The laundry room at Mount Elgin in Muncey, Ontario.
United Church of Canada Archives, 90-162P1173N.
In 1931, Principal Ed Maillard at the school in Sechelt, British Columbia, wrote to his Oblate superiors, seeking extra help in maintaining discipline at the school. He wrote that the students had no respect for the two men he had hired to maintain order among the children. “This life is worse than a life of a jail keeper. So I do not feel very keen in looking after these ruffians if I do not have the help of a Brother.” He felt unjustly accused of being too harsh, and suggested that the problems at the school were not his fault, but should be laid at the feet of his predecessor, a man he referred to simply as “Brother Dave.” This man, according to Maillard, “had to yield” to the parents’ “wishes and desires to cover his tracks. I am really fed up with these savages.”1
Maillard’s frustrated, angry, and racist sentiments are a stark reminder of the degree to which the residential schools were places of compulsion that relied on the application of force. This should not be surprising. Many of the children had been placed in the schools against their will. Most of the children whose parents had voluntarily placed them in the schools would have preferred to have been at home. At the schools, they were poorly housed, poorly fed, and poorly clothed. They were at risk of infection, hard-worked, and forced to study a curriculum that had little cultural relevance to them in a language they did not know. Their cultural traditions were derided while they were indoctrinated in a foreign religion. Not surprisingly, the lonely, neglected children did not always do what they were supposed to do. Resistance might take many forms: talking out of turn, passing notes, speaking their own languages, refusing to eat unfamiliar food, taking extra food, neglecting chores and homework, and running away. Boys and girls also would find ways to be alone with one another. Older children bullied younger ones. When punished by the staff, some of them fought back.
The schools responded to such predictable resistance with a regime of harsh discipline. In the context of residential schools, discipline refers not simply to punishment of wrongdoers, but also to the maintenance of order and obedience. Given that the schools were understaffed and poorly equipped, they sought to control student behaviour through strict regimentation. As early as 1883, Wikwemikong, Ontario, principal R. Baudin wrote, “It is true that a strict watchfulness is kept over them at all times by some member of the Institution. Besides their studies and working hours, they have a person constantly in attendance to know what they are doing.”2 At the St. Boniface, Manitoba, school, an inspector noted, “The sisters immediately in charge have sleeping apartments at one end of this dormitory, simply screened off; therefore they [the students] are under constant supervision, night as well as day.”3 There were always gaps in this surveillance. A later Wikwemikong principal, G. A. Artus, reported in 1890 that “very frequent religious exhortations” had been the main method to improve morals at the school. “However, the scattering of the boys all over the premises for their daily work and industrial training, has a tendency towards weakening their spirit of obedience and relaxing the discipline.”4
On an 1895 inspection of the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, Indian Affairs official Martin Benson was struck by the
order, regularity and precision with which all the pupils conducted themselves. This school is as well regulated and controlled as a piece of machinery, going on without stop or hitch from morning to night. The boys have a thorough military organization, being divided into four squads, forming a company, each squad having its corporals and sergeant who act as monitors, and the whole is in charge of a sergeant major.
A similar system for the girls also met with Benson’s approval.5
In 1905, Christie, British Columbia, principal P. Maurus wrote, “The discipline is mild, but firm. The pupils are under constant supervision and their conduct is watched most carefully.”6
In 1915, Simon Gavin, a student at the Anglican school in The Pas, Manitoba, wrote a brief article for the school paper that showed the role that bells played at that school:
I carry wood into the kitchen and bakery every day; when I finish there I go to the skating rink and sweep it. When I hear the big bell I come in and brush my hair; when the little bell rings I line up with the other boys in the play-room and march in to school. I learn arithmetic, spelling, reading, to write stories from the3rd Reader and to draw maps.7
Of his years at Battleford, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gilbert Wuttunee recalled, “We were controlled altogether by the bell.”8
A passage from the Anglican history of the Chapleau, Ontario, school, written in 1939, gives a sense of how regimented daily life was for students at the end of this period.
On week days the rising bell rings at six o’clock; at six-thirty another bell calls bigger girls to help with the work in the kitchen and dining-room, and the bigger boys to help with the work at the barn; at seven o’clock the bell is rung again to call all to breakfast, and at seven-thirty prayers are conducted. While the bigger boys and girls are helping in the way indicated, the younger ones are engaged in looking after their respective beds and the dormitories. After prayers the children assist in washing the dishes, sweeping floors, dusting furniture, and on wash days a certain number of them are assigned to the Laundry Supervisor to assist her in that work. At eight forty-five the warning bell for classroom work is rung, and at nine o’clock all who have not been assigned to some special duties enter their respective classrooms. Bells are rung again at recess, at noon, and at various times in the afternoon, each ring having a definite meaning, well understood by all, until the final bells of the day are rung for evening study, choir practice, lights out, and go to bed.9
Basil Johnston wrote in his memoir of his years at the school at Spanish, Ontario, “Our treatment implied that we were little better than felons or potential felons.”10
Many of the Roman Catholic schools employed staff members who were given the title of “school disciplinarian.” The principal of the Christie school, G. Forbes, provided a good summary of the work of school disciplinarians when he described the ways in which the one at his school was not doing his job.
Time and again, I have told him that he must remain with the boys during the recreations, that he must let them go certain places or talk in other places, that he must have the beds made tidily, the dormitory and other places kept clean, that he must see to it that the boys come immediately after the bell rings, that he must have them change boots and stockings when they are wet, they must not leave their work or the recreation room without permission—but all to no avail.
Forbes was so frustrated that he thought he would have to take over the work himself. “The disciplinarian must be on the job: we have had a couple of kissing and hugging parties between the boys and girls already: I do not want what they had last year, fornication.”11
The churches and religious orders that operated the schools had strong and interrelated conceptions of order, discipline, obedience, and sin. They believed that human beings were fallen, sinful creatures who had to earn salvation through mastery of their nature by obedience to God.12 The approach to discipline in schools was based in scripture: corporal punishment was a biblically authorized way of keeping order and of bringing children to the righteous path.13
Nineteenth-century educational bureaucrats such as Egerton Ryerson were critical of excessive force in the school, but even he believed that the “best Teacher, like the best Parent, will seldom resort to the Rod; but there are occasions when it cannot be wisely avoided.” Ryerson, a leading figure in the Methodist Church, believed that opposition to corporal punishment was “contrary to Scripture.”14 The birch rod was the staple disciplinary tool of the first half of the nineteenth century. In the 1880s, at the Central School East in Ottawa, there was an average of sixty strappings a month.15 At the Jesse Ketchum public school in Toronto in 1888, students were strapped for such offences as “fighting, misbehaving in line, lying, eating in school, neglecting to correct wrong work, shooting peas in the classroom, going home when told to remain, long continued carelessness and general bad conduct.” At that school, a strapping was between four and twelve beatings on the palm of the hand.16 The strap was still in use a half century later: in 1933, the strap was administered to 1,500 Toronto school students.17
Provincial governments provided public schoolteachers with only limited guidance as to how children were to be disciplined. In 1863 in New Brunswick, the department of education urged teachers to “exercise such discipline as would be pursued by a judicious parent in his family.”18 The 1891 Ontario Education Act instructed teachers not to exceed measures that would be taken by a “kind, firm, and judicious parent.”19 Teachers who went beyond these boundaries could be charged with assault under the Criminal Code. Canadian courts had ruled that corporal punishment could not be unreasonable, exceed the severity of the offence, or be carried out with malice. Teachers who hit students on the head or took other actions that could lead to permanent physical harm ran the risk of conviction. Courts also ruled that discipline was not excessive if the teacher had an honest belief that the student had committed an offence and that belief was supported by probable grounds.20 While corporal punishment was an accepted part of education and child rearing in Euro-Canadian society, the courts had placed limits on its use. However, historically, corporal punishment did not have this same level of acceptability among Aboriginal people. And, in many cases, residential schools imposed punishments on Aboriginal children that were in excess of the norms that would be accepted even in Euro-Canadian society at that time. The large number of recorded parental complaints, coupled with the schools’ ongoing difficulty in recruiting students, is evidence of occasions where discipline imposed by the schools exceeded what would have been acceptable in either Aboriginal or European communities.
Although the schools felt justified in using discipline, including corporal punishment, to establish and maintain order, Indian Affairs never provided system-wide guidelines or regulations that placed limits on the use of discipline. Instead, instructions were provided on a case-by-case basis. This was so in the 1880s and it still continued in the 1930s.
Indian Affairs officials were aware that, since the beginning of residential schools, staff members were using corporal punishment. In 1885, Albert Lacombe, the principal of the High River school in what is now Alberta, wrote in the Indian Affairs annual report:
We have found by past experience that it is impossible to control and manage these Indian boys by mere advice and kind reprimand. If we have not some system of coercion to enforce order, and at least a little school discipline, then I assure you it will be very hard to conduct the school with that measure of success which, it was hoped, would attend its establishment.21
His successor, E. Claude, wrote in the 1887 Indian Affairs annual report, “The system of discipline is a military one and strictly carried out, no breach of the regulations remaining unpunished, but must say to the honour of our pupils that all, with few exceptions, observe perfectly the daily routine.”22 Hayter Reed, then Indian commissioner for the Prairies, recorded in 1889 that corporal punishment, while resorted to only in “extreme cases,” was administered at the Mohawk Institute in Brantford.23
As noted in an earlier chapter, in 1889, Deputy Minister Lawrence Vankoughnet instructed Bishop Paul Durieu, regarding the proposed Kootenay school in Cranbrook, British Columbia, “Obedience to rules and good behavior should be enforced, but corporal punishment should only be resorted to in extreme cases. In ordinary cases the penalty might be solitary confinement for such time as the offence may warrant, or deprivation of certain articles of food allowed to other pupils.”24 This is similar to instructions issued to Roman Catholic assistant principals in 1888. They were told to “avoid giving nicknames to his pupils and using too rigorous means with regards to the most rebellious.” The only punishments recommended were:
1)The standing or sitting in the corner of the School room.
2)The confinement during one recreation or more.
3)The diet, which is of two kinds, the half diet or deprivation of one plate, the total diet or deprivation of a meal, and then, the pupil shall stand in the centre of the refectory. This last punishment cannot be inflicted without recource [sic] to the principal.25
Such vague instructions led to abuses. Parents withdrew five students from the Rupert’s Land school in Middlechurch, Manitoba, in 1892 because two students had their “clothes taken up and been whipped in that state,” and a boy had been thrashed on the back. The local Indian agent said, “Thrashing at the school, which is a remnant of the dark ages, has caused nearly all the trouble at this School.”26 Seven years later, Indian Commissioner David Laird was obliged to conduct an inquiry into events at the same school. He concluded that several children had been “too severely punished.” He acknowledged that it appeared that a girl (whose age was either eight or nine) had been impertinent, but Laird felt that no “child should show marks on her person several days or weeks after being strapped.” To Laird’s mind, Principal J. F. Fairlie’s treatment of another boy, which included “strappings on the bare back,” was “too suggestive of the old system of flogging criminals,”27
In 1895, after allegations of excessive discipline being employed at the Red Deer school in what is now Alberta (an event discussed in greater detail in an earlier chapter in this volume), Hayter Reed, who was then deputy minister, instructed the assistant Indian commissioner in Regina to issue a directive to the effect that “children are not to be whipped by anyone save the Principal, and even when such a course is necessary, great discretion should be used and they should not be struck on the head, or punished so severely that bodily harm might ensue.” Corporal punishment was to be reserved for grave offences and where it could serve as a deterrent.28 Although the assistant commissioner may have issued that directive, as he was specifically instructed to do, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has not been able to locate a copy of it in federal government records. If such a directive were sent out by the assistant Indian commissioner in Regina, its circulation likely would have been restricted to the schools in Manitoba and the North-West Territories (the regions for which he had authority). It would not have applied to all the schools the government funded. Reed’s instructions contained no direction as to what other types of discipline were to be used, what the children could and could not be punished for, whether a record of punishments was to be kept and reported annually or otherwise, whether parents were to be notified, whether more than one adult was to be present, whether it was acceptable for clothing to be removed prior to the administration of corporal punishment, or whether children were to be punished in front of other students.
