Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1 Origins to 1939: Volume 1

The government accepted his advice. As a result, the story of the people who worked in the residential schools from 1867 to 1939 cannot be separated from that of the religious organizations for which they worked. At one point during this period, four distinct churches operated schools in Canada. These schools were administered by a variety of missionary organizations, and, in the case of the Roman Catholics, the schools were staffed by the members of several, different, Catholic religious orders.

Each school was a miniature society, often with more than twenty employees. In addition to teachers, there were cooks, seamstresses, housekeepers, matrons, disciplinarians, farmers, carpenters, blacksmiths, engineers (to operate the heating and electrical generators), shoemakers, and even bandmasters. In 1930, there were eighty schools in operation. Although many of the school staff stayed for decades, complaints of high staff turnover were common. It is clear that thousands of people worked at residential schools during this period. They came for a variety of reasons, many staying for only a short time, while others lived the rest of their lives in the schools. Given all these variations, it is possible to present only a sketch of the staff of these schools.

It is not surprising, then, that most of the early school staff members believed they were participating in a moral crusade. In her history of the McDougall Orphanage, the predecessor of the Morley school in Alberta, Mrs. J. McDougall recalled that during the twelve years her husband managed the institution, he was often “greatly worried and the financial burden upon him was heavy and we as a family underwent many times great sacrifice.” She described the work of the mission and orphanage as “going out after the wild and ignorant and bringing them into a Christian home and blessing the body, culturing the mind and trying to raise spiritual vision.” She felt the work justified the sacrifice. It was, she felt, “good work and surely it must be blest.”³ Given the health conditions that prevailed in many communities and schools, the missionaries assured themselves that even if they could not save lives, they could save souls. Writing of her time as a matron at the Anglican school in Fort George, Québec, Louise Topping recalled how “many a night she stayed up to watch a child with feverish hands and head as they clung to her and she counted the last dieing [sic] breaths. Even in death they were wonderful Christians and would say Jesus was waiting for them and say they were glad to go to him.”⁴

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was a common belief among Protestant leaders that the Canadian nation could serve as the basis for God’s kingdom on earth. This nation was ideally white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. They also believed that the character of this nation was under threat from French-speaking Catholics in Québec, and from European immigrants. If Canada were to achieve its mission, these people, along with Aboriginal people, had to accept the benefits of Protestant civilization and become assimilated.5 For such Protestant men and women, devoting oneself to residential school work was a way of helping Canada fulfill a divinely ordained mission.

Some believed it would be possible to evangelize the world in a generation.⁶ The completion of this task of conversion would be the prelude, they expected, to the day of final judgment. Victoria Roman Catholic Bishop Charles John Seghers believed the Inuit of Alaska were the last people on earth who had not heard the Christian message. He expected that their conversion to Christianity would usher in the second coming of Christ. In order to bring about this conversion, Seghers undertook a poorly planned and poorly provisioned expedition to Alaska. It did not result in the second coming, but rather in his own tragic death.⁷

Most missionaries had more mundane motives. Alarmed by deteriorating health conditions in many Aboriginal communities in the late nineteenth century, they believed that without their assistance, Aboriginal peoples could not survive the disease, poverty, and dislocation that followed upon their contact with European societies. As W. H. Withrow, the editor of the Canadian Methodist Magazine, wrote in 1875, although the supplanting of a weaker race by a stronger one was “a step towards a higher and nobler human development,” the incoming Europeans had assumed new responsibilities, having become “wardens to those weak and dying races.”⁸

Although these views may have been based on ‘good intentions,’ those intentions were forged in Europe and implemented without any consultation with Aboriginal people. Such a strong belief in the rightness of their intentions and the divine nature of their mission suggests that the missionaries—and, by extension, the people who founded and operated residential schools—were convinced of their own cultural and, often, racial superiority.

As a young man, T. B. R. Westgate had worked as a missionary in both Paraguay and German East Africa.⁹ Of his experiences in Africa, Westgate wrote that “the vanity and impudence of the educated nigger … passes comprehension. There is no more contemptible or despicable production under the sun.”¹⁰ Westgate went on to play a leading role in the operation of the Anglican residential schools in Canada from 1920 to the 1940s.

One finds echoes of these racially laced thoughts in the writings of prominent school officials well into the early twentieth century. Brandon, Manitoba, principal T. Ferrier in 1903; Mount Elgin, Ontario, principal S. R. McVitty in 1913; and Kuper Island, British Columbia, principal W. Lemmens in 1915—all used the word “evil” in describing tendencies in Aboriginal culture.¹¹ Aboriginal people were also seen as being essentially lazy. In 1877, the superintendent of the Wawanosh Home near Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, a Miss Capelle, complained:

Margaret Butcher wrote of the First Nations people she encountered at Kitamaat, British Columbia, in 1917:

They are a slow, indolent, dirty people bound very strongly by custom and superstition. Matron says the young folk who have been educated in this school and at Coqualeetza will have more chance when some half dozen of the old folks of the Village, who still hold fast to their ancient customs are dead and one hopes that it is so. In all our bunch of 37 children there are only two who appear cunning and they are half-breeds.¹³

In another letter, she wrote, “These people have no history—or written language—no arts or handicrafts.”¹⁴

When teacher Maggie Nicoll was accused of mistreating children at the Presbyterian school in northwestern Ontario in 1902, she asked if Aboriginal people had any right to comment on staff behaviour.

Do you think an Indian—whose children simply run wild—one day having a feast, and at another time having perhaps only one article of food, and not enough of that—with clothing half in rags, and even in the middle of winter, sometimes having neither shoes nor moccasins—is capable of judging what is proper treatment for a child? And still further mention may be made of this fact, that until an Indian has that sort of respect, which savors somewhat of awe or fear perhaps, for the person who has to deal with him in school management nothing can be done.¹⁵

When faced with a former student’s complaints about his treatment at the Shubenacadie school in Nova Scotia, Principal J. P. Mackey depicted the student as shiftless: “To play a game of baseball was work for Tom; he would rather sit in the sun and pester a bumblebee or a fly, by pulling off one wing and one leg at a time. To make an Indian work is the unpardonable sin among them.” Mackey portrayed all Aboriginal people as natural liars. “For myself, I never hope to catch up with the Indian and his lies, and in fact I am not going to try.”¹⁶

Residential school staff members were representatives of colonial authority. Whether they were proclaiming the Anglican school at Aklavik to be the “most northerly residential school in the British Empire,” or using the cadet corps to instill in boys at the Roman Catholic school at Williams Lake, British Columbia, “some feeling of pride in belonging to the British Empire,” many of the staff were proud of the schools’ connection to the British Empire.¹⁷ It was not uncommon for missionaries to assume that by mitigating the harsher impacts of colonialism, they were, in effect, upholding the honour of the empire. Selina Bompas, the wife of Anglican Bishop William Bompas, spent much of her life in the Yukon. In a speech to the Dawson Anglican women’s auxiliary, she reminded members:

In an effort to uphold the honour of the imperial project, missionaries and principals often acted as advocates on behalf of Aboriginal people. Hugh McKay, the superintendent of Presbyterian work among Aboriginal people, concluded that Aboriginal people were “a people that is becoming extinct, a poor people suffering for want of the necessaries of life and dying without any sure hope for the life to come.”¹⁹ McKay criticized the federal government for failing to implement its Treaty promises and for failing to alleviate the hunger crisis on the Prairies.²⁰ Similarly, William Duncan, the Anglican missionary at Metlakatla, British Columbia, advised the Tsimshian on how to advance arguments in favour of Aboriginal title. The Oblates assisted First Nations in making claims to land by circulating petitions and attempting to enforce their rights. Nicolas Coccola, who was principal of the Cranbrook and Williams Lake schools, travelled to Ottawa to argue on behalf of First Nations fishers whose traditional fishing practices had been criminalized by federal laws.²¹

Not all missionaries or residential school officials felt the same strong degree of loyalty to the British Empire. Many of the early Oblates came from France and Belgium. The women who were recruited to the female orders often came from Québec or Ireland. Their world views were shaped by their deep commitment to Roman Catholicism and by their generally French or French-Canadian background. While they were an integral part of the colonial process and shared many of the racial attitudes of other settlers, they stood apart from—and, at times, were in opposition to—the British Protestant colonial movement.²²

Many of the staff members were motivated by a spirit of adventure as well as a religious commitment. As a young seminary student in Corsica, a French island in the Mediterranean, Nicolas Coccola concluded that he wanted more than a life as a priest. In his memoir, he wrote, “The desire of foreign missions with the hope of martyrdom appeared to me as a higher calling.”²³ It was his desire to work in China.²⁴ When he was undergoing his training as an Oblate, the French government adopted laws that placed the Oblates’ lands and communities in that country in jeopardy. In keeping with his adventurous nature, Coccola said to his superiors, “Give us guns, and protection will be assured.” Instead of arming him, the Oblates sent him to Canada.²⁵

British-born nurse and midwife Margaret Butcher managed to get to India, where she worked for a British family. From there, she made her way to British Columbia, where she worked with a Methodist mission to Japanese immigrants.³⁰ In 1916, she was on her way to a job at the Methodist residential school in Kitamaat, British Columbia. She wrote to friends, “Here is Maggie, on the Ocean at the North of Vancouver Island, 200 miles away from her nearest relatives or acquaintances, with about £5 in her pocket, going to unknown shores. Isn’t it lovely!”³¹

Elizabeth Scott, who worked for many years at the Onion Lake, Saskatchewan, school, was raised in rural Manitoba. After a brief time as a rural schoolteacher, she went on to study medicine. She interrupted her studies in 1889 to travel to India to work with the Presbyterian missions there. Illness forced her to return in two years’ time.³²

A similar thirst for experience motivated the four young people who set off from Toronto to establish an Anglican residential school for Inuit children at Shingle Point on the Arctic Ocean in 1929. The party included Anglican minister Sherman Shepherd, his sister Priscilla, who had training as a nurse, and two young teachers, Bessie Quirt and Florence Hirst. Quirt had just finished a year of training as a deaconess and had several years of experience in teaching school, and Hirst, according to Quirt, “had come from England a year before seeking adventure in a new land.” In a memoir, Quirt recalled:

There were no conveniences of any kind—water had to be brought from a fresh water stream some distance away, fuel was driftwood, fresh food was fish, light was from kerosene and gasoline lamps. In one’s wildest imagination it was difficult to see how we could survive a winter let alone operate a school.³³

Two stories, one from southern Alberta in 1899 and the other from the Yukon in 1929, provide insight into the range of people who worked in a residential school and into the often improvised nature of school hiring.

Waldbrooke’s family came to help look for her, but she was never found. The family members believed that the father of a student she had reprimanded had killed her, but police officials believed the disappearance was, in all likelihood, suicide.³⁵ The mystery of what became of her was never resolved.

