At the beginning of each residential school year during this period (from 1867 to 1939), newly arrived students were stripped of their home clothing and provided with a school-issued wardrobe. At many schools, photographs were taken of students in their new uniforms and used to publicize the work of the schools. The schools were expected to produce much of the clothing that students wore. In 1883, Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney informed the newly appointed Battleford industrial school principal, Thomas Clarke, that he would be provided with material from which he was to have clothing made “at as moderate a rate as possible.”1 The requirement that spending on clothing be held to a “moderate” level meant that, just as students were poorly fed, they were poorly clothed.
From material provided by the federal government, students at the Qu’Appelle and High River industrial schools were expected to produce the following wardrobe for each student in 1884.
2 grey flannel shirts
2 pairs of trousers (of étoffe, grey in color, one pair to be of better material than the other for Sunday use)
2 coats of the same material as the trousers (one for Sunday use)
3 pairs of socks
2 pairs of boots
1 cloth coat
3 handkerchiefs
2 pairs of mittens
1 leather belt2
At the Mount Elgin school in Muncey, Ontario, in 1889, the students were to be provided with between one and one and a half suits of clothing a year, all made in the institution. According to Hayter Reed, then the Indian commissioner, the students “had no undershirts nor drawers.” They also did not have nightshirts, “the boys having to sleep in those worn through the day.” At the nearby Mohawk Institute in Brantford, students were given three suits of clothing, three undershirts, and night shirts, which were replaced annually.3 In 1895, the girls at the St. Boniface school in Manitoba made all the clothing for the students, with the exception of the boys’ dress suits. According to Inspector T. P. Wadsworth, “the boys’ suits for fatigue as well as for dress parade excel in texture and value any as yet furnished in government conducted schools.” The girls wore “dresses, made of a neat, brown material, wearing also brown Holland pinafores, trimmed with red braid.”4
The schools depended on the churches for a portion of their clothing supply. The Anglican Church encouraged Sunday schools across Canada to make a financial commitment to support students at the Shingwauk Home in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in the nineteenth century. According to the school, $25 would clothe a boy for a year in “two suits of strong clothes, one hat, one winter cap, two pairs of boots, one pair moccassins [sic], four pairs of socks, three shirts, two under-vests, two pairs of drawers, four pockethandkerchiefs [sic], one muffler, one pair mits [sic], one overcoat.”5
Beginning in the 1880s, the Women’s Auxiliary of the Anglican Church collected clothing that was sent to church missions and schools across Canada.6 The Methodist Church’s Women’s Missionary Society played a similar role, collecting and shipping bales of clothing to Methodist schools in such locations as Chilliwack and Kitamaat in British Columbia.7 Indian Affairs paid for the shipping costs to the schools. From 1930 onward, the federal government also paid for the shipment of clothing bales to schools in the Northwest Territories attended by Inuit children.8
Whether clothing was purchased or donated, it did not necessarily fit the students. At the school in Birtle, Manitoba, Inspector Wadsworth noted in 1895, “Although a great deal of the clothing is received made up; there is much of it that requires alteration to be made to fit.” The inspector observed that although the girls had nightgowns, the boys did not. He said this problem was to be “rectified forthwith.”9 In some cases, it appears the clothing was either inappropriate or not distributed to the children. For example, a 1908 report on the Presbyterian school at Shoal Lake in northwestern Ontario concluded that “the children were not too warmly clad, although there were ample supplies of unused clothing on hand furnished by the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society.”10
There are also many reports of students being well clothed. For example, in his 1905 report on the Williams Lake, British Columbia, school, A. E. Green wrote, “Clothing is suitable to the season and sufficient. I did not see a child with a patched article of clothing. I also saw the children in their Sunday suits—the girls in a neat blue sailor suit, and the boys in a suit of the same material.”11
It was common for schools to ensure that students had a good suit of clothing to wear when they appeared in public. Susie Doxtator, who attended Mount Elgin in the 1930s, said, “We had to wear uniforms—one for everyday and one for Sundays. On Sundays we’d get to wear our own clothes to go to Church.”12 Martha Hill, who attended the Mohawk Institute during the First World War, said:
We wore uniforms, we didn’t wear ordinary clothes. We had our school uniform that we wore to school, our play uniform that we played around in, and then we had our church—see we went to the Mohawk Chapel, and we had our uniforms for that. We used to look quite nice in our navy-blue trimmed with white, walking down the road—the girls ahead and the boys behind.13
In his 1897 survey of conditions in industrial schools, Indian Affairs official Martin Benson recommended giving students a new outfit when they left the school, rather than—as he said was done at many schools—asking them to return their school clothes and obliging them to leave in “any old worn out garments that come to hand.”14 Not only were students being stripped of their traditional clothes, but they also were not being provided with a decent wardrobe upon dismissal from the school.
