Fifteen-year-old Clayton Mack was sent to the Alert Bay, British Columbia, school by the local Indian agent in 1923 after the death of his father. He arrived during the summer holidays and was asked by the principal if he could handle horses and cows. When he said he could, he was put to work tending them.
So I feed the horses, clean the barn, feed the cows and later even milk the cows. I get up at four o’clock in the morning sometimes and go look for them cows. I had ten cows. I’d get up, round them up, put them in the barn, feed them bran and then milk them. Then I have to get the milk ready for the Chinaman to pick up. Let the cows out for the day. In the summer it was really hard work. When the school closed in the summer they gave me the girls’ cows too! The girls had about eight milk cows. So I did, looked after the whole works for two years. I also helped look after the farm, help with the potatoes, and helped cut the hay. I tried to go to school but there was not enough time. I worked most of the time. I went to Alert Bay for school and instead they put me in a job!1
Clayton Mack’s story is extreme, but it is a stark reminder that the residential schools were places of labour as well as education. In the name of receiving ‘vocational training,’ many students spent much of their time at repetitive tasks needed to support the schools. As Indian Affairs official Martin Benson observed of the Mount Elgin school in Muncey, Ontario, in 1902, residential school students were “not only working,” they were “being worked.”2
Manual or vocational training had been a central element in residential schooling from the time the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, began taking in boarding students in 1832. Throughout the residential school system’s history, there was ongoing debate over the purpose of this training, with some arguing that it should be preparing students to leave the reserves and integrate themselves into the Euro-Canadian workforce, and others arguing that students should be trained to return to the reserves to take up farming and ranching.
With regularity, Indian Affairs officials pronounced that previous policies had focused too much either on providing academic skills or on preparing students for skilled trades in which they were unlikely to find employment. In 1897, Deputy Minister James Smart worried that the schools were providing too much vocational training:
Education must be considered with relation to the future of the pupils, and only the certainty of some practical results can justify the large expense entailed upon the country by the maintenance of these schools. To educate children above the possibilities of their station, and create a distaste for what is certain to be their environment in life would be not only a waste of money but doing them an injury instead of conferring a benefit upon them.3
In keeping with this view, in 1902, Indian Commissioner David Laird reported that he had “tried to discourage the introduction or even continuance of so many shops which are not likely to turn out any but a small number of good mechanics. It is a waste of funds to employ an expert craftsman in a school to train a mere handful of pupils who in the end may be unable to turn their knowledge to advantage.”4 In 1910, Duncan Campbell Scott, then superintendent of Indian Education, announced that trades training was being dropped at many residential schools in favour of training in the skills that would “fit the Indian for civilized life in his own environment.” The students would still receive a “scholastic education,” but the focus would be on carpentry and farming for boys and housekeeping for the girls.5 Seventeen years later, shortly after R. A. Hoey, a former Manitoba cabinet minister, took over as the superintendent of Welfare and Training for Indian Affairs, he concluded that the system was still too academic.
My personal opinion is that in our educational programme provision should be made for a course of study that would enable the pupils to spend at least one third of their time at manual training or vocational instruction. The general public have an impression that the instruction given in our Indian schools is altogether too abstract and academic. They feel that there should be a more direct relationship between this instruction and the tasks that confront the pupil after his departure from school.6
Reed and Hoey may have differed in the amount of time they thought students should be spending in vocational training, but both men were convinced that residential students were spending too much time in class. Not Reed, Smart, Laird, Scott, or Hoey expected that, in their adult lives, Aboriginal students would be required to do much “brainwork” or have need for “scholastic” or “academic” training, however these terms were defined. Indian Affairs officials had much lower expectations for Aboriginal students than this.
Vocational training also was seen as part of the essential remaking of the Aboriginal character, which was viewed as being inherently lazy. When he took over the Kamloops, British Columbia, school in 1893, M. Carion wrote, “The greatest difficulty we experience with the pupils is to overcome their natural repugnance to work of any kind; but I have no doubt that they will gradually be made to look upon work as a necessary and healthy occupation.”7 At the Cranbrook, British Columbia, school in the same year, the principal, Nicolas Coccola, wrote, “Although brought up with their people in idleness and in perfect ignorance of all sorts of work, the active life of this industrial school is soon cheerfully embraced by the new comers.”8 Two years later, Mohawk Institute principal Robert Ashton told Indian Affairs official Martin Benson that by the impartial enforcement of strict rules, he could “train a child that by the time he is ready to leave the school, he will have formed the habit of doing what has to be done unconsciously.” According to Benson, Ashton claimed to be able to “train an Indian child to work whether he likes work or not.”9 His clear implication was that Aboriginal children preferred not to work.
These views were long-lived. The United Church’s 1935 report on its First Nations education work observed:
The Indian is still a creature of fits and starts. Unconsciously, perhaps, but nevertheless truly, he still lives in the psychology of the chase, when all the men of the tribe went out to hunt the buffalo. When the hunt was a success and plenty of food had been obtained, they sat around, slept and smoked until the pangs of hunger forced another hunt.10
This fear of inherent laziness is present in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, principal J. P. Mackey’s 1939 comment: “We feel that every child capable of work should be impressed with the idea that if they are to get along, they must work.”11
Despite this ongoing concern over the need to train Aboriginal young people to earn a living, the vocational training program too often degenerated into a student labour program. Training in trades was always very limited. Throughout this period, parents complained that their children were being overworked. Government officials often came to the same conclusion. But, because the government refused to increase funding, the schools remained dependent on student labour.
This labour was essential to the housing, clothing, and feeding of the students. Without their work, the system would have collapsed. In 1889, Indian Affairs Deputy Minister Lawrence Vankoughnet rejected a proposal from the Mount Elgin school that contractors be hired to carry out an expansion of the school. Instead, the government was prepared to pay for materials and have the students, working under staff supervision, do the work. It would, he wrote, “be the best instruction in carpentry those pupils can receive.”12 In 1894, the principal of the Alert Bay industrial school reported, “At present no trades instructor has been appointed, owing to the small number of boys, but elementary lessons have been given them in carpentry; the chief industry of the boys has been clearing land, and extracting stumps, preparatory to making a kitchen garden and play ground.”13 Principal A. M. Carion at the Kamloops school wrote that due to the
want of shops, trades could not be taught regularly. However, three boys have acquired some practical knowledge of carpentering by helping the foreman in the erection of outbuildings. The boys were employed chiefly in clearing and fencing land, gardening and making the improvements described below. From four to five hours, according to the season, were devoted every week day to manual labour. The half holiday allowed by the rules on Saturdays was not kept here.14
The establishment of the Red Deer school, in what is now Alberta, depended on student labour. Principal John Nelson rejoiced in farm instructor McClelland’s ability to persuade the boys that
work is only play after all, and although only boys, they can do the work of ordinary men. As an illustration of this, four pupils and farmer [sic] put up nearly sixty tons of hay in less than two weeks, and this work done with oxen. During the past winter the boys cut eight thousand rails; each boy would average over two hundred per diem. To my mind at least, the too prevalent idea that Indians are naturally lazy has no proof in actual observation. The older boys work faithfully and well in the carpenter shop and eagerly await their turn at the bench. With pardonable pride they point to the laundry they have shingled during the carpenter’s absence, also a substantial board fence they erected, using hewn poles instead of scantling. The building site was a veritable forest, although possessing its advantages. A playground is a necessity. To obtain this a great amount of labour has been performed by the pupils before and after school in preparing the grounds, clearing brush, digging stumps and levelling up.15
By the summer of 1890, Thomas Clarke, the principal of the Battleford school in what is now Saskatchewan, could report that the carpenter’s shop was a source of revenue for the school. He provided the following summary of the work undertaken by the school’s carpentry students:
In July they erected the outbuildings, and in August and September worked on the new addition to the main building with the carpenters employed, making sash and frames [for windows], shingling, lathing, siding up and laying floors. They subsequently went to Thunderchild’s Reserve, where they quickly put up a schoolhouse. On their return from the reserve they built three flights of stairs in the new wing and made all the storm sash for it, wainscotted the different rooms and completed the work in detail. They then made the needful alterations in the old building, removed partitions to enlarge the rooms, wainscotted them, and made such necessary furniture as tables, benches, & c. When spring opened, they accompanied the Instructor to Red Pheasant’s Reserve and built a school-house. They also lathed the Farm Instructor’s dwelling house. Thence they went to Moosomin’s Reserve, where another school-house was put up by them; and finally they completed the school-house and the Farm Instructor’s dwelling at Poundmaker’s Reserve.
