Residential schools were intended to reshape Aboriginal children and detach them from the influence of their parents. One of the most visible and memorable steps in this process took place at the time of their arrival at the school. The process was outlined in the 1889 instructions that Deputy Minister Lawrence Vankoughnet issued to British Columbia Bishop Paul Durieu prior to the opening of the Roman Catholic school in Cranbrook, British Columbia. New pupils were to be bathed immediately. Their clothing, “if from its condition it is considered advisable,” was to be taken from them and replaced with school clothing. The heads of new students were to be examined for vermin and, if necessary, “effectual means should at once be taken to destroy them.”1
For many students, this process was shocking and distressful. Not only were students stripped of their home clothing, but their long hair, part of their cultural identity, was usually cut off. Many children knew from their own beliefs that the cutting of hair was part of a mourning tradition. When Daniel Kennedy had his braids clipped at the Qu’Appelle school in the 1880s, he wondered if his mother had died, since his hair had been cut so close to his scalp.2 Mike Mountain Horse was left in tears when his hair was cut off at the Anglican school on the Blood Reserve in what is now Alberta.3 Charlie Bigknife recalled his first day at the File Hills, Saskatchewan, school:
First thing I knew, I was ushered into a room, which they called the playroom, I didn’t know at the time. The farm instructor whose name was Mr. Redgrave and who was an old sergeant from the First World War came in with a sheep’s shear and cut my 4 braids off and threw them on the floor. After a while along came a young boy rolling a horse clippers into the room and that horse clippers bounced over my head and gave me a bald head. After he got through, he said, “Now you are no longer an Indian” and he gave me a slap on the head.4
Often, on their arrival, students were also given new names. At Alert Bay, Tlalis became Charles Nowell.5 At Qu’Appelle, Ochankugahe became Daniel Kennedy.6 At the Anglican school on the Blackfoot Reserve, Medicine Pipe Rider (itself a translation of a Siksika word) became Ben Calf Robe.7 In baptizing children, missionaries commonly assigned them British or French names. In one case, a child on Herschel Island in the Arctic Ocean was named David Copperfield, and in La Pierre’s House in the Yukon, there was a Henry Venn, named for a leading figure in the British Church Missionary Society.8 Newly arrived students were also assigned numbers. Margaret Butcher, a member of the staff at the Kitamaat, British Columbia, school, recalled the difficulty in getting newly arrived students who spoke no English “to understand each her own number. First, pinning it on, then having it sewed on the clothes she was wearing.”9 Butcher wrote, “I think it is very silly that all the Indians have English names. It was Mr. Crosby’s plan to baptize with two names so we have English surnames as well. It spoils the individuality of the people in my opinion.”10
The first day of school was, in effect, an initiation into a continuing process of separation and loss. Aboriginal children were to be separated from their parents, their family members, their language, and their culture and spiritual beliefs. This chapter examines the ways that the schools sought to reduce and control contact between parents and their children by severing the students’ links to their families and cultural traditions. The next two chapters examine school policy towards Aboriginal languages and spiritual beliefs. They are followed by a chapter that examines the ways in which the schools were involved in a government campaign to control and restructure Aboriginal families through a process of arranged marriages.
One of the central goals of residential schooling was to break the bond between child and parent. Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney made this perfectly clear in 1883 when, on the advent of the opening of the first three industrial schools, he wrote, using language borrowed from Nicholas Davin’s 1879 report:
Experience has taught that little can be done which will have a permanent effect with the adult Indian, consequently, to create a lasting impression and elevate him above his brethren, we must take charge of the youth and keep him constantly within the circle of civilization. I am confident that the Industrial School now about to be established will be a principal feature in the civilization of the Indian mind. The utility of Industrial Schools has long been acknowledged by our neighbours across the line who have had much to do with the Indian.