Some students remembered the daily clothing as being uncomfortable. Ivy Koochicum, who attended the File Hills school in Saskatchewan in the 1920s, said, “We wore slips and bras made out of flour sacks. We had loose dresses; they used to make them; they were just plain with a belt. Then we wore black stockings with boots. The boots were ill-fitting in that they were very tight.”15
Pauline Creeley attended File Hills in the 1930s. She recalled:
Our boots were not warm. We only had one pair of cotton stockings. Our coats were made of heavy melton [a heavy woollen fabric], which were warm. We had mitts. I cannot remember if we had sweaters. We had big bloomers. Our uniforms were made like a jumper with a dress underneath. They were not warm. On Sundays, we had a black-and-white outfit, midi and a jumper, sleeveless dress with a white blouse under. That was our Sunday best which we wore to church only.16
Along with the positive inspection reports such as those of A. E. Green, there were also reports of students being dressed in inadequate and worn-out clothing. In 1893, Inspector T. P. Wadsworth wrote that at the Qu’Appelle school, “very great economy has been exercised in repairing the children’s clothing, darning, patching and repairing blankets. In this connection, I may observe that much of it was worn after the poorest white person would have considered the garment worn out: the condemned clothing is only fit for the rag bag.”17
Louise Moine, who was at the Qu’Appelle school in the early twentieth century, recalled:
We wore black stockings that were made on a knitting machine, operated by hand by the older girls who worked in the sewing room. We all dressed alike in loose fitting ‘menage’ dresses during the week and our dress-up clothes on Sunday. We usually wore aprons for work. Our hair was braided and rolled back. We wore little black veils on our heads while at chapel during the week, and wore white ones on Sunday.18
Martin Benson reported in 1902 that the supply of clothing at Mount Elgin was “scanty and well worn,” although he was told there was a new supply on its way.19 Footwear was often in a state of disrepair. According to Qu’Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard in 1894, “The amount of repairing done here keeps the shoemaker and his boys fully occupied, there being always at least fifty pairs of boots waiting for repairs.”20
Although there is less information on bedding than on clothing, there are indications that it too was limited and of poor quality. At the Qu’Appelle school in the 1880s, students were supposed to be issued a cot, a mattress, two blankets, two sheets, and two pillowcases.21 Former Mount Elgin student Susie Doxtator recalled a shortage of warm bedding: “In the winter time I didn’t like it either because we didn’t have no quilts to be warm, for the bed. We used to sneak up to the attic and they had great big fur rugs up there and we used to bring those down to cover us.”22 Dorothy Day recalled that at Mount Elgin, students were issued only two sheets and a blanket. In winter, the bedding was not warm enough: “We used to push those beds together we’d be so cold, and all sleep together, before we could go to sleep, to be warm. All the Oneida girls would sleep together, and the girls from Cape Croker would all get together!”23
The principal of the Anglican school in The Pas, Manitoba, in 1931 said that the “dormitories have a foul smell chiefly from the dreadful mattresses we have to put up with.” He said he believed the mattresses had come from the Battleford school, which had closed in 1914. “They are dreadfully foul and should be burned.”24
Indian Affairs was well aware of the problems that schools had in providing students with sufficient clothing, but the department rarely budged from its position that the per capita grant was adequate.