Clarke set the value of the construction undertaken by students at the school as $1,329.16
In 1893, two boys from the Qu’Appelle school in what is now Saskatchewan “worked the whole winter on the building erected at the High River Industrial School.” In that year, Qu’Appelle students also did repairs to an unnamed boarding school on the Sioux Reserve and built twenty desks for other schools.17
Many of the schools were substantial operations. For example, the Coqualeetza Institute at Chilliwack, British Columbia, included:
(1) the main building, containing kitchen, dormitories, lavatories, laundry, recreation-rooms, school-rooms, clothes-rooms, furnace-rooms, and dairy; (2) the residence of the principal; (3) the residence of the farm instructor; (4) three large barns; (5) a granary; (6) a wagon and implement shed; (7) a wood-shed; (8) a new bake-house; (9) a hen-house; (10) a root-cellar; (11) a hothouse; (12) a new pig-pen; (13) two new tent-house dormitories added this year.18
Other than the main building, the Regina school included the
principal’s residence, brick veneered cottage hospital, frame, one story; carpenter instructor’s cottage, frame, one story; trades building, frame, containing shoe-shops, printing office, hardware storeroom, paint-shop, carpenter-shop, with lumber-house attached; laundry building, frame, two story; two implement sheds; cow stable, frame; horse-stable, frame, with stone basement; hen-house, hog-pen and boiler-house attached; bake-shop, containing brick oven and grocery store-rooms; blacksmith shops, ice-house, containing cold storage room for meat; granary, root-house, pumping engine-house, garden tool-house, lumber-house, grain-crusher house, boys’ outside closet and girls’ outside closet.19
The students played a central role in maintaining these facilities. When, in 1907, the Christie, British Columbia, school’s waterline froze, nine boys and the instructor spent eight days replacing the pipe. According to school principal P. Maurus, “One boy with the assistance of another looked after the many plumbing fixtures of the house and kept them in good order. The same boy, unassisted by instructor, did all the plumbing work in connection with the installation of a gasoline engine in a launch.”20 In 1910, the High River, Alberta, school principal reported, “The boys, under the instruction of the school carpenter, did all the repairs and building during the year.”21
The female students’ contribution to the ongoing operation of the schools was also substantial. In 1889, the principal of the High River school, E. Claude, reported that, in the previous year, the girls at the school had produced substantial goods:
27 aprons were made; bonnets, 6; coats, 28; drawers, 25; dresses, 34; garters, 23; night-dresses, 89; mattresses 6; mitts, 14; napkins, 37; overstockings, 12; petticoats, 17; pillows, 6; sheets, 14; shirts, 80; towels, 72; trousers, 48; socks, 64; stockings, 6 (these last two articles are hand knitting);—besides the ordinary mending of theirs and the boys’ clothes.22
The boys taking carpentry had done work worth between $500 and $700 for the school, and the four boys in the shoe shop were credited with
one hundred and ninety-seven pairs of boots repaired, twenty-three new pairs made, eighty-nine pairs of shoepacks were made for winter supply, and seventy-four pairs for Qu’Appelle Industrial school: fourteen pairs of slippers have been refitted for use, and eighty-eight pairs of soft moccasins have been enlarged and refitted for use.23
In 1894, Qu’Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard wrote, “All the clothing for the girls and most of that for the boys is made in the institution by the girls.”24 Repairing clothes was a constant part of residential school life. Mary Augusta Tappage recalled of her days at the Williams Lake, British Columbia, school in the late nineteenth century: “The sewing was from four o’clock til six. We had to patch. We had to patch the boys’ clothes. We had to wash and iron Mondays, Tuesday. We had to patch and keep on patching till Saturday and all their bags would be lined up.”25 Mary Englund, who attended the Mission, British Columbia, school in the second decade of the twentieth century, recalled:
I used to go to the sewing room in the mornings and she start teaching us how to run the machines, you see. And sew, first it was aprons, we all had to wear aprons. Everybody had an apron to wear. So she gave me this material and she cut it out. She never let us cut it out, she cut it out and there she showed us where to sew and how to sew and your stitching had to be straight. So I started this interfacing, you know, this zig-zag. She’d make me rip it over and I’d sit there and cry and rip, you know, and the names I didn’t call her.26
In 1915, Matilda Wilson provided the following account to the school paper of the work she did at the school at The Pas, Manitoba: “I work in the sewing room. Everyday I sew clothes for boys and girls. Three girls mend moccasins every morning. I guess I will work in another place next week. I like to work everywhere for then I can learn. I was sorry Emma hurt herself on the eye with a needle.”27
The students not only repaired clothes, but they also made them. In 1897, the twenty-five female students at the Kamloops school made “fifty-seven dresses, fifty drawers, forty-five aprons, eight bed-ticks, forty-two pillow cases, twenty-three pairs of stockings, thirty bodices, fifty chemises, twenty-six shirts, ten night-dresses, twenty-seven sheets, fifty petticoats, three bouquets of artificial flowers.”28
The girls were also charged with cooking and cleaning. Mary Angus enrolled in the Battleford school in 1893 after the death of her mother. She recalled:
We did all the work, cleaning up, make the beds upstairs. Some of the girls were washing dishes in the kitchen. After that we go to work. We kept changing work every month. I used to work at the sewing room, another month I got to knitting stockings for the children on the machine, another month I got to the kitchen and another month I go to the laundry. We were changing all the time.29
Of all the chores at the Battleford school, the one that Sarah Soonias liked least was scrubbing the wooden dining-room floor.30 Pauline Creeley had similar school memories about File Hills, Saskatchewan: “The worst part I used to have to scrub the cement floor every day, sometimes twice a day. It was very hard on the knees. In those days there was no such things as kneeling pads or mops with long handles. I used to kneel on my hands and they would get very sore.”31
For Alice Star Blanket, the laundry room at File Hills was the
one place that I dreaded to work in because it was a place where you were required to work hard, like hard labour. They kept us very busy here; there was washing of lots of clothes and bed clothes to be laundered, hanging them up outside, folding them up and carrying these clothes and bed clothes to the rooms upstairs. There were big machines in the laundry room that we had to man and they were big noisy things like they have in the hospitals, big washers and dryers.32
During the late nineteenth century, the All Hallows girls’ school at Yale, British Columbia, enrolled both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students. Initially, the students studied together, but, by the mid-1890s, they studied and boarded separately. Even the Christmas celebrations were organized separately. While the non-Aboriginal girls dressed for dinner, the Aboriginal students were setting the table. While there were awards for academic achievement, there were also awards for the Aboriginal girls for baking and laundry work.33 A non-Aboriginal student recalled that the Aboriginal students “were the servants; they did the work.”34
Nellie Stonefish, who attended Mount Elgin in the 1920s, recalled, “We had to make beds every day after breakfast—20 beds on each side. There’s two girls in a dormitory and you make ’em when you came back from breakfast and you’d sweep up. Saturdays you’d scrub the floors on your hands and knees.”35
Lila Ireland recalled that at Mount Elgin:
The beds had to be made just right and lined up so that the cuffs of the sheets were all turned over exactly the same—there was even a board to measure them with. You had either 8 or 10 beds to make. So then you come along and look at it and every one of these cuffs had to be absolutely straight and all even or she’d rip them all out, and that would maybe make you late for class cuz you had to do them over.36