In that country, as in this, it is found difficult to make day schools or [sic] reserves a success, because the influence of home associations is stronger than that of the school, and so long as such a state of things exists I fear that the inherited aversion to labour can never be successfully met. By the children being separated from their parents and property and regularly instructed not only in the rudiments of English language, but also in trades and agriculture, so that what is taught may not be readily forgotten, I can but assure myself that a great end will be attained for the permanent and lasting benefit of the Indian.11
In a 1908 letter asking for an increase in the permitted enrolment at the Fort Frances school in northwestern Ontario, Principal G. A. Poitras wrote that residential schools were necessary to provide Aboriginal children with the sort of training they needed to survive economically. Day schools, he wrote, had been tried and failed. “On account of the roaming habits of the Indians, it is impossible to get a large and regular attendance; besides, to civilize the Indian children you have to take them away from their surroundings.”12 In a 1913 article in the Christian Guardian, S. R. McVitty, the principal of the Mount Elgin school in Muncey, Ontario, spoke of the pleasure the staff experienced “as we watch evil tendencies fade away, and the nobler and better instincts spring forth and blossom, giving much promise of splendid fruit in the after days.”13 Two years later, Kuper Island, British Columbia, principal W. Lemmens wrote to the local Indian agent that the “only way of educating them is to bring them to an Industrial School, where they are completely under the control of their teachers and separated from the evil influences of most of their homes.”14 The view that home influences were essentially “evil” was to shape government and church policy towards parental visits, letter writing, and vacations during this period (from 1867 to 1939).
Not surprisingly, parents took every opportunity to visit their children. When schools were close by, they regularly tried to see them. This was one of the reasons why Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed preferred the establishment of industrial schools “at a greater distance from their Reserves, than would be the case were they at the Boarding Schools.”15 Despite the distance, parents still visited the industrial schools. At the High River school in what is now Alberta, Principal Albert Lacombe opposed parents camping outside the school grounds, since “their intercourse and bad influence demoralize the pupils very much. Of course this difficulty could very easily be removed, by building a good high fence around the play-ground, so that the pupils would be entirely separated from any obnoxious visitors.”16
At the Battleford and Qu’Appelle schools, principals Thomas Clarke and Joseph Hugonnard were more welcoming than Lacombe was at High River. They believed that, after visiting the schools, the parents would come away reassured that their children were being well treated. Many of the industrial schools had an “Indian reception room” set aside for such visits.17 Clarke wrote in 1888, “The Indians are beginning to realize the advantages to be derived from the school. The parents of the children are allowed to visit them as frequently as they can get passes from their agents.”18
The passes he referred to were issued under the pass system that Hayter Reed had instituted, without legislative authority, after the North-West Rebellion of 1885. The system required First Nations people to obtain a pass from their Indian agent before leaving the reserve. In 1889, Indian Affairs school inspector Alex McGibbon recommended, based on the large number of parents visiting the Qu’Appelle school, that it would be advisable “for the Principal to give no meals to any who have not passes from the agents; and agents should be told not to give passes to any but those who have children at the school and not oftener than once a month, or certainly not more than twice a month.”19
Two years later, Reed discovered, to his displeasure, that Hugonnard had “thought proper to fit up a place for the entertainment of Indian visitors, of whom I found a number breakfasting the first morning I was at the school. A long table is provided for them to take their meals at, and I found that a quantity of provisions were being given to them.”20
That year, Dewdney, who was by then minister of Indian Affairs, warned Hugonnard that “relations of the pupils are allowed to visit the school, to an extent which can only be regarded as quite unnecessary and no doubt feeding such visitors accounts to no small extent for the large consumption of supplies.” Dewdney said that at other schools, “children can be obtained and kept” without allowing what Dewdney believed to be excessive parental visiting. If Hugonnard could not limit visits, Dewdney said he would be obliged to ask the “police to keep visitors off the precincts of the school.” Also, children were not to be allowed to return home for visits, since “taking children in for short terms and letting them go again is regarded as perhaps worse than useless.”21
In his defence, Hugonnard claimed that the regulations given to him when the school opened stated that parents should not visit their children more than once every two weeks. He said most parents visited only once a month, and he had “done all that I reasonably could to lessen their visits.” This was counterproductive, he felt, since “several times pupils were furtively taken away by their parents.”22
Reed was not convinced by Hugonnard’s arguments. He instructed Indian agents on the Prairies
to put into force regulations already issued, but so far disregarded. By these it is forbidden to allow Indians to visit the schools without a Pass; and when for good reason, an occasional Pass may be issued, rations are to be given, and a note of this made on the Pass, so that the Principal can have no excuse for receiving Indians unprovided with Permits for their visits, or for giving licensed visitors provisions.23
Parents were not always pleased by what they saw at the schools. An 1891 visit to the Battleford school convinced parents from the Carlton and Duck Lake reserves that the children were not being given enough to eat. In response, Indian agent P. J. Williams wrote that he believed it was a
great mistake for to give [sic] Indians a pass for any extended period to visit the school or to give passes to large Bands to go at once to visit children at the school as those Carlton and Duck Lake Indians made more discontent amongst the children at the school than anything that has come amongst them, as will be seen that some seven or eight deserted shortly after they left.
