The observance and transmission of cultural and spiritual practice are intrinsic to a people’s identity. The federal government’s assimilationist policy deliberately stressed the suppression of traditional practices and sought to prevent children from being raised within those traditions. Conversion to Christianity was a specific element of that policy. Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney argued in 1884 that the “importance of denominational Schools for the Indians is obvious.” Dewdney recognized that the government’s goal of assimilation involved the destruction of Aboriginal spirituality. Since “Indians certainly have their own ideas of right and wrong,” he thought it would be a mistake “to deprive them of their own mythology without providing a better one in which there exists no question (so far as the Indian is concerned) as to its perfect correctness....” This task could, he believed, be carried out only by the churches. He also believed that allowing more than one Christian denomination to provide religious training in any particular school would lead to “indifference to both.”1 By turning day-to-day operation of the residential schools over to competing Christian denominations, the federal government created circumstances that ensured that Aboriginal people would be ensnared in an ongoing and highly divisive religious conflict between and among Catholic and Protestant churches.
Active support for church efforts to convert children at residential schools was only one element of the government’s assault on Aboriginal culture and spirituality. On a parallel track, from the 1880s onwards, the government also actively sought to suppress and criminalize Aboriginal peoples’ own spiritual ceremonies. Residential school officials demonstrated by their own actions that they were strong supporters of these government measures to suppress Aboriginal culture.
The government also wanted the churches to run the schools for reasons of economy, since they believed missionaries would willingly work for less money. These savings came at a price—among them, the ongoing conflict between denominations for students. To limit conflict, Dewdney sought to implement a policy under which “no child is taken into the School except with the consent of parents and guardians and not until matters have been thoroughly explained to them—and they are perfectly free in the choice of faith.”2
Dewdney was not really offering parents a full choice. There was never any thought of establishing schools that respected and passed on their own Aboriginal spiritual practices and beliefs. Meaningful choice was available only to those parents who had already converted or had their children baptized. Also, Dewdney was well aware that missionaries were not above rebaptizing children who had already been baptized by another, competing, denomination. Assistant Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed, writing at the same time, reported, “In many instances Priests of the Roman Catholic faith are prone to claim children as belonging to their faith merely on baptism taking place even after the same rite has been performed by representatives of another faith.”3 To an Indian Affairs official, the prospect of allowing children to switch schools because they had been baptized a second time conjured up a future of endless wrangles. The contemplation of such a future led Dewdney to ask, if baptism were to be “considered by any denomination sufficient to lay claim to any child as belonging to their faith where would the end be found?”4
During this period, there was, indeed, no end to the problem. In an effort to forestall conflict, Indian Affairs issued the following policy guidelines in 1891.
1)That where the parents of children whom it is desirable to have entered at a boarding or industrial school are pagans, the children may be taken to those schools, provided always that the parents consent thereto.
2)In cases where parents are not baptized, altho’ claimed as adherents of a Church, before children are taken the parents should be required to state whether they are or are not adherents, as claimed, to the Church: and the children should be dealt with accordingly.
3)Where parents have been baptized but do not attend Church or their children are not attending a school, if the parents have not relinquished their adherence to the Church in which they were baptized, their children should be treated as belonging to that Church; but the parents should be required to make a statement in writing that they have not relinquished their adherence to the Church.
4)Where parents have been baptized but are desirous of sending their children to a school of a denomination other than that to which the Missionary belongs (it is assumed the Missionary referred to or some other of the same denomination baptized the parents) the parents’ wish in writing to the children being taken to the Industrial or Boarding School, as the case may be, should be obtained, and it should be complied with; but great care should be taken that the parents understand thoroughly in any case the written document before they sign it, and that the same is signed by them in the presence of at least one reliable witness as having been fully explained to and understood by them.5
The policy spoke the language of parental choice. However, in 1891, the majority of Aboriginal parents in western Canada were not Christian. The only avenue open to them involved sending their child to a school that openly opposed their spiritual values.