Martha Hill, who went to the Mohawk Institute from 1912 to 1918, said of her training, “We learned everything about housekeeping there was to learn—cooking and everything. We even learned how to look after a baby when a baby was born. We had a celluloid doll, and we had to dress it, put a diaper on it, pretend we were feeding it.”37
The school farm operations were expected to make money for the school, provide a low-cost food source for the students, and teach the students, usually the boys, how to farm. In 1896, the students at the Kamloops school produced the following from the school’s 1.2-hectare garden:
potatoes, twenty-seven thousand and six hundred pounds; carrots, nine thousand five hundred and three pounds; field pease, one thousand and sixty-five pounds; dry beans, two hundred and seventy-three pounds; onions, six hundred and four pounds; beets (table), seven hundred and eleven pounds; mangolds and sugar beets, three thousand one hundred and ninety-four pounds; white turnips, one hundred and two pounds; Swede turnips, nine hundred and twenty-seven pounds; cabbage, one thousand pounds; tomatoes, six hundred pounds; squash, four hundred pounds; corn, one hundred and fifty pounds; flax seed, fifteen pounds; giving a total of forty-six thousand one hundred and forty-four pounds, or twenty-three tons and one hundred and forty-four pounds; independent of what was used during the summer, and two hundred and fifty pounds of parsnips left in the garden and dug in the spring. Besides, we raised in the orchard, six hundred and forty-five pounds of turnips, two hundred and fifty pounds of corn, sixteen hundred pounds of squash and pumpkins, and more than one thousand melons and citrons.38
The students at the Elkhorn, Manitoba, school had been expected to learn to farm, but the farmland associated with the school was eight kilometres away.39 Similarly, the Regina school’s ability to train students to farm was hampered by a lack of pasture land.40 At the St. Boniface, Manitoba, school, “for the want of more land,” agricultural training was “confined chiefly to gardening.”41
Farming was carried out at the Mission, Lytton, Squamish, Kuper Island, and Chilliwack schools in British Columbia. But, in other schools in the province, there was a shortage of arable land. For example:
•At Kamloops in 1903, only 6 of the school’s 129.5 hectares could be cultivated.
•At Port Simpson, the land was wet and boggy.
•At Christie Island, less than one of the school’s 70.8 hectares was being cultivated in 1906.
•At Alert Bay, the soil was poor.
•At Alberni, the school, which had an orchard, had been established on heavily treed land.
•At Metlakatla, farming opportunities were limited because the school was located on only 2.4 hectares of land.42
Farming was an unpredictable enterprise. At Battleford, the crops of the summer of 1894 were a “total failure.”43 These were the same words that Principal Hugonnard used to describe the Qu’Appelle crops of 1893.44 The following year, drought left the same school short of grain and vegetables.45 In the early twentieth century, the principal of the Red Deer school increased the amount of land under cultivation from 30.3 to 121.4 hectares, a decision that dramatically increased the school’s deficit. Four years of poor crops, coupled with mismanagement, left the school with a $5,000 deficit.46 In 1908, the school at High River derived considerable revenue from fattening cattle on contract, receiving fifteen cents a pound for animals that usually gained at least 150 pounds (68 kilograms). In this way, the principal paid off a $3,000 debt to the federal government.47
An extremely positive assessment of the Portage la Prairie school in 1925 focused solely on the success of the school farm, where, according to Inspector M. Christianson, the principal “grows everything on this farm that it is possible to grow here in the West.”48
To survive, some schools engaged in a variety of economic endeavours. In Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Shingwauk Home principal E. F. Wilson sought in 1884 to supplement the school’s revenue and provide students with training opportunities by investing $4,000 in a window-and-door shop. It appears to have been short-lived, however, as there was no reference to it in subsequent annual reports.49 Some of these economic endeavours led to conflicts with local business people and residents. In 1896 at the school at Middlechurch, Manitoba, pupils who had received “some instruction in these trades” were in charge of the blacksmith and print shops. While it was hoped they might do work for local customers to generate revenue for the school, in reality, they took in little outside work due to “opposition from local tradesmen.”50 The Williams Lake school’s financial situation was jeopardized in 1893 when the federal government halved the school pupilage from fifty to twenty-five students.51 To compensate for the lost income, the school harness shop began to seek out local customers, which resulted in objections from local businesses. In the spring of 1899, there were complaints that the school was undercutting local businesses while neglecting its educational responsibilities. In particular, it was alleged that the “harness shop is conducted for revenue and not for purposes of instructing the pupils.” Indian Affairs Superintendent A. W. Vowell investigated the allegations at the time and concluded they had no merit.52
In 1915, a business operator in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, objected that the trades shops at the Qu’Appelle school were doing work for members of the public, thus taking work away from local businesses. Principal Hugonnard denied the claim, saying that the only outside work was done by the school wheelwright, and, since there were no other local wheelwrights, he was not hurting local business.53
At Chapleau, Ontario, school principal George Prewer sold milk and firewood locally. He contracted with local residents to cut the firewood, and students milked school cows and delivered both the milk and wood in a wagon. For their labour, the students were paid twenty-five cents a day. On days when they delivered the milk, they did not get into class until 10:00 a.m. According to Indian Affairs Superintendent of Indian Education Russell Ferrier, Prewer’s “closed-fisted business activities” had alienated local residents.54 When charges were made that Prewer was overworking the students, Indian Affairs instructed him to change the wake-up time from 5:30 to 6:30 a.m., to cease the sale of milk and wood, and to provide more vocational training.55
In the early years of the system, trades students were paid for work “done by them of value to the Department.” Hayter Reed from Indian Affairs sought permission to pay the boys doing farm work as well.56 As he envisioned it, such payment would be limited to the “best workers.” The possibility of being promoted into this class would, he believed, encourage boys to stay in school and work hard.57 Reed proposed a rate of twelve cents a day for farm work.58 At the Mohawk Institute in 1889, boys were paid for at least some of the work they performed. In addition, students could win good-conduct badges that entitled them to a small weekly allowance.59 At High River in 1893, “the older boys worked all day at their trade and the smaller ones the usual half time. The bigger boys were allowed twenty-five cents per diem.”60 At the Elkhorn, Manitoba, school in that same year, students were paid between ten and thirty cents for the work they did at their trades. They were allowed to spend the money on what they wanted, “tobacco and of course spirits being prohibited.” Girls were said to spend their money on clothing, gloves, handkerchiefs, collars, and ribbons, and the boys bought neckties, collars, and handkerchiefs.61