In conclusion, Williams proposed that rations not be issued to anyone who made “a nuisance out of their visits that these Carlton Indians did.”24
Many schools strictly controlled parental contact. In 1906, a woman from the Sarnia Reserve was concerned about the lack of medical attention her foster son was receiving at the Mount Elgin school in Muncey, Ontario. When she went to visit the school, she said, the principal not only refused to let her speak to her foster son, but also she was not allowed to “come near the building.”25 The principal, T. T. George, explained that the woman, whom he described as the boy’s grandmother, had made attempts to visit the boy in the school playground and when he was working.
This I refused to allow and informed her that any visitation would require to be made in the office in the presence of an officer and all conversation carried out in English. It is a rule of the Institute that persons other than parents or guardians are allowed to visit pupils only when accompanied by an officer and the conversation is carried out in English.
The rule also was applied to parents and guardians where there was “reason to believe that influence is being brought to bear upon the pupil to create discontent and unrest leading to truancy or removal.”26 Visits, in short, were carried out under the sorts of conditions normally associated with a penal institute.
The belief that parents stirred up discontent continued into the twentieth century. In 1917, Inspector Semmens noted that parents of children at the Cecilia Jeffrey school in northwestern Ontario
visit the school frequently and remain for meals and talk a great deal with the childre [sic]. More than this it is feared that they encourage their children in disobedience and they resent every form of punishment. Complaints of the pupils are too readily believed by their guardians and the Principal finds that their interference makes his work doubly hard.27
Sometimes, parents were denied access to their children. An E. Elliott wrote to Indian Affairs in 1919 that when a father went to visit his son at the Kuper Island school in British Columbia, he was not allowed to see him. According to the father, “The priest who was the principal would have nothing to do with me.” When the principal said the letter writer did not have a son enrolled at the school, Elliott explained he was writing on behalf of a parent.28
In July 1928, Indian Affairs officials met with chiefs from the northwestern Ontario region. Chief Gardner asked if there could be some land set aside so that parents could stay in Kenora when visiting their children at the Cecilia Jeffrey school.29
When a mother in Manitoba complained, through a lawyer, about the lack of accommodations for parents visiting their children at the Birtle school in 1935, Indian Affairs departmental secretary A. F. MacKenzie wrote that “the matter of visiting hours and accommodation at Indian residential schools is left in the hands of the Principal and staff of the schools.” This answer was far from accurate: from the outset of the residential school system, the government had instructed the principals to limit parental visits. MacKenzie added, “Indian parents have the habit of visiting schools, indiscriminately, at any time and remaining for indefinite periods. While they have the right to see their children, it must be at the time stated by the principal of the school.”30 In a letter to the principal, MacKenzie advised, “Indians who come from a distance might be permitted to remain over night but not for a longer period. The Indian parents from the nearby reserves should not be given meals and not be allowed to remain on the premises over night.”31
Conflicts between parents and principals continued to the end of the 1930s. Ruben Kesepapamotao filed a complaint in 1937 about the treatment he had received when he attempted to visit his children at the St. Andrew’s school at Whitefish Lake, Alberta. According to his statement:
I was talking to my children. I saw Mr. Cathcart come out of the school home, and he gave me a push off the platform. I went on the platform again and Mr. Cathcart gave me another push for no apparent reason that I know of. Mr. Reynolds the farm instructor, came and pushed me to the Indian room which is about 50 yards again for no apparent reason. They acted as if they were angry. Mr. Cathcart said: “See that fence, if I do not want anyone inside there, they do not have to come in.” My wife and I waited in the Indian room till the children were let out of the school. I have not gone back to the C. of E. [Church of England or Anglican] Mission. I do not want my children to go there again.32
Letter writing between parents and children also was strictly controlled. Deputy Minister Lawrence Vankoughnet’s 1889 instructions for the new industrial school in Cranbrook, British Columbia, specified that the principal was to require students to write to their parents twice a year. He was also instructed to read “all letters sent and received.” Pupils were not to be allowed to post letters on their own, or to receive letters from the local post office.33 In 1901, parents of children attending the Mount Elgin school complained that their children were not responding to letters they had written to them.34 The students were allowed to write their parents once every two weeks. The principal, W. W. Shepherd, opened and read the letters the children sent and the ones they received, and placed them under “close sensorship [sic].” At times, he intercepted letters and found it necessary “to prevent letters written in Indian from going out.”35
Vacations presented an even greater challenge to the schools than parental visits or letter writing. In addition to concerns that students on vacations would be exposed to the “evil” influences of reserve life that residential schools were intended to eradicate, vacations were feared because they amounted to a form of authorized truancy. Once the children were out of the schools and back at home, it was often very difficult to get them to return.