There are other problems with Reed’s instructions: no limits were placed on the number of blows that could be administered, or on the instrument that was to be used in administering them. In the Indian Affairs correspondence on corporal punishment, there are frequent references to students being “whipped” or “thrashed.” It also appears that principals devised their own disciplinary tools. For example, Birtle, Manitoba, principal George McLaren wrote in 1892 that he did not use severe punishment, but on occasion he made use of “a small raw hide when the guilty person was large and the offence serious such as persisting in running away.”29 In December 1896 in British Columbia, the Kuper Island school’s acting principal gave two boys “several lashes in the Presence of the Pupils” for sneaking into the girls’ dormitory at night.30 Reed’s admonition that children were not to be struck on the head may also have given principals perceived licence to administer blows to any other part of the body.
In their annual reports for 1896, many principals provided information on their discipline policies. Principal John Scott at Metlakatla, British Columbia, wrote that, at his school, disciplinary measures consisted of “extra lessons, work in play-time, deprivation of a meal or being sent to bed during part of their play-time of an evening, and as a last resource for persistence in serious wrong doing, expulsion from the school.”31
The principal of the girls’ school at Port Simpson, British Columbia, J. Redner, reported: “Discipline is firm but kind. The pupils are trained as much as possible to govern themselves. The punishments used are private reproof, corporal punishment in rare instances and solitary confinement in extreme cases.”32
The principal at Mission, British Columbia, E. C. Chirouse, wrote:
As regards punishment, I must confess that our methods seem rather strange to those who have only had dealings with white children. The Indian thinks it an awful disgrace to be struck, and to avoid the bad effect which would more than counterbalance any good arising from such treatment, we usually punish the boys by giving them lines to write, depriving them of play, or by giving them a meal on their knees in the refectory, though occasionally they receive a slap on the hand with a light cane. The girls are so docile and gentle that punishment even of the mildest kind is altogether unnecessary.33
At the Shingwauk Home in Ontario, Principal G. L. King reported, “The methods of punishment adopted are: fines, impositions and kept in to work on half-holidays. Corporal punishment is administered only as a last resource and in cases of repeated acts of disobedience.”34
Principal A. M. Carion, at Kamloops, British Columbia, wrote:
A system of marking faults committed has been adopted, and twice a day, at roll-call, attention is called to those faults and the wrong-doers are reprehended, and, if deemed necessary, punished by being confined during recreation or deprived of dessert. Corporal punishment is resorted to only in extreme cases.35
Kuper Island principal Father G. Donckele wrote, “The discipline laid down in the regulations of the department was strictly carried out, and for punishment for occasional infractions moral persuasion seemed to have a better effect than any kind of corporal punishment.”36 The Alert Bay, British Columbia, principal wrote, “The pupils have been well-behaved, and are generally industrious, and punishment is rarely necessary.”37 Middlechurch principal John Ashby noted, “Punishments have been very few. I have found a kindly talking to more avail than any punishment. I have whipped, but it only hardens instead of softening, deprivation of privileges being generally sufficient.”38
No matter what the European standards of the day might have been, residential school discipline clearly violated the norms by which Aboriginal parents expected their children to be treated. In her memoirs, Louise Moine recounted an incident in which a student at the Qu’Appelle school complained to her parents about being strapped. The girl’s mother “marched right down to the playroom where she confronted the Sister by shaking her fist at her and telling her off in Sioux. The Sister, fearing abuse, held her cross up in front of the woman but she knocked it out of the Sister’s hand.”39
Principals recognized they were violating parental norms, but concluded that such norms were ‘inappropriate.’ In 1922, Andrew Paull, the corresponding secretary of the Allied Tribes of British Columbia, wrote to W. E. Ditchburn, the chief inspector of Indian agencies in British Columbia, to complain that the principal of the Alberni industrial school, Mr. Currie, “unmercifully whips the boys on their backs, which is objected to as well as Mr. Curry fighting and kicking the boys for the purpose of correction. It is further reported that Mr. Curry gets extremely mad at the slightest provocation, and whips or hits the boys with his fists, or chokes them.”40 Currie said he thought himself to be “patient, kind and lenient with every child who shows any attempt at obedience to the rules, but certain offences must be dealt with firmly.” But, he said, Aboriginal parents never punished their children. “The result is that when the teacher does it they magnify the thing to appear that the child was being murdered.”41
In the absence of guidelines and directives, individual principals decided for themselves what was and was not appropriate. When principals, or perhaps other staff members, changed, the pattern of discipline also changed, resulting in inconsistency within schools from year to year, and from school to school.
As the principals’ reports indicated, corporal punishment was not the only tool employed in an attempt to maintain discipline. Students might be forced to eat everything on their plates or be denied holidays. At the Sechelt school in 1936, the school disciplinarian held extended drills, requiring boys to hop on one leg “for longer periods than usual,” in an effort to force them to reveal who had stolen a set of the school keys. The method failed to bring about the recovery of the keys, but the boys did complain to their parents, who in turn complained to Indian Affairs. The disciplinarian defended the punishment, saying it was not as vigorous as the activities the boys engaged in during their own playtime.42
Many former students spoke of having their ears twisted as a classroom punishment. This punishment is not often referred to in the documentary record. However, in 1906, parents complained that at one of the schools at Onion Lake, Saskatchewan, students were having their ears twisted. Indian Commissioner David Laird instructed the Indian agent that “ear twisting for punishment should be dropped.”43 Again, this was not a system-wide instruction, but one that was limited to one Indian agent, who was expected to pass the instruction on to a single principal.
Cornelius Kelleher, a half-Irish, half-Nooksack boy who attended the Mission school in the nineteenth century, recalled that when a student’s work was not prepared, the teacher would “hit you on the fingers with a rod, I’ll tell you. There was no soft things in them days.”44 It was not uncommon for runaways to have their hair cut short or shaved off, in addition to being strapped. Alice Star Blanket attended the File Hills, Saskatchewan, school in the 1930s. She recalled that runaways at that school were “punished with a strap, shave their hair off, get bald heads.”45 Sarah Soonias (known as Sarah Wuttunnee when she was in school) was enrolled in the Battleford school in 1900. She recalled being strapped by a Mr. Denten: “I got a good strapping from him because I wouldn’t say a word. I got sad, I waited too long, I couldn’t speak and I got a strapping.” She recalled that another teacher was always distressed at having to strap students and sought to console them afterwards.46
In extreme cases, bad behaviour might be dealt with by expulsion. Kuper Island principal George Donckele expelled one boy in 1891 for his “very offensive disobedience and insubordination.”47 In February 1935, the department supported the principal of the Kuper Island school in discharging a student who was “having such a bad influence on the other pupils and the discipline of the school.”48 Chapleau, Ontario, principal A. J. Vale sought in 1936 to discharge a girl who had been at the school for eight years. He said,
We have had considerable trouble with her due to her stubbornness. I have tried severe whipping and various methods of punishments, such as extra work instead of play, being sent to bed early and loss of extra privileges but all seem to have failed to cure her of exhibitions of temper and passive resistance to the rules of the classroom and school in general.
Vale could see no alternative but to send her “back to her own people at Ruperts House where she belongs.”49 In 1938 in British Columbia, one girl, who ran away from the Williams Lake school twice in one year, was discharged.50
In 1907, much to the displeasure of the students’ parents and Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham, Principal W. McWhinney of the Presbyterian school at Kamsack, Saskatchewan, tied ropes around the arms of boys who had run away and “made them run behind the buggy from their houses to the school.” Their parents complained that “the children are not dogs.” Graham told the principal to cease the practice: if he had trouble with runaways, he should seek permission to send “the worst offenders to another school.”51 Martin Benson asked the deputy minister whether McWhinney’s behaviour entitled the department to demand his resignation.52 McWhinney explained that he had gone looking for a group of runaways in the school buggy, accompanied by his wife. When he encountered the three boys almost thirteen kilometres from the school, he took the smallest boy into the buggy. The older boys were instructed to walk behind the wagon.
After going a little distance while drawing near a bluff, the boys showed unmistakeable signs that they were going to make a break for liberty. I stopped and tied a rope loosely around one arm of each and threw the other end of the rope over the back of the buggy and over the seat. The rope was not tied to the buggy in anyway. Thus we proceeded to the school, the horses walking or trotting slowly, so that the boys could follow without danger of hurting themselves in any way.53
Punishment could also take the form of cancelling vacation. This happened at the Mohawk Institute in 1926 when it was discovered that a group of older male and female students had been meeting secretly at night for what the principal described as “a series of wild escapades.”54 When two girls ran away from the Gordon’s Reserve school in Saskatchewan, the principal and the Indian agent informed them that their discharge from the school would be delayed for six months as punishment for their behaviour. Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham refused to authorize the punishment, saying that the principal and the agent had no authority to impose it.55
Another option was to transfer a student to a different school. In 1923, Indian agent M. Christianson reported “an epidemic of truancy at the Gordon’s Reserve school.” Students said they had run away because they “did not like the Farming Instructor.” However, the problem continued after the instructor was replaced. Christianson recommended transferring two of the more persistent runaways to a more distant school, saying it would “put a stop their escapades” and have a “salutary effect on other boys and girls.”56 In 1927, Paul Bousquet, the principal at Fort Alexander, Manitoba, sought permission to transfer persistent runaways to the school at Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan.57 In 1932, the principal of the Sandy Bay, Manitoba, school attempted to have two boys transferred to the Muscowequan school in Lestock, Saskatchewan.58 The department denied the request, pointing out that, since the boys were only fourteen and thirteen years old, the school was expected to “exert sufficient moral suasion to prevent these boys from being chronic truants.”59 In 1935, the principal sought to have another boy transferred to Muscowequan. In this boy’s most recent episode of truancy, he and two other boys had ridden a boxcar to Winnipeg. The principal felt the boy could not be discharged, since his father’s whereabouts were unknown and his mother was in a sanatorium.60 In 1937, Mount Elgin principal O. B. Strapp was given approval to transfer six students—“the ring leaders among the truants”—to the school at Chapleau, Ontario.61
Students were also sometimes punished for things beyond their control. It is not uncommon for children who have been removed from their homes and placed in institutions to develop involuntary bedwetting.62 In Canada’s residential schools, humiliating punishments were created for those who wet their beds. At the Spanish, Ontario, school, these students were called “piskers” and they were thrashed regularly. In 1924, one chronic bedwetter was placed in a tub filled with hot water. According to a staff member, “After a half-hour stay, he became sick to his stomach so had to take him out. It cured him from wetting his bed for two nights, but now he is as bad as ever.”63 In 1927, the boys were given seat baths in cold water in an attempt to cure bedwetting. This led to short-term improvements, but, by 1931, bedwetters were being spanked.64 Since these measures served only to intensify the students’ feelings of anxiety and insecurity, they were ineffective.65
Some schools had rooms specifically set aside as the ‘punishment room.’ In 1985 at the Mohawk Institute, Martin Benson reported:
A room at the head of the landing leading to the rear of the Principal’s house, is set apart for the solitary confinement of very refractory boys with a similar place on the girls’ side of the building. These two rooms are about 6 x 10 and are only lighted by a barred fanlight over the door. I asked the Principal if he ever had occasion to make use of these rooms, and he replied that he sometimes did so for short periods and he found this mode of punishment has a most salutary effect. Confinement in the rooms lasts during playtime.
