CHAPTER 28

 

Separating the sexes, arranging marriages, establishing colonies: 1867–1939

Through residential schools, the Canadian government and the churches sought to control and transform Aboriginal people and their families. The three previous chapters have described the assaults the schools launched on Aboriginal families, language, and cultural and spiritual practices. This chapter looks at the ways in which the schools were also instruments in a broader campaign to control Aboriginal families.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Canadian government and the Canadian churches attempted to regulate, with the goal of eventually eliminating, traditional Aboriginal marriage practices.1 These practices, through which Aboriginal family structures were established and maintained, varied among cultures and changed over time.² The conventions under which men and women joined together—and had the opportunity to separate—were part of a larger, complex set of kinship relationships. These relationships established both rights and obligations, ensuring social stability.³ Marriages often were arranged by family and community leaders, but, in many societies, individuals could reject a proposed marriage, and the option of separation without stigma was also commonly available.⁴ In some cases, a husband might have more than one wife. However, these plural marriages, which missionaries found particularly scandalous, were not the general practice.⁵ To take an additional wife, a man usually would need the approval of both his existing wife or wives and the new bride’s family. He also would be required to have the resources to support the enlarged family.⁶

Missionaries were strong opponents of Aboriginal marriage practices and sought to have the government ban them.⁷ The federal government chose not to do that. Sir John A. Macdonald, writing as minister of Indian Affairs, concluded that the solution lay in the gradual civilization of the First Nations. Until then, the government would recognize Aboriginal marriage, but not Aboriginal divorce.⁸ As part of the civilization process, it was expected that the schools would produce young people who would reject Aboriginal marriage and would choose instead to be married by the church according to Canadian marriage laws. As noted previously, the whole purpose of admitting girls to the schools was to train them to be Christian wives and mothers. To ensure this goal was achieved, school principals and Indian Affairs officials took it upon themselves to both prohibit and arrange marriages. In one case, the government went so far as to establish a colony for former students, to make sure that they did not return to their reserves and fall back under the influence of their parents.

While it was the intention that residential school students should marry one another, schools put considerable effort into keeping male and female students separate while they were enrolled. This separation of the sexes reflected both the general social attitudes of the day and the stereotype of Aboriginal people as being sexually promiscuous. The schools had removed children from their families and home communities—the traditional agents of social control. By seeking to impose a rule of complete gender segregation, the schools were all but inviting student disobedience. And they got it. Throughout this period, male and female students attempted, and succeeded, in seeking out each other’s company. Parents were displeased by this turn of events and often complained about it to the schools and the government. School responses were harsh and dangerous. Enhanced measures intended to limit contact between male and female students, for example, often reduced the effectiveness of school emergency exits, which were sometimes locked to prevent students from visiting each other. In addition, the courts were used in an effort to police the sexual activity of students—even in cases of what appear to have been consensual relationships.

This chapter begins by examining the growth of female enrolment. It then describes school efforts to separate male from female students, outlines the measures the government took to arrange marriages, and concludes with an examination of government measures to influence the lives of students once they had left the schools.

Enrolling girls: “To civilize the intended wives”

From the outset, the Protestant-run boarding schools established prior to the early nineteenth century were co-educational. As early as 1834, the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, recruited both boys and girls.9 The Alnwick and Mount Elgin schools operated by the Methodists in southern Ontario also enrolled female and male students.¹⁰ At Wikwemikong on Manitoulin Island in the 1870s, the Jesuits established two boarding schools, one for girls and one for boys.¹¹ At Sault Ste. Marie, Anglican missionary E. F. Wilson opened the Shingwauk Home for boys in 1873 and the Wawanosh Home for girls in 1879.¹² A similar approach was taken in the West, where Oblate missionaries opened a boys’ school in 1863 and a girls’ school in 1868 at Mission, British Columbia.¹³ At the Catholic school in St. Albert, in what is now Alberta, girls were educated in a convent and boys in what was termed an “industrial school.”¹⁴

Despite this practice, the first three industrial schools the government built in the North-West Territories in 1883 and 1884 were intended solely for male students. Liberal opposition leader Edward Blake, using language that reflected commonly held assumptions, questioned the policy in 1883, asking Conservative Public Works Minister Hector Langevin:

If the hon. gentleman is going to leave the young Indian girl who is to mature into a squaw to have the uncivilized habits of the tribe, the Indian, when he marries such a squaw, will likely be pulled into Indian savagery by her. If this scheme is going to succeed at all, you will, unless those Indian bucks are to be veritable bachelors all their lives, have to civilize the intended wives as well as husbands.

Langevin responded, “No doubt the Government will have to provide for the education of the girls as well as the boys.”15 In January 1884, Indian Affairs Deputy Minister Lawrence Vankoughnet informed Qu’Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard that if the school employed members of the Sisters of Charity (the Grey Nuns), “a few female students should be taken into the institution.”¹⁶ However, Vankoughnet neglected to provide Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney with a copy of his instructions to Hugonnard. As a result, Dewdney ordered Hugonnard to send the first female recruits back to their homes.¹⁷ Hugonnard persisted in his quest to have girls admitted, and, by the end of 1885, the school had nine female students. He lobbied to be allowed to increase their numbers, arguing that their presence was

absolutely necessary to effect the civilization of the next generation of Indians. If the women were educated it would almost be a guarantee that their children would be educated also and brought up christians, with no danger of their following the awful existence that many of them ignorantly live now. It will be nearly futile to educate the boys and leave the girls uneducated.¹⁸