Initially, industrial schools and boarding schools had different vacation policies. The boarding schools allowed students approximately forty-five days of holidays. It was not uncommon for them to allow children to go home on the weekends, depending on their location and proximity to the reserves.36 The industrial school vacation policy was a function of the per capita funding formula. For industrial schools to qualify for their full per capita grant, students were required to be in school for at least 340 days a year. In theory, this allowed for twenty-five days of vacation a year. But the process was complicated by the Indian Affairs policy of dividing the year into four quarters, and refusing to pay the full per capita rate if a student was not in attendance for eighty-five days of each ninety-one-day quarter. Schools could give students two sets of ten- to twelve-day vacations, if the vacations were provided at the end and beginning of consecutive quarters. But they could not give students twenty-five days off in a row without a significant loss in revenue.37
The fact that industrial schools provided far fewer holidays (twenty-five) than the boarding schools (forty-five plus the weekends when some children returned home) was one of the government rationales for the significant difference in funding between the two types of schools.38 It was also one of the reasons why parents preferred boarding schools to industrial schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Many of the early boarding schools had developed their own vacation system. In the 1880s at the Shingwauk Home in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, two-thirds of the students were given a summer holiday each year. Those who remained behind were required to do chores around the school, for which they received pocket money. Parents were to pay to transport their children home for the holidays. When parents enrolled their child at the school, they left a deposit of $10. The fee was to be forfeited if the child was withdrawn from the school early or did not return from holiday (without a reasonable cause). Widows were obliged to pay only a $5 deposit.39
Many students attending industrial schools came from locations several days’ travel away from the school. As the Anglican Committee on Indian Missions in Rupert’s Land observed in 1891, given the short period allowed for holidays at industrial schools, it was “impossible to give holidays to those coming from distant points.” The Anglicans were in agreement with the government view that “holidays should be given as seldom as possible,” but felt that the existing policy was “tantamount to saying that no holidays whatever are to be given.” Once parents became aware of this, it was difficult to recruit students. The policy also put a considerable strain on staff members who had to supervise students on a year-round basis. If the government were to continue with the policy, the Anglicans thought, it should fully explain the policy to “leading Indians on reserves.” The Anglican preference, however, was for the government to allow a vacation of three weeks a year for students who lived close to the schools, and six weeks for those who lived at a distance.40
Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed opposed the Anglican proposal for a longer holiday, saying he was against “anything having a tendency to encourage the admission of a greater number of pupils for shorter periods to such Institutions.” Neither was he keen on making “known the existing regulations to leading Indians on reserves.” As noted in an earlier chapter, he said he would make all school regulations known to “Agents, Church authorities, and Teachers, but so far as Indians are concerned, I think it will be best to deal with them, in so far as matters, such as the one now under consideration, are concerned, individually, as each case presents itself.” First Nations communities were not to be consulted about school policies.41
It appears that the school vacation policy actually tightened in the 1890s. In 1889, both the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, and the Mount Elgin school allowed regular vacations for the students, who, at that time, were all there voluntarily.42 Eight years later, the Indian commissioner for the Prairies expressed his concern over the fact that students at the Duck Lake school, in what is now Saskatchewan, were being granted annual holidays. “There is nothing on file here,” he wrote, “to show that any boarding or Industrial school has been authorized to observe annual holidays.”43 In 1904, Indian Affairs official Martin Benson attempted to explain the vacation practice at the Mohawk Institute—or the lack thereof—to his deputy minister.