According to Benson, no one but the principal could order a child’s confinement or administer corporal punishment.66 The rooms were still in operation a dozen years later when the Ontario inspector for Indian agencies, J. G. Ramsden, reported: “I cannot say that I was favourably impressed with the sight of two prison cells in the boys playhouse. I was informed, however, that these were for pupils who ran away from the institution, confinement being for a week at a time when pupils returned.”67
Martha Hill, who attended the Mohawk Institute from 1912 to 1919, could recall the punishment room vividly. “They had one little room—it had just room to crawl in and go in the bed if you done anything wrong. That’s how he’d punish you—he’d make you go in that room. No light—shut the door and lock it from the outside.”68
According to some reports, the treatment given to students was heartless. In 1903, missionary W. S. Moore of Mistawasis, Saskatchewan, wrote to the Presbyterian Church about the treatment of children at the Regina industrial school. In particular, he told of a girl who, having been shut in a room for running away, had tried to hang herself. Her teacher was able to save her; however, he then gave her a revolver and told her to shoot herself. She pulled the trigger, only to discover it was not loaded. Another runaway was “tied behind the buckboard and made to trot or run back to the school in the manner of an animal.” Moore said the teacher in question had told both these stories to him and his wife.69
In 1912 at the school at Round Lake, the matron, who was also the principal’s wife, had struck a girl so hard in the head that she had been knocked to the floor. A complaint was made, and a missionary, Hugh MacKay, investigated on behalf of the church. He concluded that neither the principal nor the matron could control their tempers.70 In this case, the church took action: the principal and his wife were gone by the end of the year.71
Sometimes, students who came into conflict with the law were sent to provincial reformatories (often called “industrial schools”). For example, when a group of boys from the Mount Elgin school were arrested in 1920 for stealing from the local store, the principal recommended they be sent to the Victoria Industrial School in Mimico.72 In other cases, students might be sent to such institutions if they were thought to be ‘uncontrollable.’ In 1922, Gordon Smith, the Indian superintendent in Brantford, Ontario, concluded that three boys, at least two of whom were sixteen years of age, were beyond the control of the Mohawk Institute and their families. He also recommended they be sent to the Mimico school.73 Duncan Campbell Scott concurred, suggesting that “one or two of the worst boys be committed to the Mimico Industrial School. This action would have a good all round effect on the general discipline, not only at the school but on the reserve.”74
In 1936, the principal of the Gordon’s Reserve school in Saskatchewan wanted to press criminal charges against three boys who had attacked the school’s engineer, Mr. Sworder. The attack was brought on because Sworder had demanded to know why one of the students had been—against regulations—in the engine room. The local Indian agent thought the corporal punishment the boys had been subjected to was sufficient. In his opinion, “If the police are to be called in for every breach of discipline in the schools they would be on the road the whole of their time, and the effect on the minds of the Indian parents would be bad.”75
In 1938, Indian Affairs agent Eben McKenzie and the Grayson, Saskatchewan, principal recommended that a fifteen-year-old orphan boy be sent to a “reformatory for an indefinite period.” According to McKenzie, “This lad has incited the other pupils especially the younger ones to grumble about the food un-necessarily, cause general trouble, and has instigated recently five pupils to run away from the school.” Judging the boy to be “unmanageable,” he thought a year in a reformatory might “fill in just what is needed and would be well worth the trial.” As in other cases, there was concern about the example that might be set. It was thought that expelling the boy “establishes a precedent that if all a lad has to do to get expelled from school is to become a general nuisance which would set a bad example for any other pupils.”76 In the end, the boy was transferred to another residential school.77
In 1937, a young boy who had run away from the Joussard, Alberta, school broke into a store in Enilda, Alberta, and stole $30 worth of goods.78 He was arrested and charged with break, enter, and theft.79 At the recommendation of R. A. Hoey, the superintendent of Welfare and Training for Indian Affairs, it was decided to send the boy back to the Joussard school until his father returned from hunting, at which time he would be “placed in his father’s care.”80 Principal Paul Serrand objected to the decision, writing that the boy “having committed a serious offense should be punished according to the natural law.” If he was discharged, Serrand feared that other “children lonesome at school” might be tempted to steal in hopes of being discharged.81 In defending the decision, Indian Affairs official Philip Phelan wrote that “after making very extensive inquiries it was not found possible to locate any institution in the Province of Alberta to which this boy could be sent. I feel you will agree that it is not likely he would profit by being sent to any of the regular penal institutions.”82
Conflict and confrontation were never far from the surface. The principals and government officials worried about what might happen if they appeared to be weak in the students’ eyes. Indian agent J. P. B. Ostrander refused to transfer a boy from the Cowessess school at Grayson to another school in 1919 for fear that “the other boys may form the opinion that the Brother [in charge of discipline at Cowessess] is afraid of the big boys.” Ostrander’s letter made it clear that staff were expected to physically dominate students. He wrote, approvingly, “Of course when he is strict there will be a big boy occasionally who will try him to see how far he can go, but so far the boys have found that the Brother is their master and I think it does them good.”83 In other cases, as students got older, they successfully stood up to staff. Susie Doxtator, who attended Mount Elgin in the 1930s, recalled, “There was a lot of staff there that cared for us, but there was some staff that would rather beat us up. I was so glad when I got big enough to stand on my own feet. I got in trouble sometimes hitting staff back, but they always asked for it—they always hit me first and I hit ’em back.”84 Raymond Hill had similar memories of the Mohawk Institute during that period: “I got the strap until I was big enough to take care of myself and then they didn’t dare strap me. I fought back and that was it—that ended the strapping I got. I got a talking to but I didn’t get a strapping.”85
Louise Moine recalled being strapped for speaking back to a teacher when she attended the Qu’Appelle school in the early twentieth century.
She took me into the bathroom where she strapped me so hard that she got red in the face. What irritated her the most was that I wouldn’t cry. I was as stubborn as they come. When she stopped for air, I threw in an apology (not that I meant it). She stopped then and kissed me, but the damage had been done. As she had strapped on the seat, I couldn’t sit down properly and I couldn’t stand anything touching my behind for a while.86
When a boy was caught in the act of attempting to burn down the File Hills school in 1932, he was immediately strapped on his hands. The principal wished to send him to the Regina Detention Home. The local Indian Affairs inspector, W. Murison, reported, “This boy is of very low mentality; as a matter of fact he cannot be considered normal.” The Indian agent favoured taking a lenient approach to the case. Murison said he feared that directly discharging the boy into the care of his parents would “act as an incentive to other boys to attempt the same thing in order to bring about their discharge.” Therefore, he suggested transferring him to another school, and, from there, discharging him to his home. Officials were unwilling to take the correct step directly and immediately—in this case, returning a boy to his family when the school was incapable of caring for him—for fear of appearing weak or vulnerable. Among the reasons why Inspector Murison opposed having the boy sent to the Regina Detention Home was the fact that the case would first have to be brought before a juvenile court. This would have involved an expense that he knew Indian Affairs was “anxious to avoid.”87
Sometimes, conflict broke out into the open. In the spring of 1896, Brandon principal John Semmens sought advice from Indian Commissioner Amédée Forget about how to deal with a group of rebellious students. One boy had “collared” and threatened a staff member, and, on separate occasions, two others had challenged another staff member to a fight. Semmens had been able to obtain apologies from the students in each case, but he feared that they might “combine and give trouble to all concerned. It may be necessary to handcuff or imprison if the ordinary corrective influences fail us.”88 Without reference to any specific policy, Forget recommended that, in the face of repeated behaviour of this kind, Semmens would be justified in punishing the boy by depriving him of a holiday, placing him on a “simple diet,” or, “as a last resort, unless the boy had great provocation, by corporal punishment.” This “should not be more severe than a strapping on the hand, which should be administered in the presence of the whole school, and after such a full explanation of the case as will leave no doubt in the mind of any one as to the justice and necessity of the course pursued.”89 Forget’s letter did place limits on where blows could be landed when punishing students. It did not limit the number of blows. It also incorporated humiliation into the punishment process by having the student strapped in front of the entire school population.
By the time Semmens had received Forget’s advice, the situation had escalated: at the principal’s request, three boys had been arrested for attacking a staff member. Semmens had recommended that the sentence be only one night in duration, but the magistrate, angered by the boys’ defiance in court, sentenced them to a week in jail.90
In 1902, Indian Affairs Minister Clifford Sifton received a telegram from Thomas Ross, who identified himself as a teacher at the Red Deer school in what is now Alberta, stating that the boys at the school were armed with knives and out of control.91 These allegations were exaggerated. Students were not brandishing knives, and neither the staff nor the principal was being threatened. Two separate investigations raised questions as to the qualifications of Ross and another former staff member who had made the complaints. One of the Red Deer teachers successfully prosecuted a student for assaulting him. However, the student received a suspended sentence, and the Methodist Church official who investigated the affair questioned whether the conviction was merited.92 A government inspector said older students swore, disrupted prayers, and threatened teachers. The principal appeared unable to provide direction or order. According to the inspector, “The boys have no respect for authority unless it is based on the personal strength of the particular officer exercising it. Each officer who is physically able punishes and disciplines his boys after his own methods.” The officer who is not endowed with this physical capability is helpless, he said.93 The principal resigned at the end of the school year.94
There was ongoing conflict at the Anglican school in The Pas in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1922, a group of boys who had previously been punished for drinking at the school were found to have purchased peppermint extract in town with money they had acquired by selling the school skates to a second-hand store. The clerk who sold the boys the extract was jailed, but the Indian agent was uncertain about what to do with the boys. “I could handle them as was done previously, but it seems useless to beat them, and I do not think it possible to cure the wild ones.”95
An inspector of Indian agencies, A. G. Hamilton, wrote in the early 1930s that the only way to control the older boys at the Anglican school in The Pas would be if “a proper boys’ supervisor were secured, and he would need to be a real man, it would be a big step towards handling the children. This would also strengthen the authority of the other members, who at present find themselves unable to control the children.”96
But this forceful approach had real limits. In 1932, a teacher at the same school tried to maintain his authority by striking a student on the arm with a shovel.97 A church investigation concluded the teacher had been provoked, but recognized that only the principal was authorized to administer corporal punishment at the school. The field secretary of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, T. B. R. Westgate, proposed that the teacher in question be allowed to stay at the school until he could be transferred to another school.98 Instead, the teacher was dismissed, but Indian Affairs noted that there would be no objection to his being hired at another Anglican-run school.99
In 1936, a boy refused to do some barn work and struck a staff member at the Presbyterian school in Kenora, Ontario. The staff member retaliated by hitting the boy with a horseshoe. Inspector A. G. Hamilton wrote that he did “not like the idea of a man forgetting himself to such an extent that he would resort to methods of this nature.” The staff member was not a teacher, but a hired hand and, to use Hamilton’s term, “of foreign birth.” Hamilton, revealing the levels of racial prejudice in operation at the time, wrote he was “not enthused with the employment of such people as instructors of our Indian children. I am quite sure that their method of discipline would be on a much lower level than ours.” For his part, the principal said the man had regretted his action and should not be fired.100
Changes in staff, particularly in principal, could bring about changes in discipline. When C. M. Turnell took over the Mohawk Institute in 1915, he found it necessary to “relax in some respects the somewhat rigid discipline” he found at the school.101 Martha Hill, who attended the school during this period, recalled how the approach to discipline changed when Turnell took over from Nelles Ashton, the previous principal: “Ashton—when he was there—he was cruel. When he gave you a licking he used the cat-o’-nine-tails [a multi-tailed whip]. Until Turnell went in—he took that out. All you could use was the strap, and he couldn’t hit you no place—only on the hands.”102
In 1918, without consulting the federal government, the New England Company dismissed the more lenient Turnell. Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott initially opposed the move, threatening to cut off the school’s funding unless the New England Company sent an official to Canada to discuss the matter with him.103 However, in July 1918, Turnell left. His replacement, a former school employee, complained that the “boys are out of hand as Mr. Turnell was not strict enough with them.”104
The rest of this chapter examines a series of discipline-related issues at residential schools from 1892 to 1939. They are a reminder that although corporal punishment was acceptable in Euro-Canadian schools, the degree and severity of punishment administered at Canadian residential schools for Aboriginal children were regularly viewed by government officials as being excessive. In some cases, the violations were so severe that they landed principals and staff members in court. In other cases, the government investigated and absolved the principals and schools of excessive behaviour.
The government’s response to discipline-related problems remained piecemeal, vague, and contradictory. The absence of any overall regulations, standards, or policies meant that government officials had to draw their conclusions about whether discipline had been excessive based on their own instincts and prejudices. Their judgment also would have been affected by the belief that decisions that favoured parents’ complaints would serve only to weaken the authority of the system. Disciplinary policies were clearly in the hands of the schools, despite the fact that the 1910 contract between the federal government and the churches provided the government with the authority to impose any regulations on the schools that it deemed necessary.
The contradictory nature of Indian Affairs policy is captured in its handling of two events from the 1920s. In 1922, Russell Ferrier, the Indian Affairs superintendent of Indian Education, described the disciplinary regime at the Chapleau school as “severe.”105 The following month, Indian Affairs instructed the principal, George Prewer, “Give careful and thoughtful attention to the discipline problem of the school and assiduously avoid any corporal punishment that could be considered by outsiders as pitiless.”106 In 1928, when commenting on the treatment of runaways from the Gordon’s Reserve school in Saskatchewan, the local Indian agent noted that all but three of the boys had been “punished corporally but whether severely enough to check them remains to be seen.”107 Principals, it would appear, were expected to be severe enough to stop children from running away, but could not be seen to be “pitiless.”