The education regulations adopted under 1894 amendments to the Indian Act simply ignored the existence of non-Christian parents. The regulations stated that “no Protestant child shall be placed in a Roman Catholic school, or in a school conducted under Roman Catholic auspices; and no Roman Catholic child shall be placed in a Protestant school, or in a school conducted under Protestant auspices.” The language of supposed parental choice had given way to a policy under which children were, or were to become, either Protestant or Catholic. Left unresolved was the question of who would determine a child’s denomination—and who could alter that denomination.6 This policy was incorporated directly into the Indian Act in 1920.7
By the 1920s, Indian Affairs had called on the federal Department of Justice officials to provide a definition for Protestant and Catholic children. According to the officials, a Protestant child was “one born of Protestant parents or one whose father or widowed mother has decided to have him or her educated in a Protestant school or a school conducted under Protestant auspices.” Catholic parents were similarly defined. From 1922 onwards, the Indian Affairs policy was that it would not place the child of a Catholic father in a Protestant school without an affidavit from the father, and neither would it place the child of a Protestant father in a Catholic school.8
No matter what the definition, conflict was continual. In 1896, for example, a Catholic missionary complained that Thomas Clarke, the principal of the Anglican school in Battleford, Saskatchewan, had, along with others from the school, “gone, several times, among our catholics [sic] for the purpose of inducing them to give up their children for the Industrial School, Battleford, and they have yielded to their importunities.” For this reason, the Catholics were seeking a Roman Catholic boarding school for the Battleford Reserve.9 Red Deer, Alberta, principal Arthur Barner said that the Methodist and Roman Catholic missionaries were engaged in a “race for baptism.” Because of competition from the Catholics, the Methodists, “in order to save a new born babe to the Methodist Church … had to make a special drive to the home of the confinement days before etiquette would permit a visit to a White home under such circumstances, for fear that the priest would be there ahead of them.” Barner also claimed that the Catholics operated an “inter-marriage system,” under which matches were arranged between Protestant boys and Catholics girls.10 The principal of the Regina industrial school, R. B. Heron, acknowledged the existence of the race for baptism when, in 1905, he recommended an increase in the number of Presbyterian missionaries on the reserves from which the school hoped to recruit students. “As the Catholic School is much nearer, the priest sees the people oftener than it is possible for us to see them and it is very often the case of the first come gets the children.”11
Indian Affairs officials grew frustrated with the churches. In 1912, the chief inspector of Indian agencies in Winnipeg, Glen Campbell, called for the end of denominational schooling on reserves, which he termed “a curse to the Department and the Indians.”12
In some cases, church officials did not bother asking for Indian Affairs assistance in resolving conflicts. In her memoirs of growing up as the child of the principal of the Anglican school in Onion Lake, Saskatchewan, in the early twentieth century, Ruth Buck recounted an instance when her father, John Matheson, went directly to the Catholic mission in search of a young girl. Once there, he forced the newly appointed priest to surrender the girl into his custody.13
It was also common for denominations to claim that Indian Affairs officials were favouring either the Catholic or the Protestant schools. In a 1922 letter defending his decision to admit two students, the principal of the Roman Catholic school in Grayson, Saskatchewan, wrote that it seemed “very easy for our Protestant Schools to obtain [sic] from the Department to have our Catholic Children from Catholic Parents discharged from our Schools and transferred to Protestant Schools.”14 In 1931, Roman Catholic Bishop Guy of Grouard complained that the Anglicans “have practically no children in their schools which rightly belong to them. If you were investigating you would find the majority to be Catholic or of Catholic origin.”15