By 1887, the Qu’Appelle school’s enrolment was made up of fifty-five boys and thirty-nine girls. Since no provision had been made for them in the original building design, the girls were living, working, and studying in the school attic.¹⁹ That same year, the Battleford school began to enrol female students. Principal Thomas Clarke reported that they were “much quicker in apprehension than the boys, and too great importance cannot be attached to their training. Those already in the school have made such wonderful progress, as to warrant increased accommodation at an early date.”²⁰

Qu’Appelle principal Hugonnard initially claimed that the girls could not be counted upon to work without supervision. He observed, “The inconsistency of the Indian character is remarkable in them, especially in the elder ones.”²¹ By the 1890s, however, the girls had become essential to the operation of the school, having become responsible for making almost all student clothing. According to Hugonnard, the girls did “not have as much school as the boys owing to the large amount of housework, sewing, knitting, mending, washing, etc., that has to be done.”22

This sort of discrimination—which was consistent with discriminatory practices in broader Canadian society—was also to be found at the Sault Ste. Marie school where, in 1884, girls had the option of doing “laundry work, sewing, knitting, &c., in the place of history and grammar.”²³ Similarly, in 1899, girls at the Wikwemikong school attended classes full time, except for those “detained by turn to help in the general housework.”²⁴

Many schools found it difficult to recruit girls. In 1894, Regina school principal A. J. McLeod reported that there were twice as many boys as girls at the school.²⁵ The High River school in what is now Alberta had sixty boys and twenty-five girls in 1894.²⁶ The principal of the Alert Bay, British Columbia, school wrote in 1889, “We still find it almost impossible to persuade heathen parents to leave their daughters in our home. Those we have are orphans or the children of Christian parents. There is no difficulty in getting the boys, but the heathen value their girls at a high figure and they are early given away in marriage.”²⁷

In 1895, Mohawk Institute principal Robert Ashton wanted to increase the number of girls in attendance at the school because, he believed, “the man may be the breadwinner but the woman is the civilizer.” He thought that a male student who married a woman who had not attended the school would revert “to the Indian language, habits and customs and his children are Indians pure and simple.”²⁸ To the degree to which these policies were reflective of broader Euro-Canadian attitudes towards the roles of men and women, they are also evidence of the way in which assimilation was central to the work of the schools.

As shown in Table 28.1, the number of male students exceeded the number of females until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. However, from then on, there was a slight majority of girls in the schools. One of the reasons for this slightly larger female enrolment was that girls tended to stay in school longer; the government and churches preferred to keep female students until they were engaged to be married.

In the ways that the schools attempted to handle relations between female and male students and to control Aboriginal family structures, residential schools both reflected and intensified broader patterns in Canadian society. During this period (1867 to 1939), most Canadian women gained the right to vote and saw their educational opportunities expand. These reforms did not challenge—and, in some cases, were based upon—the idea that men and women operated in different social spheres with differing responsibilities. Granting women the vote, for example, was seen as an opportunity to improve the moral tone of society, since women were believed to be a natural force for purity and stability.²⁹ But, it was feared that if Aboriginal women were not subjected to a process of ‘civilization,’ they would present a threat to social norms: at times, they were viewed as temptresses who would lead men astray; at other times, they were viewed as being too weak-willed to resist temptation. No attempt was made to discover, let alone accommodate, the actual roles that Aboriginal women played in their communities—roles that varied over time and from location to location.

Table 28.1. Comparison of male to female enrolment in Canadian residential schools, 1894 to 1939. (Percentages may not add up to 100, due to rounding.)

Source: Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1894, 250–270. Calculation based on the following schools: Mohawk Institute, Mount Elgin Industrial Institute, Shingwauk Home, Wawanosh Home, Wikwemikong Industrial, Alert Industrial, Coqualeetza Institute, Kamloops Industrial, Kootenay Industrial, Kuper Island Industrial, Metlakatla Industrial, Port Simpson Girls’ Home, St. Mary’s Mission Industrial, St. Joseph’s (Williams Lake) Industrial, Yale (All Hallows), Portage la Prairie Boarding (Sioux Mission), St. Boniface Industrial, St. Paul’s Industrial (Rupert’s Land), Washakada Home (Elkhorn Industrial), Water Hen Boarding, Battleford Industrial, Birtle Boarding, Blackfoot Boarding, Blackfoot (Old Sun’s), Blood Boarding (St. Paul’s), Crowstand Boarding, Emmanuel College, File Hills Boarding, Gordon Boarding, Lac La Biche Boarding, Lake’s End Boarding, Muscowequan’s Semi-Boarding, McDougall Orphanage, Onion Lake, Piegan Boarding, Qu’Appelle Industrial, Regina Industrial, Red Deer Industrial, Round Lake Boarding, Sarcee Boarding, Stony Plains Boarding, St. Albert Industrial, St. Joseph Industrial, Vermillion (Irene Training School), Fort Chipewyan, Fort Resolution, Île-à-la-Crosse, Lesser Slave Lake, Moose Fort. Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1899, 444–449; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1904, 2:50–57; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1909, 2:18–23; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1914, 152–153; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1919, 92–93; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1924, 94; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1929, 104; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1934, 77; Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1939, 266.

As described more fully in other parts of this report, the boys and girls received very different training. The girls were to be Christian homemakers and mothers; the boys, trades workers and farmers. While the early industrial schools differed from the boarding schools in that they offered—or attempted to offer—a wide range of trades training to boys, there was very little difference in the training offered to girls at either the boarding schools or the industrial schools. Boys were also provided with greater recreational opportunities and more liberty than were the girls.