Class-work is discontinued for six weeks during the months of July and August and very few of the pupils are allowed out of the school during this period. The Principal assumes the responsibility of granting holidays in special cases. It is not the practice to allow all the pupils to go from any of the Industrial schools.44
In 1908, R. N. Cairns, the principal of the Coqualeetza Institute in Chilliwack, British Columbia, wrote, “One source of annoyance and friction is the question of holidays. You never can be sure that they will come back voluntarily.” Cairns blamed the parents: “The pupils would come back if the parents would leave them alone.”45 In the case of students who returned from vacation after the official start of the school year, Indian Affairs refused to pay any per capita grant for the days they had missed. In 1908, the principal of the Wikwemikong school on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Th. Couture, protested this policy. He pointed out that the school had to pay all its fixed costs even if the student was not present. Instead of punishing the school by denying it a portion of the per capita grant, he suggested the government withhold the parents’ Treaty annuity.
Whilst as things are now, the parents, selfish and thoughtless as they are, set off [into the country] on the eve, nay sometimes on the very day of the opening of the school, and bring their children with them. Some do it through thoughtlessness perhaps, but some do it for the mere sake of setting us at defiance and worrying us.46
Indian agent C. L. D. Sims advised him that the government could not withhold Treaty annuities in such cases. Instead, he recommended that “leave of absence should not be granted unless the school authorities are reasonably satisfied the child will be returned.”47
According to the 1910 contract between the churches and the government, classes at boarding schools were to be held five days a week, and “industrial exercises” were to be held six days a week. There could be no more than one month of vacation, which was to be taken between July 1 and October 1 each year. During that month, children were allowed to visit their homes, but Indian Affairs would “not pay any part of the transportation either going or returning.”48
In 1915, a report from Indian Affairs medical official Dr. O. Grain noted that students at the Round Lake, Saskatchewan, school were “allowed the privilege of going home and remaining there more often than is inductive to their benefit.” The school principal was reminded that students at that school were limited to “one months [sic] holiday each summer.”49
Government control and coordination of vacation policy, as in so many other matters, was sporadic at best. During the First World War, the Mount Elgin school began giving students two months of holiday, and the school principal continued the practice into the post-war period.50 In 1922, Duncan Campbell Scott, by then deputy minister of Indian Affairs, wrote to the Mount Elgin principal, asking “if you would please refresh my memory” as to the length of vacation time allowed at Mount Elgin. When he did so, he pointed out that at other schools, the per capita grant was paid for only one month of holiday.51
In May 1925, a new vacation policy was announced, one that applied equally to all residential schools. Annual leave with grant would be allowed for any period up to forty-three days. These six weeks of holiday were to be taken consecutively at the principal’s discretion, during the summer quarter. But the extension of the summer holiday came at a price. In announcing the policy, Superintendent of Indian Education Russell T. Ferrier wrote that “giving pupils leave from Indian residential schools at Christmas is considered unwise: and in future, grant will not be allowed if holidays at this season are given without permission. At no school should week-end holidays be given.”
Before orphans and the children of destitute families could be granted summer holidays, the principal had to ensure that satisfactory arrangements had been made for their care. Summer holidays would not be granted to those who had not returned from the previous holiday voluntarily. The principal could also refuse to grant holidays to those who had truancy records. Students who lived at a considerable distance from the school were not to be granted holidays “unless specific safeguards concerning their return can be taken.”52 In recommending the policy change to Scott, Ferrier had noted that the measure would allow for longer staff holidays. It was also a case of government policy adapting to reality, since, according to Ferrier, “some principals allow six weeks or more, without the permission of the Department and have been doing it for many years.”53
Not all principals implemented this policy change. The Sandy Bay Band in Manitoba had agreed to the construction of a boarding school on the reserve, providing the students who attended would be allowed to go home on Saturday morning and return Saturday evening.54 The school did not end the practice until 1932. On the first Friday after school resumed, one father, William Beaulieu, went to the school and took his son Clifford home against the principal’s wishes, saying “he was lonesome.” A Mounted Police agent went to the reserve and met with the father, who agreed to let the constable take his son back to school. In his report, the officer wrote that “if some steps had not been taken … other parents would go to the school and take their children away without the consent of the principal.”55