For their part, the Anglicans believed that the Catholics used church-run hospitals as recruiting grounds. The principal of the Anglican school on the Blood Reserve, S. H. Middleton, reported in 1931 that Helen Chief Mountain, a student from the Anglican school, had been accepted into the Roman Catholic Church “whilst lying on a bed of sickness” at the Roman Catholic hospital. After her death, she was buried in the Roman Catholic school cemetery. He named several other Anglicans who had been converted at the hospital, all “without my knowledge.”16 When the Indian and Eskimo Commission of the Missionary Society of the Church in Canada met with the Indian Affairs minister in 1938, two of the issues they wanted resolved were the presence of twenty-nine Anglican children in the Roman Catholic school at Fort George, Québec, and that of eleven Anglican children at the Roman Catholic school at Grouard, Alberta.17
For parents, a more serious consideration was not the religious affiliation of a school, but its location. In 1931, Billie Whitehat, with the assistance of a Melville, Saskatchewan, lawyer, sought permission from Indian Affairs to have his ten-year-old son attend the Roman Catholic Cowessess school at Grayson, which was eight kilometres from his residence. The local Indian agent, J. P. B. Ostrander, opposed the move. He believed the boy should go to the United Church school at Round Lake. According to Ostrander, the Whitehats, whom he described as “pagans,” had given him considerable trouble over this issue in the past, when he had insisted their daughter go to the Round Lake school rather than the Cowessess school. While he acknowledged that the Round Lake school was twenty-four kilometres from the Whitehats’ home, he said he did “not consider the difference in the distances is of any account when the schools are residential.” The parents, he concluded, were stubborn and troublesome, and their request should be denied.18 Understandably, distance was of considerable account to parents. Eight years later, a father wrote to Indian Affairs, “begging the favour from the Indian Department to have my two daughters Rosa and Alice of 11 and 9 years old respectively to be transferred from Round Lake to Cowessess School, and I wish at the same time to have my son Clifford 7 years to be admitted with them. I am a pagan and my wife catholic.” The letter was signed by David Poniki and Maggie Smoker.19 According to the Cowessess principal, the chief reason for the request was the distance between the parents’ home and the Round Lake school.20 In denying the request, Philip Phelan noted there was no room in the school.21
Parents were not allowed to transfer their children in hopes of getting them into what they viewed as a better school. In 1934, the Belangers, former Catholics who said they had joined the United Church, sought to have their children attend the Round Lake school, which was then being operated by the United Church. Indian agent Ostrander wrote of the case, saying that to allow the children to be shifted from the Cowessess school would
establish a dangerous precedent as there will be other Indians with the same view as Alec Belanger who may come to the conclusion that if they join the United Church and engage the services of a lawyer they will be able to place their children in Round Lake School which at the present time is a more popular school than the Cowessess Roman Catholic School.22
The decision to send children to denominational schools had, in short, made parents pawns in the ongoing conflict between Christian denominations. They were subject to regular lobbying from missionaries to switch from one denomination to another. By 1935, Harold McGill, the deputy minister of Indian Affairs, was ready to throw up his hands. The number of conflicts between the churches over children was increasing and it was “at times impossible to decide, from the evidence produced by both parties as to the religion of either the parents or their children.” In many cases, he said, parents signed an affidavit transferring their children to one school, only to transfer them to a different school a few years later. A frustrated McGill suggested that in cases when the evidence did not allow the department to form a judgment, it should simply refuse to authorize admission to either school until the churches settled the matter among themselves.23 The government’s response to the ongoing conflicts in which Aboriginal parents found themselves entangled—and to parents’ efforts to exercise the small amount of choice they were granted under the Indian Act—was to abdicate its responsibility.
Converting people to Christianity was coupled with a direct attack on Aboriginal spiritual practices. Residential school principals played a leadership role in early campaigns to suppress those practices and sought to have them outlawed. Once bans were adopted, they reported violations to officials and they criticized the government for not enforcing the bans more vigorously. Since some principals were also justices of the peace, they also passed judgment on individuals accused of participating in ceremonies. On at least one occasion, people convicted of participating in spiritual ceremonies were held in a residential school while awaiting transportation to jail.