Keeping the students separate: “A note easily changes hands”

While they might be attending the same schools, male and female students were strictly separated from one another. The separation of the sexes divided brothers from sisters and was a cause of significant distress to many residential school students. It was a central element in church and government efforts to control the social lives of Aboriginal people, while they were students and even after they left the schools. The practice of separating female and male students was not out of keeping with educational practice of the day, where separate school entrances, hallways, playgrounds, and classrooms for girls were common.30 However, maintaining such strict separation was considered especially important in the case of Aboriginal children, since they were seen as being particularly vulnerable to temptation. In 1896, Mission, British Columbia, principal E. C. Chirouse wrote, “After many years of labour amongst our Indians I am convinced that the system of keeping the boys and girls apart is by far the best as far as morals are concerned, and this is likewise the opinion of my brother missionaries, some of whom have spent over forty years with these people.”³¹

Louise Moine recalled that at the Qu’Appelle school, “the teachers were very strict about segregation. So the boys kept to their side and we to ours. I can’t speak for the teenagers but, we, the younger members, were quite satisfied with these regulations.”³²

The Catholics were not the only ones to educate the sexes separately. At the Anglican Metlakatla school in British Columbia, the boys’ and girls’ classrooms were in separate buildings.³³ An inspector noted that at the Middlechurch school in Manitoba in 1893, “there is the greatest circumspection exercised regarding the association of the boys and girls.”³⁴ It was common for each school to have a separate girls’ and boys’ playground.³⁵ At the Coqualeetza Institute in Chilliwack, British Columbia, there were “play-rooms for boys and girls in their respective quarters and recreation grounds for each side.”³⁶

Margaret Butcher, a teacher at the Kitamaat, British Columbia, school, took a somewhat philosophical view of the difficulties involved in keeping the boys from the girls. “Sometimes notes are passed when we are out. It is as easy as pie. The pathway is narrow. The Boys brush by the line of girls & a note easily changes hands. Yes, it is all natural to their years. One sympathizes with them & would like to laugh but ‘Discipline must be maintained.’”³⁷

Government and missionaries remained hostile to Aboriginal marriage traditions. They sought to control the sexuality of young Aboriginal people while they were in the schools, and to arrange Christian, as opposed to traditional, marriages after they graduated.³⁸

Closely related to the issue of marriage was the control of the sexual activity of older students in the schools. In Aboriginal communities, such activity fit into the broader set of long-standing relations. However, the schools destroyed the traditional norms and controls. At the same time, the understaffed schools created the conditions for sexual relations that offended the morals of the churches and were beyond the oversight of the broader Aboriginal community. The schools also served as a setting for the sexual abuse of students by both staff and other students. Kamsack, Saskatchewan, Presbyterian school principal W. McWhinney’s 1907 comment to a church official is representative of church attitudes: “The Indian boy or girl you may know, yields easily to any impulse or desire and from twelve upwards their passions are peculiarly strong.”39

Not only were sexual relations regarded by the churches as sinful, but also almost anything to do with sex was seen as shameful.⁴⁰ As a result, there was little in the way of sex education in the schools. There was, of course, little sex education in Canadian public schools at this time, either. However, the residential schools severed the students’ links with their traditional source of knowledge and guidance on sexual information and practices: their families and their community. Hilda Hill recalled with affection one teacher at the Mohawk Institute and her discreet efforts at sex education. She told the senior girls that when they left the school, “‘I want yous [sic] to be able to be your husband-to-be’s—your first kiss, let it be your husband’s.’ I think she meant more than kissing. I think she meant sex, but sex wasn’t mentioned then.”⁴¹ One nun at the Qu’Appelle school noticed that Louise Moine often stared at a young male student and asked her if she liked the boy. When Louise said that she did, “Sister Cloutier, in her understanding way, proceeded to give me a few pointers on the facts of life. I felt affection for the first time in that school. I shall always remember her.”⁴²

Parents often blamed the schools if children became sexually active at a young age. When it was discovered in 1891 that male students, along with men from the local reserve, had been visiting the girls’ dormitory of the Presbyterian school at Kamsack at night, Indian Affairs school inspector A. J. Macrae wrote:

It is not to be wondered that the Indians regard the school with the gravest disfavor when it is remembered that the pupils concerned in these immoral occurrences were entrusted to the guardianship of the school authorities when of most tender years, and as one of them said to me, “they have been allowed to grow up in wickedness which their mothers might have protected them from.”⁴³

The principal of the Ermineskin school at Hobbema, Alberta, sought Indian Affairs’ permission in 1938 to keep two eighteen-year-old female students at the school until they were married. According to Principal Pratt, the parents of one of the students insisted “that the girl comes back and be here until she gets married. One of their daughters had an accident and they want to avoid this with Lena.”⁴⁴

School officials could be reluctant to provide their superiors with reports on problems with sexual activity. It was only after the matter had already come to the attention of the local Indian agent that Kamsack school principal W. McWhinney told Presbyterian Church officials of how a group of young men, all former students of the school, had been caught with a bottle of whiskey in the girls’ dormitory in the summer of 1907.45 McWhinney wrote that he had refrained from reporting the matter earlier because of his “distaste for putting the disgraceful affair on paper.” In his letter, he explained that the problem was not new to the school. Prior to his being appointed principal in 1903, he said, a number of girls had been sneaking out of the school to meet with young men. These included former students of the Kamsack and Regina Presbyterian schools, one of whom was working as the school’s farm instructor. After he became principal, McWhinney discovered that, several times, the boys and girls had been visiting each other’s dormitories at night. Students were punished and the “windows were blocked so that they could only rise a short distance, while the stops were securely nailed on. The doors also were kept locked.”⁴⁶ The problem recurred at the school in 1911 and 1914.⁴⁷ In 1914, McWhinney argued that sexual relations between students were ongoing problems at all residential schools. “In our case these are always reported while in other schools the Agents there take the view that no good can come of reporting them.” He also returned to his argument that “Indian boys and girls have strong sexual passions.” He felt the “best remedy” would be “separate schools for boys and girls.”⁴⁸