In 1929, the staff of the Dawson Hostel for Aboriginal students in the Yukon included a so-called mystery woman. According to director C. F. Johnson, she was “a Polish peasant woman who walked all the way from Telegraph Creek to Dawson arriving here just as winter was setting in.” The hostel took her in after she had lost several other jobs. Johnson said she was “uncouth, proud and ignorant and of uncertain temper and there is very little she can do. However she irons and sews after a fashion so that she earns her board. Every little bit that she does is a real help and relieves the others just that much.”³⁶ However, by spring, “the girls got on her nerves and she ‘ran amuck’ amongst them,” so Johnson let her go.³⁷

The missionary societies

In 1920, the MSCC formally assumed responsibility for “Indian and Eskimo work in the Dominion of Canada.”⁴⁴ By the following year, it had established an Indian and Eskimo Commission to direct its Aboriginal residential schools.⁴⁵ Sidney Gould became the general secretary of the MSCC in 1910. Born in England, he and his family immigrated to Canada in 1883 when he was fifteen. Gould attended Wycliffe College in Toronto, where he pledged, “It is my purpose, God permitting, to become a foreign missionary.” After receiving his medical degree, he carried out missionary work in Palestine before returning to Canada. As head of the MSCC, he played a central role in transferring responsibility for Anglican work with Aboriginal people from the British Church Missionary Society to the MSCC.46 He continued in his position with the MSCC until his death in 1938.⁴⁷ From its creation in the 1920s until the mid-1940s, the Indian and Eskimo Commission’s field secretary was T. B. R. Westgate of Winnipeg.⁴⁸ Westgate had joined the Church Missionary Society in German East Africa in 1902. He was imprisoned by the Germans during the First World War and returned to Canada after his release. He also conducted missionary work in Paraguay.⁴⁹

The Methodist missionary societies

From the late 1870s onward, the Methodist missionary work in Canada was carried out by the Methodist Church’s Board of Missions under the direction of Alexander Sutherland. In 1906, the Board of Missions was split into two organizations: one with responsibility for missionary work in Canada; and one with responsibility for foreign work, which also had responsibility for work with Aboriginal people. Sutherland became the head of the Foreign Missions Board. He was succeeded in this by Egerton Shore and, later, James Endicott.⁵⁰ James Woodsworth was the director of western missions for the Methodist Church from 1886 to 1915.⁵¹ One of his sons, J. F. Woodsworth, served as principal of both the Red Deer and Edmonton residential schools. (James Woodsworth was also the father of J. S. Woodsworth, the founder of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a forerunner of today’s New Democratic Party.)⁵²

At the time of the creation of the United Church of Canada in 1925, the Methodist Church of Canada operated three residential schools in British Columbia (Chilliwack, Kitamaat, and Port Simpson), two in Alberta (Edmonton and Morley, which was operated as a semi-residential school until 1926, when a new residential facility was built), two in Manitoba (Brandon and Norway House), and one in Ontario (Mount Elgin at Muncey). After amalgamation, the United Church assumed responsibility for all these schools.⁵³

The Presbyterian missionary organization

While most of the Presbyterian Church’s missionary efforts were devoted to overseas missions, the Presbyterian Foreign Mission Committee (FMC) was responsible for all Presbyterian Church work with Aboriginal, Jewish, and Chinese peoples in Canada until 1912.⁵⁴ The FMC’S full-time secretary, R. P. MacKay, played a central role in determining and implementing Presbyterian Church missionary policy from 1892 to 1925.⁵⁵ The Home Mission Committee (Western Section) handled all other mission work in Canada west of the Maritimes. In 1912, the commission was renamed the Board of Home Missions (Western Section). This body took on responsibility for work with Aboriginal and Jewish peoples, while the Foreign Mission Committee retained responsibility for work with Chinese people in Canada. James Robertson, the superintendent of missions for the West, oversaw much of the Presbyterian missionary work in western Canada until his death in 1902.56 The Presbyterians were relatively late in establishing residential schools. They established two in British Columbia (at Ahousaht and Alberni), four in Saskatchewan (Kamsack, File Hills, Regina, and Round Lake), two in Manitoba (Birtle and Portage la Prairie), and one in northwestern Ontario (originally near Shoal Lake, later in Kenora). After the creation of the United Church in 1925, the Presbyterian Church in Canada retained responsibility for just two schools: Birtle and the school in northwestern Ontario. The rest of the schools that were still open were transferred to the United Church.⁵⁷ (The Regina school had closed in 1910; the Kamsack school, in 1915.)⁵⁸

The United Church missionary organization

After the church union in 1925, the United Church created its Board of Home Missions,⁵⁹ with C. E. Manning and J. H. Edmison as the board’s joint secretaries.⁶⁰ Along with responsibility for work with French Canadians and with immigrants, the Board of Home Missions had responsibility for residential schools.⁶¹ In 1927, the United Church operated thirteen schools with 1,227 students. The total cost of operating the schools was $215,727. Of this amount, $181,000 came from the federal government, and $34,727 came from the United Church, of which the United Church Women’s Missionary Society (WMS) raised $21,157.⁶² The fact that such a large portion of the church contribution came from the WMS underscores the significant role that women played in funding, organizing, and staffing residential schools.

There was a measure of co-operation among the Protestant missionary organizations. They had an informal agreement by which they would not compete for converts within the same geographic region.⁶³ As a result, for example, there were no Presbyterian schools in Alberta, or any Methodist schools in Saskatchewan. The foreign mission boards of the Anglican, Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches co-operated in 1921 to establish a Canadian School of Missions in Toronto.⁶⁴

The Protestant women’s organization

Austin McKitrick, the principal of the Presbyterian school at Shoal Lake in northwestern Ontario, acknowledged this when he wrote in 1901, “I think if we men were to put ourselves in the places of some overworked, tired-out women, we would perhaps not stand it so patiently as they often do.”⁶⁶ Presbyterian school principal W. W. McLaren worried that female staff members often were worked to exhaustion. In 1912, he wrote of the need to require

a medical examination for the lady workers in particular and a means of superannuation of ladyworkers [sic] whose strength is no longer equal to the strain and who are yet dependent upon their salaries for maintenance. None but strong active sound [illegible, possibly “nerved”] women are suitable for this work. Many of the difficulties and misunderstandings that arise are due almost entirely to the neurotic condition of some of the workers.⁶⁷

One missionary wrote that, knowing what he did about what was expected of female missionaries, he would discourage any daughter of his from working for the Methodist Women’s Missionary Society.⁶⁸

Protestant women’s organizations raised funds and sponsored school operations. These organizations also recruited, trained, and supported female school workers.⁶⁹ Many women who felt a call to do missionary work married missionaries, and found themselves taking on a central—and sometimes unpaid—position in running residential schools.⁷⁰

One of the first organizations founded by Christian lay women to promote missionary work was the United Baptist Missionary Union, established in the Maritimes in the 1870s. It was followed in 1876 by the Women’s Baptist Foreign Missionary Society of Eastern Ontario and Québec.⁷¹ The Women’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Canada was established in 1876.⁷² The merger of the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Church in Canada in 1881 led to the creation of the Canadian Methodist Women’s Missionary Society (MWMS).⁷³ The society operated until 1925, when the United Church was created. During its forty-four-year history, the MWMS employed more than 300 women at missions in Japan, China, and Canada. Many of them came from small towns in Ontario and the Maritimes. They were often daughters of ministers, merchants, and professionals. Many had training as teachers, nurses, or doctors; they were usually sent overseas. The less-qualified missionaries were placed in home missions, working with recent immigrants and Aboriginal peoples. Some women spent their working lives in the missionary field; two-thirds of them, however, left after two or three years.⁷⁴

Initially, the society was intended to raise money to support specific elements of the Methodist Church’s general missionary society.⁷⁵ The Methodist Women’s Missionary Society was particularly charged with funding Thomas Crosby’s work with Aboriginal people in Port Simpson, British Columbia. In its first year of operation, the society raised $200 to support Crosby’s work.76 The MWMS also supported the McDougall Orphanage for Aboriginal children in Morleyville in what is now Alberta, and helped fund work among Roman Catholics in Montréal, as well as a female missionary in Japan.⁷⁷ The society contributed funds to support the establishment of the Coqualeetza Institute in Chilliwack, British Columbia, in 1885. It recruited four women who served as matrons at the school during its first fifteen years of operation. From 1889 on, the society also supported a girls’ home in Kitamaat, British Columbia.⁷⁸ Over a four-decade history, the MWMS raised $6.5 million.⁷⁹

In recruiting missionaries, the MWMS sought to set a high standard. A candidate for mission work was to “believe herself divinely called to the work” and to have experienced “salvation through the atonement of Jesus Christ our Lord.”⁸⁰ Successful candidates were expected to make a five-year commitment and to remain single during that period. Those who did not live up to those commitments were expected to pay back all or a portion of the cost of transporting them to the mission and establishing them there.⁸¹

One of the first Methodist female missionaries sent to work with Aboriginal people was Kezia Hendrie, a dressmaker from Brantford. She was hired in 1882 to work as the matron of the Port Simpson girls’ school. Although she underwent what she described as a “spiritual salvation” at the school, she found the supervision of the girls to be difficult. After three years on the job, she resigned to marry another Methodist missionary, Edward Nicholas.⁸² Her replacement, Agnes Knight, was proud of the regimentation she imposed on the school, and recorded, “We have bed-room, dining-room, kitchen and washroom rules, also general rules, or a timetable giving the hour for everything, from the rising-bell to bed-time.”⁸³

With the coming of the creation of the United Church, the MWMS ceased to exist. It was replaced by the United Church Women’s Missionary Society, with a million-dollar budget that supported 400 mission workers.⁸⁴

In 1885, Anglican women organized a women’s auxiliary. One of the organization’s early tasks was to collect and send clothes to missions.⁸⁵ In 1912, the Anglican Women’s Auxiliary (WA) and the Anglican Missionary Society of the Church in England reached an agreement: the WA was to do “all the work among women and children in the Foreign Fields of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada.”⁸⁶ While women were to remain on the fringes of Anglican Church government, the Women’s Auxiliary constituted a parallel operation. By 1923, it was raising 43% of the Canadian church’s missionary budget (for both Canadian and foreign missions).⁸⁷ The Women’s Auxiliary was the source of many of the nurses in Anglican residential schools. In 1920, the auxiliary put out a call for women “preferably but not necessarily between 30 and 40 years of age possessing sound health, adaptability to unusual conditions, capacity for co-operating harmoniously with fellow workers and ability to live contentedly in a small community with little opportunity for social pleasures.”88

The Presbyterian Women’s Foreign Missionary Society (PWFMS) was formed in 1876. Among its early leading figures were Marjory McLaren, the wife of the convenor of the church’s Foreign Missionary Society, and Catherine Ewart, a sister-in-law of Ontario premier Oliver Mowat.⁸⁹ Initially, it supported the work of women working in India, and it was not until 1885 that it began working in Canada.⁹⁰ The move into Canadian work was, in part, a response to reports of the success of Roman Catholic missionaries working among Aboriginal people.⁹¹ All its work focused on the conversion of women and children.⁹² By 1902, the PWFMS was funding all the Presbyterian work among Aboriginal peoples in British Columbia, and providing half the budget for work in Manitoba and what is now Saskatchewan and Alberta.⁹³ In explaining why a “foreign” mission society was doing so much work in Canada, pwmfs official Elizabeth Harvie wrote that work with Aboriginal people was “work among the heathen.”⁹⁴ In 1914, the Presbyterians merged their women’s foreign missionary organization with the women’s domestic missionary organization to create the Women’s Missionary Society.⁹⁵ A Presbyterian society in Scotland also sponsored the higher education of graduates of the Presbyterian residential schools.⁹⁶

In some cases, local women’s committees led the way in establishing residential schools. Presbyterian women in Portage la Prairie were distressed by conditions in a nearby First Nations community in 1886. When local church leaders turned down their request for support, the women established their own missionary society and opened a day school for First Nations children, and provided the students with a daily lunch. The school was eventually turned over to the PWFMS, which converted it into a boarding school.⁹⁷