Little effort was made to understand Aboriginal cultural practices. For example, in 1904, Charles Angus Cooke recommended the establishment of an Indian national library. Cooke was one of the first Aboriginal people hired to work for Indian Affairs. As late as the First World War, he was the only Aboriginal man working in the department’s head office in Ottawa. It was his vision that Indian Affairs staff from across the country would be able to draw on the library, which would collect documents published by Aboriginal people. Duncan Campbell Scott, then the departmental accountant, cut the library’s budget, recommended against collecting documents produced by Aboriginal people, and proposed that it be a reference rather than a circulating library. Most of the works it collected were government studies from the United States. As late as 1938, it remained a disorganized collection of books that was largely unavailable to most staff members.24
Like religious conversion, the suppression of Aboriginal spiritual practices was government policy. The 1899 Indian Affairs annual report observed:
In the first stage, before instruction or education can be commenced, a great deal has to be done in the way of eradication of superstition and prejudice, and in overcoming fear not unnaturally entertained by the parents that education will not only destroy sympathy between them and their offspring in this life, but through the inculcation of religion separate them in a future state of existence.25
Nine years later, the department reported:
The attitude of Indian parents towards education or perhaps more properly speaking, instruction for their children, continues to be very much regulated by the advantage they can perceive as being likely to accrue to them in contact with the dominant race, and those superstitious objections, based upon the fear of separation hereafter, as a consequence of education in different creeds, are fast disappearing.26
The government attempted to keep track of how quickly those creeds were disappearing. Indian agents gave regular reports on the success missionaries had in converting Aboriginal people to Christianity. Such conversion was seen as a sign of progress. In 1898, an Alberta Indian agent wrote:
With a single dubious exception, these Indians are pagan and bid fair to remain so for at least another generation. They are, or until lately were, intensely religious in their own way and seem to have failed to perceive any attraction in Christianity, in spite of the fact that it has been expounded to them incessantly for about twenty years.27
In the same year, it was observed that on Piapot’s Reserve, “These Indians take very little interest in religion, and with a few exceptions are pagans,” and, at the Muscowpetung Reserve, “The majority of these Indians are pagans; very little interest is taken in religion by the members of the band.”28 There were other reports, such as the assessment that the James Roberts’s Band was thoroughly Christianized,29 that the Kit-wan-gah Band “have now adopted the Christian faith, there being one hundred and thirty-four Anglicans, and seventeen pagans,”30 or that almost the entire Kis-piox Band “has been converted by the Methodist Church.”31 The accuracy of these assessments, which were made by Indian agents often on the basis of limited evidence, is open to question. However, they make it clear that the government viewed conversion to Christianity as a sign that its Indian policy was effective.
In 1884, the federal drive to suppress Aboriginal spirituality took an aggressive turn when the Potlatch ceremonies of the First Nations of the Pacific coast were banned. These ceremonies served to redistribute surplus, demonstrate status, cement and renew alliances, mark important events such as marriages or the assumption of position, and strengthen the relationship with spiritual forces.32
Thomas Crosby, a Methodist missionary who eventually established a boarding school in Port Simpson, was a strong opponent of the Potlatch ceremony, as was the Anglican missionary William Duncan in nearby Metlakatla.33 Like other missionaries, they recruited the converts they had made among Aboriginal people to the missionary war against Aboriginal culture. In 1883, Christian First Nations people from British Columbia’s north coast submitted a petition calling on the federal government to ban the Potlatch. The petition had been drafted with the assistance of Crosby and another Methodist missionary, A. E. Green, a future Indian Affairs official. The following year, Roman Catholic missionary and future Kuper Island school principal George Donckele and Methodist missionary Cornelius Bryant both supported Cowichan-area Indian agent William Lomas’s recommendation that the Potlatch be suppressed. Donckele said that parents who participated in the Potlatches were left impoverished, and had to withdraw their children from day schools in the winter to accompany them in a search for food. Bryant said, “The Church and school cannot flourish where the ‘Potlatching’ holds sway.” Shortly thereafter, the government introduced an amendment to the Indian Act that made participation in a Potlatch or Tamanawas dance (another west coast First Nations ceremony) a misdemeanour, punishable by two to six months in jail.34 The amendment simply named the ceremonies and provided no further description as to what they constituted.