Not all nighttime visitors were welcomed in the girls’ dormitories. A group of boys from the local reserve broke into the girls’ quarters at the Kamloops, British Columbia, school in 1892. Two girls drove them off with broom handles. Six boys were arrested and charged with burglary. The incident came to the attention of Indian Affairs only when the parents of the girls at the school complained to the Indian agent.⁴⁹

The school administrators viewed the problem as being one of uncontrolled Aboriginal sexuality, but, from the parents’ perspective, the problem was simpler: their children did not have enough supervision. For example, in 1909, female students at the Roman Catholic school in Kamsack took advantage of the fact that one group of nuns had been exchanged for less experienced staff, and on several occasions, they slipped out of the school at night to meet with local boys in the nearby woods. To prevent such occurrences in the future, the male principal began sleeping in the main building, which housed the girls’ dormitory.⁵⁰

In 1915, the chief of the Keeseekoowenin Reserve complained to Indian Affairs about the behaviour of the students at the Birtle, Manitoba, school. After a meeting with band leaders, one Indian Affairs official wrote that “the breaking of the seventh commandment seems to be the chief diversion” of the pupils (in reference to the Biblical commandment prohibiting adultery). The official recommended separate schools for boys and girls, noting that this was a common problem in industrial schools all across the country.⁵¹ According to the school principal, the allegations arose from the fact that two students had become pregnant and had “laid the blame on the school.” His solution to future problems was to enclose the girls’ playground “with a strong fence.”52 An Indian Affairs investigation into conditions at the school revealed that the principal lived in town and was not on-site in the evenings. The report concluded that, “as the boys are not locked up at night there is nothing to prevent their getting out, if they wish to do so.”⁵³

In 1922, Andrew Paull, the corresponding secretary of the Allied Tribes of British Columbia, wrote to W. E. Ditchburn, the chief inspector of Indian agencies in British Columbia, asking for the removal of H. B. Currie, the principal of the Alberni Industrial School. After speaking to former students and the leadership of the four tribes of the area, Paull had concluded that it was “in the interest of Christianity, morality and good characters of the Indians” to remove Currie. Paull’s chief complaint was that several girls had become pregnant while attending the school. This, he said, brought disgrace on the parents, “who rely on the Government to prevent anything of the kind.” He pointed out that the “children are compelled to remain in school until they reach the age of 18 years. If they were let out at the age of 15 or 16 years, such events would be perhaps less frequent.”⁵⁴ In his defence, Currie argued that only two students had become pregnant while they were at the school, and that they and the students who had fathered the children had all been discharged. Currie reported that, in one case, two boys had been caught in bed with girls in the girls’ dormitory. To get in there, they had

to break one and a half inch wooden bars to get into the little boys dormitory, then tear the wire out of the screen window, travel about thirty feet on the outside front wall, about 25 feet from the ground, hang onto the window sills, then again tearing wire from screen windows getting into the girl’s wash room, and again break … wooden bars to gain entrance to the girl’s dormitory.

Currie said that the students were locked in their room for the night and expected to remain there until morning.⁵⁵ All these solutions were in violation of Indian Affairs instructions regarding fire escapes. Not only did they increase the difficulty that students might face should the school catch fire, but these measures also increasingly transformed the schools into correctional facilities.

When the schools were unable to control the students, the police were called. A male student was arrested and charged after being caught in the girls’ dormitory at the Coqualeetza Institute in 1895.⁵⁶ In 1912, students at the Kuper Island school committed what an Indian Affairs official termed a “serious misdemeanor”: meeting up in the barn after sneaking out of their dormitory windows at night. Two boys were expelled and charged with “seduction” before a local judge. (It was a crime to seduce “any girl of previously chaste character” who was under the age of sixteen, or to seduce “or have an illicit relationship” with a ward.)⁵⁷ The local Indian Affairs official took this action because expulsion alone “would not have been considered by them as a punishment for the offence, but more in the nature of a reward.” It was recommended that two girls be expelled and the rest were “severely reprimanded and punished.”58

In June 1919, a group of older boys, believed to be former students of the Qu’Appelle and Round Lake schools in Saskatchewan, were caught going into the girls’ dormitory of the Round Lake school. According to the Mounted Police officer called in to investigate the incidents, “From what I can see the girls are trying to protect these boys, and it is a hard job to get much information from them.”⁵⁹ In response, the school principal, H. McKay, “secured the windows and fanlights by nailing on lumber, had padlocks put on the doors and other things that I thought would make the sleeping rooms secure.” There was not enough evidence to prosecute the boys, but they continued to remain in the vicinity of the school. McKay thought of having one of them prosecuted but refrained because “he is one of my boys, and so much about him that I admire, his music, his song, his free-hand drawing, his affable and seeming kind disposition, I feel surely there is some other way beside having him placed behind the bars.”⁶⁰ Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham was not impressed with McKay’s leniency, saying it demonstrated that the “supervision of the school is not what it should be.” He requested that the Mounted Police issue warnings to the boys suspected of breaking into the school.⁶¹

The principal of the Anglican school on the Peigan Reserve in Alberta had four boys brought up on charges for entering the girls’ dormitory at night in 1924. The Indian agent, C. A. Arthur, had the charges reduced to “causing a disturbance” (although the record does not make clear what the original charges were), and the boys were sentenced to six weeks at the provincial police barracks. Arthur believed that the principal should be replaced for his inability to supervise the thirty students properly with a staff of six. In making the recommendation, he also forwarded the principal’s request for “iron-bound four inch mesh wire to place over the windows.” Arthur recommended against the purchase, saying it would “practically turn the school into a prison.”⁶² The Anglicans responded by suggesting the problem on the Peigan Reserve stemmed from the Indian agent’s ongoing bias in favour of the local Roman Catholic boarding school. According to the Anglican principal, Mr. Roe, agent Arthur “had little use for our school and that his sympathies were entirely with the R.C. School on this Reserve. All the virtues were centred in the R.C.S and the vices contained in our school.”⁶³

Although the records are fragmentary, it appears that a student at the Brandon, Manitoba, school was prosecuted for a sex-related crime in 1926. The Mounted Police official who originally investigated the case recommended that the student be prosecuted for “carnal knowledge.”⁶⁴ No further details were provided.