In 1910, Kamloops, British Columbia, principal A. M. Carion asked for an increase in the per capita grant, saying that at the existing level, “decent clothing could not be provided.”25 Even after the increase in funding provided in the 1910 contract between the government and the churches (discussed in an earlier chapter), schools found it difficult to clothe students. A different Kamloops principal, J. B. Salles, wrote in 1917, “Half of the boys have not even one pair of stockings, they repaired their own shoes, but these are too old to last long and their uniform is so old and so worn out that we do not dare to show them to anyone. The girls [sic] shoes are also worn out and although the boys patched them up many times they cannot hold much longer.” He appealed to Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott to “help us buy shoes for our children and a decent uniform for the boys.”26
During his 1925 inspection of the Round Lake, Saskatchewan, school, W. S. Murison commented that he had never seen “such patched and ragged looking clothing as worn by the boys. The girls had better clothing but appeared listless, indifferent and had a frowsy look.”27
In her letter to Indian Commissioner W. A. Graham regarding conditions at the same school in 1929, teacher Lucy Affleck wrote that Principal Ross
has complete charge of the foot-wear for both boys and girls, and he gives them the most ridiculous outfits. The little girls go teetering around in pumps with outlandish heels, or those old fashioned very high boots with high heels, sizes too large, or silly little sandals that won’t stay on their feet—cheap lots that he buys for next to nothing, or second-hand misfits that come in bales. The boys have to wear theirs until they can scarcely keep their feet in them, with binder twine for laces, and garters [to hold up their socks], quite often. Of course, each child has a better outfit, the one he puts on for “church” and takes home with him at holiday time.28
When, in 1927, Indian agent J. G. Burk put in a request for funds to purchase underwear for students recently recruited to the Fort William, Ontario, school, Indian Affairs departmental secretary J. D. McLean informed him that the schools were expected to purchase clothing out of the per capita grant.29 In the face of inadequate funding, it appears that some schools turned to the parents for support. In 1929, a father of a student at the Fort William school said he was being “obliged to spend a lot of money buying her clothes. I also have to pay for having her shoes repaired.”30
The funding cuts of the 1930s exacerbated the difficulties. In 1936, Inspector A. G. Hamilton wrote that at the Birtle, Manitoba, school, “some of the clothes and stockings required to be mended should have been discarded. A patched garment is certainly no disgrace, but some laid out for repairs were really past mending.” He added that the children had good outfits, but they were reserved for Sundays and when the children went out in public: “In other words, when out where they can be seen, they are well dressed.”31 The following year, Inspector A. G. Smith wrote that “quite a percentage of the girls” at the same school were wearing “old leather boots” that were “quite unfit to go outdoors in during the winter months.” When the problem was drawn to the principal’s attention, he agreed they were a problem, but added “he did not know that they were in that condition.”32 In his 1936 report on the Presbyterian school at Kenora, Ontario, A. G. Hamilton wrote that “the girls were not as well outfitted as might be expected. Some appeared somewhat scantily clad especially considering the cold weather.”33
In 1938, at the end of this period, the churches were reduced to asking the federal government to take over responsibility for clothing students. Writing on behalf of all the church societies, T. B. R. Westgate, of the Anglican Church’s Indian and Eskimo Residential School Commission, recommended to the federal government that
uniforms for all Indian boys and girls in the Schools should be provided by the Government. This opinion has not been generated solely by the heavy burden now resting on the Church organizations to supply all the clothing required, even though this consideration alone would be sufficient to justify its expression, but also because of the helpful effect such action would have in various ways.
Uniforms would ensure that all students were satisfactorily dressed and that no student had clothing that was superior to any other student’s, and would foster pride “in the children themselves, their race, their school, their Government, and their Country.”34 The almost inevitable outcome of the 1883 instruction that clothing be provided “at as moderate a rate as possible” was that, by 1938, the government’s funding was so low that, to use Westgate’s words, it was completely impossible to ensure that all students were “adequately and becomingly clothed.”35