As a result of this vagueness, early efforts to enforce the law foundered. British Columbia Chief Justice Sir Mathew Begbie not only overturned the first conviction obtained under the law, but also ruled that because the law did not adequately define what a Potlatch was, it was essentially unenforceable.35
On the Prairies, the missionaries who established residential schools in the late nineteenth century were also strong opponents of Aboriginal spiritual ceremonies such as the Thirst Dance (often referred to by officials as the “Sun Dance”). Austin McKitrick, who taught at the Methodist school in Morley in what is now Alberta, was appalled when he realized that students from his school were re-enacting Sun Dances in their play. Not only did they pierce their breasts with sewing pins, they also insisted “the sun dance was the right and good way to worship the Great Spirit.”36 Albert Lacombe, the founding principal of the Roman Catholic school at High River in what is now Alberta, called on the minister of Indian Affairs to end the Sun Dance, which he described as an “ugly feast” and “barbarian show.”37
Not all government officials favoured the banning of ceremonies. Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney wrote in 1884 that he believed the Sun Dance would “gradually die out; and it will be better to allow it to do so, without using strong measures to prevent its celebration as many of the old Indians, who generally inaugurate the dance, attach great importance to it.”38 Hayter Reed took a more aggressive approach. He believed that the ceremonies tended “to create a spirit of insubordination among the young men of the bands.” When he was an Indian agent in the 1880s, he attempted to prevent them from taking place.39 Reed was appointed deputy minister of Indian Affairs in 1893. Two years later, the Indian Act was amended to make it easier to convict people who participated in the Potlatch. The amended Act included a more extensive definition of the types of dances and ceremonies that were to be outlawed. These included ceremonies that involved the giving or gifting of money and goods, or the wounding or mutilation of humans or animals.40 These amendments allowed the Indian Act to be used to suppress not only the Potlatch in British Columbia, but also a variety of ceremonies that were observed on the Prairies, including Thirst Dances.41 In enforcing the law, Indian agents were encouraged to persuade First Nations people to abandon their traditional ceremonies, using prosecution as a last resort. The British Columbia Indian superintendent, A. W. Vowell, informed his staff that the law should be enforced carefully—and not too strictly.42 As a result, in that province, it appears that there was only one conviction for a Potlatch in the decade following the 1895 amendment.43 Much of the pressure that Vowell came under to enforce the law more aggressively came from school officials. When Kuper Island principal Donckele reported in 1897 that a “tamanawas dance” had been held, Vowell concluded that the ceremony “was of a most orderly nature” and no prosecution would be authorized.44 Six years later, Vowell threatened to clamp down on dancing in the Kuper Island area unless parents sent their children to school.45 At Cape Mudge, a Methodist missionary who believed that dances were keeping children out of school nearly precipitated a violent confrontation when he sought to have two men arrested under the Potlatch laws. The prosecution, which Vowell had not approved of, failed for lack of evidence.46
On the Prairies, Indian agents also were instructed to use prosecution as a last resort. Despite this, the 1895 amendments ushered in an era of prosecution and repression. In some cases, persuasion was little more than a veiled threat: Indian agent A. McNeill in what is now Saskatchewan recognized that it was the presence of the Mounted Police, and not his arguments, that dissuaded the File Hills Cree from conducting a ceremony in 1896.47 In addition, the pass system, which had been implemented without legislative authority, was used to prevent First Nations people from travelling to ceremonies being held at other reserves.48
Qu’Appelle school principal Joseph Hugonnard felt the dances were “adverse to Christianity and civilization.” In 1896, he applauded the government for its 1895 amendments, and reported that there had been no Sun Dances in the previous year. He said, “Great credit is due the agents for their firmness in the suppression of these performances.”49
Aboriginal people associated the schools with the attacks on their culture. In 1902, the principal of the File Hills school, Mr. Sinclair, was informed by a First Nations man that “the Indians on the File Hill reserves were going to attack and destroy the Indian school, in revenge for the Agent having pulled down a building they used as a dance house.” An Indian Affairs official could discover no foundation to the threat, but he did note in a report to the Mounted Police that Chief Piapot had just “served a term in the goal [sic] here, for resisting the Police in the execution of their duty.” He suspected Piapot—who was in his mid-eighties—of continuing to be a troublemaker, adding he thought the “Indians” resented the radical changes the Indian agent had made on local reserves.50
