The children who attended the Canadian residential schools during this period were victims of institutionalized neglect. They were subjected to harsh and often abusive discipline and, in some cases, left as prey to sexual predators. They were in school against their will and lived a life largely devoid of emotional support. Children could turn only to each other for support. Many strong friendships and allegiances developed in the schools. It was common, for example, for students from one community or First Nation to support one another. Dorothy Day recalled how, in the late 1920s, the Oneida girls at the Mount Elgin school all stuck together.
Mrs. Daniels used to say, “These Oneida girls are the instigators of all the trouble in the school.” They had to have a reason to take us up and give us the strap but you had to watch it. They caught us eating that bloody rhubarb one time and we thought we were going to get it, but they couldn’t prove who went over the fence first—nobody would squeal on the other ones, so they punished us all.1
Children could also look for support from family members. Ruth Seneca, a student at the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, from this period, recalled how her sister used to protect her from bullies. “They had to answer to her—she’d beat them up—so they were kinda on the scared side. So if anyone would go after me I’d just run through the schoolrooms, playrooms, hollering for my sister and she’d come out where she was and take over.”2
Of her time at the File Hills, Saskatchewan, school, Millicent Stonechild stressed the way that the children were sustained by friendships.
When we are getting discouraged and in need of healing, we must remember those people who helped us. In particular, I think of my friend, Mabel Star. There was much laughter amongst the children, a sustaining factor. We also comforted one another from the loneliness. In September, we took turns crying. In spite of some of the ‘bullying’ that went on, we established life long friendships.3
As her memories suggest, there were also bullies at the schools. The groups the students formed to protect themselves might turn on other smaller students, or on students who did not fit in with them. In 1895, Charles Eagle complained in a letter to Indian Affairs that other boys at the Brandon, Manitoba, residential school were calling him names and threatening him. “I struck one boy last night because he was teasing me down in the closets and tried to lock me in.”4 Principal John Semmens told the boys in question to stop the practice. Semmens noted that one of the reasons why Eagle was unhappy at the school was the fact that he was lonely and did not know how to speak Cree.5
Administrators seemed to be unaware of the degree of the bullying. In 1897, a boy who was dying of tuberculosis at the Kuper Island, British Columbia, school was allowed to go home to his parents. Before he died, he told his parents that a boy at the school had “squeezed him” and “bit him.” The principal, who said he had not been aware of any problem when the incident took place, discharged the accused boy, whom he viewed as the “cause of much trouble at the school.”6
Even when they were aware of problems, school officials seem to have had little ability to impose order. The Indian agent on the Blood Reserve said he was reluctant to recruit students for the High River, Alberta, school in 1917 because the school was dominated by a “tough class” of boys. “It appears to me as if the boys from this reserve were receiving their education from these half-breeds rather than from the school authorities.” As a result, he said, half the local students from the school in the previous four years had “turned out to be bad men, sneak thieves, horse thieves, etc.”7
Former student Edward Groat recalled that one bully at the Mohawk Institute used to be referred to as “Satan.” “He had a bunch of probably half-a-dozen smaller boys who were his slaves. They had to do what he wanted to do all week, and then come Saturday night he would go to the store and buy a little bit of candy and give them each one candy, and that was their pay for the whole week.” Once, when he was beating one of his slaves, another boy stepped in and, according to Groat, “beat up on old Satan, and Satan didn’t have his slaves anymore.”8
Membership in a group often came at a high price. Harrison Burning, who attended the Mohawk Institute in the 1920s, recalled:
It was a place you could say made you a man before you was—whatever happened in that school you couldn’t tell—whatever happened, it was confidential to the boys. If you got in a fight and got all black and blue and everything else, that was as far as it went—it couldn’t go any further, because the boys wouldn’t let you.9
It was a world where toughness was valued above all else. Burning said, “If you want to fight don’t fight with an Indian from the Mohawk school, because he’s going to get you.” Burning felt the experience left him emotionally scarred: “I have no heart. I might look like I got a heart, but I don’t.”10
Hilda Hill’s memory of girls’ experiences at the Mohawk Institute during this period was not as extreme. Although the older girls ordered the younger girls around, she felt that did not amount to bullying.
When the younger girls come in, the older girls would have—we called ’em slaves. “Fix my bed for me,” “Do this, do that for me,” but always gave ’em a cake that night. “I’ll give you a cake”—you never worked for nothing. Maybe that’s why I got along with them—they’d ask me to do things for them and they’d give me their cake so it wasn’t a bully thing.11
Melvina McNabb recalled how, in the 1930s, she and friends defended themselves against a group of bullies at the File Hills school.