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has yet to locate a single, system-wide, directive on discipline that applies to this historical period. The churches and, more specifically, individual principals were left to develop their own policies. When these policies attracted unwanted attention, the government might step in and demand that the policy be changed or that the principal be dismissed. In many cases, the churches refused to comply with such instructions.
Indian Affairs sent Inspector A. J. Macrae to the Battleford school, in what is now Saskatchewan, in the spring of 1892 to investigate parental complaints about discipline at the school. Much to the principal’s displeasure, Macrae took control of discipline at the school. In the opinion of another Indian Affairs official, Alex McGibbon, Macrae actually increased the severity of discipline at the school. In a report from the fall of 1892, McGibbon wrote:
Locking a boy up in a cell, tying a girl’s hands behind her back as has been done here, not with the consent of the Principal, however, will neither redress faults, nor will they tend to develop good qualities. Making pupils stand for two hours along side of a fence as punishment has been the case here. Punishments like these are more calculated to bring contempt on a school than to accomplish any lasting good.
The boy locked in the cell by Macrae was Lazarus Charles. He later became ill and was sent home. Principal Thomas Clarke contended that Macrae’s punishment of the Charles boy contributed to his death from unreported causes in October 1892. In his defence, Macrae stated that the boy was confined only at night in “a well ventilated room about 14 feet by 16 feet” to prevent him from running away. The dispute quickly shifted from a discussion over whether students were being poorly treated to a dispute as to whether Macrae had exceeded his authority, and had been consistent in later descriptions of the events. In the end, Macrae was transferred and his responsibilities were reduced. His demotion was the result of his attempts to avoid responsibility for his actions, not his overly harsh disciplining of students.108 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has not located evidence of any further investigation into the cause of Lazarus Charles’s death.
On February 8, 1902, nine boys ran away from the Williams Lake, British Columbia, school shortly after lunch. A teacher chased after them, and later organized a search that returned eight of the boys to the school. The principal, Henry Boening, was not at the school at the time, but when he returned at 5:00 p.m., he was informed that the ninth boy, eight-year-old Duncan Sticks, was still missing. Boening later stated that he did not send out a search party because he expected that Sticks would find shelter under a haystack for the night. Boening did spend the night looking for four other boys who had run away in a separate incident that day. The following day, he sent a school staff member to a First Nations settlement “to see if he could get some Indians to go after the boy.”109 Later that day, a local man, Antonio Boitano, found Sticks frozen to death.110
The coroner initially opposed holding an investigation into the death, reportedly saying that “he thought the Government would not allow the expenses as he could see nothing to warrant an enquiry.”111 However, a local businessman named E. C. Gibson and a former teacher named Brophy lobbied for an inquiry. Brophy claimed to have kept a record of the mistreatment of students at the school. The local Indian Affairs representative, E. Bell, doubted its accuracy. He viewed Brophy, who had been fired for absence from the school, as untrustworthy.112 Bell gave this report of his investigation into why students were running away:
I examined the boys as to their reasons for running away from School and the only reason they gave me was “the teacher whips us.” I asked them if it was the Principal they said no asked if he whipped their head they said ‘no’ only on the legs. The teacher showed me his book where a record of all the chastisements the pupils get is kept and I must say they are slight indeed compared to the time I went to school. I asked the boys why they were whipped and the reply was “When we don’t have our lessons.” I have frequent letters from the parents of the boys who have been running away from this institution asking me to find out why the boys run off claiming they cannot do so from their children. My own opinion is there is no good reason for their absconding only the wild nature of the Indian hates confinement as they are well fed and cared for.113
In late February 1902, a coroner finally conducted an investigation. The inquiry heard from several students who complained about the food and the discipline at the school. Eleven-year-old Mary Sticks, sister of the boy who died, stated:
The sisters scold me all the time—they gave me bad food—the beef was rotten I couldent [sic] eat it—they kept it over and gave it to me next meal—they tied my hands and blindfolded me and gave me nothing to eat for a day. My hands were tied with a piece of rag behind my back. I saw them strike Ellen Batiste across the face with a strap and I afterwards saw a bandage on her face. I ran away from the school last fall and came home no one came after me from the school. I was brought back to the school by my father. I was never allowed to speak to my brother at the school, and dont [sic] know how he was treated.114
Christine Haines, who had been at the school for five years, told the coroner:
I ran away twice from the school because the sisters dident [sic] treat me good—they gave me rotten food to eat and punished me for not eating it—the meat and soup were rotten and tasted so bad they made the girls sick sometimes—I have been sick from eating it—they shut me up in a room by myself for 3 days and gave me bread and water—the room was cold and dark—they beat me with a strap, sometimes on the face, and sometime took my clothes off and beat me. This is the reason I ran away.115
Fifteen-year-old Ellen Charlie told the coroner she ran away “four times because the Sisters and the Fathers did not treat me good; they gave us bad food which was fit only for pigs, the meat was rotten, and had a bad smell and taste.” As punishment, she said, “they would sometimes lock me in a room and make me kneel down for half an hour or an hour. They once kept me locked up for a week—they gave me some work to do. They sometimes whipped me with a strap on the face and sometimes stripped me and whipped me.”116
Ellen Batiste, who had been a student at the school for nine years, stated that she had been whipped for talking to another girl. On that occasion, a sister “hit me with a strap on the head several times but did not hurt me very much.”117 Ten-year-old Francis, a boy who had run away with Sticks, said he had been horsewhipped by Principal Boening for throwing rocks at the school fence. He said that “the whip left blue marks on my legs, and my legs hurt me.”118 Another boy, twelve-year-old Louis, said he had run away a number of times in the past because “they whipped him all the time.” He said he was always whipped on the legs, never on the face or head.119 Augustine, another boy who had run away with Sticks, said he ran away because “the teacher whipped me with a strap on the legs for not knowing my lessons.”120
Duncan’s father, Johnny Sticks, told the inquest that his son had been at the school for three and a half years. He told the inquiry:
I was glad for him to be at the school. He ran away from the school about a year ago and was found on the road and brought to the Rancherie—he had two companions with him. He gave as his reason for running away that he did not get sufficient food and that they whipped him too much—he said he was beaten with a quirt [a riding whip]—he said the food was bad and he could not eat it, and he was allowed no other food until he had eaten it. He was sick when he arrived home and when he got better I brought him back to school—I made no complaint to the fathers at the Mission about his treatment.
Mr. Sticks had not been informed that his son had run away on February 8. If he had been told, he said, he would “have gone at once and hunted for him.”121
Joseph Fahey, a teacher at the school, said he had sometimes punished Sticks for not finishing his lessons, adding that he “never punished him severely—used a leather strap across the legs—seldom exceeded 6 blows.”122
Principal Boening had taken over the school less than a year earlier. In a statement prepared for the inquiry, he wrote that, for the last nine months, boys had been regularly running away from the school. He said that when he tried to find out why they were running away, the only reason they had given was the poor quality of the food. He said he had
never known the teacher punish [sic] the boys with undue severity or too frequently, and the strap which he uses I do not think too severe. I sometimes have occasion to administer corporal punishment to the boys myself for special faults, and I use a strap similar to that used by the teacher—I have used on perhaps 3 occasions a saddle whip or quirt to punish boys for immorality—I limit myself on these occasions to 8 10 or 12 blows across the back outside of the clothes on the seat, and on only one occasion have I punished several boys after taking off their coats and then used the ordinary strap.
He said the punishment of the girls was left to the discretion of the sister superior, but he knew of no unduly severe punishment being given to the girls.
I have never known of a girl being confined alone in a room for a week, or being whipped with a strap across the face, at least since my arrival, though I am aware of such a case occurring in the past. No child has ever been confined in a dark room since my arrival, though I have heard from others that cases of the kind have occurred in former times.123
The sister superior, Sister Euphresia, said:
The girls sometimes have to be whipped with a strap—generally on the back, sometimes on the hands, and on the occasion when Ellen Batiste was hit on the head, she raised her hands to her head and the blow took part effect on the head unintentionally—I found fault with the Sister on that occasion and I believe it has never occurred since. Sometimes girls are shut up in a room for serious faults for periods varying from a few hours to 10 to 12 days—this is the longest time—this latter has only happened once, they are fed on bread and tea, or water at breakfast when confined as above and get the ordinary school diet for their other meals. If a girl is whipped it is always done outside some of their clothes.124
Deputy Chief Little Pete told the inquest that although he had been glad when the school was established, he now felt that “ill treatment is the cause of the deceased running away and meeting his death.”125 The coroner’s jury concluded that Sticks died of “exposure and exhaustion from want of food and fire, after a long walk through deep snow.” The jurors also said the issue of discipline and food at the school should be addressed by an independent inquiry.126 No such independent inquiry was held, although the Indian superintendent for British Columba, A. W. Vowell, did interview several boys and girls at the school. He concluded that nothing he was told reflected “in any serious way upon the management.” What he was told was the following:
•One boy “was whipped on the legs with a strap by the teacher for not knowing his lessons.”
•One boy “ran away because the teacher whipped him on the legs.”
•Another boy “ran away because he was punished in like manner.”
•Another boy “ran away because he did not get enough food, and also because he was whipped on the legs.”
•Another boy “repeated what the last boy said.”
•One girl ran away because she had been “whipped at school for talking to another girl”—in the course of the whipping, which was meant to be administered to her hands, she held her hands close to her head and was hit on the head.
•“Other girls” said that they ran away because “they wanted freedom of restraint from the school discipline and wanted a chance to play with the boys.” (The superintendent described these as “foolish excuses.”)
Vowell wrote that he thought the older boys ran away because they thought they could get jobs and make money, and the younger students accompanied them, “wishing to appear brave.”
He also said that the former teacher, Bridger, was creating problems by making “the most serious charges against the Management.” He spoke with Christine Haines and Ellen Charlie, two of the girls who had testified at the inquest. They “both persisted in stating that the meat was bad in the soup and that at times the bread was like putty. Ellen Charlie said she was whipped sometimes for talking to and looking at the boys; whipped on her hands mostly, sometimes her clothes were turned up.” The superintendent added that Christine Haines and Ellen Charlie had been discharged from the school for “bad conduct.” The principal told him that, because a number of boys wet their beds at night, the principal had taken to refusing to allow them any water after the evening meal. The inspector told him this “was bordering on cruelty,” to which the principal replied that “in most cases they were not actually in need of a drink but took it out of mischief.”127
In the wake of the tragedy, Indian Affairs issued no policy recommendations—neither specifically to the school nor generally to all principals—that provided directions on food, punishment, or the policy to be pursued when students ran away. The complaints of former staff and students were discounted or dismissed. There was no question that students were subjected to corporal punishment, and that, at least on some occasions, this punishment was administered with a riding whip. Superintendent Vowell made no effort to determine if all other forms of discipline had been tested before the supposedly “last resort” of corporal punishment was administered.