In a memorandum to his supervising officer, Mounted Police officer R. H. Nicholson wrote that Principal Ferrier was “desirous of keeping the matter as quiet as possible.”⁶⁵ Prior to the trial, Ferrier met with both Nicholson and the magistrate who was to hear the case. According to Ferrier, “The magistrate is of the opinion that the charge should be for house breaking.” (Although the rationale is not given, presumably the boy would be prosecuted for breaking into the dormitory, rather than for attempting to have sexual relations with a student.) If the Manitoba government’s Industrial School for Boys in Portage la Prairie would accept the boy, the magistrate said, he would send the boy to that institute (a provincial government-run correctional facility and not a federal residential school). Otherwise, he would be sentenced to two years in Stony Mountain federal penitentiary in Manitoba. Ferrier wrote, “If it were only a case of this boy, I would discharge him and send him home.” But he feared if he did that, other boys who wished to be dismissed would follow his example.66 The seventeen-year-old boy pleaded guilty to housebreaking and was committed to the Industrial School for Boys for a period of one year, “with the understanding that if his behavior was good he be allowed out on parole.”⁶⁷

In 1933, the principal of the Hobbema school complained that “several young men were coming around the school, trying to have relations with our girl pupils.” When three students ran away with three men, the men were arrested, convicted of an unspecified crime, and given a one-year suspended sentence. Despite this, one of the men continued to come around the school, and one of them had written at least one letter to a female student. The principal sought to have him prosecuted, but the local judge informed him that there was not “matter enough for a conviction.”⁶⁸

The prospect of students becoming pregnant was an ongoing concern for school staff. At the Kitamaat school, Margaret Butcher kept a record of every girl’s menstrual period, monitoring their laundry to check her records.⁶⁹ Sometimes, students who became pregnant were discharged. When, in 1913, a female student at the Alert Bay school became pregnant, the principal sought to place her “in some home here until the child is born.” The principal expressed a concern that the student had been pregnant when she was admitted to the school. Indian Affairs inspector W. E. Ditchburn thought that if that were the case, her condition should have been detected by the medical examination. The issue of whether she was pregnant at the time of admission was of concern to both the principal and Indian Affairs, since it would determine which organization was to pay for her transportation away from the school. In writing about the issue, Ditchburn noted to an Indian Affairs colleague, “It is hardly necessary for me to point out to you the desirability of this matter being kept as quiet as possible in order that the Department’s educational policy may not be affected.”⁷⁰ In December 1939, the Indian Affairs medical superintendent recommended that a pregnant student at the Mount Elgin school be “discharged in care of her father.”⁷¹

That same year, Indian Affairs conducted an investigation into the charges of immorality, largely involving students over sixteen years of age, at the Presbyterian school in Kenora, Ontario. The boys had used a five-cent skeleton key to gain access to one of the girls’ dormitories; in another case, they had gained access to the girls’ dormitory by climbing a rope the girls had dropped from a window to the fire escape below. Much of the activity took place while the principal, E. W. Byers, and his wife were on holiday. Inspector A. G. Hamilton concluded that the principal did not spend enough time at the school to ensure it was well managed, and recommended that the students involved be discharged from the school.72 Under prodding from Indian Affairs, the Presbyterian Church dismissed Byers.⁷³

Arranging marriages:
“They sever themselves from their tribes”

Indian Affairs officials believed that because the department had spent money educating students, it had gained the right to determine whom they married. Government officials feared that if students married someone who had not also been educated at a residential school, they would revert to traditional ‘uncivilized’ ways. In 1888, Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald told the Parliament of Canada, “The young men when trained can get their homesteads, and if they can get white women or educated Indian women as wives, they sever themselves from their tribes.”⁷⁴ Clearly, the control of marriage was part of the ongoing policy of forced assimilation.

In 1890, Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed took Qu’Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard to task for marrying female students from the Qu’Appelle school to boys who had not gone to school, without first getting Indian Affairs approval. In his letter to Hugonnard, Reed made it clear how little concern or respect the government had for parental wishes.

The contention that the parents have the sole right to decide such matters cannot for one moment be admitted. The parents themselves are to a certain extent wards of the Government who interfere in many directions to prevent actions which the ignorance of these people blinds them to the detrimental consequences of.

The regulation of marriage was in keeping with the Indian Affairs belief that Aboriginal parents were not able to instill in children the appropriate social values. According to Reed, Indian Affairs “has most assuredly acquired still further right in return for the expenditure involved in educating them in Industrial Institutions.”⁷⁵

Principals regularly reported and celebrated student marriages. In 1894, the principal of the Middlechurch school reported, “One boy and girl who were among the first to enter this institution, and since married, have applied to be employed here.”⁷⁶ That same year, Hugonnard at Qu’Appelle reported that five school pupils were recently married. In one case, a female student married a male student, and in the others, three young women married young men from the local reserves. The former male student was described as “an excellent carpenter.” On the occasion of his marriage, he was supplied with “a set of tools.” His wife was described as a first-class housekeeper who had “been in service for some time and bears an excellent character.”77

In 1896, Martha Thompson married Peter Smith, a former student of the Coqualeetza Institute. According to Coqualeetza principal Joseph Hall, Thompson “was one of a few pupils received eight years ago into the mission house for purposes of training, and out of which our present institute has grown.” Hall described the married couple’s home as “a model of neatness and taste, and furnishes in itself and its occupants a striking illustration of the good work which is being done for those in the school; such a work as can only be accomplished after years of faithful training and instruction.”⁷⁸

Six years later, Hall reported, “Our most competent pupil, Agnes Murphy, was married from the institute to our most advanced ex-pupil, George Matheson, on February 12, in the presence of the advisory board of the institute.”⁷⁹

In 1905, Port Simpson, British Columbia, principal Hannah M. Paul wrote:

This year we have had the highest average attendance in the history of the institution. Three girls were discharged last summer and fall. Two of them are now married and the third expects to be married in August, to one of the best young Indians in the village. All have behaved themselves well and we have heard good accounts of them.