It was not until 1933, eight years after the official vacation policy change, that a newly appointed principal of the Grayson, Saskatchewan, school ended a long-standing policy of allowing parents to visit the school on Sundays and take their children home for a meal. Local Indian agent J. P. B. Ostrander supported the move: “While this procedure has been fairly satisfactory and has never led to a great deal of trouble I know it is not customary at most residential schools and I do not approve of it.” Under Acting Principal P. Chatelain’s new rule, children would be allowed to visit their homes only under special circumstances. According to Ostrander, when the rule was announced, thirteen parents visited his office; three favoured the new policy, while ten opposed it.56
Some students, often those who were orphaned or whose families were in distress, reported enjoying their summers at the schools. Lizzie Grosbeck, who attended Mount Elgin for two and a half years in the 1920s, said, “I liked it so much I stayed there in the holidays. It was a nice place—they took in a lot of children and helped people.”57 But the memory of Peter Smith, who attended the Mohawk Institute during the same period, was much more typical. “When it came time to leave for the summer holidays and no-one came there. I used to look out the window and look out the window, waiting for someone to come. But it never happened to me. I was very disappointed. I never really blamed anyone.”58
In 1930, the principal of the Delmas, Saskatchewan, school, N. C. D. Dubois, objected to the directive that principals “should not allow annual leaves to children who have had to be brought in under escort upon the expiration of former vacations.” He said:
To keep such a bunch of sad delinquents at school like prisoners during vacations would necessitate special and continual watching from the part of the staff because they would run away upon the very first occasion. Imagine what trouble it would be for the principal and teachers of having such a disagreeable task to perform.
That fall at his school, nineteen students had not returned from vacation. He had visited their reserves and spoken to their parents, only to discover it was “impossible to convince them of the necessity and great advantages of having their children at the school.” He certainly did not think it either “fair or practicable” to force those students to stay at the school over the next summer if he was ever able to persuade them to return to school.59
In 1931, Ferrier sent a circular to all principals, stating that the department opposed weekend holidays. There was a slight loosening of other restrictions, since there was now no objection to pupils going to their homes for Christmas Day, or on a Saturday or a Sunday. In such cases, students were expected to return to the school before nightfall.60
The cost of transporting children home for vacation was another ongoing issue. In 1933, the principal of the Anglican school at Onion Lake, Saskatchewan, requested that Indian Affairs pay the $150 needed to send children home for the summer holiday “in the event of the children’s parents not being in the position to meet the same.”61 It is not clear if that request was met, but in 1935, the government was providing $100 to send children from that school home for the summer vacation.62
In many cases, due to travel costs or concerns about home life, children were not allowed vacation. In 1933, Indian agent A. A. Johnston was informed by the principal of the Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, school that no children from his agency “would be granted vacation this summer.” If parents objected, they were to be reminded that when they committed their children to the school, they had signed over “the care of the children to the Superintendent, who has the authority to judge how long the children must be kept there, and under what conditions they may be granted vacations.”63
This was a reiteration of a point Deputy Minister Scott had made in 1913: parents were not guardians of their own children, even during the summer vacation. According to Scott, “The principal of a boarding school remains the guardian of a pupil while on vacation, and he may recall a pupil should he deem it necessary for good and sufficient cause.”64 As noted earlier, the admission form used from 1900 onwards stipulated that parents were making application for admission “for such term as the Department of Indian Affairs may deem proper.” The form also required parents to consent to a provision that the “principal or head teacher of the institution for the time being shall be the guardian of the said child.”65
By the early 1930s, the principals were pushing for a longer vacation period, consistent with what was already provided in Canadian public schools. In 1933, the principal of the Fraser Lake, British Columbia, school called for a two-month summer holiday, saying that, given the distances that children had to travel, “it is almost impossible to get the children back at the prescribed time.”66 Blue Quills, Alberta, school principal Joseph Angin lobbied Ottawa for a two-month holiday in 1934.67 The request was rejected: no exceptions could be made to the rule that allowed for forty-three days of holiday.68