In 1913, eleven-year-old Hazel Miller and her thirteen-year-old sister Ruth were confined to the school’s punishment cell after running away from the Mohawk Institute. There, they were also subjected to corporal punishment and had their hair cut short.128 Their father, acting through a law firm he had hired, asked for an investigation into conditions at the school. In making the request, his lawyers stated that
children are being punished from time to time in a shameful manner for trifling offences and that they are treated from time to time as though they were criminals. For instance, boys are whipped until they are cut, girls have had their hair cut off close to the scalp, and parents are not allowed to see their children if they (the children) happen to be under punishment at the time.129
Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott advised the Indian Affairs minister that there was no need for an investigation, since the father, George Miller, was a Baptist and was simply motivated by denominational jealousy against an Anglican-run school. Scott did acknowledge that the rules governing discipline at the school were “antiquated,” and that he had set in motion measures to improve them. He noted that the children were “whipped with a strap allowed by the Department of Education in Ontario.” At this point, Scott expressed his personal view: “I do not believe in striking Indian children from [sic] any consideration whatever. If children resident in the schools prove themselves continuously so untractable as to require physical punishment, they should be discharged from the school. This school is not a reformatory.”130
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has not found any evidence that Scott ever ordered the sort of ban on corporal punishment that would have been consistent with the views he expressed to the minister. Scott informed the parents’ lawyers that, while it might be necessary to make “minor improvements in discipline and dietary,” there was no need for an investigation. They were, he added, free to take the case to court.131 He advised the minister that, by taking this stand, “we will not hear very much more about the matter.” He was also concerned with saving face: holding an independent inquiry “would only be considered a triumph, first of these men personally, and second of their faction.”132
The suit proceeded, although the government attempted to frustrate its progress. The Six Nations council had offered to support the girls’ parents by making a $100 deposit with their law firm. Indian Affairs refused to allow this expenditure of band funds, deeming the case a “personal matter.”133 By this time, Scott had reviewed the school’s disciplinary code in detail, and concluded it was “too severe.” However, he felt, “this has been in use so long in the Mohawk Institute that it is difficult to change it.” The best he could report to the minister was, “As time goes on it will be possible perhaps to relax it.” In the same letter, he described the Mohawk Institute as “one of our best conducted schools.” These were words he might come to regret.134
The case went to trial in April 1914. According to the Brantford Expositor, Ruth Miller testified that she
had run away from the Institute because she did not like the food. When brought back she was put in the cell on the third floor, which was 3 feet by 6 feet, with a little hole in the door. There was no light, no bed and no chair. In this she remained for three days, getting bread and water on Sunday. Her hair was cut off on Monday. She was put on the black list, having to walk in a ring in place of playing, and not being allowed to talk to the other girls. She tried to get away a second time, but was caught. She got a birching the next day, receiving thirteen stripes on the bare back while laying face downwards on a bed, from Miss Weatherall. The latter had been told to give her 12, but she gave her 13. After that for a week and a half it was hard for her to sit down. She had never received such a whipping before for it was hard. Her back was black and blue and had red marks.135
Principal Nelles Ashton said that although the whip had been used in the past, upon his becoming principal, he had “ordered that the whip be prohibited to any officer.” He stated that he did instruct Weatherall to “whip” Ruth Miller but that he had not instructed her “how it was to be done.” Ashton maintained that Ruth had been punished with a strap. Weatherall had left the school and was living in Medicine Hat. As a result, she was not called to testify. Other students testified that the punishment had been administered with a strap, not a whip, and gave lower counts as to the number of blows that were inflicted.136
The court dismissed the claim for damages for cropping the girls’ hair and for providing them with poor food. However, the court awarded Ruth Miller’s father $100 in damages for the school’s imprisoning her for three days on a water diet and $300 for the physical punishment to which she had been subjected.137 Ashton, who had been principal since 1911, was replaced that year.138 On his departure, Indian Affairs official Martin Benson inspected the school and concluded that the pupils “are disciplined to death. What is needed at this school is an entire change of system, as the one inaugurated by Mr. Ashton has been too long in existence.”139 Although the next principal, C. M. Turnell, did relax discipline at the school, his time in office was only four years.140
In 1914, rumours were circulating in the Lake of the Woods area of northwestern Ontario that one of the students at the Presbyterian school at Shoal Lake had been so badly beaten that her death a short time later was due to humiliation.141 John Semmens, the Indian Affairs inspector (and the former principal of the Brandon school), investigated and concluded there was no truth to the rumour. He concluded that the girl in question had not been punished and her death was the result of measles. However, he wrote, “the Principal has resorted to corporal punishment at times and the children have reported this to their parents and dissatisfaction is the result and recruiting has been made difficult.” Semmens instructed the principal to use “other means of correcting the pupils.”142 Departmental secretary J. D. McLean agreed that the principal should “adopt other means of correcting pupils instead of resorting to corporal punishment, as the Indians are so prone to take offence.”143
In their correspondence, neither McLean nor Semmens made reference to any existing policy documents relating to discipline or the use—or banning—of corporal punishment. While it would appear that senior Indian Affairs officials such as Scott, Semmens, and McLean viewed corporal punishment as being self-defeating and unnecessary, no one was prepared to ban it. Three years later, an Indian Affairs inspector reported that at the school:
Quite a number of the children have run away, and have travelled through all sorts of hardships to reach their distant homes. When such things happen on an extensive scale, one begins to look about for some adequate cause, and careful enquiry showed that two reasons were given, first, too much hard work, and second frequent punishment. Information showed that boys were not treated with the same leniency which marked the treatment of the girls, and that when the Principal enforced discipline he displayed considerable temper possibly forgetting his own strength, without realizing the subjects of correction were only children after all.144
In August 1920, a First Nations man (identified by the Indian agent only as “a Canoe Creek Indian named Sam”) asked the Indian agent, Arthur O’N. Daunt, to discharge his son from the school at Williams Lake, British Columbia, because the disciplinarian was “much too free with his cane.” Daunt stated he would not normally have taken such a request very seriously, since “Indians are very much averse to any kind of restraint, and to put it mildly, not to be believed as a general thing when they complain about Schools or similar institutions, as they let their imaginations run riot, if they think that by so doing it will help them to gain what they happen to want at the moment.” However, in this case, the father reported that a school death that had been treated as an accident was, in fact, suicide. According to Sam, the level of discipline at the school had put several of the boys “in a very depressed state of mind.” Nine of them decided to try eating poison hemlock. One boy, Augustine Allan, told his friends “he would eat the hemlock first and that they should eat after him.” Allan died, and the others became very ill. The local coroner had decided not to hold an inquest into the death because, according to Daunt, “there was nothing suspicious about children eating a poison weed.” Daunt himself did not believe the death was the result of suicide, but noted that “anything of that sort will spread like wildfire among the Indians.”
It is apparent from Daunt’s letter that he believed the school administration would not co-operate with the government in any investigation into either the death or the alleged harshness of the disciplinarian. To get around such opposition, he suggested to the Indian Affairs departmental secretary in Ottawa that the department tell the school it wanted to carry out a medical examination of all the boys in the school.
By this means we should know whether boys were unduly flogged as claimed by the Indians, and if the examination were held for some other reason, such as to locate possible cases of Rupture etc, the School authorities would not be aware of what we were doing. Should the doctor find no trace of abuse, as I do not think he will, the matter can rest there, and we can ignore the complaint of the Indian.145
While the Indian agent was recommending that the department employ this ruse to find out what was actually going on in the school, the department was funding the bulk of the cost of the school and had the right, by contract, to inspect the schools whenever it wanted. That an Indian Affairs employee felt it necessary to propose the use of such a deception is a sign of the degree to which Indian Affairs had failed to assert control over the schools it was funding.
Rather than authorizing the surreptitious medical examination, Indian Affairs instructed Daunt to conduct an inquiry into complaints of “unduly severe punishment” at the Williams Lake school.146 By the time Daunt received this instruction, he thought the time to carry out a medical examination had passed, since many of the boys had gone home for their vacation. Also, he was not hopeful about the outcome of any further investigation, since the case would be reduced to “unconfirmed statements of Indian children, against the testimony of the church authorities, and to take action upon that will bring a religious hornets [sic] nest around the ears of the Department, unless the reverence in which missionaries are held in the East has undergone a great change since I lived there.”147 As a result, Daunt did not carry out the inquiry as instructed.
The issue was revived in late August when Paul Stanislaus, a member of the Canim Lake Reserve and the father of Augustine Allan, the boy who had poisoned himself with hemlock, requested that Daunt assist him in having another son discharged from the school. Stanislaus pointed out that after the death of Augustine, the school did “not send any notice to me to say that he died they wrote and say [sic] that he was going to burry [sic] him in the morning. You know how it is for a man not to see a boy of his before the body is put away.” He was asking for the discharge of his son Patrick because he feared he would kill himself as well.148 Daunt forwarded the letter to Ottawa, noting that “the Indians are not well satisfied with the conduct of the Missionary schools in this part of the country.”149
The inspector of Indian schools, R. H. Cairns, was instructed to investigate. In discharging this responsibility, Cairns never bothered to visit the Williams Lake school or speak with any of the children or parents. Instead, he met with John Duplanil, who had been in charge of the Williams Lake school at the time of Augustine Allan’s death. By then, Duplanil was the principal of the school at Mission, British Columbia. The interview took place at the Mission school. According to Duplanil, one of the students had called the Williams Lake disciplinarian, Brother Joseph, a “son of a bitch.” The disciplinarian was “naturally very angry to have an Indian boy use such an objectionable expression.” As a result, he used a rod that he was carrying to beat the boy. Cairns noted, “In doing this the Disciplinarian was breaking the rules of the school. He should have reported the matter to the principal.” The boy ran away from the school that night and was never brought back. Duplanil denied there was any connection between these events and that of the nine boys taking hemlock. According to Cairns, Duplanil “admitted that the Disciplinarian did wrong in taking the matter into his own hands.” He did not admit that the punishment was too severe, claiming it was a “serious offence.” Cairns did not think “any good purpose could be attained at this late date by an investigation. It would not be an easy matter to get the parties face to face.”150 He certainly had not tried to do that.
Among the documents it has reviewed, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has not located any direct and immediate report from the school to Indian Affairs that describes the death of Augustine Allan. Neither has the Commission been able to locate any document to indicate that Indian agent Daunt fulfilled his instruction to investigate the death. The one investigation that was carried out was limited to a conversation with the acting principal. No students or parents were questioned. There was no report of the school’s taking action against Brother Joseph for violating school regulations, and no indication of any effort on the government’s part to take action against the school for not enforcing government regulations. In fact, in all the government correspondence on the issue, Augustine Allan’s name is never used: it appears only in his father’s request that his brother be discharged. Indeed, it appears that the Indian Affairs office in Ottawa might never have been informed of this death of a child in one of its residential schools if a First Nations father—the “Canoe Creek Indian named Sam”—had not requested that his son be discharged from the school. In addition, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has not located any record of the government’s decision on either Sam’s or Paul Stanislaus’s heartfelt request for the discharge of their sons.
In 1920, the Anglican Church appointed S. H. Middleton, who had been principal of its school on the Blood Reserve near Cardston, Alberta, since 1911, to take over responsibility for the Anglican school on the Peigan Reserve near Brocket, Alberta. The move was made in response to ongoing problems in relations with the First Nations in the region. Canon S. Gould, the general secretary of the Anglican Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, said that when he visited the Peigan school several years earlier, he found that the previous church official in charge of the school had chained “two of the older boys … together as a punishment for desertion.” He hoped that Middleton would restore order.151 His expectations were not met. The following spring, sixty members of the Peigan Reserve petitioned for another change in administration at the school. The Anglican Indian Residential School Commission investigated and concluded that parents were keeping their children out of the school due to the “fear and dislike” of Middleton and his assistant principal generated by “the severity of methods they adopted in endeavouring to enforce what they called ‘discipline.’” Although the local Indian agent and Mounted Police officers initially had returned runaways to the school, they had stopped because that was not producing “lasting or satisfactory results.” The commission also discovered that bitter animosity existed between Principal Middleton and the local Indian agent, the local police officer, and the local Anglican missionary. The Anglican inquiry recommended that Middleton be replaced.152 Middleton gave up the position at the Peigan school in 1922. However, he remained principal of the school on the Blood Reserve until 1949.153
A second controversy at the schools in southern Alberta in this period involved P. H. Gentleman. When he was appointed principal of the Anglican school in Gleichen in southern Alberta in 1919, an allegation emerged that when Gentleman had previously worked at the Anglican school on the Peigan Reserve, he had shackled a runaway student to a bed and beat him with a horse quirt until his back bled.154 Gentleman denied that he had broken the boy’s skin. As to the allegations of using a whip and shackles, he wrote, “The whip and shackle was the same as Mr. Giggle [a previous principal] had left in the school and was I am told, often using, for far less serious offences than this.” The boy was being punished for having run away with the wagon and horses used for transporting water for the school from a local river, obliging the rest of the students to carry water. The offence, Gentleman felt, merited a severe punishment.155 Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham was upset that Gentleman, rather than being dismissed, had been transferred to a different school and given “a more important position.” In Graham’s mind, Gentleman was “the kind of man that will make trouble wherever he goes.”156 No action was taken against him at the time, and Gentleman retired from the Gleichen school in 1922.157
In November 1921, Margaret Jean Ramage, a travelling nurse employed by Indian Affairs, visited the Cluny, Alberta, Roman Catholic school to investigate parents’ complaints about conditions in the school that had led their children to run away. In the dining room, she found: “Four boys were in chains and chained to the benches. Later returned to the locked dining room to examine one of the girls who was reported marked badly by a strap. Several marks were found on her right lower limb. Five girls were in chains.”158
Alerted to the situation by Commissioner W. M. Graham,159 Duncan Campbell Scott informed the principal that “the Department of Indian Affairs will not countenance such corrective measures as chaining pupils to benches and corporal punishment that leaves a boy or girl marked. Treatment that might be considered pitiless or jail-like in character will not be permitted.” According to Scott, “The Indian children are wards of this Department and we exercise our right to ensure proper treatment whether they are resident in our schools or not.”160
In response, the principal said that students had been chained to their benches on only one occasion, and, due to the disapproval of the Indian agent, the practice would not be continued, even though “it had good result [sic] in bringing shame on the truants.” He also said he did not believe strapping fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boys or girls to be “pitiless treatment,” even if it left “the boy or the girl marked.”161 In a follow-up letter, Scott wrote:
I wish to intimate that the Department approves of corporal punishment, but we demand that it be of a certain type and within reason. In the near future a circular letter is being addressed to all principals, which will, I trust, clearly indicate the Department’s position and wishes concerning disciplinary methods.162
In its review of the documents released to it, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has not been able to locate a copy of the promised circular letter.