Following the US model, the Canadian schools established what were termed “outing systems,” under which students would be placed “out” with local farmers or in local homes. In 1896, Deputy Minister Hayter Reed said that most of the outing work for boys came in the harvest season when there was a heavy demand for boys, while “many more girls could be placed as servants if the numbers and work at the institutions permitted.” He said the wages were paid to parents, in most cases, “otherwise they would not consent to their children going out to work in this manner.”62 In 1893, six boys from the High River school lived with local farmers and assisted with harvesting and haying. Principal Albert Naessens declared it “fairly satisfactory,” but, he noted, “most of the children become lonesome, especially when they are in a place where they have no one to associate with, and wish to return to the school.” The boys were allowed to keep the money they earned.63 Naessens could not fill all the outside requests for student workers, since he needed their labour at the school.64 In 1894, Qu’Appelle principal Hugonnard reported that there were more requests for female domestic servants than the school could fill. On average, he said, there were nineteen girls in service, making from $5 to $10 a month.65 Battleford principal E. Matheson reported in 1896, “A number of girls have been at service as out-pupils, and have given great satisfaction.”66 By 1897, forty-six High River students were doing outing work, usually for farmers, but in some cases as interpreters for Indian agents or the police. Principal Naessens had difficulty encouraging the students to bank their earnings—a combined total of $824—so he introduced a policy of using the student earnings to buy calves that they would care for and own.67
Principal John Ashby at Middlechurch worried in 1896 that “in going out to work with white people,” students were “easily led into bad habits, such as swearing or drinking.”68 The school continued with the practice and, in 1898, Ashby’s successor, John Fairlie, wrote:
One boy working with a farmer has put $40 in the bank, another boy has over $60 saved, one is working as a carpenter in Winnipeg at $2 a day, another as a blacksmith in Winnipeg at $1.50 a day, another gets $6 a week in the department warehouse, Winnipeg, one was placed with a surveying party at $1 a day and board, and several others are doing steady work. I am pleased to be able to state that with only one exception every boy placed during the year has proved sober and reliable.69
At the Qu’Appelle school that year, Hugonnard reported, “Nineteen boys were hired out on farms and nineteen girls were in domestic service at wages ranging from $4 to $25 per month and board; some girls have been in continuous service now for over seven years.”70 The following year, the number of students being placed had fallen to six boys, and their wages were between $5 and $18 for periods of from four to seven months.71 Hugonnard did express a concern that some girls, by working as servants, might “acquire habits and ideas which will render them unsatisfied with their future prospects as wives of Indians on the reserves,—and still, on account of their connections, very few of them can expect to marry respectable men outside the treaty.”72 At the Regina school, ten boys were working for farmers for four to six months a year, making between $15 and $20 a month and receiving their board. Two girls were “in service” in town, making $8 a month. As was often the case, much of the money was banked for students.73 At File Hills, four boys worked in the summer for local farmers. They made $150, of which $64 were left with the principal.74
In 1899, Joseph Hall, the principal of the Coqualeetza Institute near Chilliwack, British Columbia, reported that students from that school “are in demand beyond our ability to supply it by the farmers in the neighbourhood during the summer season, especially in haying and harvest. They receive wages, which they are allowed to spend in any proper way.”75 In 1906, his successor, R. H. Cairns, noted, “The girls who go into service give marked satisfaction, and are much sought after. If we could get the consent of the parents all our girls could be placed in good Christian homes, and earn good wages.”76
Efforts were made also to put former students in positions as domestic servants. When she was seventeen, Mary Angus, a student at the Battleford school, pleaded to be discharged. To secure school principal E. Matheson’s support for this request, she found work for herself as a domestic for a number of residents of South Battleford.77
Although the outing system appears to have been largely abandoned by the early twentieth century, some schools continued to find placements for girls as servants when they were discharged from the school. In 1913, the principal of the Yale school reported, “Three girls, who had no homes, have lately been placed out in service, where they are giving much satisfaction. We constantly have applications to send out girls to service but prefer, when possible, to send them home.”78
The school at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, worked with Indian agents to try to find female students jobs as domestic servants after their schooling finished. Indian agent R. McCutcheon reported in 1939 that over the previous four years, he had placed “some thirty girls in white homes as domestics. Some have let me down and been failures but I am more than satisfied with the average.” In writing about one girl who had left service, he said, “Just another case of a girl being discharged from our school where she has had the security of that school over a period of years and then sent to me; one by one I have watched them revert to type even though we move heaven and earth to save them.”79
The 1894 Indian Act regulations authorized the government to retain the Treaty annuity due to children committed to a residential school and spend the money for the child’s education or benefit.80 In the nineteenth century, the Canadian postal system, like many postal systems in industrial countries, offered small-scale, secure savings accounts.81 Separate postal-savings accounts were established for each student, and the Treaty payments owing to children attending industrial and boarding schools were deposited into these accounts.82 In many cases, the money the students earned while working at the school or for local farmers was also deposited in these accounts. In 1897, Indian Commissioner A. E. Forget provided instructions to Indian agents and principals as to how students could go about withdrawing this money. The circumstances under which the student was leaving the school had to be described in an application for withdrawal, as well as the “object for which the money was intended to be used.”83 The applications for withdrawal were to be sent to Indian Affairs in Ottawa.84
From the time the schools were opened, parents and inspectors raised concerns about just how much work students were being required to do. Inspector T. P. Wadsworth claimed in 1884 that the boys at the Battleford school generally enjoyed their chores, but added that he would protest “against forcing these little fellows to haul water every day and all day from the river in winter, as was the case last year.”85 In 1886, Qu’Appelle school principal Hugonnard wrote, “During the summer they have more manual labor and recreation. The parents cannot understand that the pupils are here to learn how to work as well as to read and write, we therefore cannot at present devote too much time to the former.”86 Inspector Wadsworth returned to the topic in 1893, when he said that much of the farm work at the Middlechurch school was too much for the boys. The girls were also set to work in the laundry at a “tender age.”87
In 1897, Indian Affairs school official Martin Benson observed that the industrial school timetable “generally covers 15 hours or more, for study work and play, and the balance of the time for sleep. A days [sic] routine at a school is a wearisome grind for teacher and pupil and should in most cases be shortened considerably.” The half-day system was, he suggested, exhausting for all but the oldest boys: “Say a boy works all the morning on the farm, at this trade or about the house and barns, he is pretty well used up by noon, and then after dinner he has to put in four or five hours in class and study.”88 Their workload on the farm was so heavy in 1898 that very few of the students at the Brandon school could “attend school through the whole day.”89
Birtle, Manitoba, principal Walter McLaren recognized in 1912 that the amount of labour required by the half-day system was undercutting the quality of education provided at the school.