Aboriginal resistance to the ban took several forms. In some communities, particularly those distant from any Indian Affairs officials, the ceremonies continued to be held openly. In other cases, they were held in secret. In others, they were celebrated under new names, often as a sports day. And, in other cases, they were modified in an effort to fall within the limits of the law. First Nations people also lobbied politicians about the inherent unfairness of a law that suppressed their religious freedom. Emerging Aboriginal political organizations generally did not support the efforts to resist the Potlatch laws, since much of their leadership was made up of people who had gone to residential schools and converted to Christianity.51
Incomplete records make it difficult to determine how many people were arrested on the Prairies after the 1895 amendment. In 1897, five people were arrested at the Thunderchild Reserve for holding a “give-away dance.” Three were sentenced to two months in jail. The local Mounted Police officer thought the jail terms too harsh and worked with Indian Commissioner Amédée Forget to secure early releases for the men, who were all elderly.52 Records show only two prosecutions in 1900, but thirty-six for 1902 and ten for the following year. In addition, chiefs were deposed by Indian Affairs for their involvement in dances, and men in their eighties and nineties were given jail sentences.53 In 1903, the organizer of a dance on the Muscowpetung Reserve received a three-month sentence. The following year, the organizer of a dance at Fishing Lakes received a two-month sentence. The man convicted was more than ninety years old.54
In some cases, Indian agents resorted to extra-legal measures to enforce the law. In 1900, the Indian agent on the Blood Reserve cut off a man’s food rations for participating in a Sun Dance. The man, Wolf Tail, slaughtered one of his herd of cattle to make up for the loss. The agent escalated the conflict by seizing the rest of the herd, but had to return it after Wolf Tail took legal action.55
In 1903, alarmed by a recent acquittal of a First Nations man charged with participating in a dance, Qu’Appelle principal Hugonnard believed that government efforts needed to be intensified.56 He called for “the total suppression of these dances and pagan practices.” Hugonnard stressed that the purpose of the schools was to transform the students from “savages to civilized individuals.” Unfortunately, many graduates were, he felt, returning to their “pagan habits.” Hugonnard took the position that Aboriginal people were being expected to attain, in one generation, a state of civilization that was practised by “the most favoured white nations after centuries of gradual evolution from their original savage condition.” How, he asked, could the young generation overcome the “pagan habits, customs, and superstitions and mode of life” that still held sway on the reserve? These habits, he wrote, “must be eradicated, or at least suppressed.” He challenged those who might think this harsh to visit a dance “where graduates of these schools were present and see them nearly nude, painted and decked out in feathers and beads, dancing like demented individuals and indulging in all kinds of debauchery.” In his opinion, Indian Affairs needed to adopt a strong uniform policy, “totally prohibiting dancing and its attendant pow-wows.”57 Indian Commissioner David Laird shared the letter with three Protestant missionaries in Winnipeg, who fully endorsed Hugonnard’s request.58
When Duncan Campbell Scott became deputy minister of Indian Affairs in 1913, he initiated an intensified enforcement of the laws suppressing First Nations ceremonies.59 In the case of the Potlatch, he believed the government should suppress “this wasteful aboriginal custom.”60 In October 1913, Scott instructed Indian agents to “in every way possible discourage gatherings which tend to destroy the civilizing influence of the education imparted to Indian children at schools, and which work against the proper influence of agents and farming instructors.” He also reminded them that dances involving “the giving away features and the wounding or mutilation of bodies” were illegal.61 Much of the impetus to renew the enforcement of the anti-Potlatch legislation came from A. E. Green, a former Methodist missionary, who was the Indian Affairs schools inspector in British Columbia. In 1913, British Columbia Indian agent W. M. Halliday laid charges against Alert Bay men for their participation in a Potlatch. Their initial hearing of the case was presided over by A. W. Corker, who was not only the local justice of the peace, but also principal of the Alert Bay industrial school. Two men convicted of violating the anti-Potlatch law were given suspended sentences.62 Prosecutions in 1915 also resulted in suspended sentences and acquittals. The light sentences led to an increase in Potlatch activity in the Alert Bay area.63