It was not until 1937 that the vacation period was extended to two months. The holidays were to be granted in July and August. In announcing the new policy, R. A. Hoey, the new superintendent of Welfare and Training, said the extension of the summer holiday did away with the necessity for “week-end holidays or holidays at Christmas time.”69 These holidays, which had been eliminated by the 1925 policy, were gradually reintroduced. Hoey thought that doing away with the Christmas holiday would reduce student exposure to “epidemics that are usually prevalent at that season of the year.” Christmas holidays brought with them additional travel expenses and created truancy problems if children refused to return to school—a problem the department preferred to deal with only once a year.70 Other elements of the previous policy continued. Orphans and children of destitute families were to be granted holidays only if arrangements were made for their care. According to Hoey, “This provision [to ensure there was proper home supervision] has special application for girls from twelve to sixteen years of age. Extreme care should be exercised in the case of students whose homes are distant from the school. Unless special safeguards concerning their return can be taken, holidays should not be granted.”71
The files from the Shubenacadie school for the mid- to late 1930s provide an insight into how the federal policies actually were implemented. Two months of vacation may have been the rule, but transportation costs, limited funding, and concerns about home conditions meant that many children spent the summer in the school. In the mid-1930s, Charles Hudson, an Indian agent in New Brunswick, reported he was being continually contacted by parents seeking to have their children returned to them from Shubenacadie for the summer holiday. In some cases, the parents offered to pay to transport the children to and from the school.72 One of these parents, George Paul of Red Bank, New Brunswick, wrote to Indian Affairs Minister Thomas Crerar in 1937 that he and his wife would “like to have our children home for vacation. They never come home since they left home. Its [sic] about six yrs. since I have seen them.” He offered to pay for the transportation to and from the school. “The children wrote to us and they said that they were lonesome. They want to come home this coming vacation.” He concluded that his wife was “a kind of one that worries about children so please do your best.”73
Agent Hudson expressed reservations about the proposal, asking “can we depend on the parents providing their return expences [sic] and will they even let them go back without some trouble.”74 The acting superintendent of Indian Education, J. D. Sutherland, took Hudson’s point. He doubted that parents would provide the return fare, and, “as our funds are limited, the Department is not in a position to incur the expenditure that would be required.” He added that it was probably in the students’ best interest to stay at school for the summer, since they would be “taken on picnics and that other entertainment is provided for them.”75 In some cases, children were allowed to go home if the Indian agent had either collected the return fare from the parents in advance, or required the parents to forward the funds to the Shubenacadie school principal. In the case of Mr. Paul, Indian Affairs official Philip Phelan recommended that his children be sent home for vacation if he forwarded the transportation money to the school in advance.76
In 1936, Mary Hammond, a Shubenacadie student, wrote to her sister in Chester Basin, Nova Scotia, asking for her assistance in coming home for the summer.
I was glad to know that you want me this summer. I know you always want me. Its [sic] too bad to tell you that you shouldn’t be expecting me home this summer. Why don’t you write and tell him you want me this summer. Try hard and I’ll pray that Government will let me go home. Because gee if you were me you wont [sic] like to stay. If you knew how much I want to go home you would jump over this roof. Every day I except [sic] some telegram or letter that you got a letter from Government and saying that I’m to go home. Write a letter to Government and tell him you want me home. If you only get me home I’ll be so grateful to you when I get home.77
Her sister, Mrs. Charles Toney, wrote a letter to the local Indian agent, asking if her sister could spend the summer with her and her husband.78 Without giving any reasons, the agent recommended that the request be turned down.79 Indian Affairs official J. D. Sutherland responded that pupils would not be allowed to go home if they lived far from the school or if their home conditions were “reported unsatisfactory.” He added, “As it is understood from your letter that the home conditions of the Toney children are unsatisfactory, the Principal of the Shubenacadie School will be instructed to keep these children during the holiday period.”80
Shubenacadie principal J. P. Mackey was more than willing to provide guidance as to whether children should be allowed to go home. In responding to a letter from Indian agent John Langley, in Barra Head, Nova Scotia, on behalf of a First Nations father, Mackey wrote that when the children of one family were allowed to return home a few years earlier, “the father went to the Agent for extra relief rations because the children were home. If the home conditions are such that the parents cannot care for the children without extra relief, we understand it to be the wish of the Dept., that the children should not go home.” He added that it was his understanding that in the case that the Indian agent was proposing, “the father was having a woman of low reputation come to the house, and would be up half the night drinking.”81