The children are made a means to the end. The Indians perceive this and the demand for day schools is growing as a result. They see too often the interests of their children’s English education are sacrificed because the children are useful to relieve the situation about the school or farm. I know boys and girls who after ten years in our schools—Birtle included—cannot read beyond the second reader, cannot write a decent letter.90
In some cases, boys took matters into their own hands. In 1915, in an effort to bring an extended day of threshing to an end, two boys at the Mount Elgin school placed a stone in a sheaf of wheat before it was fed into the school threshing machine. The stone did considerable damage to the machine. The two boys were strapped, a punishment the Indian agent did not view as undue.91
In a 1923 report on conditions at Cranbrook, Indian agent G. S. Pragnell noted there was
a very lively and strongly expressed antipathy to the school. The gist of the Indians [sic] complaint is that the boys, that is, the smaller boys are far too heavily worked at such work as logging for the school supply of fuel in the winter and that the boys are quite insufficiently dressed as to be exposed to the cold weather in such work. The fact that so many boys died there this Spring of pneumonia has, of course aggravated and lent colour to their complaints.
Pragnell concluded, “Of course I have taken their complaints as largely exaggerated.” Despite this, he felt there might be some basis to the concerns.92
In 1930, Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham noted that the Catholic school on the Blood Reserve in Alberta had 280 acres (113.3 hectares) in crop, while the Anglican school on the same reserve had 225 acres (91 hectares) in crop. In his opinion,
too much land is being cultivated at these schools and that the boys are being made slaves of, working too long hours and not receiving the close supervision they should have. I do not think it is the intention of the Department to have these growing boys working on the land from morning until night.
He thought farming should be on a smaller scale and provide for more extensive training.93 Superintendent of Indian Education Russell Ferrier said he would like to hear from the agent as to whether the boys were being overworked before taking action.94
In October 1931, Indian agent G. C. Mortimer reported that it had been with great difficulty that he had been able to get students from the Kitwancool Reserve in British Columbia to return to the Edmonton, Alberta, school. “The complaints,” he wrote, “chiefly being, from both the parents and the children—especially the boys—that they are continually working on the farm, thereby getting little or no education.” He noted that one boy, Eddy Smith, had refused to return to Edmonton because “he was very anxious to learn,” and had reported to the school at Alert Bay. Since this was against government policy, he was removed from that school and sent back to Edmonton.95 In a letter to Mortimer, Smith had written:
I am not getting along fine up here because I work all the time, and I don’t go to school right. I’d rather stay home, with my parents or go to the other school [Alert Bay] instead I work whole [sic] day on the farm. I just went to school, three days since I came here, that isn’t why my father send me here to work, he send me here to go to school and study hard, and to learn to read and write. It will be better for me to go home before Christmas, because I am working too hard, and I am real tired, and I’ll ask your kindeness [sic] to send me home before Christmas for sure, please.96
Schools continued to rely on students for labour and maintenance into the 1930s. Indeed, with the onset of the Depression, this reliance may have intensified. The Alberta Indian inspector, M. Christianson, wrote in 1932 that the provincial inspector in charge of each province should be consulted before large expenditures were authorized at residential schools, since “there is no reason why the employees and the bigger boys at the school cannot do a lot of the repairs that are annually required in institutions of this kind.” He also said the schools could do a better job in “giving the boys a better training in the care of livestock and doing all the farm work that is at present carried on at the schools, and having the girls milk cows, look after the chickens, etc., which very few of them are doing at the present time.”97
Indian Affairs sometimes opposed the introduction of labour-saving technology in the schools. When a Halifax company tried to sell the Shubenacadie school industrial potato peelers and bread slicers, Indian Affairs ruled that it did not provide such equipment to residential schools—this sort of work was to be done by hand.98
The federal government appears to have become quite concerned that female students were not being taught how to milk cows. In 1929, Indian Affairs sent out letters to more than twenty-five residential schools, asking if they were teaching their older girls how to milk.99 In 1936, Indian Affairs reprimanded the principal of the Presbyterian school in Kenora, Ontario, for purchasing a milking machine, since it was “expected that the boys and girls should be taught milking.”100 In the opinion of Indian Commissioner W. A. Graham, “the milking of cows, the making of butter, the making and baking of bread, the care of the garden and similar work usually falls to the lot of the farm-house wife.”101
Many students recalled being overworked. In an interview, Bernard Pinay said he had
nothing against File Hills School. The only thing is I didn’t get much schooling because I spent a lot of time working on the farm. I still think the fhirs [File Hills Indian Residential School] owes me about five or six years of wages, working on the farm there. Our supervisor, he was the one that was supposed to do that but he didn’t, I did.102
Of his years at File Hills, Alvin Stonechild said:
At our young age, we worked hard, a great deal of manual labour was carried out by we boys at our young age, like working in the gardens. We tended to rows of vegetables so the children could eat vegetables for a good part of the school term. We stored these vegetables in root cellars which we cleaned out from time to time. I can say that I had six years of work experience even though we were driven like slaves. One could term this kind of work as child labour.103
Gilbert Wuttunee, who attended the Battleford school in the first decade of the twentieth century, recalled, “They didn’t do any farm work or any kind of work until you got to, at that time, standard three, whether you were nine years old or fifteen years old.” After he turned nine, he “never saw another full day of school until I left.” By then, the school had drastically reduced the number of trades it taught: “There was just blacksmithing, carpentering and farming.”104 Students did not have any choice as to what they would be trained to do. “They just told you, ‘Go here. You, go there.’ And that was all there was to it.”105 He also spent two years baking bread.106
Kenneth Albert thought that in the late 1930s, the boys at Mount Elgin had a punishing workload.