The appointment of a new principal to the Roman Catholic school in Kenora, Ontario, in 1921 led to a quick deterioration in relations among the school, the Indian agent, and local parents. In the fall of 1922, parents informed the agent, Frank Edwards, that Principal Hervé Kerbrat had frightened them when he visited their homes armed with a gun. They also complained that he carried a knotted bootlace that he used to strike children. When Edwards spoke to Kerbrat about the incident, the principal said he had not taken the gun to frighten the parents and “did not often use the boot-lace.”163 Kerbrat said the difficulties at the school were because the students were too old when they began school, they were on summer holidays for too long, and they had too much contact with their parents. Edwards said in his report that even though the parents complained about discipline, he thought the thrashings at the school had been limited but deserved. However, he told the principal to consult with him before thrashing students in the future. Part of the problem, Edwards felt, lay in the fact that the principal and all but one of the staff spoke very poor English. Relations between the school and the community were so poor that “the only way I can fill this school is by force.” By contrast, he said, parents were willing to send their children to the nearby Presbyterian school. The principal also refused Edwards’s invitation to meet with a band member who had complained at his office about the school. According to Edwards, Kerbrat “would not come with any Indian, he would not lower himself.”164
Despite this attitude towards the parents of the children he was teaching, Kerbrat was allowed to remain in office. Two years later, Minakijikok, of the Sabaskong Band, wrote to Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott, claiming that Kerbrat was punishing children by whipping, tying their hands and feet together, and locking them in the cupboard “and outhouse and four of them put in the cellar and kept there for 4 hours.” The matter had been raised with Edwards, but he had not done anything about it.165 According to Edwards, one student who “used to shut herself up in the dormitory toilet at night to vex the sister in charge” had been shut in the toilet for two hours with her hands and feet “loosely tied.” Kerbrat denied whipping children, but, because Edwards had recommended against corporal punishment, he had taken to locking students in the cellar with their hands tied for up to two hours as punishment. Edwards said he thought the principal, a war veteran who was suffering from “shell shock,” was doing his best, but needed to be replaced.166 Kerbrat remained on the job until February 1925.167 By then, the school was grappling with a murder-suicide: a hired man wounded a fellow hired worker, then shot and killed a priest, and finally killed himself.168
In 1924, Indian agent J. W. Waddy reported that he thought E. V. Bird, the principal of the Anglican school in The Pas, Manitoba, was “too severe in punishing the children at that place.” Waddy wrote that parents had brought their fifteen-year-old son into his office to show the treatment he had received at the school. According to Waddy, “He was black from his neck to his buttocks where he had been strapped.” The boy had refused to work because his hands were blistered from handling a hay fork. For refusing, Waddy said, the boy was “trimmed.” He fought back and, for this, was strapped. During the strapping, he said, the principal lost his temper.169 Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham recommended to Deputy Minister Scott that the principal be discharged, since “he is not fit to have charge of Indian children.”170 The assistant superintendent general, J. D. McLean, wrote to T. B. R. Westgate of the Anglican Church about the incident, saying he concurred with Graham’s recommendation.171 A frustrated Commissioner Graham wrote, “The Inspectors feel that where the churches are concerned there is practically no use in sending an adverse report, as the Department will listen to excuses from the incompetent Principals of the schools more readily than to a report from our Inspectors based on facts as they find them.”172
In this case, Graham’s prediction was borne out by the facts. The church conducted its own investigation and concluded that the boy had been defiant, and that the punishment was deserved, was not as severe as described by the Indian agent, and had led to an improvement in the boy’s behaviour.173 The principal remained in his position, and McLean assured Waddy that the principal “will exercise care in maintaining discipline in the future.”174
For his part, Waddy stated that he stood by his report. He said, “Mr. Bird is all right in other respects but when he gets an unruly pupil he seems to lose control of himself, and if my report does nothing else than make him careful in the control of his temper it will be enough.”175
It was not. The following year, Waddy was once more writing to Graham about the same principal. This time, he said a man had informed him that a boy who ran away from the school had been so badly beaten, he “was welted all around one leg, black and blue.” Waddy’s informant said that if the government did not take action, he would take up “the matter with the S.P.C.A. like he would if a dog was abused.” He also warned, “One of these times a pupil will starve to death in the bush after running away from school.”176 The chief of The Pas Band, P. Constant, wrote to Graham about the case. He said the boy ran away after being flogged. His parents returned him to the school, where he was flogged once more and locked up. He escaped that night, “almost naked and bare footed. There are some white men and some Indians who saw the boy in the state he was in after his flogging, in fact, we were afraid that he would probably die some where as those who saw him say that he was nearly out of his mind.”177
Graham once more recommended that Bird be fired.178 On behalf of the Anglican Church, Westgate visited the school. Westgate questioned the veracity of the evidence of the man who had originally found the boy, pointing out that he was “a Frenchman and a member of the Roman Catholic Church.” On encountering the boy at the school, he concluded that he was “so rugged and healthy that I did not consider any physical examination necessary.” After speaking to the principal and the staff, he concluded that “the punishment administered was neither abusive nor unduly severe, but barely what would be expected under the circumstances.”179 Graham continued to call for the principal’s dismissal, pointing out that the church investigation had not consulted the people who found the boy and reported his condition.180 In late 1926, an unnamed boy who ran away from the school died of exposure.181 The following year, Bird was serving as the principal of a day school in Saskatchewan.182
On the morning of January 9, 1928, a long-simmering conflict between Edwin Smith, the school gardener at the Roman Catholic school in Cardston, Alberta, and seventeen-year-old Albert Many Fingers erupted in violence. During the winters, Smith assisted the boiler operator and the school disciplinarian. According to Smith, he and Many Fingers initially came into conflict because the boy spent a considerable amount of time flirting with the female students working in the kitchen, laundry, and bakery, all of which were located near the boiler room. Smith told Many Fingers to stop this behaviour. Instead, the boy was defiant, at times insulting Smith in such a way that, according to Smith, “no white man would take from another; not speaking of an Indian.” According to Smith, Many Fingers also told a student of his intent to fight Smith. Smith took his complaints to the principal, E. Ruaux, who said it would only increase the boy’s contempt for Smith if the principal strapped him on Smith’s request. Having taken all he could stand, on January 9, Smith told Many Fingers to stay behind when the other students went to breakfast. In his own words, Smith told Many Fingers that “since he thought himself a better man than I, the time has arrived to show it. He was given the same chance that I had myself. I hit him a few times and the result was a bleeding nose. When I saw that he was making no attempt at striking back, I quit.”183
Many Fingers ran away and complained to his parents, who wanted to launch a prosecution. The local Indian agent, J. E. Pugh, first became aware of the incident when the principal informed him that Many Fingers had run away. However, it was not until Many Fingers’s father approached him about laying charges against Smith that Pugh found out about the assault. When Pugh went to the school, Smith was absent on leave. The principal confirmed that Smith had challenged Many Fingers to fight and had bloodied his nose. Pugh wrote, “While dealing with the matter, I stated that the Department, as far as I knew, would not countenance the striking of a boy by fists, and stated that I thought the proper method should be by the use of a regulation strap.” In future cases, he expected that any school employee who struck a student would be dismissed.184 Pugh informed Duncan Campbell Scott of the affair, saying he hoped to keep the matter out of the courts and noting that the family was still seeking a prosecution.185 Scott agreed it would be best to avoid any publicity, but recommended that Smith be fired.186
Principal Ruaux, however, chose to support his staff. He accused Pugh of taking the family’s side because the school was Roman Catholic. He said the Indian agent had no business involving himself in anything other than the physical operation of the school.187 Scott supported Pugh, saying that in light of the “unwarranted assault” on the student and the principal’s unwillingness to dismiss Smith, Pugh should not take any steps to stop the family from having a charge laid.188 The Mounted Police officer who conducted the investigation noted that Smith made a “futile attempt to justify his activities by saying that this was the only way to enforce obedience, which is obviously ridiculous.”189 The case went to trial on February 25, 1928, and, based on the evidence, including Smith’s testimony that he had challenged Many Fingers to a fight, police magistrate J. W. Low convicted Smith of assault. In his decision, he said, “I think that the accused stepped outside the bounds of his official position, when he invited Albert Many Fingers to fight. This in my opinion was not discipline.” Smith was given the choice of paying a $10 fine or spending ten days in jail.190
Instead, he successfully appealed the verdict. In overturning the conviction, Judge A. M. MacDonald recast the key facts of the incident. Whereas all the evidence to this point, including a written statement from Smith, showed that Smith had challenged Many Fingers to a fight, in MacDonald’s version of events, Smith told Many Fingers that he had been disobedient in the past and was still disobedient—even though none of the evidence reported from the original trial indicated that Many Fingers had been disobedient on the morning of the fight—and he was going to be punished. “Other words then passed between them and Many Fingers, seeing that he was about to be punished, assumed a fighting attitude with closed fists. Upon his so doing Smith struck him three rapid blows about the face and head with his fists, causing his nose to bleed.”
MacDonald transformed the whole affair back into a matter of discipline, adding that Smith had the right to punish any pupil for violating school rules. In determining whether the force was reasonable or not, MacDonald quoted the testimony of the Reverend William R. Hanes, whom he described as having “considerable experience in the management of Indian Schools.” Hanes had testified that if a student had ever attempted to fight with him, he would “knock him down and then take him to the principal.” In reaching this decision, the judge made no effort to determine if the school had a discipline policy or whether Smith’s actions were consistent with the policy.191 On reading the decision, Deputy Minister Scott wrote to the head of the Oblate order in Alberta, saying he was still opposed to the form of punishment that had been carried out and might still be requesting that Smith be dismissed.192
Relations between Ruaux, the principal, and Pugh, the Indian agent, remained tense. Late in 1928, when a father returned his runaway son to the school, he asked that he not be whipped. The principal told him he would do so unless the Indian agent prohibited the punishment. Pugh complained to Ottawa that it was not fair for the principal to burden him with the decision, adding he preferred to “deal with the Indians strictly according to the Act.”193
Six years later, complaints were raised once more about Father Ruaux’s treatment of another boy at the school, Willie Big Head. In the principal’s opinion, Big Head was a troublemaker whose inability to control his temper was bound to land him in trouble. One day in 1934, when the boys were leaving the school chapel, Ruaux noticed that Big Head had his hands in his pockets. A letter from the Oblate headquarters in Ottawa, defending Ruaux’s actions, gives the following account of what happened next when the principal asked Willie to take his hands out of his pockets.