Although the Protestant churches did not have female religious orders, they did have deaconesses. These were women who had undergone religious and practical training with the intent of a career of church service. The deaconess movement first emerged in Germany in the 1830s.⁹⁸ Starting in the 1860s, institutions were established in England to provide training for female Protestant missionaries. Deaconess training included religious studies, cooking, nursing, and accounting. Although a deaconess had a title and specific training, the position of a deaconess was not formally defined until well into the twentieth century. Like the Roman Catholic nun, the deaconess was expected to provide assistance to the male missionary. But, while it was a subservient position, it did allow women an opportunity to step outside the domestic sphere to which society sought to limit them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁹⁹

Several training programs developed in Canada for deaconesses. The Anglicans opened a deaconess training school in Toronto in 1892. A Methodist facility was established in Toronto in 1894.100 The two-year training program was divided into nursing and non-nursing sections, and the school was an important training ground for female missionaries.¹⁰¹ The Presbyterian Women’s Foreign Missionary Society established the Ewart Training Home in Toronto in 1897. In 1908, the Presbyterians established a formal order of deaconesses, leading to the creation of the Presbyterian Deaconess and Missionary Training Home.¹⁰² Although the Ewart Training Home initially provided a six-month training course that included both religious and practical training, by 1908, the training period had been extended to two years.¹⁰³ After church union, the United Church established its own United Church Training School.¹⁰⁴ The Presbyterian Church continued to operate Ewart College.¹⁰⁵

The Oblates of Mary Immaculate

The Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) was the dominant Roman Catholic organization involved in the operation of residential schools. The OMI was not the only male Roman Catholic order in charge of residential schools in Canada. For example, priests from the local Catholic diocese founded the school at Kuper Island, which was later taken over by the Montfort Fathers.¹⁰⁶ Similarly, the Christie school on the west side of Vancouver Island was founded by a chapter of the Order of St. Benedict in 1899.¹⁰⁷ The Jesuits operated the residential school at Wikwemikong, Ontario, that was later transferred to Spanish, Ontario.¹⁰⁸ However, the vast majority of the Roman Catholic schools were operated by Oblates, in large measure as a result of the work they had undertaken among Aboriginal peoples in the Canadian Northwest in the nineteenth century.

The general administrative headquarters for the Oblates was in France until 1905, when it relocated to Rome. The Oblate order was divided into geographical jurisdictions called “provinces” and missionary vicariates.¹⁰⁹ An “apostolic vicariate” was a territory under evangelization by missionaries. The expectation was that, over time, it would be transformed into a regular church diocese.¹¹⁰ In western Canada, the OMI was designated as a vicariate of missions until 1926. As such, it was under the direct authority of the order’s superior general in either France or Rome.¹¹¹ Several Oblates became bishops, and successfully used their position to lobby the federal government for support for their residential school policy. However, the Oblates, who tended to view the federal government as a hostile, Protestant-dominated institution, were slow to develop a national body to co-ordinate activities with the federal government. Father Joseph Guy was appointed as an informal representative of the order in Ottawa in 1920.¹¹² In 1924, the Oblate school principals began to hold regular meetings.¹¹³ An Oblate province of St. Peter’s was created in 1926. It extended from the Québec border west to the Pacific Ocean, with headquarters in Ottawa. In January 1936, the first meeting of the Commission Oblate des Ouevres Indiennes was held in Lebret, Saskatchewan.114 Oblate Omer Plourde became the new association’s representative in Ottawa in 1930 (even though he lived and worked in Winnipeg until 1942).¹¹⁵ While this served to co-ordinate Oblate activities, it did not co-ordinate all Roman Catholic activities: the Jesuits in charge of the school in Spanish were unaware of Plourde’s role until 1943. They also discovered that the federal government had thought, mistakenly, that the Oblates had been representing the Jesuits at annual meetings between government and church officials.¹¹⁶

The centrality of female labour in the Roman Catholic schools

The Roman Catholics relied heavily on female religious orders to staff and operate the residential schools, orders such as the Sisters of Charity (the Grey Nuns), the Sisters of Providence, the Sisters of Saint Ann, the Missionary Oblate Sisters, the Sisters of Assumption, the Benedictine Sisters, the Daughters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and the Sisters of Notre Dame in Québec.¹¹⁷ These orders not only supplied much of the workforce for the schools, but they also provided it at an extraordinarily low cost. Access to such a low-cost labour supply was one of the main reasons why the Roman Catholic Church was able to operate so many schools.

To take just one example from the 1890s, although the Oblate order was formally charged with the operation of the school at St. Boniface, Manitoba, all staff in 1894 were members of the Sisters of Charity (Grey Nuns) except for the chaplain, carpenter, shoemaker, blacksmith, and farmer.¹¹⁸ An Indian Affairs survey from the 1920s indicates that at five Roman Catholic schools in the West, members of female religious orders accounted for 56% of the school staff.¹¹⁹

Reports from the 1930s make it clear that members of female orders made up a large portion of the workforce at Roman Catholic schools, and also that they were poorly paid in comparison with other school employees. According to an Indian Affairs audit, in 1934, the Delmas, Saskatchewan, school employed one principal, fourteen sisters, one teacher, and one farmer. The principal was paid $1,200 a year; the sisters, $200 a year each; the teacher, $90; and the farmer, $720.¹²⁰ In the following year at the Fort Alexander, Manitoba, school, the male principal, assistant principal, and engineer were all in religious orders. The principal was paid $1,800, the assistant principal was paid $1,200, and the engineer was paid $900. The school also employed five laymen: a night watchman, two farmers, and two labourers. Each of these employees was paid $240 a year. The rest of the work was done by ten Oblate Sisters, who were paid $120 each per year.¹²¹ A similar situation prevailed at the school at Lestock, Saskatchewan. There, the principal, vice-principal, shoemaker, and gardener were all members of male religious orders. They were paid annual salaries of $900, $480, $240, and $240, respectively. The school farmer and engineer were both laymen and were paid $720 a year, and the assistant farmer was paid $360 a year. There were also eleven sisters, each of whom was paid $120 a year.122 In 1936, the Kamloops school had eighteen employees. The salaries for the principal, the assistant principal, the boys’ attendant, and the gardener, all members of male religious orders, were $2,100, $1,200, $900, and $900, respectively. The eight members of the Sisters of Saint Ann at the school were paid $300 a year each.¹²³

The discussion of wages at Roman Catholic residential schools is complicated by the fact that, in most cases, these wages were not paid to the individual member of the religious order who worked for a specific school. Instead, they were paid to the order to which the priest, nun, or brother belonged. Indian Affairs was aware of this practice, but it was not understood by all federal government employees. In 1929, H. B. Rayner, a federal government auditor, noted that the Sandy Bay, Manitoba, school was making quarterly payments to the Winnipeg-based treasurer of the Oblate order. When asked about this by Rayner, the school principal said that the payments were “an assessment or tax made by the order.” The funds were to be applied to deficits for schools in the Oblates’ jurisdiction. Rayner estimated that the tax worked out to 14% of the school’s annual grant.¹²⁴ The following year, Rayner noted that cheques equal to the salary amounts of the Oblates working at the school were being sent to the Oblates in Winnipeg, and the salaries for the sisters were sent to the Sisters of Notre Dame in Québec.¹²⁵ Indian Affairs officials told the auditor that the department was aware of the policy of some religious orders of paying a portion of the staff’s salary to their order. The superintendent of Indian Education, Russell T. Ferrier, said that paying the salaries directly to the workers would be a mistake, since “deficits would then occur more frequently than in the past.”¹²⁶

Similarly, the Jesuit school at Spanish sent money from the government’s per capita grant to the Jesuit Province as compensation for each priest and brother at the school. The principal, Paul Méry, wrote in 1935 to Jesuit Provincial Henry Keane that “every year a large amount, sometimes very large, was sent to the province” (in this case, province refers to the Jesuit Province, not the Ontario government). The principal congratulated himself on the fact that, unlike many Catholic-run schools, the Spanish school was not “bleeding the children to feed the mother house,” but he said that, given the recent cuts in the per capita grant, it would no longer be possible to pay the requested levy.¹²⁷ Méry’s charge that other schools—which were almost all Oblate-run—were “bleeding the children to feed the mother house” is very serious. He did not, however, provide any supporting evidence for the allegation. Although some Catholics may have used money from the per capita grant to fund other missionary activities, it is also the case that they provided staff at well below market rates.

The history of the Sisters of Charity and the role it played in Catholic evangelization in the Northwest in the nineteenth century has already been outlined. Two other female orders also played a significant role in the residential schools: the Sisters of Saint Ann and the Oblate Sisters of Mary Immaculate.

The Sisters of Saint Ann

In the 1840s, a Montréal woman, Esther Blondin, drew together a group of women to teach in a rural parish west of Montréal. By 1850, she had gained the approval of Québec Bishop Ignace Bourget to establish a religious community, the Sisters of Saint Anne. Blondin became Mother Marie-Anne, the order’s first leader. The order opened its first boarding school for rural youth in 1853 in Vaudreuil, Québec. Most of the sisters were from rural francophone backgrounds, although there were also some Irish-Canadian sisters. Those who joined the order had to undergo a two-year training period. They were given new names, and undertook vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and instruction. Eight years after its founding, the order sent nuns to assist Catholic missionaries working in British Columbia. There, the order was known as the “Sisters of Saint Ann” (spelling Ann without an ‘e’).¹²⁹ Eventually, the Sisters of Saint Ann worked at the Mission, Williams Lake, Kamloops, and Kuper Island residential schools in British Columbia.¹³⁰

The Oblate Sisters of Mary Immaculate

Although the Missionary Oblate Sisters were based in western Canada, more than half of the sisters recruited between 1904 and 1915 came from Québec. The world these young women entered was governed by rules and the need for obedience. New members had to give up their names, their clothing, and their personal belongings (as one sister recalled, even a little thimble given to her as a present had to be sacrificed). They were discouraged from developing close friendships (which could be divisive within a small organization) or discussing religious issues with other sisters (since they were supposed to take their religious direction from priests). Visits from family members were not encouraged, and the directoress read all incoming and outgoing letters. Meal servings were small, and asking for more food was frowned upon, but, at the same time, one was expected to eat everything put on one’s plate. Any fresh fruit, always a rare commodity, received as a gift was to be shared with other members of the community.¹³² After they completed their training, they took vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty.¹³³ The sisters had little privacy. Most sisters slept in dormitories that were kept locked during the day.¹³⁴

The Oblate Sisters’ 1931 constitution made it clear that their role was to assist the Oblate Fathers. Great emphasis was laid on the vow of chastity, which required constant vigilance, since the human body was said to have “instincts of wild beasts.” Because of this, any form of entertainment was to be viewed with suspicion.¹³⁵ Some of the Oblate Sisters came to the order as qualified teachers, but many had completed only a few years of high school. Given the demand for teachers and the order’s lack of funds, sisters often had to postpone their own education and, instead, teach for considerable lengths of time before they finally received their normal school certificates.¹³⁶

The Oblate Sisters worked in four Manitoba residential schools (Cross Lake, Norway House, Fort Alexander, and Pine Creek), one in Ontario (McIntosh), and one in Saskatchewan (Kamsack). The Oblates dictated the terms of their service. At Cross Lake, for example, four sisters were expected to teach, take care of the church and sacristy, keep house, and cook and care for the students.¹³⁷

It was through these organizations that the Canadian churches—both Protestant and Roman Catholic—recruited and mobilized a workforce that was dispatched to residential schools across northern Canada. It is common to speak of the schools as being “remote,” although many were located close to Aboriginal communities. They were, however, generally very far from the home communities of the staff. In fact, many of the memoirs and collections of letters of former staff members devote considerable detail to the lengthy journey undertaken to reach the school.¹³⁸ Once there, staff members were submerged in a world for which most of them were not prepared.¹³⁹

The work and the workers

Heavy workloads were common in Protestant schools, as well. In 1889, John Ashby, the assistant principal at the Battleford school, wrote to complain about his wife’s situation. He gave the following description of her summer routine at the school:

Four years after Ashby registered this complaint, the Indian Affairs annual report printed the following summaries of the workloads of two teachers at the Middlechurch school.