We farmed 450 acres and we did it all—harvesting and threshing wheat, silos. We picked all the potatoes—maybe 50 acres. We grew all the wheat and corn for the livestock—a large herd of prize Holsteins, we looked after the teams of 8–10 horses, 500 chickens, but never had a boiled egg for breakfast—not even at Easter. We had to shovel all the coal off the cars and into the storeroom.107
Harrison Burning, who attended the Mohawk Institute in the 1920s, recalled cutting ice from the river while wearing ordinary leather shoes: “That’s all we had on when we were cutting ice. I used to have sores on my feet all winter long—chilblains [an inflammation]. We cut ice, he never gave us different shoes—we wore them day in and day out.”108
Of his time at the Mohawk Institute in the 1930s, Peter Smith recalled, “We worked on the farm, we were hungry all the time. We had a team of horses—you had to clean all the stock, all the stables—you had to work all the time. We got up at 6 in the morning and we worked until 6 at night.”109
When they were in the fields, the boys were under limited supervision and were able to work in teams in which they had the opportunity to speak their own language. One boy from the Fraser Lake, British Columbia, school recalled, “There was no freedom, except working the fields. The girls didn’t have that chance.”110 But the work was difficult, done with little machinery, and imparted few skills. Mary John recalled that, on another occasion, a former Fraser Lake student told her, “I’m just a human bulldozer!”111
In 1902, Martin Benson reported that at the Mount Elgin school, “the care of over two hundred head of cattle, which chiefly devolves on the pupils entails more work than is good for them and leaves no time for other farming operations which they should be taught.” Benson noted that the boys at the school all came from reserves where it should be possible to carry on a successful farming operation. However, he was informed by one of the teachers that none of the boys
had ever handled a plow or were even allowed to drive a harrow [an implement for breaking up the soil] as time could not be spared to teach them. The boys of this school are not only working but are being worked, and they as well as their parents see the difference, hence the number of complaints which reach the department of ill-treatment of pupils.112
Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham reported on the “sad neglect of Class-room training” at the Qu’Appelle school in 1916. The situation at the school had gone from “bad to worse,” with many parents complaining to him that their children were “receiving no education and that the sole aim of the Principal is to get the children to school to make them work.” Graham said that the ailing principal, Joseph Hugonnard, had turned supervision of the school over to Father Kalmes, who had “increased outside work to such an extent, the main idea and object of the school is being entirely neglected.” He pointed out that many parents who farmed said their boys might as well stay at home and help them if they were “to do nothing but work” at school.113 In response, the department reminded the principal that students under fourteen were to spend the full day in the classroom and the older boys should get a half-day in the classroom.114 Scott reminded church official C. Cahill in 1917 that the government expected to see an improvement “in the conditions under which the pupils have to work. It has been constantly represented that they are simply used as so much manual power to produce revenue for the school, and this has certainly been a factor in making recruiting difficult.”115
The trades training at the industrial schools was hindered by the fact that skilled trades-people could make more money practising their trade elsewhere. In 1893, both the carpenter and shoemaker at the High River school resigned. A permanent replacement was found for the shoemaker, but the school went through several carpentry instructors in the next year without finding “a suitable man.”116 By 1899, carpentry was the only industry taught at the school, other than farming. According to school principal Albert Naessens, “All the boys work on the farm, the nature of the work performed depending on their strength. The smaller boys help in weeding the roots and gardens, feeding pigs and other light work.” The girls were “kept continually employed at other household work when not in class or recreation. Their work in the sewing-room is really very heavy for the number of girls, especially as there are so many young ones.”117
In 1894, the Battleford school’s blacksmith quit. As a result, the shop was in the hands of “a couple of the larger boys.” Carpentry training had been disrupted when the carpentry shop burned down.118 For much of the following school year, the school continued to do without a blacksmith instructor, while the paint shop was supervised by a senior pupil.119 The blacksmith shop at the Williams Lake school burned down in 1891. After it was rebuilt, the blacksmith became ill and quit.120 In 1894, because there were no shops at the Kamloops school, no trades were being taught, with the exception of carpentry, which the boys learned as they helped construct new outbuildings.121 A year later, there were still no trades being taught at the school.122 When the carpentry teacher resigned from the Metlakatla school to take a better paying job in Victoria in 1908, the school could not afford to replace him.123 In 1909, no trades were being taught at the Red Deer industrial school.124 During the late 1920s, there was no manual training at the school at Mission, due to the lack of facilities.125
In June 1922, Indian agent G. H. Gooderham wrote of the school at Cluny that “the boys are not given very good instructions in farming, and stock raising, and wish to suggest that more thorough training along this line be given.”126 Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham returned to the topic in more detail in the spring of 1923 when writing of both the Cluny and Gleichen schools in Alberta. According to Graham, the students received an “inadequate training in farming” at the two schools, and the problem was not restricted to Gleichen and Cluny: “school graduates, in many cases, are very much less capable as farmer and stockmen than Indians who have not received a school training.” It was his suggestion that “only men who are practical agriculturalists be appointed as principals of our boarding schools.”127
Parents of children at the Fraser Lake school complained in 1924 that vocational training was being neglected. Departmental secretary A. F. MacKenzie reminded the local Indian agent that the older boys were expected to work six half-days a week, but the work should not “be beyond their physical powers” and should be “changed often enough, so that it will not become laborious.”128
The training provided often was not appropriate to the needs of the students. In 1923, Frank Flatfoot wrote to Indian Affairs on behalf of the Pine Creek Band in Manitoba, asking for an investigation into the Pine Creek school. According to Flatfoot:
At the present time but little time is spent in teaching the Indian children reading, writing, and arithmetic. Instead of this being done the children are employed as labourers the major part of the time on the farm of the Roman Catholic priest who is in charge of the boarding school. It is not the desire of the children’s parents that the children be so employed. On the contrary it is the parents’ desire that the children be taught the English language, reading, writing, and arithmetic.129
When asked to investigate, Indian agent A. Ogletree said that Flatfoot was an agitator, “always trying to make trouble at the school and among the Indians.” According to Ogletree, “some of the larger boys do some work on the farm and also do the milking and attend to the stables,” all of which he considered to be good training.130 The department informed Flatfoot that the older students were expected to be in class for at least five half-days, but were to spend the rest of the day “performing household and farm duties and receiving vocational training.”131 Flatfoot persisted, complaining the reserve land was not suitable for farming.
Here we are fishermen, trappers, and hunters and such we will remain regardless of any ‘attempt’ to teach our sons farming. Our sons require to be schooled and educated in the English language and methods of doing business in order that they may gain some knowledge of how to successfully cope with the white men.132
Departmental secretary J. D. McLean closed off the correspondence by informing Flatfoot, “The Pine Creek Indian Residential School is guided in its activities by the wishes and rulings of this Department. The routine cannot be disturbed by any special privilege for your children.”133 Later that year, the Indian agent threatened to remove Flatfoot from the reserve.134 Ironically, two years later, Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham commented that “the farming venture at this school has not been a success in the past, and I am of the opinion that it never will amount to anything. Stock-raising is the industry that should be encouraged at Pine Creek.”135 In other words, he had reached the same conclusions as Flatfoot had of the value of the training provided to students at the farm at Pine Creek.