On May 1 another girl was discharged who seems to be doing well, and another was married from the school on June 9. She keeps her house neat and clean and we think she will put in practice the lessons learned in the school. Nearly all these girls have comfortable homes, and many of them will be in more danger from the vices introduced by bad white people than from the old Indian customs.⁸⁰

The Reverend P. Claessen, principal of the Kuper Island school, reported in 1909 that he had succeeded in “engaging one of our leaving girls with one of our best old boys.”⁸¹ In 1909, Kamloops principal A. M. Carion reported, “It is gratifying to note again that since my last report, two more couples of ex-pupils have been united in the bonds of holy wedlock. The ex-pupils who marry other ex-pupils are better able to retain the habits of civilized life, which they acquired at the school.”⁸² The following year, he reported:

Most of the boys prefer to marry girls trained in the same institution; quite a number of marriages have taken place between ex-pupils, to the satisfaction of all concerned. The circumstances of the Indians in this district are such that it is next to impossible to form the ex-pupils into separate colonies, or settlements.⁸³

Efforts were also made to block marriages deemed to be unsuitable. In 1894, J. W. Tims of the Anglican mission on the Blackfoot Reserve in what is now Alberta said there “is extreme difficulty in obtaining girls from the fact that they are allowed to marry from 10 years of age upwards and to become the second or third wife of grown up and middle aged Indians, a custom which I think it is time the Department should take steps to discourage.”84 Indian agent Magnus Begg supported Tims. In August of that year, Begg reported that “one large girl who had left the boarding school for the holidays wished to be married.” Instead of allowing her to proceed with the marriage, Begg had her returned to the school. He also wrote, “Everything is done to prevent girls under sixteen years of age getting married.”⁸⁵ The following year, Begg told members of the Blackfoot Reserve that they could have only one wife, that they could not marry anyone under the age of eighteen, and that “no young man could marry a girl from an Industrial or board [sic] School without having prepared a house with two rooms, and owning cows, with the necessary stabling, &c.” The Blackfoot at the meeting told him that if the government attempted to prohibit the marriage of girls under the age of eighteen, he “might expect blood.”⁸⁶

In 1895, Indian Affairs instructed principals and Indian agents to seek the permission of Indian Affairs officials in Ottawa prior to allowing students to marry. Later that year, Indian Commissioner Amédée Forget was disturbed to discover that a student who was discharged from the Lestock, Saskatchewan, school, ostensibly to care for her sick mother, had recently married. He said the Indian agent should not have allowed the marriage without government approval. Even though the marriage had already taken place, Forget demanded to be supplied with information on the “prospects generally of the newly married couple being able to maintain themselves and the probability of their carrying out in their home the lessons they have learned at school.”⁸⁷

The government not only encouraged marriage between students, but it also began to make marriage part of the process of getting out of residential school. In his annual report for 1896, Deputy Minister Hayter Reed wrote, “It is considered advisable, where pupils are advanced in years and considered capable of providing for themselves, to bring about a matrimonial alliance, either at the time of being discharged from the school or as soon after as possible.”⁸⁸

The degree to which the Methodist school at Port Simpson had managed to take control over the lives of its residents was demonstrated in 1898 when a father asked that his daughter, Nellie Atanasse, be returned to him. School officials opposed the measure, describing the father, who was not Aboriginal, as “a Catholic and a worthless man.” In court, the judge asked the girl, who was over the age of sixteen, to choose her own guardian. She chose to return to the school; her marriage was arranged for November of that year.⁸⁹

School administrators remained involved in the lives of the students long after they left the school and married. In 1898, Betsy, a former student of the Qu’Appelle school, sought to remarry after the death of her first husband. Since her new husband was already married, Qu’Appelle principal Hugonnard and Indian agent W. M. Graham travelled to her reserve in an effort “to stop this illegal marriage.” They arrived only to discover that the couple had left for the husband’s reserve.90 The Mounted Police tracked the couple down and forced the man to send Betsy back to her home reserve. Hugonnard announced he had arranged for her to “be married to a Pasquah Indian, a widower of one of our girls.”⁹¹

In 1900, the Indian agent at Muscowpetung, in what is now Saskatchewan, sought permission to block recognition of the traditional marriages of two young men from the reserve. Both of them were former residential school students but, according to the Indian agent, their “conduct during the past has not been at all satisfactory.” He had tried to get one of them to take up farming and marry “a respectable girl from the Regina school.” Instead, the two men had visited a nearby reserve and returned with young women with whom they intended to live. The agent believed the women were “very undesirable companions for young men who have received a good common education and a Christian training and of whom we have a right to expect better things.” The agent stated his intention to refuse to recognize these relationships as legitimate marriages “in keeping with hereditory [sic] customs of the tribe.”⁹² His superiors informed him that, according to band records, one of the men was already married, but, in the other case, it was still department policy to accept “the Indian form of marriage.”⁹³

In 1902, Indian agent A. J. McNeill informed Sarcee Reserve school principal J. W. Tims that a student who had planned to be married “next Wednesday or Thursday” would have to delay her wedding until the government could process the principal’s application for her discharge.⁹⁴ Seven years later, Indian Affairs was still seeking to exercise influence over whom students married. In a circular issued that year, Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs Frank Pedley instructed Indian agents and principals:

Most careful thought should be given to the future of female pupils; the special difficulties of their position should be recognized and they should be protected as far as possible from temptations to which they are often exposed. They will be assisted in any effort to become self-supporting, or helpful to their parents, or at the time of their marriage.