Miss Willith, teacher of the junior classes, rises with the children, attends the dressing of the girls, calls the roll, attends with them at prayers and marches them into breakfast. Her school closes at 3 p.m., then she has the girls for sewing, darning, mending, knitting, etc., until 4 o’clock; she then takes them for a walk till five, marches them into tea 5.45, after tea has a ‘King’s Daughters’ Class’ twice a week, takes them into prayers and attends the junior girls in their preparation and getting into bed. She takes alternate Sundays with Mrs. Burman [in] charge of the girls for the whole day. On Saturday she has general charge of all the girls and bathing of the junior girls.¹⁴³

Winnipeg physician George Orton noted the impact that caring for a school of sick children could have on staff. In 1895, many students at the Middlechurch school suffered from pneumonia, bronchitis, and typhoid fever. By then, John Ashby was principal of the Middlechurch school, and his wife was the matron. In Orton’s opinion, the Ashbys were overworked: “Mrs. Ashby, as well as Mr. Ashby, was indefatigable in her efforts, as also the staff, in attention to nursing and caring for the sick. Poor Mrs. Ashby was terribly run down in health, as a consequence, and should even yet be given a short leave of absence to recruit her health before the winter.”¹⁴⁴

The seven-day week was the norm for many employees. The policy at the Anglican schools into the 1920s was to allow “one full day off duty each month.”¹⁴⁵

Indian Affairs did not produce detailed job descriptions for the various job positions at the schools. However, over time, the churches developed their own list of expectations and responsibilities.

In the Anglican schools, the school matron was “responsible for the management of all the domestic affairs of the Institution.” In this position, she was expected to:

•Take charge of all the food supplies.

•See that the school menu was adhered to.

•Take charge of the children’s clothing, and all linens at the school.

•Record the date of receipt of all clothing and food supplies as well as the date of their distribution.

•Provide the principal with copies of the records and a list of items that needed to be ordered.

•Supervise all the female staff and female students, seeing that “the work assigned to each is performed in accordance with instructions given.”

•“Report to the principal any inefficiency on the part of any member of the staff, or any disobedience or misconduct on the part of any of the pupils.”

•Assist the principal in selecting students to be given special instruction in different school departments.

•Arrange for the care of sick children in the absence of a nurse.

•Take on the duties of sick or absent staff or arrange to have other staff take on these duties.146

The Anglican farm instructor had responsibility for “all the outside work of the Institution, including the buildings, land, fences, live stock, machinery implements, vehicles, etc.” With the assistance of the students, he was expected to:

•Operate the farm “upon a paying basis.”

•Maintain a full list of needed supplies.

•Raise “a plentiful supply of vegetables” for the staff, students, and livestock.

•Sell surplus produce on the open market.

•Transport all needed provisions to the school.

•Secure a sufficient supply of hay, preferably from the school land.

•Maintain the grounds.

•Instruct students in the best methods of horticulture, agriculture, and the care of livestock.

•Maintain the water, heating, and lighting systems.

•Provide the principal with regular reports, including reports on sickness and misconduct.¹⁴⁷

•Prepare all meals for the pupils and the staff.

•Give instructions in cooking, making bread, making butter, etc.

•Ensure the cleanliness of the kitchen, pantry, dining room, and cupboards.

•Bake all bread required.

•Be responsible for all milk brought in from the farm.

•“Exercise careful and judicious economy in the use of food.”

•Oversee students assigned to the kitchen.

•Insist that students under her charge speak English.

•Report any disobedience to the principal.

•Engage in the moral and spiritual education of the students.¹⁴⁸

The list of teacher responsibilities the Anglican Church developed during the 1920s set out the following:

•Be punctual in attendance.

•Keep “an accurate record of the names of the pupils and the time spent by each under instruction.”

•Follow the Indian Affairs course of instruction along with “any additional subjects which may be suggested by the [Anglican] Indian and Eskimo Commission.”

•Pay “strict attention to the instruction of the pupils, in Biblical knowledge, Church History and Doctrine, devoting not less than fifteen minutes to this purpose daily, and using such Text-books as may be sanctioned by the Indian and Eskimo Commission.”

•Report cases of “gross misconduct” to the principal.

•Supervise the children’s play.

•Supervise the sweeping, ventilating, and cleaning of the classroom.

•Inform the principal of any equipment that had been destroyed or was lacking.

As previously noted, one of the main reasons for the federal government’s decision to enter into partnership with church organizations to run the residential schools was the expectation that the churches would provide a low-cost labour force. Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed embraced the idea, writing in 1895 that

as the work is of a denominational, and therefore necessarily of a missionary or philanthropic character, and the churches have facilities for obtaining through various societies men and women to whom remuneration for such work is a minor consideration, it seems only reasonable that a lower, rather than a higher rate, as compared with other service, should obtain.¹⁵⁰

In fact, as early as 1889, the federal government had ordered the church-managed industrial schools to cut staff wages. Qu’Appelle principal Joseph Hugonnard described those salary reductions as arbitrary and “odious.” He said that many of the staff had been at the school for several years and had legitimately expected a salary increase.¹⁵¹ When his salary was cut in 1889, Battleford school assistant principal John B. Ashby wrote to Hayter Reed to express his “disappointment that my services have been so little appreciated by the department.” After two years of “faithful and hard service,” he thought, his value to the department should be increased, not decreased.¹⁵²

Alexander Sutherland of the Methodist Church was particularly outspoken about the link between low wages and the difficulties the schools had in recruiting staff. In 1887, he wrote to the minister of Indian Affairs about the “difficulty of obtaining efficient and properly qualified teachers, on account of the meagre salaries paid.”¹⁵³ Six years later, he described the salaries as “insulting.” Those who accepted them would be deemed as “inferior or incompetent men.”¹⁵⁴

One of the great difficulties in connection with schools of this class is to obtain the services of persons whose interest is greater than the wage they receive; this difficulty increases as the years go. The nature of the duties is very trying and the better class of assistants cannot be obtained. This institute has suffered in the past very greatly because trained assistants were not to be obtained.¹⁵⁶

Pay was not only low, but, in some cases, it was also uncertain. In his 1904 report, Metlakatla principal John Scott noted that Miss Davies, who was in charge of the girls’ division, had “given her services for more than two years without any salary or other reward.”¹⁵⁷ In 1921, the staff at the Lytton school had not been paid for six months.¹⁵⁸

There was a considerable difference in salaries from one industrial school to the next. Table 31.4 sets out the staff positions and monthly salaries at four prairie industrial schools in 1894. The federal government imposed the salaries at these schools. The Elkhorn school was operated by the Anglican Church, the Regina school was operated by the Presbyterian Church, and the Qu’Appelle and High River schools were operated by the Roman Catholic Church.¹⁵⁹

Table 31.5 shows staff salaries at the Brandon school in 1935, and at the Kuper Island, Kamloops, and Edmonton schools in 1936. The Kuper Island and Kamloops schools were operated by the Roman Catholic Church; the Brandon and Edmonton schools were operated by the United Church. (It is not possible to prepare a direct comparison with the figures in Table 31.5 because, by 1936, the Regina and High River schools were closed. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has been unable to locate audited statements for the Elkhorn and Qu’Appelle schools from this period.)

Pay rates during this period varied considerably. In 1932, the boarding school at Morley, Alberta, employed eight people: a principal, a matron, two teachers, a seam-stress, a laundress, a cook, and a farmer. The principal’s annual pay was $1,500; the matron’s was $550; the two teachers were paid a combined total of $1,250; the seam-stress and laundress were each paid $500; the cook was paid $540; and the farmer was paid $480.¹⁶³ A 1935 report from the small Crosby Girls’ Home in Port Simpson, British Columbia, showed a staff of only three. The principal was paid $850 a year, while the two teachers were each paid $743.75.¹⁶⁴ In 1935, the Squamish school in British Columbia had eight employees: a principal, a vice-principal, a senior teacher, a junior teacher, a beginners’ teacher, a matron, a cook, and a gardener. Each of them was paid $360 a year, except for the gardener, whose annual salary was $340.¹⁶⁵ Again, the wage rates at the two United Church schools (Morley and Port Simpson) were generally higher than those at the Roman Catholic school at Squamish.

Table 31.6 presents comparative information on salaries in public and religious schools in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, the five provinces that operated residential schools extensively throughout this period. These figures, provided by Statistics Canada, are averages, except for Manitoba. The Manitoba figures are the median, which means that 50% of the salaries were below that level. The Northwest Territories and Yukon did not have a public school system during this period, so salary comparisons with religious schools there cannot be made.

This table shows the impact of the Great Depression on the Canadian Prairies, when wages fell dramatically, particularly in rural schools in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The public school wage range in 1935 for elementary teachers was from the median of $465 in rural Saskatchewan to an average salary of $1,300 in British Columbia. In her memoir of teaching in Manitoba schools, Sybil Shack wrote about when, in 1932, she travelled “to a little schoolhouse about thirty miles from my home to interview a board. There were about a dozen of us applying for scrubby jobs which paid a munificent salary of 450.00 per year.”¹⁶⁶ In addition to these wages, rural teachers in public schools often were provided with accommodation, either in a teacherage (which might be a converted granary or barn) or with a local family. In some cases, they were passed around from one family to another on a monthly basis. There was little privacy, and conditions often were cramped. It might have been unusual, but one rural Canadian teacher ended up sharing her bed with her landlady and the landlady’s baby.¹⁶⁷

Initially, room and board at the Hay River school in the Northwest Territories was deducted from staff salaries, but, from 1935 onwards, it was provided free.168 It is very difficult to calculate the value of the housing that was provided. The quality of housing was, in fact, a matter of ongoing complaint. In 1903, the Indian Affairs annual report stated that at the Coqualeetza Institute in Chilliwack, there were “some very inadequate and unsuitable rooms, occupied by the principal and his family.”¹⁶⁹ In 1904, the principal of the Calgary school reported he was living in a building that had been intended as a laundry. It was, he wrote, “very inconvenient, and naturally in many ways uncomfortable.”¹⁷⁰ By comparison, at Regina in 1905, the principal lived in a two-storey brick residence.¹⁷¹ The principal of the Lytton school, A. R. Lett, wrote in 1924 that, since coming to the school, he and his wife had “no home life.”