School principals continued to play a role in the suppression of Potlatches and Sun Dances. In 1914, Billy August complained about the role that the Ahousaht principal and missionary John Ross had played in the jailing of four people, including August’s wife, for their participation in a Potlatch. According to the letter, “Mr. Ross to do so, put them into Jail, those four Ahousat Indians. Mr. Ross is not good teaching for the Children he is a Policeman all over the west coast Indians they know he is a Policeman.” August requested that Ross be replaced, noting that he felt the local Catholic missionary was superior to the Presbyterian missionary.64 In responding to the criticisms, Ross said:
For some time I have taken an active part in the suppression of intertribal potlatching. I was the first on the West Coast to lay information before the authorities of a breach of the Indian Act in regard to the custom. In spite of warning from the Indian Agent Cox and myself, the Ahousaht Tribe gave a potlatch to the Keleomaht Tribe Nov. 20th. As it was the first offense four Indians paid the cost, $7.25 and were let out with a warning that if they were found guilty on a second offense they would be sent to jail.65
Indian agent Charles Cox came to Ross’s defence, saying that while four people had been arrested and taken to Clayoquot for trial, they were never jailed. The complaints from August were, in his words, “foolish and meaningless.” Cox added that he was “somewhat in sympathy with the Indians,” but when it came to the prohibition of the Potlatch, he intended to continue to enforce the law. He concluded, “The more one does for these people, the more abuse one gets from them.”66 The inspector of Indian agencies, W. E. Ditchburn, also examined the case for the department and reached conclusions similar to Cox’s, noting that another cause of complaint was Ross’s refusal to allow local boys to play baseball on the school field on Sunday, since it would “desecrate the Sabbath,” a refusal that, in Ditchburn’s view, was “perfectly justified.”67
The government school officials also believed that the cultural practices interfered in the effectiveness of the schools. In 1917, school inspector Markle was concerned that students at the Roman Catholic school on the Blood Reserve in Alberta were “too much engrossed in the society doings on the reserve to give attention to their studies.”68 The problem was common, he said, at schools located on reserves and “where Indians have inherited the dance craze. The Superior of the Cluny, Alberta, school made a like complaint to me last Monday. She stated that the big boys apparently though [sic] of little else and were constantly running away from the school to attend these dances, of which there has been two or three weekly.”69
Indian Affairs officials believed the courts had been too lenient in the way they had handled these cases. In response, in 1918, the federal government amended the Indian Act: breaking the law by participating in banned ceremonies became a summary, rather than an indictable, offence. Now, instead of the cases being tried by local magistrates, who tended to take a broader approach to the interpretation of the Act, the charges would be laid by Indian agents, who would then, acting in their capacity as justices of the peace, pass judgment on them.70 In the following year, Indian agent Halliday, acting as a justice of the peace, sentenced two men to two months in jail, the minimum jail term allowed under the Act. The case against four other men that year was adjourned when they, and over seventy other Kwakiutl people, promised not to participate in future Potlatches.71 The practice continued, however, and in 1920, eight men were sentenced to two months in prison.72 Charles Nowell was prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned for his involvement in a Potlatch in 1921.73 The following year, twenty-two people were sentenced to between two and six months in jail for their participation in a Potlatch. While they awaited transportation to Oakalla prison near Vancouver, they were held in the Alert Bay residential school.74
In the schools, students attempted to recreate their traditions, but they had few resources upon which to draw. When Eleanor Brass attended the File Hills school in the early part of the twentieth century, students held their own improvised powwows in secret. Brass said that Gracie Squatepew, the group’s leader, often struggled to impose the proper sense of decorum at these events.