The boy answered in a mumbling way which the principal did not understand. The Principal repeated the order. Same mumbling. The father left the chapel with the boy and asked him four times: “Have you anything to say?” No answer. A fifth question—the same—was asked. No answer but then the boy took the Principal by the wrist. The Principal took hold of the boy’s hand and held his thumb. Scuffling followed. Kindly note that boys and girls had stopped and were watching the scene. The principal seeing that it was time to act if he did not want to lose authority and escape a black eye (his own words) put his hand in the hair of the boy (not pulling) who covered his face with his arms. The father then struck his arms 3 or 4 times with his fist, not touching directly his face or head. Then he left him, the boy being apparently subdued. But the father noticing that he was nose bleeding [sic] sent him to wash his face and told him to behave in the future. Then, through the advice of one of the chiefs’ (Edward Red Crow) adopted son (a bastard and a sneak father called him) Willie jumped from a window five feet from the floor (showing that after all his supposed injured arm was not too bad) and ran to his home.
Indian agent Pugh was informed of the event and had Big Head examined by a doctor. According to the principal’s unnamed Oblate defender, the doctor “could not say that the nose was broken,” and, within a few days, the “black around the eyes had disappeared.” A police investigation did not lead to charges being laid, but the principal believed that the Indian agent, acting on anti-Catholic bias, had met with the local chiefs to agitate for the appointment of a new school principal. In complaining about this action to his superiors, Ruaux asked, “What business do they [the chiefs] have in the government of his school?”194 In his report on the matter, the Indian agent said the chief and council had come to him to request the principal’s dismissal, noting that the boy’s father was so angry that he did not trust himself to speak to the principal.195 In May, Indian Affairs Deputy Minister Harold McGill instructed Pugh to inform the chief and council that “this matter had been taken up with the Church authorities, and I feel assured that a similar difficulty will not again occur at the Blood School.” He went on, “As intimated in my letter of March 28th, last, I feel that it would be in the best interests of all parties concerned to allow the matter to drop.”196 The government had the authority both to request and to enforce the dismissal of any staff member, and made use of this authority in other situations. In this case, it chose not to do so, even though it was apparent to government officials that Ruaux engaged in, and encouraged, the excessive disciplining of students.
In 1931, Principal William Shoup at Norway House, Manitoba, was prosecuted for common assault. According to the Mounted Police record of the case, Shoup was alleged to have struck a student, who, he thought, was being impudent, in the head with his fist. Two other students said the principal then knocked the student down, “kicked him and then dragged him across the floor to another room and strapped him.” The principal stated that after chastising the boy for his impudence, he had “caught hold of this boy by the collar and threw him across the room where he fell.” He denied striking or kicking the boy, but acknowledged that when “the boy would not get up he had dragged him to another room where he had administered a strapping.” The officer in charge of the Norway House detachment, D. C. Saul, wrote, “The accused took over as principal of the School last summer and different stories regarding his harshness to the pupils have been brought to my notice, this being the first one that action was taken on.” The principal was acquitted of assault, but with a warning “to punish only with the strap.” Officer Saul concluded his report by noting, “Assuming that the boy deserved a strapping for his impudence, I do not think that it warranted the abuse he received.”197
The punishment of three girls who ran away from the Blue Quills, Alberta, school in either late 1931 or early 1932 almost led to the dismissal of that school principal. In his report for January 1932, Indian agent W. E. Gullion reported that there was a good deal of truancy at the school.198 A few weeks later, Blue Quills principal Joseph Angin reported that the father of one of the runaways had refused to return his daughter to the school and had been encouraged in this behaviour by the Saddle Lake chief. Angin requested that Gullion depose the chief.199 In March 1932, Duncan Campbell Scott wrote to the head of the Oblate Fathers Provincial House in Edmonton, informing Father U. Langlois that
I have learned, from a most reliable source, that the Reverend Joseph Angin, O.M.I., Principal of the Blue Quills Indian Residential School, has lost the confidence of a great number of the Indians in the vicinity, and I have information which leads me to believe that he is certainly not the right type for our work. In the interests of the Oblate Order, itself, and of the School, the Department does not wish to go into the details or to have any formal investigation, but I write to ask you to remove him at once and to appoint a suitable new principal in his place.
If this was not done, he said, the government would have to consider closing the school. He concluded by noting that the information on which the government was basing this decision had come to light only a few weeks earlier.200 In a letter to Langlois, Russell Ferrier, the superintendent of Indian Affairs, wrote, “There is nothing against the moral character of Father Angin at all. His method of dealing with Indians is clearly unfortunate, and, if given publicity by an investigation, might be undesirable in his case, to say the least.”
One of the government’s concerns in these issues was that it not be seen to be yielding to First Nations criticism. However, since there had been “no recent difficulties,” Ferrier did not “believe it would be subversive of discipline on the reserve if Father Angin left quietly. The Indians could not feel that they have won any ‘Victory’, as they have not recently sent in any formal complaints.”201
Langlois reasonably protested that he could not remove Angin without being provided with the details of the complaints against him.202 Ferrier arranged to have Mounted Police Constable English meet with Langlois in Edmonton to provide “personal information in connection with one incident in the old school last fall.”203 It was eventually revealed that there were three complaints levelled against the principal. The first was that two female students were punished with a rawhide quirt. For the punishment, it was alleged, they had been forced to lie on their stomachs, with their otherwise bare bottoms covered with a sheet. Supposedly, a police officer and two other individuals, including the son of W. E. Gullion, the local Indian agent, were also in the room. In the second incident, it was alleged that one of these girls and another girl had been locked in an outside toilet as a punishment for running away. It was claimed that they escaped through the toilet holes and made their way home. Finally, it was charged that the girls had been “corrected by the Sisters when they had menstruation.”
The school officials rejected the allegations. According to the school’s mother superior and the two school disciplinarians, the two girls—who were being punished after their third attempt at running away from the school—were wearing their nightgowns when the principal used the quirt to discipline them. They were standing up and had freedom of movement. They also said that the punishment took place not only in the presence of a local constable, but also of all the girls (but not Gullion’s son, who, they said, was outside in a car). They stated that although one girl wept, neither screamed, which, they said, “proves that the correction was not very hard.” In the second case, the nuns maintained that although the two girls did run away from the toilets, they had not been locked in, and that they had escaped through windows. The nuns also denied punishing the girls for having their menstrual period.204
In the end, Indian Affairs backed down and Angin remained as principal. The incident resulted in strained relations between him and Indian agent Gullion.205 Problems at the school continued. In the fall of 1933, T. H. Tuck, the school disciplinarian, complained he had “nearly all the biggest boys against me, owing to the fact that they say I handle them too roughly.” Tuck acknowledged he was “very quick-tempered & have at different times got after them perhaps a little too severely.” He also said that, at times, he had had trouble with the nuns “giving scandal in front of the children which I know was a wrong thing to do.” He said that after the return to school that fall, there had been two or more runaways every eight days. When eight boys left on one night, Angin threatened to fire Tuck. In his defence, Tuck argued that, when hired, he had been told the school was looking for “somebody who would discipline these boys.”206
Tuck’s temper was still creating problems in 1935, as evidenced by Langlois’s comment in a letter to the superior general of the Grey Nuns: “As far as Mr. Tuck is concerned, he has been properly warned, and I hope these outbursts of anger he has given in to will not recur.”207
In 1939, Chief Moses of the Saddle Lake Reserve complained to the school that Tuck was “not fit for the position he holds. He has a bad temper and in fits of anger he abuses the boys.”208 The school’s response was that although Tuck should not have struck the boys, he had promised not to do so again, “provided the big boys do not raise their hands to threaten him.”209 In 1941, Tuck left the Blue Quills school to take a position at the Fraser Lake school in British Columbia.210 He apparently ran into trouble there as well, and efforts were made to send him to the school at Mission. The principal of that school turned down the offer: “Regarding Mr. Tuck I confess frankly that I know him well, having made my novitiate with him [having trained with him] and I do not think that he is the right man for the job here.”211
In the spring of 1934, $53.44 was stolen from a locked drawer in a cabinet in the office of the mother superior of the Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, school. Chocolate boxes taken from another locked drawer were scattered.212 The sister who discovered the theft made some inquiries and located one boy who admitted to taking $2 from the drawer. She took her findings to Principal J. P. Mackey.213 The principal called both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the institute’s carpenter. Inquiries at village stores revealed that a number of boys had been purchasing cake, candy, tobacco, knives, and chewing gum. Some of these items turned up in a search of the beds and the toilet room.214 Several boys were questioned: some admitted involvement in the theft; some denied it. Eight of them, including some who denied involvement, were punished that day. They were thrashed on their bare backs with a seven-thonged strap that was specially made by the school carpenter.215 After a few more days of investigation, eleven more boys were thrashed and had their hair clipped. Most were put on a bread-and-water diet for two days.216 Most of the strapping was done by Edward McLeod, the carpenter, because Mackey was ill. McLeod later said that he gave most of the boys five strokes of the strap, which, he said, was intended to sting but not bruise.217 The local RCMP official, L. Thurston, was present for the initial round of punishment, and said he did not see any blood.218
The story was reported in the local papers. When alarmed parents showed up at the school, Mackey prevented them from seeing their children because he “did not think it prudent they should see the children and talk the matter among them.”219 Sufficient public attention was devoted to the matter that the federal government appointed L. A. Audette, a retired judge of the Exchequer Court of Canada, to conduct an inquiry into the event. He held two days of hearings in June 1934, two and a half months after the boys were thrashed.
On the first day of the hearing, Dr. Daniel McInnes examined ten of the boys. In the case of one boy, he said he discovered “noticeable linear marks, of about the width of a lead pencil, three or four inches long, on the right side of the abdomen. I think the skin would necessarily be broken to cause these marks and are liable to be permanent scars.” He said they could have been produced by the strap used to thrash the boys. All but one of the other boys had marks. In two cases, he said it appeared that the skin had been cut.220
All nineteen boys testified. Some admitted to stealing the money, and others admitted to having been given money, or goods that had been purchased with money they knew to be stolen. Some, including Leonard Tennass, Joseph Toney, Edward Socobie, Ben Bernard, Jack Stephens, Peter Lafford, and Edward Poulette, said they had been thrashed until they bled.221 In his testimony, Mackey said that the boys did not complain at the time, although one of the younger boys, who received two strokes of the strap, cried. He said he was not aware of any blood on the strap. He also denied rumours that the strap had been soaked in vinegar.222
In his report, Judge Audette wrote that “punishment must be measured according to the gravity of the offence and not overlooking the complex intelligence of these boys who have all been brought up in the life of Indians.”223 Since “all human governments rest in the last resort upon physical paid [sic],” it was well for the students to “realize through experience this ineluctable fact.”224 The thrashing was, in short, not only a punishment, but also a ‘benefit,’ an education into the foundations of civilization.
Audette pointed out that the Criminal Code allowed for the use of force in the correction of a child, “provided such force is reasonable under the circumstances.” To him, the strap “or what it represents, is an absolute necessity in a school.”225
The judge suggested that being strapped was simply a rite of passage. He asked, “Where is the man who in his boyhood has gone to a school and managed to get through without having a taste of the strap? If he did he must have been a true saint or a clever hypocrite who has been able to deceive his teachers.”226 More significantly, he made the point that the principal and school could not afford to look weak in the eyes of the students: “A weak punishment to these Indian pupils would have had no effect, would have been turned into derision and they would have laughed at it.”227
Judge Audette said that a firm, determined exercise of authority was required, since “Indians, in terms of civilization, are children, having human minds just emerging from barbarism.” A few lines later, however, Audette argued, “If strap, cane and birch are used in the white man’s schools, as a fair human expedient, why can it not be resorted to with the Indians?”228 As to the marks the strapping had left on the backs of some students, Audette wrote that “flesh differs. Some skin or flesh has more or less resistance than others. Some skin will take imprints much easier than others. That is well known. For instance, Toney and Tennass received the same number of strokes and delivered by the same person, McLeod, yet one showed marks and the other did not.” In short, if the boys were injured, the fault lay with them and their thin skin, not with the person who was inflicting the punishment.229
Judge Audette provided the principal with a complete exoneration:
Far from finding fault with the Principal of the School for what he has done, he should be commended and congratulated for carefully investigating the conduct of his pupils and finding all the culprits and punishing them in a commensurate manner. How could order, discipline and good behavior be maintained in the School if he were to have acted otherwise than he did?230
No mention is made of the fact that there was good reason to believe that Mackey punished the innocent with the guilty. In addition, Audette made no effort to determine if there were any rules to guide the principal in how students were to be disciplined or if those rules had been transgressed.