Mrs. Lett, baby and myself, occupy one bedroom, not even having a spare room for visitors. The livingroom [sic] and the dining room are so public that we dare to talk over business affairs, and repair to our bedroom, but then must confine ourselves to whispers. The main corridor running through our part, and the staff (three members) living upstairs, sharing our toilet and bath, gives no privacy, which is so much needed under strenuous conditions of work.¹⁷²

Finding accommodation for married staff was an ongoing problem. In 1926, the engineer at the Anglican school at Onion Lake resigned because the school could not provide accommodation for himself, his wife, and their four children.¹⁷³ Three years later, E. Ruaux, the principal of the Roman Catholic school on the Blood Reserve in Alberta, faced the loss of a teacher who was getting married. Indian Affairs turned down Ruaux’s request for the construction of a teachers’ residence, suggesting that, instead, he offer the teacher two of the staff rooms.¹⁷⁴ Ruaux went ahead and built the residence. The next year, the Oblates sought to have the government reimburse the costs incurred.¹⁷⁵ Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott refused, saying, “The Department can hardly be expected to provide funds for buildings at these schools when we have no control over their erection.”¹⁷⁶

Privacy was also a rare commodity within the schools. Margaret Butcher commented in a 1918 letter from Kitamaat:

The United Church Board of Home Missions associate secretary, Kenneth Beaton, was concerned by the need to construct a separate residence for Portage la Prairie principal W. A. Hendry and his wife, who was serving as school matron. If this were not done, he feared they would quit. Beaton noted that the Hendrys had “borne their full share of the burden for us and the Department by their willingness to reside in the school with all the noise and confusion for so many years.”¹⁷⁸

Indeed they had. Hendry started his career as a teacher at the Round Lake school in what is now Saskatchewan in 1900.¹⁷⁹ By 1902, he was principal of the Portage la Prairie school in Manitoba. At that time, his sister was the matron and his fiancée, Miss Finnie, was the assistant matron.¹⁸⁰ With the exception of a few months when he served as the principal of the Alberni, British Columbia, school, Hendry remained in office at Portage la Prairie until August 1931. His resignation came after nearly thirty years of service at the school, and seven months after Beaton had worried he would quit if he were not provided with a private residence.¹⁸¹

Conversely, in the mid-1930s, the Oblates had to deal with serious internal criticism that the quality of housing provided to its members at residential schools was not spartan enough. From June 1935 to July 1936, the Oblates’ European-based superior general, Théodore Labouré, visited the order’s western and northern Canadian missions.¹⁸² He disapproved of the degree of contact that existed between Oblate fathers and members of female religious orders, and the “extravagance” in which, he felt, the Oblates were living at the schools. He wrote, “Some parlours resemble the living rooms of the rich with their massive and expensive armchairs and couches; and the offices of some Principals could rival those of a bank manager or high-ranking government official.” He ordered that all Oblates remove from their rooms “all these trinkets, knick-knacks, lace curtains or drapes, pictures, photos (with the exception of our Oblate photos), the thousand little nothings that transform a religious cell into the den of a worldly man, or even an artist’s studio.”¹⁸³

Journalist Agnes Dean Cameron painted this portrait of life in the Roman Catholic school at Fort Chipewyan in northern Alberta in 1908:

In the long winter evenings these good step-mothers of savages do all their reading and sewing before six o’clock. The mid-winter sun sinks at four, and two hours of candle-light is all that the frugal exchequer can afford. “What in the world do you do after six?” I venture; for well we know those busy fingers are not content to rest in idle laps. “Oh! We knit, opening the stove-doors to give us light.”¹⁸⁸

By 1936, they had lanterns at the Shingle Point school in the Yukon. However, the windows and walls were so poorly insulated that a strong wind could extinguish the flame in a lantern. Staff member Adelaide Butler confided in a letter home:

Who would live all their life with oil lamps? I am looking forward to using electric lights again, after poking about in semi-darkness, but I am also afraid that these dim religious lights have done my eyes no good, and that I shall have to have glasses when I go south. Another expense! They rob one right and left for teeth and eyes, out here!¹⁸⁹

The residential school staff had greater immunity than their students to many of the diseases that plagued residential schools, and, as previously described, their diets were generally superior to those provided to the students. Despite this, the living conditions that prevailed in many schools took a toll on staff. In 1896, Indian Affairs Deputy Minister Hayter Reed described Miss Fetherston, the teacher at the White Fish Lake school in what is now Alberta, as “a cripple and a chronic invalid,” adding that the school “has often to be closed on account of her ill health.” The principal, Mr. Glass, objected strenuously, stating that although Fetherston had been lame when she was hired, she was able to get about without the aid of a cane or crutch. The change in her health was, in the principal’s opinion, the result of having to work in a poorly heated and poorly insulated schoolhouse in which the “cold wind whistled up through the floor.” Glass said that “the Department which charges itself with building, repairing and furnishing school houses, should also charge itself with neglect and the suffering endured by the teacher from that neglect.”¹⁹⁰

The first five Sisters of Charity to serve at the Fort Providence school in what is now the Northwest Territories spent two and a half months travelling from St. Boniface to Fort Providence in 1867.¹⁹¹ In her record of the journey, the sister superior, Sister Lapointe, wrote, “We were ashore, in a strange, though longed-for, land in our new country, our home, our tomb.”192 In adjusting to a change in diet, the staff experienced many of the same difficulties as the students. Sister Lapointe later wrote that although she and the other members of the order did not regret coming north in 1867, “there are in truth many sacrifices to be made.” In particular, she said, they found it “rather hard to get used to the coarse food which is always the same. We never taste bread.”¹⁹³

Some school staff members lived their entire working lives at residential schools. At least twelve principals died in office during this period: Regina principal A. J. McLeod (1900); Muncey, Ontario, principal W. W. Shepherd (died after a horse-drawn cart accident in 1903); Regina principal J. A. Sinclair (1905); Mission, British Columbia, principal Charles Marchal (diphtheria, 1906); Onion Lake, Saskatchewan, Anglican school principal John Matheson (1916); Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, principal Joseph Hugonnard (1917); Shoal Lake, Ontario, school principal Mr. Mathews (influenza, 1918); High River, Alberta, principal George Nordmann (influenza, 1918); Gordon’s, Saskatchewan, principal H. W. Atwater (1925); Beauval, Saskatchewan, principal Mederic Adam (typhoid, 1930); Grayson, Saskatchewan, principal J. Carriere (1933); and Kamsack, Saskatchewan, principal C. Brouillet (1935).¹⁹⁴ Kuper Island, British Columbia, principal George Donckele resigned in January 1907; by June of that year, he was dead.¹⁹⁵

It is more difficult to say how many staff members died during this period. Elizabeth Long, the first matron of the school at Kitamaat, British Columbia, died from illness in 1907. The school was renamed the Elizabeth Long Memorial Home in her honour.¹⁹⁶ Staff members also lost children: Emma Crosby, who helped found the Crosby Girls’ Home in Port Simpson in the late 1870s, buried four of her children at Port Simpson. Two of them had succumbed to diphtheria.¹⁹⁷ Elizabeth Matheson, the wife of the Onion Lake principal, lost a daughter to whooping cough and a son to meningeal croup in the early years of the twentieth century.¹⁹⁸

Those who worked in isolated schools had little access to medical care. In 1935, Miss Tomalin, the nurse at Shingle Point, came down with typhoid. According to her co-worker, Adelaide Butler:

Miss Harvey, the Kitchen Matron, who has had hospital training in England, undertook to nurse her. We had a terrible time with her, as she was delirious most of the time, and became so weak that we thought she would die of collapse. It was the very worst time of the year that she could have got ill, as there was too much ice about for a boat to venture out to sea, and the water would have frozen the engine anyway. There was not enough ice and snow for the dog teams to travel in safety, and though we would have given anything to have her go to hospital at Aklavik, where she begged us to send her, she might have got in the ice in the boat, or fallen through it with the dog teams, so she had to stay here and be nursed, and in consequence, upset the whole routine of the school.¹⁹⁹

She recovered, took three years of training as a deaconess in Toronto, and then was dispatched to the Anglican school at Alert Bay in British Columbia. From there, she went to the school at Carcross in the Yukon, where, once more, she worked as matron. Her health broke down one more time and she returned to Toronto for surgery. After her recovery, she went to the Northwest Territories to work at the Anglican hospital in Aklavik and then transferred to the school at Hay River.²⁰¹

The isolation, coupled with the pressures that accumulated in a small, restricted society, was often stressful. According to her daughter Ruth, Elizabeth Matheson, whose husband was the principal of the Anglican school in Onion Lake, drove “herself until she was alarmingly thin and tired; quite unable to cope patiently with any problem.” During her fourth pregnancy, Elizabeth Matheson was so depressed that she considered suicide.²⁰²

An Indian agent, F. J. C. Ball, gave the following summary of the workload of one employee at the Lytton school in 1922:

There is a man of sixty-three, Mr. Hooper, acting as teacher, minister, janitor and general handy man around the School. He also has charge of the boys [sic] dormitory at night. This man is certainly overworked and is conscientiously trying to do more than his strength will stand and his work should be divided, which I expect the new Principal, when appointed, will attend to. I watched this man rather closely and am inclined to think he is heading for a nervous breakdown.²⁰³

From letters and reports, it appears that physical strength and the ability to dominate a class were considered necessary qualifications for teachers. In 1915, Birtle school principal Rev. David Iverach wrote that he intended to dismiss a female teacher, saying he had “never been satisfied with the results of her teaching larger pupils.” His preference for a replacement was “a good male teacher,” and he noted that if “that was not possible a good strong woman would do.”²⁰⁴ A 1924 inspection report described the need for “a male principal to handle the larger boys” at the Kootenay school.205 In 1928, Indian agent J. Waddy wrote of the Anglican school in The Pas:

The Indian people here in the north respect size in a person much more than they do knowledge contained in a smaller person. Four of the staff at this school are very small and very young for this work, though they are well equiped [sic] for the work otherwise. The Children really do not respect them at all. I would not suggest replacing them with matrons from a jail or rough people of any sort, but in future it would be well to supply good husky ladies for this school, a light weight one is out of place there.²⁰⁶

A show of weakness could devastate a teacher’s career. At the Anglican school in The Pas, a female in the junior class refused to be disciplined in 1933. According to Inspector A. G. Hamilton, the result was that the teacher suffered a nervous breakdown and resigned.²⁰⁷

People often had little control over when their careers ended. Duncan Campbell Scott recommended that Shingwauk Home matron Lulu Botterell be retired in 1931. She had “given splendid service for many years,” but, since she was now blind, “her usefulness at an Indian residential school is largely ended.”²⁰⁸ Alice Davies, one of the teachers at the school, came to Botterell’s defence, pointing out that her sight had not diminished in quality over the past eight years. She thought the principal, Benjamin Fuller, had deceived the department as to the quality of service that Botterell could still offer. In a passage that highlights the sorts of passions that could develop in the insular environment of a residential school, Davies described Fuller as “a self-deluded warped man with the most unreasonable jealous, unfair mind at times, and cunning enough to appear one thing and act another.”²⁰⁹ In response, Indian Affairs allowed Botterell to continue in her position as matron.²¹⁰ Her sight continued to deteriorate and she eventually retired, then died in 1938. In noting her death, the Anglican Indian and Eskimo Residential School Commission commented that, in all her work, “she was governed solely by considerations of Christian duty.”²¹¹ When the seventy-three-year-old matron of the Ahousaht school in British Columbia retired in 1929, the principal, W. M. Woods, recommended that she be given an honorarium of a month’s salary as appreciation for her years of service. Woods noted that she was “retiring with very limited means.”²¹²

In the early 1930s, Indian agent W. G. Tweddell had concluded that at the Anglican school in The Pas, there were “two (aged) ladies who I consider should be superannuated.” He also thought the school engineer should be retired.²¹³ In the case of the two elderly staff members, Anglican official T. B. R. Westgate wrote that the church was

not convinced that these ladies are unable to control the girls, and to dismiss them at short notice, at a time like this when there is so much unemployment throughout this country, and they would be both obliged to return to England, would be to inflict a great hardship upon them, and one which existing conditions do not appear to justify.