Every fall, Mackey, like other principals, had to pursue students who had not returned from their summer vacation. When, at the end of the summer of 1937, twelve-year-old Louis Thomas did not return, Mackey informed the boy’s father that he must either return him to the school or arrange to have an Indian agent discharge the boy from the school. A discharge could be arranged if the boy was going to attend a local day school. Otherwise, Mackey said, he would report the matter to Indian Affairs. If that happened, he warned, “the R.C.M.P. will take Louis back to the school and he will remain until sixteen years of age and have no further vacations.”82 Dr. H. S. Everett, a physician from the New Brunswick community where the Thomas family lived, intervened in the case. He wrote to Indian Affairs, saying that neither the boy nor his father wanted him to return to the school, since Louis said “he gets beatings at Shubenacadie.” Everett noted that it would be possible for Louis to attend a rural school that was across the road from his father’s house.83 Mackey dismissed the allegation of beatings as “the usual line of the Indian.” It was, he wrote,
the old story over again. The Indian does not want to do what he is told or follow regulations but must have his own way. Personally it is a matter of indifference to me whether the boy comes back or not, but I think it should be impressed upon the Indian that he cannot have his own way in matters concerning which the Department has set regulations.84
In the end, Louis’s discharge was approved, but Indian Affairs refused to provide any grant “for him at a white school,” thus casting him into an educational limbo. Without such a grant, public schools would not accept a First Nations student, since the cost of their education was viewed as a federal responsibility.85
Mackey’s frustration with Aboriginal people was never far below the surface. When passing on the receipts for the 1937 vacation expenses, he wrote, “We do not know why, but the Indians had the idea that because it was Coronation year, that all children were to go home for vacation. This is the first time that any number from New Brunswick went home for vacation.” He said the majority of those who had gone home had been at the school for between four and six years. He also noted that the only way he expected to be able to pay for needed dental and tonsil work at the school was with money intended for vacation expenses.86 That seems to have been what happened. In the following year, Indian Affairs official Philip Phelan concluded that five children from one family should stay at the Shubenacadie school because “the Department’s funds are not sufficient to permit us to allow all children from Residential schools to go home for the summer holidays.”87
When Nova Scotia Indian agent C. A. Spinney asked him about the Christmas holiday policy, Phelan wrote that
no valid reason has yet been given to us why holidays should be allowed at that period of the year. There is no question that the children attending the Shubenacadie Residential School receive every possible care and attention, and in addition at Christmas time there are always special festivities which the children enjoy.88
Parents obviously felt differently. When the parents from the Cambridge Reserve in Nova Scotia had asked Spinney to arrange to have their children returned home for Christmas, he told them that this was “against the rules of the Dept.” To Spinney’s disgust, this did not stop the parents. “These people went so far as [sic] have a man go to the school for their children. They did not get the children. Father Mackey would not let them take the children.” Referring to a woman who had written to Indian Affairs in Ottawa about the holiday issue, Spinney complained:
This Mrs. Nibley who you had the letter from thought by writing she would be able to get her children home for Xmas.
These people think they can have their own way and would like to do so and when they find out they cannot they get mad.89
Parents’ desire to see their children at Christmas, or at any other time, was apparently viewed as being selfish and unreasonable. These official attitudes were not limited to the Maritimes. The mother of a child at the Kuper Island, British Columbia, school was told in 1937 that her daughter could come home for the summer holidays only if she gave “a written guarantee that she will be returned to the school by the opening date, after the holidays.”90 That year, two children from the same school were kept there for the summer because their parents were not legally married.91 The following year, the Indian agent on the Blood Reserve in Alberta noted that “some restlessness appears among the parents in regard to the weekly holiday problem, and many appeals are made to me for this privilege, which is of course denied.” When five parents showed up at his home to seek permission to take their children to the sports events being held in Cardston on the Victoria Day long weekend, he was able to report that “all were denied.”92 A failure to enforce the rules was taken as a sign of weakness—one that First Nations families would “exploit.” When, at the end of the 1939 summer holiday, 115 students at the St. Paul’s school on the Blood Reserve refused to return to the school, Indian agent J. E. Pugh attributed the problem to “lax parents” who chose to “take advantage” of the fact that the truancy section of the Indian Act had not been enforced in that region since 1932.93
Principals such as Mackey, and Indian agents such as Spinney and Pugh, may have entered into their work with well-meant intentions. But the broader colonial project and mentality in which the residential schools were embedded served only to generate resistance on the part of parents and children who were not prepared to have every aspect of their lives controlled and changed. This resistance left principals and agents feeling angry, embittered, and unappreciated, and locked them into a cycle of conflict.
The effort to separate children from their parents was, of course, one part of the larger campaign to remake Aboriginal people. Physical separation from their community was coupled with separation from both their language and their culture.