Audette’s report was not the end of the issue. According to former student Isabelle Knockwood, in her memoir of life at Shubenacadie, in the fall of 1934, a secret band council meeting was convened at the request of her father, John Knockwood. The men at the meeting were so dissatisfied with Audette’s report that they agreed to assassinate Father Mackey. But, after further discussion, and weighing the potential impact on the students at the school, the decision was abandoned.231
In 1936, two boys ran away from the Presbyterian school in Kenora. Upon being returned to the school by the Mounted Police, they claimed they ran away because they had been thrashed by the principal for insolence. In their efforts to get home, they hopped a moving train and rode it for ninety-seven kilometres. The mother of one of the boys asked that the boy be allowed to attend a local day school. The other boy said he would prefer to attend “some other Indian school.”232 The events surrounding the return of the boys sparked a protest from the school principal, E. B. Byers. He was not at the school when Mounted Police Constable E. Stanley and Indian agent Frank Edwards returned the boys, but staff members had informed him that these officials had taken the boys’ side in the affair. According to Byers, “The policeman and also the agent put various members of the staff on the carpet and in the presence of the boys and the mother began to question actions of the staff.” The police officer was reported as saying “that when he was twelve years of age if he had been kept in as one of these boys had been, he would have gone farther away than the boys did.” The agent reportedly told the boys they would not be punished and they should write to him if they wished to be transferred to another school. The whole process, he felt, left the boys and their mother, who was present at the time, with the sense that the “boys were quite justified and that if there were any blame that it could only be placed on the staff.” Byers said, “Never at any time has any pupil been unduly strapped,” but felt that corporal punishment was necessary at times. He said that after the Indian agent left, the boys told the supervisor she could not punish them anymore. Byers said the agent and the police officer had effectively undermined discipline at the school, concluding that “Indian children must be dealt with firmly, and if they once conceive the idea that the staff has no authority over them, then the discipline will get out of hand completely.”233
Indian Affairs inspector A. G. Hamilton was asked to investigate the principal’s complaints. By the time he arrived at the school, tempers had cooled and positive relations had been restored between the principal and Constable Stanley. Byers and the Indian agent, Edwards, remained at odds: in Hamilton’s opinion, both men were harbouring grievances against one another “that should have been forgotten years ago.” Notably, no inquiry was ever held into whether overly harsh discipline was responsible for the boys’ running away.234 Edwards was, however, instructed by his superiors at Indian Affairs, “The principal is in the best position to decide what disciplinary measures are required.” The ability of Indian Affairs field staff to monitor school discipline was, once more, effectively undermined by department officials.235
In 1937, a Toronto lawyer, H. H. Craig, wrote to Mohawk Institute principal H. A. Snell on behalf of a parent who complained that a teacher, Cyril Lager, had taken her son into a henhouse, where he proceeded to “flay him with a belt.” As a result, according to Craig, the boy was covered with bruises.236 In a letter to Indian Affairs, Snell said he had investigated the matter and concluded that the boy was struck on each hand three times with a “light strap.” None of the boys “had any knowledge of how the boy had received the bruises that his aunt found on his arms.”237 In a letter to Craig, however, he said the boy had been hit four times on each hand.238 Indian Affairs was concerned by the aggressive tone Snell adopted in his correspondence with Craig, and by the facts of the case. The Indian Affairs superintendent of Welfare and Training, R. A. Hoey, wrote to Snell, asking if it was usual, as Snell had said in his letter to Craig, that a number of boys had witnessed the strapping. He also asked for a statement from Lager.239 In that statement, Lager wrote he had strapped the boy four times on each hand for throwing stones at a five-year-old boy. Although, in his correspondence, the principal said the boy was not reliable, Lager said that, until this event, the boy “has given little trouble.”240
In response to questions from Hoey, Snell said that although it was not common for staff to punish students in the presence of other students, that did happen.241 Hoey’s response is intriguing for what it reveals about the lack of policy governing discipline at the school. Hoey wrote, “I am, personally, of the opinion that corporal punishment should only be administered by a member of the staff, in the presence of the Principal.” This, he said, was the practice in the “larger schools in Western Canada.” He said he had just learned that a “circular making provision for this was sent out to the principals of all residential schools a few years ago. I am enclosing herewith a copy of this resolution for your information and guidance.” The letter concluded with the following postscript: “I am unable, at the moment, to discover the circular to which I refer, but I shall be glad to send it forward just as soon as it is recovered.”242 Given the vagueness of Hoey’s statement, it is not possible to determine the specific year that such a circular was sent out. In its review of the documents released to it, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has not been able to locate any system-wide circular on discipline issued prior to 1940.
In his letter to the family’s lawyer, Hoey said he believed no serious injury could have been inflicted by the light belt with which the boy had been strapped, and asked if the reports of the boy’s injuries had been exaggerated. In any event, he had no intention of carrying out a special investigation into the case. Perhaps embarrassed by the lack of regulation regarding discipline, Hoey, who had begun to work for Indian Affairs only the year before, added:
There are few laws or regulations governing the administration of Indian residential schools, for the simple reason that these schools, without exception, are conducted in cooperation with the churches, with clergymen in charge. The clergymen who undertake this work are missionaries in a very real sense and, consequently, very much devoted to the care and guardianship of their pupils.
It is a weak rationale, applied after the fact, to mask the reality that the government had established and was funding a school system for which it refused to provide the appropriate level of policy direction. Hoey went on, “I have been assured that the complaint registered with you on behalf of this boy is the only complaint that has reached the Department in the memory of the officials.”243
In 1938, Chief Ed Poor Man and Head Man Jim Worm asked for the discharge of three children from the Poor Man Reserve who were attending the Gordon’s Reserve school in Saskatchewan. In their letter, the men complained that the “children are running away twice from the School ever since they had holidays, and they are getting bread and water for 2 weeks for punishment.” It was not, they said, “fair how these kids are treated.”244 Principal R. W. Frayling gave a similar account of how he treated the runaways. “I strapped them once, put them on Bread and Water and had their hair cut short, which is only done for truancy.” After that, he said, he confined them in the infirmary.245 After reviewing the matter, Thomas Robertson, the inspector of Indian agencies for Saskatchewan, concluded that the punishment was not “unreasonable [sic] severe.”246 Indian Affairs departmental secretary T. R. L. MacInnes did advise the principal that “while it is doubtful” that cutting the girls’ hair “constitutes assault in a legal sense at the same time it is felt that you should adopt some other method of enforcing discipline.”247 Once again, the department ignored the opportunity to provide a clear, system-wide directive on a disciplinary matter. The issue recurred the following year at the Chapleau school. There, Principal A. J. Vale reported to Indian Affairs, “The three girls who got on the train have run away before and were punished by having their hair clipped short. It does not appear to have been effective. They were also severely strapped and will be again when they return.”248
The schools would continue to cut hair as a punishment, parents would complain, and the government would continue not to take a clear stand.
In the period of time stretching from Confederation to the outbreak of the Second World War, it would appear that when it came to discipline in residential schools, Indian Affairs officials had learned nothing and—if R. A. Hoey’s letter of 1937 is to be taken seriously—they had remembered nothing. Policy statements were promised on several occasions, but there is no evidence that such promises were kept. If the policies actually were produced and circulated, they appear to have had little impact. In judging the residential school disciplinary regime to have been harsh and often abusive, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada is not applying the standards of the present to the past. As early as 1913, Indian Affairs Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott had written that he did not believe in “striking Indian children,” and that children who could not be controlled should be discharged. Government officials could conceive of, and even endorse, a less punitive approach to discipline. But Scott and his successors never made these beliefs the foundation of government policy.249 As a result, the schools came to resemble reformatories, the staff member’s life was the life of a jail keeper, and harsh discipline remained as an underlying cause of the schools’ ongoing problems with runaways and recruitment.
Girls ironing at the Coqualeetza Institute in British Columbia.
United Church of Canada Archives, 93-049P418N.
Girls sewing at the Williams Lake, British Columbia, school.
Museum of the Cariboo Chilcotin.
Young boys at work at the Mount Elgin school in Muncey, Ontario.
United Church of Canada Archives, P75-103-S4-505
The carpenter’s shop at the Battleford, Saskatchewan, school, 1894.
Saskatchewan Archives Board, R-B7.
Farming at the Elkhorn, Manitoba, school.
General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, P7538-455.
Working in the fields at the school in Lesser Slave Lake, Alberta.
General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, P7538-732.
The Battleford, Saskatchewan, school cricket team in 1895.
Canada, Department of Indian Affairs, Library and Archives Canada, PA-182265.
Girls’ exercise class at the Hay River, Northwest Territories, school.
General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, P7501-49.
The cast of the play Isle of Jewels at the Coqualeetza Institute, British Columbia.
United Church of Canada Archives, 93-049P424N.
The Kuper Island, British Columbia, school’s marching band.
British Columbia Archives, D-05991.
The Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, school’s brass band.
Canada, Department of Mines and Technical Surveys, Library and Archives Canada, PA-023091.
Girl Guides at the Dawson City hostel in the Yukon Territories.
General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, P75-103-S8-265.
First Nations recruits, 191st Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, Fort Macleod, Alberta. Mike Mountain Horse is in the back row on the right.
Glenbow Museum, NA-2164-1.
Dr. Peter Bryce, Indian Affairs’ chief medical officer, recommended that Canada’s residential schools be turned into sanatoria and placed under his administration.
Library and Archives Canada, Topley Studio, a042966.
Blackfoot leader White Pup told Indian agent Magnus Begg in April 1895, “When children are taken sick at Industrial Schools, they should be sent home so that their parents could look after them, and not be kept until they are ready to die.”
Glenbow Museum, NA-1773-24.
A “sick room” at the Edmonton, Alberta, school.
United Church Archives, 93.049P870N.
The Anglican hospital on the Blackfoot Reserve in Alberta was the scene of ongoing conflict between Indian Affairs’ medical officer Dr. James Lafferty and local residential school principal H. W. Gibbon Stocken.
Glenbow Museum, NA-3322-4.
Nineteen boys, aged seven to twelve, and the supervising nun died in the 1927 fire that destroyed the Beauval, Saskatchewan, school.
Deschâtelets Archives.
Fires could spread quickly through wood-frame buildings that had little in the way of fire protection. Pictured at the top is the 1913 fire that destroyed the Norway House, Manitoba, school. Below is the 1939 fire that destroyed the Fort Albany, Ontario; school.
Glenbow Museum; NA-2749-24; Deschâtelets Archive.
Cows at the Fraser Lake, British Columbia, school. In 1923, in his inspection report on the brand-new school at Fraser Lake, R. H. Cairns noted, “There is really not enough milk for the children. This school should have more cows than it has at present.”
Deschâtelets Archives.
The Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, school lunchroom. Qu’Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard wrote in 1891 that “the present ration scale may be good for children but is not suitable for the majority of our pupils, one third of whom eat more than men and women and another third eat fully as much. I have seen them at the end of a meal come to complain that they had not enough to eat and upon inquiry have found that it was never without good reason.”
St. Boniface Historical Society Archives, Oblates of Mary Immaculate, SHSB 23107.
Boys at the Lac La Ronge, Saskatchewan, school.
General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, P7538–229.
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.”
United Church of Canada Archives, 93–049P1162.
Girls at the Anglican school in Brocket, Alberta. It was common for schools to ensure that students had a good suit of clothing to wear when they appeared in public.
General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada, P7538–1053.
Students at the Fort Providence, Northwest Territories, school. In 1938, the churches were asking the federal government to take over responsibility for clothing students.
F. H. Kitto, Canada, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, Library and Archives Canada, PA–101545.
The Anglican school on the Blackfoot Reserve, Alberta.
Glenbow Museum, NC-5-1.
Grey Nuns, students, and Father Joseph Hugonnard, principal of the Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, school, centre.
Library and Archives Canada, C-033259.
Staff and students at the Beauval, Saskatchewan, school.
Deschâtelets Archives.
H. W. Gibbon Stocken served as the principal of a number of Anglican boarding schools in what is now Alberta in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Glenbow Museum, NA-1020-7.
Staff of the Crowstand School in Kamsack, Saskatchewan.
Saskatchewan Archives Board, R-B1457.