Low pay rates, difficult working conditions, and limited benefits made it difficult for schools to recruit qualified staff. According to one study, only two of the fifty-four women the Methodists employed in the Aboriginal missions had university training. One of them had been sent originally to Japan, but found that posting too difficult. Only seven had experience as teachers, and only five of the fifty-four had gone to a Methodist training school.²¹⁵

Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that there were many qualified and experienced people working in the schools. Bessie Quirt, who taught in Shingle Point, was a graduate of normal school and had taught public school for four years. Louise Topping, who worked throughout the North, had trained as both a teacher and a nurse. Adelaide Butler had taught for nine years in England before going to work in northern Canada. Mabel Jones, who also taught in the North, had a degree in theology, and Margaret Peck, who worked in Aklavik in the Northwest Territories, had a degree from Oxford—a distinction that she preferred to keep private.²¹⁶ Miss Asson, the matron at the Kitamaat school in 1930, was a graduate of the Ensworth Deaconess Hospital in St. Joseph, Missouri. She had also trained as a deaconess in Toronto, and worked in China from 1909 to 1927. Ill health obliged her to return to Canada.²¹⁷ The matron at the Anglican Wabasca, Alberta, school in 1933 was a nurse.²¹⁸

Among the staff at the Norway House school in the early twentieth century were the sisters Charlotte Amelia and Lilian Yeomans. Charlotte had trained as a nurse, and Lilian was one of the first women in Canada to qualify as a doctor. Because no Canadian medical school accepted women at the time, she had taken her training in the United States and then opened a practice in Winnipeg in the 1880s.²¹⁹ During the course of her practice, she became addicted to morphine.²²⁰ She claimed to have overcome her addiction in 1898 with the assistance of a Chicago faith healer, John Alexander Dowie, and returned to Canada with the intention of giving up medical practice and working as a missionary.²²¹ In 1900, Charlotte Amelia took a position as the matron of the Norway House residential school.²²² Lilian joined her the following year, working as a teacher.²²³ Despite her desire not to resume her medical practice, as the only doctor for hundreds of kilometres, she was pressed into service.²²⁴ Both sisters apparently adopted children when they were working at Norway House.²²⁵ Charlotte moved to Calgary in 1904, and Lilian joined her there two years later.²²⁶ Lilian later moved to the United States and became an associate of the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.²²⁷

In the circumstances of the low pay and poor working and living conditions, high turnover rates were not uncommon. From 1882 to 1894, there was what amounted to an annual turnover of teachers at the Fort Simpson (later Port Simpson) school. At one point, all the teaching was being done by local Methodist missionary Thomas Crosby, his wife, Emma, and the school matron.228 Twenty-three of the fifty-four women whom the Methodists assigned to work in the Aboriginal missions prior to church union in 1925 resigned in less than three years, and only seventeen served for more than five years. The frequent changes in staff meant there was little camaraderie; meanwhile, the work wore them out. Lavinia Clarke, who had said there was no place in the missions for idlers, was so overcome with work that she resigned from her position at Port Simpson in 1902 and died two years later. Her death was attributed to the long years of work she had devoted to the Women’s Missionary Society.²²⁹

In 1907, the Metlakatla principal in British Columbia reported that both the matron and her replacement had resigned. As a result, the teacher was taking on the roles of matron and teacher. Furthermore, the cook had resigned and could not be replaced “on account of the great increase asked in wages.”²³⁰ A 1929 report on the Carcross school in the Yukon noted:

The Staff appear to be unsettled, the Principal and the teacher have both tendered their resignations to the Indian and Eskimo School Commission, up to date neither of these resignations have been accepted. Miss Ostergarde, R.N. recently arrived to fill the position of head matron and girl’s [sic] supervisor has resigned and will be married in August to the Missionary at Carmacks. Miss Bertram, the kitchen matron is compelled to resign through a complete breakdown in health.²³¹

The Presbyterian school in Kamsack underwent a period of constant staff turmoil in the early twentieth century. Two days into her first week of teaching at the school in 1901, the new teacher, Miss Downing, informed Principal Neil Gilmour that, “on account of the children not being very healthy, the atmosphere of the class-room will not be such that she can stand it.”²³² A week later, the matron, Miss Wright, also resigned. Gilmour strongly recommended that Wright’s resignation be accepted, since “she is certainly not the right person for the work.”²³³ Gilmour hoped to replace her with his cousin, a Miss Gilmour, who, in the past, had worked at both the Kamsack and Regina schools. However, Miss Gilmour initially turned the job down, saying she was glad to be rid of the “endless task of telling the same thing over and over again until my head used to get dizzy, and I would think, how much easier to do the work myself.”²³⁴ Gilmour was dismayed to learn that a former matron at the Regina industrial school, a Miss Nicoll, had been appointed as the new matron. He wrote that at Regina, “they have a cook, a baker, a laundress, a seamstress, and an assistant matron.” Therefore, the duties of a matron at Regina were those of a manager. At Kamsack, Nicoll not only would have to “understand how to make bread, but that she must do a larger share of the kneading of dough for 72 loaves of bread.” Does she know, he wrote, that “this is not merely an issuing of orders regarding the meals but doing the cooking herself and so with all the work?”235

It appears that Gilmour succeeded in discouraging Nicoll from taking the position. He also managed to convince his cousin to reconsider her initial rejection of the position, and she became matron at the end of 1901.²³⁶ It was Principal Gilmour who resigned by the end of 1902. Miss Gilmour, however, stayed.²³⁷ By 1911, she was acting principal. She appears to have been viewed as having made a positive contribution to an often-troubled school. In 1914, after she had retired, Indian agent W. G. Blewett wrote of the Presbyterian school in Kamsack, “Dormitories fair, play rooms dirty, water closets dirty. Many pupils dirty and poorly clad. Miss Gilmour’s retirement seems to have started it on the down grade.”²³⁸ Whether or not this was an accurate assessment, it is clear that a school’s success or failure was regularly laid at the principal’s door.

The principal: “Responsible to the Church and the Department for every phase of the activity”

In 1933, the Anglican Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada offered Reverend K. L. Sandercock $80 a month, plus room and board for him and his wife, if he would take on the position of acting principal of the Wabasca, Alberta, school. The church also agreed to pay half their transportation costs from their current residence in Saskatchewan to the end of the rail line, plus all their transportation costs from there to the school. This money would have to be refunded if he did not stay in the position for five years. At the end of that period, he would be allowed a paid leave of six months. In its offer, the church made it clear that it assumed no responsibility for “any medical treatment which may be required” while he was in its employ. If he accepted the offer, Sandercock would be supplied with a furnished log house, 183 metres from the school. The house was “lined with beaver board, has two bed rooms, and a living room upstairs, with office, dining-room, kitchen, etc. below.” He would remain as the acting principal until his appointment was confirmed by the federal government, and, he was warned, it was government policy to “never advance any appointee to the Principalship until some years of service have been given.” In addition, he was to serve as the Anglican missionary in the district, and was expected to “visit surrounding Indian settlements, to baptize the children of Anglican Indian parents, and recruit pupils for the school.” He could expect “keenest competition and opposition” from the Roman Catholic boarding school, which was located ten kilometres from the Anglican school. Effective recruiting was essential to the school’s survival—it had a pupilage of thirty, but, even with full enrolment, “the revenue does not balance the operating cost.”²³⁹ Sandercock accepted the offer and remained at the school for five years.²⁴⁰

The principal’s job was all-encompassing and poorly defined. In 1926, newly appointed Gordon’s school principal J. K. Irwin discovered upon taking office that he could not find any “laid down regulations as to the duties and powers of a Principal of an Indian Boarding School.” He asked Indian Affairs for a copy of such regulations, since he wanted to know “exactly what I am to do and what powers I have.”²⁴³ Departmental secretary J. D. McLean informed him that “there are no printed regulations concerning the duties and powers of the principal of an Indian residential school.” Irwin was told he was “responsible to the Church and the Department for every phase of the activity” at the school. If he had any specific questions, he should refer them to Indian Affairs.²⁴⁴

Since he was an Anglican, Irwin could, at least, turn to a pamphlet produced by the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, which provided an overview of a principal’s duties. These included the following:

•Supervise “every department of the work, paying particular attention to the welfare of the children, the efficient discharge of their respective duties by members of the staff, and the proper conduct of the School as a whole.”

•Draw up timetables and menus for the operation of the school, allocate students to the proper departments, and ensure that “each pupil is under instruction in the class-room at least half the full time set apart for this purpose daily.”

•Ensure that each pupil had daily religious instruction.

•Maintain “as economical an administration of all departments of the work as may be compatible with safety and efficiency.”

•Correspond with the Anglican Church and forward budget estimates in a timely fashion.

•Prepare annual estimates of the amount of clothing needed at the school.

•Provide itemized lists of the contents of the bales of clothing received.

•Provide quarterly returns to Indian Affairs.

•Maintain accounts and forward copies of accounts to the Anglican Church.

•Report “any inefficiency or improper conduct which may come to his notice.”

•Co-operate fully with Indian Affairs.245

In addition to these tasks, many of the principals were missionaries as well as school administrators. File Hills school principal Kate Gillespie preached every Sunday in the neighbouring reserves.²⁴⁶ Norway House principal Joseph Lousley was also a missionary to the general community. In his memoir, he noted how he depended on the school carpenter to take care of the school “while I was away visiting camps and other reserves, and into Winnipeg to buy supplies.”²⁴⁷

Principals also had to spend much of their summer and fall recruiting students. John Semmens, principal at the Brandon school, used to take “one or two trips every summer looking for more pupils going as far north as Gods Lake [Manitoba] and bringing the children as far south as Norway House in canoe and then by open boat or steamer to Selkirk and by cpr to Brandon.”²⁴⁸ On the trip back to the school, he had to care for up to thirty-five children. Of one steamer trip, he wrote, “I was up from ten to twenty times every night with sickness restlessness fear and thirst. A lamp was kept burning. The small children were troublesome & I was father mother physician and nurse cook servant companion and master.”²⁴⁹ Semmens believed the students could suffer in the absence of the principal, noting that, at Brandon, “the officers left in charge were not always wise or kind in their dealings with the children so that disagreements and misunderstandings arose which had serious consequences of a wide reaching character.”²⁵⁰

The principals were usually churchmen, but some, like Onion Lake principal John Matheson, had a rough-and-ready background. Matheson was born in Red River, and grew up with knowledge of Cree and Gaelic, as well as English and French. After a brief time as schoolteacher, he headed west at the age of twenty, finding work as a mail carrier, freighter, and trader.²⁵¹ He had a strong sympathy for the Métis and was reputed to have lent Métis military leader Gabriel Dumont a rifle in 1885.²⁵² When he was in his forties, he underwent a religious conversion. After a time as a revival preacher in Vancouver, he agreed to take over the Anglican mission at Onion Lake in 1892. The appointment was somewhat unusual, since Matheson had been raised as a Presbyterian and had been recently seeking a mission appointment from the Methodists.²⁵³ At Onion Lake, Matheson not only served as missionary and principal, but he also ranched, farmed, and traded, often using income from his business enterprises to support the school.²⁵⁴