Qualified teachers remained hard to obtain. In 1926, Inspector R. H. Cairns expressed a hope that “Manual Training” could be introduced to the school at Alberni, British Columbia, since the senior teacher was qualified to give that instruction.136 By the following year, nineteen pupils were receiving such training. In total, about eighty First Nations students in British Columbia were receiving instruction in manual training.137 By 1928, students at Alert Bay were making paddles, wheelbarrows, armchairs, and cabinets. Inspector Cairns said more advanced work could be done but for a scarcity of tools.138 At the Roman Catholic school on the Blood Reserve in Alberta in 1929, other than farming, the only training was “some shoemaking.”139 The following year, the Indian agent reported that “little” manual training was being done and suggested “equipment be provided.”140
During the Depression, the range of vocational training offered to students continued to decrease. The department sent out a circular to all schools in 1931, which stressed the importance of vocational training. It was believed that academic training was receiving proper emphasis, but Russell Ferrier, the superintendent of Indian Education, feared that “in the rush to complete the routine work, the instructional function will not receive sufficient prominence.” Girls should be taught to bake small batches of bread, do small loads of laundry by hand, tend gardens, and, of course, milk cows. Boys from farm communities should be given “a thorough training in farming, gardening and the care of stock,” and those from maritime communities were to be given courses in boat making, the care of gasoline engines, and carpentry.141
The policy went largely unimplemented. In 1932, the local Indian agent described the manual training at the Roman Catholic school in Kenora as being “practically nil,” and, in 1935, the assessment was “very little.”142 In 1932, an inspector called for the hiring of an additional teacher at the Chapleau school, saying the new teacher should be capable of teaching both academic subjects and manual arts. The inspector thought manual training was being neglected at the school.143 In 1932, Inspector G. H. Barry wrote that he was “not satisfied” with manual training at the Alberni school. “The teacher does not hold as far as I can learn any sort of certificate and does not appear to me to have much idea of what is required.”144 In 1936 at the Catholic school on the Blood Reserve, there was no manual training taught, although, when they turned sixteen, the boys worked on the farm, and “all the boys help to look after the cattle.”145 In 1938, the school had finally appointed a supervisor of manual training. However, his workshop had no tools.146
In any workplace, young workers are at a high level of risk. They have less experience and skill than do older workers, their work is often repetitive and boring, and supervision can be minimal. This was frequently the case in residential schools. The risks were greatest when students were used as a cheap source of labour, working with powerful and poorly protected machinery. In laundries and bakeries, students operated large, steam-power wringers and dryers and used industrial-scale mixers. Since it was expected that the vast majority of the girls would return to their home communities, marry, and work in the household, the use of these machines could not realistically be described as “vocational training.” They were not being provided with schooling for the future; they were working to maintain the school. The injuries to students in these situations are best understood as the result, not of training or education, but of the use of child labour.
The risks increased with the onset of the Great Depression. Hard-pressed for money, Indian Affairs was reluctant to keep students in school past the age of fifteen. Principal W. A. Hendry at Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, noted that this created additional hardships for the younger students left behind. He said, “The breakages and dangers of accidents and mishaps working with farm machinery and school equipment are greatly increased with the employment of these young children as compared with the older ones of 16 and 17 years of age. They are not able for the heavy work either on the farm or in the school.”147
A girl working in the laundry at the Mount Elgin, Ontario, school got her hand caught in a mangle (or steam press) in early 1929. Luckily, a school employee turned the machine off before her hand was crushed. Principal S. R. McVitty said that the machine, which was nearly two decades old, had no protective guards and needed replacement.148 Indian Affairs initially rejected his request for money to purchase a safer machine.149 Eventually, a new mangle was purchased and a guard installed over the old one, which remained in use.150 McVitty’s response appears to have been unusual. Other principals tended to place the blame on student carelessness and neglected to report such injuries to the government. In several cases, Indian Affairs became aware that students had been injured only when parents complained or a hospital sent a bill for medical services to the department.
In 1928, the principal of the Pine Creek school petitioned Ottawa for funds to purchase a new bread oven. The existing brick oven was in a state of near collapse, with bricks regularly falling from the top into the oven. When this happened, thick smoke escaped from the kitchen, spreading throughout the whole school. Because of the smoke, the girls were “crying while making bread.” He feared that if the top fell in completely, the school would catch fire.151 There was a similar problem at the Presbyterian school in Kenora. According to a 1936 inspector’s report, the school oven was defective.
When the bread is baking a gas is given off which makes it impossible to stay in the room. This gas strikes one when 20 ft. from the door and, before reaching the room, one is blinded by tears. It also affects the throat, making it almost impossible to speak. The children are unable to do any of this work and Miss Reichart is practically overcome at the end of baking day.152
When a Manitoba government boiler inspector visited the Pine Creek school in 1929, he declared the school laundry machine to be unsafe, due to its unguarded belts and lack of cover. He recommended it be discarded as soon as possible.153 However, safety guards were not installed until late 1931.154
In May 1930, two girls at the Shubenacadie school in Nova Scotia got their hands caught in an automatic dough mixer. Each girl lost two fingers on her right hand. The principal blamed the girls for the accident, saying they were “not youngsters, and they have been warned many times about tinkering with the machines.”155
In 1932, Paul Groslouis, a boy at the Spanish, Ontario, school, lost a finger to an accident at the school sawmill.156 After receiving a complaint from the boy’s father, Indian Affairs requested that the school provide a detailed report of the accident.157 Upon receipt of the report, the government refused to provide the family with any compensation, saying the accident “was due wholly to the boy’s own carelessness.”158
In January 1935, Elsie La Pierre was working in the kitchen of the Gordon’s Reserve school in Saskatchewan when her right hand was caught in the dough mixer, crushing two fingers. She was taken to hospital, where the fingers were amputated. In reporting on the accident early the following month, the principal, R. W. Frayling, noted, “Ordinary care being taken as in other matters, accidents would not happen, but I purpose [sic] having a cover made that would prevent such occurrence.”159 It was revealed later that no supervisor was present at the time of the accident and that students were no longer allowed in the mixing room when the automatic dough mixer was in use.160
In December 1935, a mangle at the Qu’Appelle school crushed several fingers on Florence McLeod’s right hand, which were amputated. Her family hired Lemberg, Saskatchewan, lawyer William Hall, who accused the school administration of gross negligence.161 The first that Indian Affairs officials in Ottawa heard of the accident was when they received a letter from Hall at the beginning of May 1936—five months after the event.162 In his subsequent report to the government, school principal G. Leonard stressed that “this mangle has been in use at this school for several years and all the girls are familiar with its operation.” On the day of the accident, he said, the sister in charge of the laundry had noticed that McLeod was improperly putting her hand over the guard rail and warned her against continuing to do so. However, he wrote, “she did it again and her hand caught in the mangle.”163 Indian Affairs secretary A. F. MacKenzie informed Hall that “all the necessary precautions were taken, and, while the accident to Florence McLeod is regretted, it was through no fault of the school management.”164 According to Hall, McLeod’s father, Henry, had been injured in a similar fashion when he was a student at the same school.165
In February 1938, the laundry at the Ahousaht, British Columbia, school claimed fourteen-year-old Clifford Tate’s left arm. He had opened the lid on the machine that extracted water from clothing, while it was still running, and placed a hand into the machine. He could not recall what happened after that. The matron, who was also in the laundry room, heard Tate shout that his arm was broken, and took him to the school nurse. She put a splint on his arm and had him taken to a doctor in nearby Tofino. The doctor had no option but to amputate the arm. In reporting the accident to Indian Affairs, school principal A. E. Caldwell wrote that since Tate had been warned not to open the extractor until it had stopped running, “the accident can only be put down to the carelessness and disobedience of the boy himself.”166 In the spring of that year, Josephine Edgar’s hand became caught in the laundry machine at the Coqualeetza Institute. Her fingers were so crushed that a doctor had to amputate two of them at the second joint and one at the first joint. According to the principal, Josephine “says it was her fault, and that she does not know how she did it.”167
Melvina McNabb suffered a similar injury at the File Hills school in the 1930s. “I was working in the laundry with no supervision. This was my first time working there. The girls were all scrubbing. No one was watching me. I stepped on this lever, this extractor that dries clothes. It was going slow but it still caught my arm.” She was hospitalized and left with a twenty-five-centimetre scar on her arm.168
Although the students were not school employees, they certainly represented a large part of the school workforce. By the 1920s, most Canadian provinces had adopted workers’ compensation laws that operated on what were termed “no-fault principles,” meaning that workers were eligible for compensation whether or not they had been ‘careless.’ The government position, in effect, denied young Aboriginal students access to the sort of accident compensation that was available to older, better trained, non-Aboriginal people who were performing similar tasks in the paid workforce.