Marriage between pupils should be encouraged, and when a marriage takes place, the Department will give assistance to the young wife in some form to be afterwards decided upon.⁹⁵

At the Kitamaat school in the early twentieth century, the staff members did not always attempt to block marriages of which they did not approve. In explaining why she was not opposing the marriage of a girl she believed to be too young, Margaret Butcher said, “The Indians are a primitive people and their moral caliber very different from ours. It is better that they should be married as they wished lest their desires got beyond control.”⁹⁶

The churches sought to have the government strengthen its control over Aboriginal marriage. In 1922, the head of the Presbyterian Church’s Winnipeg Committee on Indian Work urged the government to make it “unlawfull [sic] for a pupil or ex-pupil of the School to marry or be married without the permission of the Indian Agent.” The Presbyterians proposed that the children of such marriages be denied Treaty annuities until they reached the age of twenty-one and be prohibited from attending school.97 Indian Affairs officials viewed the proposals as being overly restrictive and punitive, and did not implement them.⁹⁸

Indian Affairs did, however, continue to use its control over discharge from school to control student marriage. In 1927, three girls aged fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen ran away from the Blue Quills school in Alberta to spend the night with three young Aboriginal men. Indian agent W. E. Gullion opposed a recommendation that the oldest girl be discharged so that she could marry the boy with whom she had spent the night. Gullion feared that if she were discharged, “some of the older girls would be inclined to follow her example.”⁹⁹ Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham supported this position.¹⁰⁰ Two years later, it was reported that two students at the Sacred Heart school on the Peigan Reserve, who were “over 17 years of age,” were to be married to two former students as soon as their discharge was granted.¹⁰¹

Principals continued to arrange marriages into the 1930s. In 1936, the principal of the Roman Catholic school at Onion Lake prepared a list of students who had turned sixteen who, he believed, should not be discharged. He insisted on keeping the students, since he would “always try to marry them as soon as they leave the school.” Of one eighteen-year-old girl, he wrote, “She will be exposed if she is turned loose.” He wanted to keep her until the fall threshing was complete. Then, she would be married to a former pupil. He wanted to keep another eighteen-year-old until “she gets married during the year.” Several of the girls he hoped to keep in the school until he had arranged their marriages were orphans.¹⁰²

The churches continued to urge government to further extend its control over the personal lives of First Nations people. In June 1936, the United Church’s Conference of Indian Workers adopted—as part of its Indian residential school policy—a resolution calling on the federal government to make it an offence “for any person to have carnal knowledge of an unenfranchised Indian woman outside the legal relationship.” It also asked that the Indian Act be amended to make it an offence “for any person or Indian to have carnal knowledge of an unenfranchised Indian woman not legally his wife.” Similarly, they asked that the Act be amended to make it an offence for “an unenfranchised woman to have carnal knowledge of any person or Indian not legally her husband.”¹⁰³ Even though it was clear to the church that the policies of the past had failed, it could see no alternative other than to urge the government to adopt even more coercive and paternalistic approaches.

The File Hills colony

In response to reports that students were being ‘unfitted’ for life in their home communities, Indian Affairs sought to continue its control over students’ lives after they left the schools. In 1909, Deputy Minister Frank Pedley instructed Indian agents “wherever possible to give some assistance to discharged pupils to enable them to immediately put to practical use the instructions which they have received. You should therefore give special attention to pupils whose term of residence is nearly completed and consider each individual case according to its needs.” The agents were supposed to work with the principals to plan each student’s discharge from the schools. Agents were to “select the most favourable location for ex-pupils, and should also consider the advisability of forming them into separate colonies or settlements removed to some extent from the older Indians.”

Agents were to provide male pupils who intended to take up farming with “some degree of assistance outright, or where any assurance can be given that a loan will be repaid, a certain advance will be made to purchase stock, building material, implements and tools.”104 Female students might be provided with a sewing machine and kitchen supplies. A student had to agree to return the machine “if at any time my behavior or personal conduct is not satisfactory to the officers of the Indian Department.”¹⁰⁵

Pedley’s 1909 directive referred to the possibility of establishing colonies for former students. One such colony had already been established in southeastern Saskatchewan in 1902. The File Hills Colony was an initiative of the local inspector of Indian agencies (and future Indian commissioner), W. M. Graham. The colony was situated on land on the Peepeekisis Reserve in the File Hills. But the colony residents did not come from the Peepeekisis Reserve: most of them came from the nearby File Hills and Qu’Appelle residential schools. Those who moved to the colony were provided with stock, equipment, seed, building supplies, and credit. No couple could live together unless they were married according to provincial law, as opposed to Aboriginal custom.¹⁰⁶

The first student to move to the colony was Fred Dieter. In 1907, Graham boasted of the success the young man had achieved, describing him as

an independent, self-respecting citizen. This man has a large house of five rooms and a basement cellar, a large barn and two frame granaries (at the time of my visit, a few days ago, these were full of grain). The grounds surrounding the house are set out with trees three or four years old. The cellar is well stocked with vegetables. They have three cows milking this season, a dozen pigs and a lot of hens in the yard.