As the Anglican missionary and principal at Fort George, Trevor Jones found that he also had to become a trader, since any labourers the school hired wished to be paid in supplies. He “had to spend three or four hours daily during the busy season weighing out small quantities of flour, beef tallow, baking powder, tea and sugar to as many as twenty-five men.”255 Other principals also felt obliged to take on extra work. In addition to the $750 a year that A. J. Vale made as a principal of the Hay River school in the Northwest Territories, he was paid $200 a year as a weather observer.²⁵⁶ On occasion, some principals tried to exploit their position. In 1929, Duncan Campbell Scott asked for the resignation of B. Rogers, the principal of the Mohawk Institute. That summer, Rogers, without informing Indian Affairs, had purchased a farm next to the school with the intention of opening a riding school. According to Scott, Rogers had used “the labour of pupils of the Institute and the staff on the farm.”²⁵⁷

Although staff turnover in the schools was high, many principals put in decades of service. The members of Roman Catholic orders were expected to accept the assignments they were given. Oblate Father Paul Bousquet, for example, had a lengthy and varied career within the Roman Catholic schools of western Canada. In 1903, he was principal of the Pine Creek school in Manitoba,²⁵⁸ and, by 1906, he was principal of the Catholic school in Kenora, Ontario.²⁵⁹ He was appointed principal of the Sandy Bay, Manitoba, school in 1912.²⁶⁰ He was put in charge of the Fort Alexander school in 1914.²⁶¹ There, he became discouraged by the number of runaways. He attempted to resign his position in both 1919 and 1921, saying he no longer wished to work in First Nations education.²⁶² However, the Oblates did not accept the resignation, and he remained in office until he became seriously ill and had to be replaced in 1927.²⁶³ By 1933, he was principal of the Fort Frances, Ontario, school.²⁶⁴ Three years later, he was back to where he began, as principal of the Pine Creek school in Manitoba.²⁶⁵ He left that school in 1937.²⁶⁶ In all, he had worked for at least thirty-four years at five different schools. Sherman Shepherd, who travelled from Toronto to Shingle Point on the Arctic Ocean in 1929, eventually served at the Anglican schools in Aklavik (Northwest Territories), Fort George (Québec), and Moose Factory (Ontario), resigning in 1954 after twenty-five years of service in northern Canada.²⁶⁷

Sometimes, a career could end on a bitter note. John Semmens, the founding principal of the Brandon school, felt he was forced out of his position because he refused to agree to a planned spending cut of five cents per day per student.

I had filled the school with pupils, had put the farm in good shape, had increased the stock from one cow to thirty head of cattle and horses, had gathered one crop of wheat and planted another one over a larger area, had constructed a number of buildings, had provided sufficient farm machinery, had erected three windmills, one for pumping water, one for clearing the sewage and one for chopping feed. After all this it seemed a small thing that the Church should quarrel with me over five cents of difference on each pupil’s cost per day.²⁶⁸

The principals faced an almost impossible task. Underfunding forced them to rely increasingly on the school farms and student labour. Once parents concluded that their children were being underfed and overworked, they might stop sending them to school. When this happened, the deficit increased and the principal was pronounced a failure. The next principal might institute a more lenient regime, but, in the end, the impact of underfunding was unavoidable. This cycle played itself out at the Red Deer school in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One after another of the school’s first four principals was forced out of office. The first, John Nelson, was judged to be too arbitrary in his treatment of staff and students.²⁷³ The second, C. E. Somerset, was dismissed after it was concluded that, due to his leniency, he had lost control over the school.²⁷⁴ Somerset believed he had not been fairly treated and claimed that the investigation into his operation of the school had not given him a proper hearing.²⁷⁵ His successor, James Rice, imposed stricter discipline and, in an effort to make the school financially self-sustaining, dramatically increased the size of the school’s farm operation. Parents objected to the harsh discipline and hard labour, and soon they refused to send their children to the school.²⁷⁶ His successor, Arthur Barner, abolished corporal punishment, placed a greater focus on education, instituted holidays, raised staff pay, and improved health conditions at the school.²⁷⁷ The school’s finances were still heavily dependent on the farm operation. When crops failed four years in a row, the school had a $5,000 deficit in 1913. Indian Affairs concluded that Barner had failed to exercise proper control of the school budget. In the face of this negative assessment, Barner resigned.²⁷⁸ While each man undoubtedly had his limitations, one likely conclusion from a review of the careers of these four men (which spans the twenty-year period from 1893 to 1913) is that success was impossible: successive principals were dismissed for exerting too much discipline or too little discipline, for focusing too much attention on the school farm and financial initiatives, or for being too attentive to student and parent concerns.

Some staff members believed that principals were too dictatorial. In 1903, teacher Wasley Harris complained that Regina school principal J. A. Sinclair would not let staff visit town, would not serve them vegetables, and had hit him on the neck.279 In other cases, principals had difficulty exerting their authority. In investigating complaints against Red Deer principal John Nelson in 1895, Alex Sutherland of the Methodist Missionary Society acknowledged that Nelson may “have been too arbitrary alike with the pupils and the employees.” But, he also said, some of the employees, particularly the carpenter (who was the brother of Senator James Lougheed), had acted as if they were “virtually independent of the Principal.”²⁸⁰ When the Brandon school opened in 1895, Indian Affairs appointed all the staff except the principal. The incoming principal, John Semmens, who was appointed by the Methodist Church, said, “This arrangement was not altogether satisfactory because they owed no distinct loyalty to me or to the Church which I represented. They felt secure because they were politically assigned to their positions and the power of dismissal for any cause did not rest with me.”²⁸¹

In 1913, the Birtle school had a problem with frequent runaways. Indian agent G. H. Wheatley believed the problem would be solved by the appointment of a new principal “who had the authority to discharge any member of the staff, who failed to faithfully fulfill their duties.”²⁸²

Given these conditions, many principals found the work very stressful. Rev. E. F. Wilson, founding principal of the Shingwauk Home, had to close the school temporarily when he suffered “nervous affection of the heart and extreme exhaustion” in 1880.²⁸³ Four years later, he considered giving up his career:

It is a question also whether if I were to give up this work, I am particularly well fitted for any other. Whether I could get employment elsewhere suited to my nature, tastes, and capabilities and at any better remuneration than I at present receive. I think if I did this, the oversight of some school or schools somewhere would perhaps suit me best but I would like to have less responsibility as I think it is this perhaps more than anything else that is wearing me out. I don’t think anyone knows what a constant strain it is upon me. I have really no time to myself, no time for reading, hardly any time for reading the newspaper. Everything from the least to the greatest connected with these Homes falls on myself.²⁸⁴

In 1891, when he was attempting to open a new school in Elkhorn, Manitoba, and a day school in Medicine Hat, in what is now Alberta, Wilson once more felt overwhelmed: “I have devoted my life entirely to this Indian work &, while I have life and strength, hope if God will to continue in it. But at present I feel, with such insufficient and uncertain help, the strain is too great upon me and the burden of responsibility too heavy.”285 He retired in 1893.²⁸⁶

In 1939, the Kamloops principal, Father T. Kennedy, asked to be relieved of his position due to “his exceedingly high strung nervous condition.” He was replaced by Father O’Grady as principal.²⁸⁷

In other cases, principals did not feel supported by their superiors. The principal of the Roman Catholic school at Mission, A. M. D. Gillen, felt that the Oblates saddled him with those members of the order who were not working out elsewhere. It was a complaint that led to his eventual resignation. In 1936, he wrote that the only good man who had been sent to him in recent years had been recalled almost immediately. Of the rest, he thought that two of them might turn out to be helpful. However:

The others were sent here because they were thorns in someone else’s side or were problems that had to be given to someone for safekeeping. I have made suggestions for the good of the community and of the missions; no account seems to have been taken of them. More than once I have asked for men by name who were shortly to be available,—men of the type needed on our missions; never have my appeals been responded to. More than once promises have been given but they have not been implemented. Men have been sent to me who on arrival told me they were not sent here to work; others have specified the kind and amount of work which they would do. Time hung on the hands of these, nothing pleased them; disgruntled and bored they took to destructive criticism and to correspondence.²⁸⁸

One of these unhappy Oblates was Thomas Girard. In the type of correspondence that Principal Gillen objected to, Girard complained to a fellow Oblate of his workload at the Mission school. He was in charge of the school barn, a job that required him to start his day at 5:00 a.m. and end it at 8:00 p.m. When he raised objections about his workload with Gillen, the principal had told him that “more important than my presence in the chapel in the morning for prayers & meditation is my presence in the barn.” Girard felt it was “not much of a religious life.”²⁸⁹ Given these frustrations with staff, it is not surprising that Gillen resigned by the end of the year.²⁹⁰

Maintaining positive relations with federal officials could be challenging. Uneasy and sometimes distrustful relationships existed between government officials and principals in some locations. Kamsack principal W. McWhinney feared that the 1910 contract, by which the federal government increased funding to the schools while setting a variety of conditions that the schools had to meet, had opened the schools up to excessive government control.

We would then have to submit to a great deal of petty tyranny from officials of the Department. Many of those at Ottawa know very little of a practical nature about the work and they would presume to make no end of regulations for our control. There is one prominent official out here that has won very much more fame than is his due and who would like to be in a position to dictate to everyone.291

Although McWhinney did not mention anyone by name, long-serving Indian agent W. M. Graham, who became the Prairies’ Indian commissioner in 1920, was a critic of many principals, including McWhinney.²⁹² In 1919, Graham opposed the appointment of Father Leonard as the principal of the Lebret school in Saskatchewan. He thought Leonard was “not big enough for the post.” Graham suspected that the appointment was not discussed with him “for fear of my objection for Father Leonard.”²⁹³ After a meeting with Leonard, Graham changed his position and approved the appointment.²⁹⁴

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing all principals was the difficulty of managing the personality conflicts that could arise when a small group of people were obliged to live and work together in relative isolation under stressful conditions. Because of the differences in the way the Roman Catholic and Protestant schools were staffed and operated, the various conflicts that arose among staff members are discussed below in separate sections. The conflicts in Protestant schools centre largely on problems that arose between the principal and the staff (particularly when the principal was married to the school matron). The Catholic staff conflicts relate more to the relations between the male and female religious orders.

