolment |
% of enrolment |
| 2% | 1% | 0% |
| 4% | 2% | 1% |
| 4% | 2% | 1% |
Source: Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1894, 250–270; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1899, 444–449; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1904, Part II, 50–57; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1909, Part II, 18–23; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1914, 152–153; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1919, 92–93; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1924, 94; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1929, 104; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1934, 77; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1939, 266.
As early as 1911, 80.1% of the general Canadian population (excluding Québec) between the ages of ten and fourteen were enrolled in school. By 1921, this had increased to 90.5%, rising to 95.6% in 1931. In 1941, the figure was 95.8%. Enrolment dropped off quickly at age fifteen. In 1911, 20.7% of Canadians between the ages of fifteen and nineteen were enrolled in school. This increased to 27.3% in 1921, reaching 37.8% in 1931 and 40.1% in 1941.161
A very small number of residential school students continued their studies past Standard 6 (by the 1930s, referred to as “Grade Six”). In 1926, Indian Affairs was providing support to 120 First Nations students who were attending “public schools, high schools and colleges.” This number included former residential school students as well as former day school students. The government provided these students with a total of $19,386.38 in support. In reporting on the funding, Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott emphasized that this support was “continued only when satisfactory reports are received.”162 A decade later, Indian Affairs was providing grants to 200 graduates of both residential schools and day schools to support them at high schools, universities, and business colleges. The policy may have been adopted in response to the early mortality of many students, since it was to provide “grants to the most promising physically fit graduates of our own schools.”163 Students also had to meet very high academic standards to gain such financial support. In 1934, the department announced it would not support students who did not get over 70% on their Grade Eight examinations.164 The government was also uncertain about the value of academic education. By the end of the 1930s, Indian Affairs was encouraging students who were thinking of pursuing high school education “to take up vocational courses such as agriculture, auto mechanics and domestic science.”165
There are several reasons for the lack of academic progress. In their early years at school, the students would have struggled to learn a new language. In inspecting the Gordon’s school in 1923, J. H. McKechnie observed, “A number of pupils have recently come into school for the 1st time, some of them being 11 or 12 years of age. This makes proper grading a difficult task.” He thought the students were doing as well in their grades as students in most rural schools, but he noted “the average age per grade is higher.”166 The fact that staff members at most of the schools were poorly trained, under-qualified, overworked, and subject to constant turnover certainly accounts for much of the difficulty. The poor health that many of the students experienced while at the schools and the often primitive conditions of the buildings and limited school supplies were other factors.
The half-day system, by its very nature, ensured that students would emerge with an inferior education. By the time the students had learned enough English to begin to grapple with the curriculum, they were put on the half-day system. As Mary Ross, a teacher at the Round Lake school, wrote in 1936, “a half day at school, and no study periods outside school hours is insufficient for those pupils in Grade Eight, where they are faced with a Departmental exam.” It was not possible, she wrote, to cover the material or “give the amount of drill work needed to give them a thorough grasp of their work.” Ross, who was the wife of the school principal, stated that over the previous twelve years, eighteen of the school’s students had successfully passed their Grade Eight examination. But the reality for most students at the school was that by the time they had reached Grade Eight, “it is almost impossible to get over the work, let alone teach it thoroughly.” The problem the students faced, she felt, was not one of ability, but of time and resources. She pointed out that Indian Affairs did not provide the school with copies of the authorized primer for students in Saskatchewan, choosing instead to substitute a different book. She also said that the policy of having only one inspection a year was not sufficient, particularly since “the teacher has not access to a copy of the report he submits,” and, as a result, “has no mean of benefiting from this criticism.”167
The idea that the residential schooling was “unfitting” students became a staple of the internal criticisms of the system. Indian Affairs education officer Martin Benson commented in the early 1900s that although the Brandon school did a good job in training students in farming, “nearly all the pupils in this school are recruited from the country surrounding the northern end of Lake Winnipeg, which is not adapted for farming.” He predicted that many of the students coming out of the school would not be able to utilize their education if they returned to their home communities.168 In opposing a proposed Methodist boarding school in British Columbia, Benson wrote:
The North West Indians are literally ‘Toilers of the Sea’ which affords them almost their entire support. They make more from fishing than any other Indians in British Columbia, and in order to obtain the necessary skill and daring in these pursuits, they must begin to learn while they are young. No knowledge of books, refinements of life or manners will help them in perils of the deep and I do not think it would be wise to force them to change their present mode of providing for their sustenance until a better one can be offered them.
Benson said, “Life even in a boarding school will unfit them for their work and increase their sensitiveness of wants without the means to supply those wants which will but add to the burden of life.”169
Indian Affairs inspector W. J. Chisholm made the following report on the Red Deer school in 1903:
The attempt to civilize our Indians by breaking up the ties of home and alienating them from their nautral [sic] associations has proved a general failure, and accounts for the fact that in many instances ex-pupils of the schools on returning to the reserves are found by the agents to be untractable and unsettled, scorning in a measure their Indian connections, yet quite unable to think or live like white men.170
These thoughts were echoed by Fisher River, Manitoba, Indian agent T. H. Carter in a letter to Duncan Campbell Scott in 1914. Carter had concluded that the industrial schools were a “cruelty instead of a benifit [sic] being imposed upon the Indian.” Well-trained young people were returning to reserves “where it is an impossibility for them to profit by the education they have received while in the industrial school; and their last state is generally worse than their first.” They had been “unfitted to get a living as an ordinary Indian.”171
In 1938, the Mounted Police sent Indian Affairs a lengthy report on its efforts to enforce attendance at the school at Fort Vermilion, Alberta. The report stated, “These Indians, particularly the Red River Band, are becoming increasingly more dissatisfied and reluctant to allow their children to attend school at the Mission at Fort Vermilion.” The parents claimed, and “rightly so,” in the Mounted Police’s estimation, that “when a boy is compelled to attend mission school until he is sixteen years of age, and then turned back into the bush, he is useless to himself or to his family and is too old to learn bushcraft.” The police report also noted that the people of that region went into the bush for the fall hunt. If they had not sent their children to school, it was a very expensive and difficult procedure for the police to track down families and transport their children to school. Indian Affairs took the police report seriously. It instructed the force not to take any further action in returning students to the Fort Vermilion school at that time. It was also decided to apply certain regulations to the children from the Little Red River Band attending the Fort Vermilion school. These regulations had been developed in the Northwest Territories, in consultation with Roman Catholic Bishop Gabriel Breynat. Under this new regime, boys would be discharged at the age of fourteen, not sixteen. Boys in good physical condition would be allowed to spend a year with their parents in the bush when they turned twelve. Orphan boys were to be placed with families who would provide them with a good knowledge of hunting.172
By 1935, it was increasingly apparent that government officials had lost faith in the value of the education they were supposed to be providing. That year, the United Church sought support to send two boys, seventeen and eighteen years old, from residential schools on Vancouver Island to the Chilliwack residential school on the mainland, so that they could complete their high school education. The acting superintendent of Indian Education, J. D. Sutherland, rejected the idea. He responded that Indian Affairs “doubts the wisdom” of the measure. “After three or four years, they would have to return to their home reserves and take up their future life work, and it is doubtful if they would then be any better prepared to make a living.” Sending them to school would leave them “handicapped by being behind the other boys in becoming established.”173