Dieter had a full line of farm machinery that was all paid for, and employed a “white man” as a farm labourer. Graham was at pains to stress the distance he felt Dieter had come.

What makes this case the more interesting is the fact that this boy was taken to school from a home which is today one of the worst hovels on the reserve and where his people are purely Indian in all their habits and do no farming, and if this boy had returned to his home, he would have fallen into line with them, without doubt. These people have nothing to do with this young man, and their influence over him amounts to nothing.107

Graham boasted:

Although this colony has only been in existence six years, the results obtained have been phenomenal, to my mind. I shall instance cases of young men leaving school seven years ago, at the age of 18, who are to-day settled in comfortable homes, married and have children, who are brought up as white children are, not even knowing the Indian tongue.¹⁰⁸

Fred Dieter’s daughter, Eleanor Brass, was one of those children brought up speaking only English. Her parents, one of whom was Cree and the other Saulteaux, spoke only English at home, in part because they were fearful their children would be held back in school if they did not have a good command of English. Brass wrote in her memoirs that by government order at the colony, “fiddle dances, pow-wows, and tribal ceremonies were forbidden. Mr. Graham considered them a hindrance to progress. But I can remember as a child accompanying my parents to some secret fiddle dances held in private homes.”¹⁰⁹

By 1915, thirty-one families were living in the File Hills Colony. It was divided into Catholic and Protestant sections, each with its own church. In addition, there was a small hospital with a resident nurse. Colony members had also proven themselves to be patriotic, donating $540 to the war effort within weeks of the outbreak of the First World War.¹¹⁰ Although the colonists were selected because they had done well at residential school, they did not wish to see their own children attend residential school. They managed to win government support for the establishment of a non-religious day school on the colony, but objection from Qu’Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard led to the federal government’s abandoning the initiative.¹¹¹

The students who came to the colony did receive far more financial support than other First Nations people who were attempting to farm in the Canadian West. As a result, they were more successful than many other former students. The federal government could not abandon its paternalistic approach. According to Brass, one of the Indian agents responsible for the File Hills Colony “handled all the finances of the reserve and we couldn’t sell a bushel of grain, a cow or a horse without getting a permit first.”¹¹² At one point, the Indian agent threatened to put Brass’s husband in jail for trading a horse without his permission.¹¹³ Brass believed that the residential schools undermined the colony’s development: “As soon as their children became of school age, they were taken away and the parents were deprived of their rightful responsibility for their upbringing. Along with the Indian agent administrating their affairs, the graduates had little opportunity to exercise initiative and ability.” Given these restrictions, she and her husband eventually left the colony.114

Edward Ahenakew described the File Hills Colony as a tribute to W. M. Graham, but also as a continuance of the residential school model of telling First Nations people what to do.¹¹⁵ While the government often pointed with pride to the achievement of the students at the File Hills Colony, no attempts were made to replicate it in other locations.¹¹⁶ By the 1930s, the government had ceased to refer to the colony in its publications. In 1936, Oblate missionary Guy de Bretagne wrote federal officials to alert them to the colony’s decline. He said only six of eighteen Catholic colonists were still farming.¹¹⁷

Although the File Hills Colony was the government’s showcase, overall support to former students was minimal. In 1914, Indian Affairs provided a total of $6,934.23 to forty-three male and twenty-three female ex-students (an average of $105 a recipient). In reporting on Indian Affairs’ program of support for former students, Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott wrote that “although in some cases the results have not been all that could be desired, it must be considered that these graduates have many difficulties to contend with owing to the environment of the reserve life and the prejudices of the older Indians.”¹¹⁸ Seven years later, the number of former students receiving support had declined to thirty-five (eleven males and twenty-four females). That year, they received a total of $2,933.84 (an average of $84 a recipient).¹¹⁹ In 1925, in referring to what he called the “graduate problem,” Scott wrote, “Many older Indian pupils of promise are being given an academic or vocational training in public schools and business colleges in competition with white children.” He did not, however, indicate how many were receiving support.¹²⁰ The levels of support remained low into the 1930s. In 1936, the government provided $4,000 in assistance, which was 57% of what it had provided two decades earlier, in 1914.¹²¹ Not all former students received support. In 1931, a former student of the St. Albert school was denied funds to purchase a sewing machine at the time of her marriage because she was defined as “non-Treaty” and had married a non-Treaty man.¹²²

In 1932, Russell Ferrier, the Indian Affairs superintendent of education, announced a new follow-up program of support. Under this program, when a student approached the age at which she or he would be eligible for discharge, the principal was expected to contact the Indian agent from the student’s home reserve. The agent was to provide a report on home conditions, and the principal was to give the agent an assessment of the student’s capabilities. Once the student returned home, it was the agent’s role to “guide the graduate into worthwhile activity.” The principals were to encourage local missionaries to assist in providing this guidance. The program’s work was very poorly defined, there were no resources provided, and expectations were minimal.¹²³ Five years later, Ferrier’s successor as the head of Indian Affairs education programs, R. A. Hoey, announced the establishment of another follow-up program. It amounted to a re-announcement of the 1932 program, under which agents and missionaries were urged to oversee and direct the lives of former students. No additional funds were provided to actually assist the students in establishing themselves.124

As this chapter and the three preceding chapters make clear, the residential schools were more than simple educational facilities. They were an integral part of a joint government and church campaign to disrupt Aboriginal families and Aboriginal culture. A great deal of attention has been paid to the obvious and destructive role the schools played in separating children from their parents and suppressing Aboriginal languages. Through their missionary work, the schools, and the men and women who organized them, also devoted considerable effort to demeaning and undermining Aboriginal cultural and spiritual practices and beliefs, and to disrupting patterns of Aboriginal family formation.