An earlier chapter in this part of the history described the way in which parental opposition to industrial schools contributed to the failure of the industrial school initiative. It is important to recognize that Aboriginal parents and communities never ceased to speak out and act on behalf of their children. This resistance took numerous forms. Parents might refuse to enrol students, refuse to return runaways, or they might refuse to return students to school at the end of the summer holidays. They also called on the government to increase school funding, establish day schools, and improve the quality of education, food, and clothing. In taking these measures, they often put themselves at risk of legal reprisals. Various acts of opposition have been chronicled in chapters on such topics as discipline, food, work, truancy, and abuse.
Almost invariably, the system declined to accept parental and student criticisms as being valid. Parental influences were judged to be negative and retrograde, if not simply “evil,” to use the missionaries’ word. Once parents came to be viewed as the ‘enemy,’ their criticisms, no matter what their validity, could be discounted. This colonialist attitude made it impossible for the schools to generate the sort of parental support and involvement any education system needs to succeed.
Principals often claimed that parents were too quick to believe their children’s complaints about life in the school. For example, in 1889, Qu’Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard reported, “Several of the boys ran away but they all came back except two. The excuse they make to their parents for doing this is, that they have too much work to do and not enough school, and the parents are generally ready to believe it.”1
Less than two months after receiving a report that conditions at the Elkhorn, Manitoba, school were good, the Indian Affairs office received a message from the local Indian agent that the majority of parents would not be returning their children to school at the end of the summer of 1926. According to the parents, the children were not well fed, the older boys compelled the younger boys to steal, and all were poorly clothed. The agent said that a physician had examined eleven children on their return to their home community and informed him that seven were in poor health and should be under the doctor’s care.”2 In response, departmental secretary J. D. McLean said he thought the parents’ complaints were baseless. “As you are aware,” he wrote, “it is quite common for Indian parents, who do not wish their children to remain at residential school to do everything possible to delay their return after the expiration of the holiday period.” The parents were to be told that “their children must be returned” to the school.3
Parents often had a very clear understanding of the failings of the schools, and proposed realistic and effective solutions to those problems. In 1905, parents of children attending the Roman Catholic boarding school in Squamish, British Columbia, petitioned to have the school converted into an industrial school. Such a change would have led to a significant increase in the school’s per capita grant. According to British Columbia Superintendent of Indian Affairs A. W. Vowell, the parents realized that the “amount paid for the support of their children at the boarding school is not sufficient to admit of anything but the bare necessities in the line of food and clothing being furnished by the Management.”4
In the same vein, in 1907, Indian Commissioner David Laird wrote that he had received
complaints from parents in regard to the lack of proficiency attained by their children in class work, and believe that in some few cases they were justified. It is quite natural that the schools should profit by the outside work of the boys, the older ones at least, as well as the various occupations of the girls at housekeeping, butter-making, clothes-mending, &c.; but this may be overdone in certain quarters.5
When their complaints went unaddressed, parents often simply removed their children from the schools. Roman Catholic Bishop Vital Grandin asked the Indian commissioner in 1897 to help him stop parents from taking their children out of the Lac La Biche school in what is now Alberta.
Would it be too much to ask the Department to instruct their Agent to use his influence with his Indians in order to bring the parents to leave their children at school until we are satisfied that they know enough to be benefitted by their stay with us. This is our greatest difficulty just now. After three or four years, and even some times after only two years in the School, parents must take their children away, to have their help in their work. Good advice from the Agent or [farm] Instructor at such time would induce some of the parents, if not all, to leave their children with us and it would be a great help to us.6
In 1904, a husband and wife attempted to remove their daughter from the Kuper Island, British Columbia, school. When Principal G. Donckele informed them that when they signed the admission form, they had given the government the right to determine when their daughter would be discharged, the father said, “I am the father of this child and I do not care for what you and the government have to say about it.” After being told that he could be prosecuted, the father left, accompanied by his daughter.7
Even when both government and church officials recognized the validity of parental complaints, they could not bring themselves to tell parents that they agreed with them. This reluctance was underscored by the handling of problems at the Presbyterian school in Shoal Lake, Ontario, in 1917. That year, Inspector John Semmens reported that the conditions at the school were, from the government’s point of view, far from satisfactory.