Catherine Sacks, who was refusing to return to the Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, school in the fall of 1936, presented a statement of complaint to Indian Affairs regarding the work she had been required to do at the school.
We had to start work at 5:30 in kitchen and were kept working till 6:30 P.M…. In the eleven weeks I was employed in kitchen I spent a total of two weeks in school. Sister Mary Armel has beaten me many times over the head and pulled my hair and struck me on the back of neck [sic] with a ruler and at times grabbed ahold of me and beat me on the back with her fists.
I have also been ordered to stand on the outside of the windows with a rope around my waist to clean windows on the fourth floor with a little girl holding the rope. When I told the Sister I was afraid to go on the window she scolded me and made me clean the window and threatened to beat me if I did not do it. This is being done to other children. After we get a beating we are asked what we get the beating for and if we tell them we do not know we get another beating. The Sisters always tell us not to tell our parents about getting a beating.169
Principal J. P. Mackey denied the allegations, saying it contained “one lie after another.” He said he would like to see her returned to school, “but I would not want her longer than twenty-four hours.”170
There were cases of students who did become skilled trades workers while they were at the schools. Although he was not happy with city life, Gilbert Bear, for example, found work as a printer in Ottawa, based on the skills he learned at the Battleford school.171 George Raymond of the Regina school worked as a printer at the Moosomin World, a newspaper in Moosomin, Saskatchewan.172 There were also successful Aboriginal farmers. In 1904, three young former File Hills students, Fred Dieter, John R. Thomas, and Ben Stone Child, were reported to be farming successfully on the File Hills Colony, which had been established for former students in southern Saskatchewan. In the previous year, Dieter had “threshed nearly 2,000 bushels of grain, and it is safe to say that had it not been for frost, his crop would have been much larger than this.”173
Other students went to work for the schools. In 1894, the Middlechurch school was employing Jessie Bird, a member of the Red Pheasant’s Band and a former Battleford student, as a seamstress. She was in charge of all “dress and garment making and the mending at the school.”174 Manson Ireland described the manual training he received at Mount Elgin in the 1930s: “We had a class of copper working—we made copper chandeliers, and I learned silver soldering, and blacksmithing, and learned to temper stainless steel so we could sharpen knives so they kept an edge, so for me it was all right.”175 Another former Mount Elgin student, Kenneth Albert, recalled, “I could handle a job and I learned discipline. We did learn—the hard way—by doing it—agricultural methods—how to farm.”176
After he had been at the Calgary industrial school for three years, Ben Calf Robe was placed in the print shop. “They selected me to be the printer because I worked hard and understood English well. They said I would be the only student allowed to work in the print shop, and that I didn’t have to do the other school work anymore.” Calf Robe not only set type and ran the press, but he also translated hymns and prayers into Blackfoot. However, once he left, he did not pursue the printing trade, becoming instead a Mounted Police scout.177
Students could find their careers blocked by racism. Rupert’s Land principal W. A. Burman thought one of his students, Maurice Sanderson, would not find work as a printer in Winnipeg because of opposition from the printing unions. For this reason, he sought—unsuccessfully—Hayter Reed’s support to have him trained as a teacher.178 In the end, Sanderson did not go into printing, but became a canon in the Anglican Church.179 In 1895, J. Paquin, the principal of the Wikwemikong school in Ontario, wrote that “farm work will be their principal means of earning their living. There is but little room on the reserve for the practice of other trades, and very few Indian tradesmen will ever be acceptable to work outside their reserve, principally on account of racial prejudices.”180 Middlechurch principal John Ashby reported in 1896 that his efforts to find work for his graduates had failed because, he said, “the employers have had to cancel their engagements, as their men will not work beside an Indian any more than beside a Chinese.”181 He also said, “They are good servants, but at present not very successful as masters. They have not received the hereditary training sufficient to give them confidence. They are too easy and let things go carelessly, and so require constant supervision and direction.”182
Inspector M. Christianson concluded a generally positive assessment of the Shubenacadie school in 1937 with an expression of his concern as to whether the school was providing students with the sorts of skills they would need to support themselves. He observed that
the Indians all over Nova Scotia are depending, for a livelihood, on what relief they get from the Department and the sale of Indian handicraft, such as baskets, axe and pick handles, and other articles too numerous to mention, and both men and women are quite expert in this work. The children attending Shubenacadie are not given this training. Therefore, they will have absolutely no means of making a living when they return to their homes, but will have to depend on their parents and the Department to assist them. I am of the opinion that this is a matter that needs careful consideration as the book-learning they receive at school will not make them any more efficient to earn their living than the others.183
The letter prompted Superintendent of Welfare and Training R. A. Hoey to ask the school’s principal, J. P. Mackey, to make proposals regarding improvements in vocational training.184 It does not appear that Mackey responded, for Hoey wrote him again two years later, asking for “a report regarding the vocational training given both the boys and girls,” and reminding him of his 1937 request for such information.185
Mackey’s 1939 response outlined a vocational training program that was limited and outdated. For the boys, it included barn duty and working in the fields. During the planting and harvesting seasons, all the older boys were taken out of class until the farm work was done. Those deemed not big enough for farm work were assigned work in the kitchen and cleaning the school. Manual training was restricted to assisting in the construction and maintenance of school buildings such as the staff house, the feed room, and the hog house. Shoes were repaired at the school. For the girls, there was training in sewing, cooking, and cleaning. Every term, each girl spent two months in the kitchen. They were taught to preserve fruits and vegetables and to set and serve a table. The girls also worked in the laundry “quite regularly.” The sewing class mended clothes four mornings a week. The girls also made new blouses, middies, skirts, and pants. The girls were taught “fancy work”: stitching, tatting, crocheting, hooking, and quilting. In their final year, the girls could make dresses for themselves that they could take with them when they left the school.186
The exchange of letters among Christianson, Hoey, and Mackey reveals a great deal about the limits of the system in 1939, over fifty years after the first industrial schools had opened. Central control was limited: in 1937, R. A. Hoey, Ottawa’s senior education official, did not know what sort of vocational training was being provided at Shubenacadie, a school that had been in operation for only seven years. Not only did he not know what sort of training was being provided, but also the principal could safely ignore his request for such information for a year and a half. The government’s inspector, M. Christianson, could see no better vocational opportunity for the students than making and selling “Indian handicraft.” It would also appear that Christianson had no expectation that the students could learn enough at the school to enter the maritime labour market anywhere but at its very lowest levels. From Mackey’s report, it is clear that much of the so-called vocational training was geared to meeting the immediate needs of the school as cheaply as possible. Martin Benson’s comment on the conditions at Mount Elgin in 1902 was still applicable in 1939: students were not only working; they were being worked.