They were these ladies who were mean to us. We had to do what they asked of us or we would get punished. For instance, there was this one lady who was the same age as I who set the fire or water hose on us in our beds. We were all soaking wet. We couldn’t tell on her because we would get pounded by her bigger sisters. That was abuse in itself. As we got older, we made a plan all of us, fifteen year olds. All right now, who’s going to do the fighting? As usual, I was chosen to be the fighter. We made a big circle and we put this lady in the middle of the circle. Boy! Did we ever lambaste her! She’s not going to boss us anymore. That’s how that part stopped. She quit.12
Ivy Koochicum, who attended the File Hills school in the 1920s, said that decades after she left, she still had nightmares about life in the school. “The part I would like to forget about is how cruelly we were treated. We were treated cruelly not only by the staff but by the pupils. There was name calling and fighting. There was one family that was very mean. There was nothing we could do. We just took it.”13
Young children were particularly vulnerable to bullying and abuse. At the Chapleau school in Ontario, Principal A. J. Vale complained about the trouble caused by one fourteen-year-old girl with a “very violent temper,” which made her “capable of doing anything at such times.” She and some other girls had been abusing a six-year-old student, striking her with a stick and, on one occasion, suspending her from a rope in the washroom until she nearly lost consciousness.14
The residential schools had no resources to accommodate students with disabilities. Such students might find themselves subject to bullying and discriminatory treatment from both staff and students. One such student attempted to kill himself at the File Hills school in 1939. After interviewing him, the director of the Psychopathic Department of the Regina General Hospital, Dr. O. E. Rothwell, reported, “He is undoubtedly deaf and has considerable difficulty in the school classroom, and as a result of this he claims that the teacher would get out of patience with him at times and ‘Boxed his ears,’ I believe he said. He is quite emotional and cried when telling about it.” Rothwell wrote that the boy was teased by the older boys because of his disability, adding that they also would “impose upon him.” He recommended that the boy be sent to a different school.15 Dr. A. B. Simes, the medical superintendent of the Qu’Appelle Indian Health Unit, concluded that the boy was not intent on taking his own life, but rather that “he wished to stir up dissatisfaction against the school and staff, with the hope that he would be discharged.”16 In the end, the boy was returned to the File Hills school.17
In at least one case, students were prosecuted for their treatment of a fellow student. In 1939, two girls were charged with assault after they beat a third girl at Mount Elgin so badly that she had to be confined to her bed for a week. They pleaded guilty and each received a two-year suspended sentence.18
Student abuse of other students was not limited to bullying and physical beatings. There are reports from the 1890s onwards indicating that older students may have sexually abused younger students. For example, in 1893, Roman Catholic Bishop Paul Durieu, in a letter complaining to Indian Affairs about the quality of construction of the dormitories at the school in Kamloops, British Columbia, wrote:
I am in duty bound to repeat here what I have told you in [sic] many occasions, that these sleeping rooms have been a school of immorality. Better to have no schools amongst the Indians if we cannot preserve the young ones from receiving the habit of sodomy and of self-abuse from those pupils who are living at the school with them.19
A missionary in Saskatchewan, W. S. Moore, told Presbyterian Church officials in 1903 that he had received word that two girls had been “raped or ruined by two boys in the basement of the Regina School.” According to Moore, the principal had threatened to punish the girls and their assailants if they spoke to anyone else, including their parents, about the assault.20
When Indian Affairs Deputy Minister Frank Pedley instructed Indian Commissioner David Laird to inspect the Battleford school in 1904, he noted that he did not think “it would be well to again take evidence of the questions of immorality at this school, but you should make careful inquiry as to what steps the Principal adopted in the past and is now enforcing for the prevention of such acts.” Laird reported that “the ringleader of the boys said to be guilty had been discharged or dismissed, that a new supervisor of experience had been secured, and that effort is being made (hereafter to be redoubled) by the Principal and his supervisor to stamp out the said practices.”21
In 1924 at Lytton, British Columbia, school principal A. R. Lett wrote that upon questioning a recent runaway, he discovered that “the bigger boys were using him to commit sodomy, hence his getaway.” He said the report confirmed his suspicions, but that little could be done to eliminate the problem as long as the school lacked separate dormitories for older and younger students.22
The evidence regarding student abuse of other students for this period is limited and fragmentary. It underscores the fact that abuse did occur and that its occurrence was a component of the emotional neglect that was a central element of the residential school system. Small, weak, disabled, or culturally isolated children were vulnerable to abuse. In the poorly staffed and poorly constructed schools, it was not possible for the staff to ensure that students were not bullied or abused by their fellow students. Those students who gained protection through admission into a group often paid for their membership through adherence to a rigid, internal code of behaviour: displays of emotion or vulnerability were not allowed. In later years of the schools, evidence indicates that students who were sexually abused in school were initiated into what became a cycle of abuse in which they then victimized fellow students and family members. At the institutional level, the schools created conditions in which students were vulnerable to abuse; the schools then failed to protect them from such abuse.