The Indian language is still used by pupils to an undesirable extent. The Indian parents visit the school frequently and remain for meals and talk a grat [sic] deal with the children. Worse than this it is feared that they encourage their children in disobedience and they resent every form of punishment. Complaints of the pupils are too readily believed by their guardians and the Principal finds that their interference makes his work doubly hard.8
The Chiefs of the Shoal Lake Bands had gone so far as to demand the dismissal of Principal F. T. Dodds in the spring of 1917, arguing that he was “incapable” of running the school.9 Indian Affairs had reached a similar conclusion: a few days after the petition was written, departmental secretary J. D. McLean wrote to the Presbyterian Church with a recommendation that Dodds be replaced.10 Instead, the church appointed a younger man to serve as Dodds’s assistant.11 Indian Affairs recommended that Dodds discourage “too frequent” parental visits and stop feeding parents who visited the school.
Dodds carried out these instructions, along with an additional recommendation that he “deal firmly with those who transgress the rules.”12 The policies backfired. In 1917, three boys, who had been strapped for secretly meeting with girls at a location away from the school, ran away. They reached their homes, and the principal, having “learned that they suffered no ill effects from their journey,” simply struck them off the school list. Another “clever boy, who was a favourite with the teachers,” began acting up and was strapped. When he ran away, no effort was made to bring him back. On another occasion, eleven girls, who had previously “shown no spirit of insubordination,” ran away.13 At the end of August 1917, parents refused to return their children to school.14 Dodds resigned in February, but his departure was delayed until the end of the school year. The Presbyterians believed that Dodds’s immediate removal “would be construed by the Indians as the direct result of their appeal to the Department and a victory on their part.”15 Once again, the government and the churches went out of their way to downplay the legitimacy of First Nations’ complaints.
Chief Napahkesit of the Pine Creek Band in Manitoba told the local Indian agent in 1917 that he was sorry he had ever supported the construction of the Pine Creek school. According to the agent, the chief felt “the children know less when they come out than they did when they went in.” When they left the school, the boys were all “liars, thieves and do nothing but run after the girls, when the girls get out they are all liars, thieves, and do nothing but run after the boys.” Whenever he wanted a letter written or read for him, “none of the children that come out of the school can read or write for him.” What was needed, the chief said, was a day school.16
Indian Affairs explicitly excluded parents from the operation of the schools. Chief William Mann of the Fort Alexander Band in Manitoba, along with two band councilors, wrote to the federal government in 1923, inquiring if the “Band of this Reserve has any rights to see if the schools are well conducted by the Teachers or the Principal.”17 The response from department secretary J. D. McLean was categorical: “as these schools are conducted under the auspices of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, respectively, in co-operation with this Department, you have no authority in directing the policy in regard to the educational work being carried on.” If they had complaints, they should take them to the Indian agent. They were reminded, “It is the duty of yourself and the councilors to assist the principal and the teachers in any way you can in encouraging the Indian parents to send their children to school.”18
Some parents felt it was their duty to their children to withdraw them from residential school. In January 1922, Andrew Saunders, a Cree man from Missanabie, Ontario, completed a statutory declaration saying he wanted to withdraw his two children from the Chapleau, Ontario, school and place them in a day school, because “they are not being properly taught and have too much work.” He said that when they came home for the holidays, they were “both lousy and dirty.”19
Mohawk writer Pauline Johnson’s sister, Evelyn, drew attention to the failings of the system in 1923. In a letter in the Toronto Sunday World, Johnson asked why the government did not “turn the Mohawk Institution into a first-class educational school, teaching trades, farming and domestic science by qualified teachers of these subjects, turning out boys and girls fitted to make their way in the life even if they do not wish or cannot afford to take up higher education?”20
Evelyn’s father, George Johnson, born in 1816, had been a member of the Six Nations. He attended the Mohawk Institute, where his facility with language and his strong Anglican belief led to his becoming an assistant to the missionaries who ran the school. He went on to become an interpreter for the Anglican Church and, later, for the superintendent general of Indian affairs. He was, in effect, the senior government official on the Six Nations Reserve.21 Evelyn’s brother, Allen, also attended the Mohawk Institute, and once ran away from the school. Evelyn and Pauline were educated by governesses, and later attended private boarding schools.22 Two weeks before Johnson’s letter was published, a provincial inspector provided the department with a highly critical assessment of the school, which upheld Johnson’s criticisms. According to the inspector, the school had no “provision for systematic instruction in the principles, either of household science, manual training or agriculture. It would, I think, be most desirable in a school of this kind if the heads of the various industrial departments were also qualified to teach the principles of these subjects.” He added that in the “junior division teachers have changed too frequently to admit steady progress.”23
Chief Kejick of the Shoal Lake Band told Indian Affairs officials in 1928 that the students from his reserve “did not know how to make a living when they left school and would like trades taught.”24 Eight years later, Charlie Shingoose of the Waywayseecappo Band sought to have his fifteen-year-old son, Charlie Junior, discharged from the Birtle, Manitoba, school. His reasoning was straightforward: the boy was making no progress at school, and if he were at home, his father thought, he could “teach him how to work, trap, etc.” After ten years in the Birtle school, Charlie Junior was still in Grade Three. The principal agreed that while he was “fairly industrious,” the boy’s “classroom work was poor.” Indian agent A. G. Smith observed, “I think that the Father is right in some respects, and that he would teach the boy how to earn a living in the Indian way, which would benefit this boy more than the school training.”