One time Gracie said to us, “Remember now, this is a sacred dance and we must not giggle or laugh.” Fanny Walker, our comic, started to beat the drum while Gracie started singing in a real high note. Fannie and I looked at each other and quietly started to giggle, getting louder and louder till Gracie said, “All right girls, I’m not going to sing anymore if you don’t stop laughing. I told you we must be quiet for this song.”75
By the 1930s, many Aboriginal people were growing up without access or exposure to spiritual practices. For example, Bernard Pinay, who attended the File Hills school in the 1930s, said, “I never had a culture before I went to school. I didn’t have any for them to take away.”76 At the school, there was no tolerance for attempts to discover or revive cultural practices. “When we were in boarding school we never tried to do any of the Old Indian Ways because the staff and the school were really dead against it. There was nothing we could do about it; some tried but they always got hell. So I can’t really name what the ceremonies were because we really never had any.”77 It was only after he left the school that he was exposed to, and participated in, Aboriginal spiritual practices.78
Dances were not the only Aboriginal practice that school principals sought government support in suppressing. In 1898, the principal of the Alberni Girls’ Home urged the federal government to support local efforts “to have the Indian doctors done away with.”79 Indian Affairs officials took a dim view of traditional healers. However, it was not illegal to practise medicine without a licence in Canada, providing the patient was not harmed and the service was provided for free. A reciprocal exchange of goods was part of the healing ceremony, but these ceremonies were generally held in private, making prosecution nearly impossible.80 As part of their schooling, residential school students were told to spurn traditional healers. The fact that members of her family had sought the help of a traditional Carrier First Nation healer in the summer of 1927 filled Fraser Lake, British Columbia, student Mary John with dread: “I could imagine Sister Superior with the willow switch, standing me up in front of the whole school and thrashing me because my relatives believed they could be healed in the Carrier way.”81 It was not until after she left the Fraser Lake school that she attended her first Potlatch ceremony, one held to commemorate the placing of a tombstone over a family member’s grave.82
Time did little to soften church opposition to Aboriginal culture. In 1924, a conference of Roman Catholic residential school principals noted that although several people had urged that the ban be lifted on First Nations dances, “their habits, being the result of a free and easy mode of living, cannot conform to the intense struggle for life which our social conditions require.” Taking aim at those in the Euro-Canadian community who might be critical of missionary work, the Oblates stated that “pagan superstitions could not,—what-soever certain philanthropists might think,—suffice to make the Indians practice the virtues of our civilization and avoid its attendant vices.” The principals actually wished to ensure that the work that had been done in suppressing Aboriginal culture “might be better known.”
With this in view, we beg to suggest the establishment of a MUSEUM OR HISTORICAL AND SCIENTIFIC EXPOSITION where, close to articles pertaining to morals, religion, industries, works of primitive tribes—the memory of which is soon lost—could also be seen the work accomplished by civilization, and the results obtained both on the reserves from Agents’ activities and in the schools of any denomination. It would appear that this would encourage and perpetuate one of the best works in the Dominion of Canada.83
The purpose of such a museum, in their minds, would not be to commemorate that culture, but to demonstrate its “primitiveness,” and to celebrate the work of the missionaries and government in suppressing that culture.
By the 1930s, there was a growing, if very limited, recognition of the importance of Aboriginal culture in the lives of the students. In this view, culture, however, was restricted largely to arts and crafts. In 1935, a United Church report on First Nations schooling in Canada included a separate section on “Indian Arts and Handicrafts,” which lamented “the almost entire lack of wholesome interests” on reserves. The authors thought “a revival of handicrafts or home industries would provide daily interests outside the normal routines of living.” They also noted that “the younger Indians are not as expert as their grandfathers and grandmothers” in basket weaving, beadwork, silver work, or carving. They recognized that the work of the Elders was of high quality and amounted to “a purely Canadian contribution to the world of art.” They also acknowledged that it was a contribution “likely to disappear except as a historic record,” unless something was done. This was particularly unfortunate because, it was thought, Aboriginal arts and crafts could generate “considerable revenue for individual families and communities.” But, they reported, teachers found it difficult “to get Indian children even mildly interested in their own art and craftsmanship.” They recommended the establishment of a Canadian Indian Handicrafts Guild, which would coordinate training at residential schools, development and patenting of designs, and inspection and marketing of craftwork. The work that Principal George Raley had undertaken at the Coqualeetza Institute in British Columbia was seen as a model.84 There was no acknowledgement of the role that the churches or residential schools might have played in the development of what was described as an “inferiority complex” in terms of students’ attitudes towards Aboriginal art, or in breaking the transmission of cultural skills from one generation to the next. There was no recognition that many Aboriginal cultural artifacts had been produced either for direct personal use or for use in spiritual ceremonies, and not as commodities to be sold in an impersonal market.85
By 1938, the Anglican position on First Nations culture had shifted. The secretary of the Anglican Indian and Eskimo Residential School Commission, T. B. R. Westgate, was prepared to acknowledge that
nothing in indigenous culture should be destroyed or condemned, unless it can be proved that it does in fact obstruct the progress of culture. In so far as the preservation, or even the revival of Indian culture and customs contribute to a wholesome coordination of their life with the national life of which they must become a part, such preservation and revival should be promoted.
At the same time, Westgate cautioned that “to encourage the Indians to believe that the old way of Indian life is adequate to their needs in these modern times is neither honest nor helpful.”86