However, he thought it would be unfair to the school to discharge a student midway through the school year, presumably because of the revenue that the school would lose. Even though he recognized that the boy would “not learn much which will be of practical value to him,” he recommended he be kept in the school until summer.25 Philip Phelan, the chief of the training division, disagreed, and allowed him to leave almost immediately.26
In the first year of the Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, school’s operation, Chief Dan Francis wrote the following letter to Indian Affairs [spelling in original]:
I am writing you a few lines to tell you about that Indian Shool at Shubenacadie. I thought that School was build for Indian Childrens to Learn Read and write not for Slave and Prisoner like jail also get worse [illegible word] now one Indian boy of this Reserve so beated by Father Mackie he was laid up for 7 Days also young girls do scrubing the floor on Sunday for one young girl give me report wich there had to Sent her Back here got Sick no wonder she get Sick for those young Indian girl never don any hard work So now when Indian agent come over told there Parents there children will not See hard time only shooling also cloths them and feed them and there Boy there do not have enough eat so I think that shool not for childrens to work like Country home that shool was build for Bording School now you see all while Children go Bording Shool don have to work and I understood those childrens at this Reserve should be all Sent Back and there can go shool here and they can help there parents also learn how to make baskets for there Living for these childrens are not orphans they got fathers and mothers and they would like to see there children be use [illegible word] and I do not Blame them for every one love their children I had childrens and got Learning with-out that kind of shool so hoping to hear from you soon.27
When Indian Affairs investigated, Chief Francis told the Indian agent of one girl who had been sent home from the school due to illness and who complained that she had not been well fed while at school. Another student was homesick; a parent wished to have her child returned to her; and parents had visited their children at the school and found them poorly cared-for and overworked. There were reports that parents visiting the school found “children’s heads lousy.”28 Departmental secretary A. F. MacKenzie dismissed these complaints, saying the children were well treated and he did not believe the school staff would “permit any uncleanliness or vermin on the children under their charge.”29
Residential schools also came under criticism from early First Nations organizations. Former Mohawk Institute student F. O. Loft founded the League of Indians of Canada. The creation of the league was one of the first attempts in the twentieth century to create a national political organization for Aboriginal peoples. The league met with considerable opposition from the federal government, and unsuccessful efforts were made to discredit Loft.30 At its meeting in Saddle Lake, Alberta, in 1931, which attracted over 1,300 delegates, a resolution was approved that called for the construction of more day schools to augment residential schools.31 The league became known as the League of Indians of Western Canada. Among its early leaders were Edward Ahenakew and John Tootoosis. By 1932, Tootoosis, who was the league’s Saskatchewan president, was calling for the closure of boarding schools.32 In 1932, the organization asked that only qualified teachers be hired to work at residential schools, that medical examinations be given to students before they were sent to the schools, and that the half-day system be reduced to allow for greater class time.33
Despite their position as a colonized people, afflicted with serious health and economic issues, Aboriginal people in this period expressed their opposition to residential schooling both collectively and individually. Their views were generally discounted, and their right to play a role in the education of their children was dismissed. The churches and the government officials all continued to believe that they knew better than parents.