Life in close quarters: The Protestant experience

Joseph Lousley, principal of the Norway House school from 1902 to 1916, wrote in his memoir that

for the long seasons of fall, winter and spring, the staff found themselves almost entirely shut up to each other’s company, as there were very few other white people in the neighbourhood and often the other people were not congenial company, having such different outlook on life and different purposes for being in that place.²⁹⁵

Frances M. Walbridge, who taught at the Round Lake school in Saskatchewan in 1939, recalled, “Although there is a bit of feeling between the farm teachers and the classroom teachers we are all on a very friendly basis.”²⁹⁶ In the Catholic schools, staff had signed on for life; in the Protestant schools, the expected term of employment was five years. Life was lived in close quarters: if conflicts could not be contained, social relations might prove unbearable. The situation could become particularly intolerable if staff members formed cliques that left other staff members feeling excluded or isolated. To the best of their abilities, staff members were to keep their conflicts to themselves. The Anglicans warned staff members, “Should differences of opinion exist or friction of any sort unhappily arise between members of the staff, no discussion of the same should ever be allowed to take place in the presence, or within hearing of the pupils.”297

Maintaining life on the “friendly basis” that Frances Walbridge described could be difficult, and there is a great deal of evidence that this was not always possible. Indian Affairs inspector M. Christianson concluded in 1932 that “considerable friction exists between members of the staff and the principal” at the Anglican school in The Pas. Christianson said the principal, Mr. Fraser, had made a number of positive changes at the school. However, he concluded that

with the present staff the school will never function properly. In the first place some of the members of the staff have been at the school too long and I do not think they are even loyal to Mr. Fraser. The members referred to are the Matron, Miss Warner and Miss Northwood. They have been in the Indian work for a great number of years, and may be splendid women, but they are getting too old to look after the work at this school, and from my observations, have absolutely no authority over the children. Mr. Turner the engineer does not appear to be very helpful to the Principal. As you will recall Mr. Turner was in charge of the school for a couple of years and I do not think there was much discipline during that time.²⁹⁸

In a small community, loyalty was a prerequisite. A Miss McRae was dismissed from the File Hills school in 1914 because, according to the inspector of Indian agencies, she had turned out to be “a mischief maker” who was “disloyal to the Church and Government authorities.”²⁹⁹

Personal disputes could reach such intensity that they were beyond resolution. In such cases, the only option appeared to be resignation. When three members of the Regina school staff resigned in April 1905, the acting principal, R. B. Heron, said they were all good employees, but he could have prevented the resignations only if he had taken sides in what he considered to be a personal matter.³⁰⁰ Sometimes, an individual was made to feel isolated and excluded. In 1932, a teacher at the Alert Bay school, was injured while playing basketball with the students. The local doctor diagnosed her as being tubercular. She continued to teach, but was suffering from such pain that she sought treatment in Vancouver, where a doctor concluded she was not tubercular. The school matron, however, told other staff that she was both tubercular and a “mental case.” As a result, the woman was ostracized by the staff, her teaching performance declined, and her contract was not renewed.³⁰¹

Protestant school employees had not taken the type of vows of obedience that characterized life in Roman Catholic orders, but if they wanted to remain employed, they often had to accept undesirable postings and transfers. Mildred McCabe was transferred from the Aklavik Anglican hospital in the Northwest Territories to the Fort George school in northern Québec, despite the fact that, according to Fort George principal Trevor Jones, she had “made it plain to Archdeacon Fleming that she did not want to come to Fort George. Since he had insisted that she should come for two years, she would put in the time, but would do as little as possible.”³⁰⁴ When the school was hit by an influenza epidemic, to Jones’s relief, McCabe “proved herself a willing nurse and visited every family regularly.”³⁰⁵

The Protestant schools often were operated as family affairs. Missionary Thomas Crosby’s wife, Emma, played a central role in establishing and running the Port Simpson girls’ school in the 1880s.³⁰⁶ At the Anglican school at Wabasca in 1895, W. R. Haynes was the manager and Mrs. Haynes was the matron.³⁰⁷ Elkhorn principal A. E. Wilson’s wife, Aldia, was a teacher at the school at the time of their marriage.³⁰⁸ In 1915, the Gordon’s school in Saskatchewan was “conducted by the Rev. H. W. Atwater, the principal, and his two daughters, all of whom are trained teachers.”³⁰⁹ In 1939, the Anglican school on the Blood Reserve employed Rev. Middleton as principal, a Mr. Middleton as farmer, and a G. Middleton as teacher. The engineer was A. Ransom and the assistant cook was Mrs. A. Ransom.³¹⁰

John Matheson was the principal of the Anglican school at Onion Lake in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while his brother Edward was principal of the Battleford school during the same period. Edward’s wife was Josephine Raymond, a former staff member at the Battleford school.³¹¹ After her death from cancer, Edward Matheson married another staff member, Eleanor Shepphird.³¹² When John Matheson died in 1916, his wife, Elizabeth, took over as principal of the Onion Lake school.³¹³ Elizabeth Matheson’s brother, James Scott, became the farm instructor at the Battleford school.³¹⁴ Her daughter Letitia and one of her husband’s nieces, Anne Cunningham, were teachers at the Onion Lake school.³¹⁵ Principal Elizabeth Matheson left the school in 1918 when she took a position as a medical inspector in the Winnipeg public schools.³¹⁶

Other reports raised questions about the effectiveness of the spouses who were employed in the schools. Mrs. Menzies was the wife of the principal at the Presbyterian school in northwestern Ontario, and she also served as school matron. Shortly after her arrival in 1924, Indian agent Frank Edwards concluded that she “does not care for Indians and has very little sympathy with them, and she is not liked by the staff.”³¹⁸ An unsigned report from later that year stated that although she appeared to be “the actual head of the institution,” she had “no sympathy for the work” and could not “handle the staff.”³¹⁹ In 1927, Menzies came into conflict with staff over the treatment of children and Aboriginal families. When Miss Brodie, a teacher at the school, asked Menzies’s permission to give some bread from the school kitchen to “an old dying woman,” the matron refused. Brodie was allowed, however, to buy a loaf from the school to give to the woman. When the school nurse, Miss Reid, asked to have eggs added to the diets of sick children, that request was also denied. The nurse, similarly, purchased the eggs out of her own salary and provided them to the students.³²⁰

In 1925, an Indian Affairs official questioned whether the wife of the Gleichen, Alberta, school principal could “satisfactorily undertake the full duties of Matron-in-charge on account of her own three small children.” While the Anglican Church Missionary Society defended the matron’s ability to discharge her responsibilities, it agreed to consider hiring additional staff members. However, it was pointed out that this could not be done until a new residence was constructed for the principal.³²¹ In other situations, it was thought the wife was providing better service than the husband. Dr. Peter Bryce wrote of the Gleichen principal in 1907, “The Principal is a delicate man, epileptic, and though good-intentioned, is physically unsuited for such a position. His wife, however, seems to be a most capable woman, and keeps things together, with the assistance of Canon Stocken of the Mission Church, who lives but a short distance away.”³²²

In many Protestant schools, an adversarial relationship could develop that set the staff against both the principal and his wife, particularly if the wife was also the school matron. If they were not to become disruptive, differences had to be repressed. Anna Phillips went to work at the Anglican mission and school at Onion Lake in 1895. Born in England, she had started work as a house servant as a child, and worked for Manitoba Lieutenant-Governor John Schultz before going north to Onion Lake.³²³ She served as matron when the Onion Lake principal’s wife, Elizabeth Matheson, went east to resume her training to become a medical doctor. After Elizabeth’s return, the two women often clashed. Elizabeth felt her position in the school had been usurped. Furthermore, her husband, the school principal, made her aware that he was ashamed of her impatience.³²⁴ Phillips stayed at the mission for nine years, leaving only when she married another missionary. As her wagon started rolling away, Principal Matheson said to his wife, “Thank God, that woman’s gone.”325

Shingle Point, Yukon, school employee Adelaide Butler was not happy when the school principal, Sherman Shepherd, married a former teacher. She thought they claimed more than their share of the scarce resources devoted to the school. In a letter, she complained:

They have their own house just south of the church, and more has been spent on that one little dwelling than on all the rest of the residences put together. Mrs. S is one who gets as much stuff around her as she possibly can, and the place is just chockfull of stuff, she went round here grabbing everything she could lay hands on, and she would even have taken some of my own personal things if I had not held on tightly. She behaves as if she were Queen of Shingle Point and we were just her subjects.³²⁶

In another, despairing, letter home, she wrote, “There is nothing else to do, I cannot get away! I sometimes wonder why I came, and if I am going to survive, and now there is a chance that I shall be here for another year after this one.”³²⁷

Butler thought she could last her full five-year commitment if two other staff members were replaced. But, she warned, “I am not going to lie down under it tamely, someone is going to hear something, and on this mail too.”³²⁸

In other schools, relations may have been more harmonious. Romances often developed between staff members that led to marriages. While Adelaide Butler was deeply unhappy at Shingle Point, Bessie Quirt, another of the school’s early employees, maintained lifelong friendships with the staff and students she met at the school. In 1979, she was the last of the school’s original staff still alive. She wrote, “The writer is the only one living of the original five and she misses the friendship and fellowship of the others who have passed on.”³²⁹ Of the Hay River school in the 1930s, Louise Topping wrote that, to amuse themselves, the staff members “had a social evening, with 2 different members each week in charge. They would put on Shakespeare plays, musical evenings or stunt nights.”³³⁰ In addition, she had very strong and fond memories of the staff recreations:

Often too they held skating parties and wiener roasts. One night walking 2 miles up the river with a party, and there having a bean supper, and it was good in the tent sitting on boughs, with a fire in the centre of the camp, with steaming coffee over it. Those are the times one loves the north. Then we had our ping pong games and the dark days when lights were used almost continually passed and the days lengthened in Jan and Feb one still found much to take up their time and with the brighter days even of lower temperatures one had glorious walks and often dog-team rides.³³¹

Relations between the Roman Catholic male and female orders

Indian Affairs official R. H. Cairns wrote in 1924 that for the previous two years at the Cranbrook, British Columbia, school, there had been “more or less discord among the staff.” This discord had increased with the appointment of a new principal, Father J. M. Smith. In response to the “entire lack of harmony” that had developed, the Oblates withdrew the principal. According to Cairns, the nuns were working well together, but, he concluded, “conditions will not be normal till a strong efficient man is found who will bring about harmony.”³³⁵

Father McGuire is a well-educated man and might fit wonderfully in a university, but the bedrock of the school, its very elements, he cannot conceive. He can run the farm; the plant, and all the outside work, but the inside drudgery of the cooking, mending, sewing, laundry work, taking care of the sick and a thousand other details do not register with him. To tell you plainly, Father McGuire is a sick man; the worry and work of that institution is too much for him in his physical condition. He is a wreck.

Sister Mary Gabriel went on to say that it would be difficult to find Sisters of Saint Ann “physically strong enough to cope with the conditions” at the school. Father McGuire had requested that he be supplied with teachers who had teaching qualifications. However, Sister Mary Gabriel said, “These girls—now Sisters—educated in Victoria, Vancouver, or elsewhere, never could succeed with the slow, indolent, uncultured child in an Indian school.” They were needed to teach in Catholic high schools and academies, and she “could not spare them to teach in an Indian school.” She noted that the twenty Sisters of Saint Ann who were working at residential schools in British Columbia were receiving a salary of $16 a month. She compared this to the $7,000 a year plus room and board that the order was obliged to pay better qualified lay teachers to work in some of the schools it operated for non-Aboriginal students. As a result, she said, the order would not be providing any more staff to the Kamloops school. “We cannot afford to place a Sister there whose education is worth a salary of Sixty dollars ($60) per month for the [$16] pittance allowed. We simply cannot submit to it.”³³⁷

Sister Mary Gabriel’s tactics bore some fruit. By February 1927, the sisters at the Kamloops school were receiving $30 a month.³³⁸ (In the 1930s, this amount was reduced to $25 a month.)³³⁹ In the face of ongoing pressure from Indian Affairs, the Oblates granted Father McGuire a leave of absence. Sister Mary Gabriel was much more conciliatory in her assessment of McGuire by the time of his departure, saying that while he “may have been persistent and probably dictatorial in his manner of expressing his views,” he had

labored here ten years and not one cent of salary did he accept; all was turned into the common fund for the betterment of the Indians. He has hardly a suit of clothes to his name and leaves in a condition which no ordinary man, save one who has dedicated his life to missionary work, would possibly endure.

By then, Sister Mary Gabriel had turned her attention to conditions at the Mission school. She informed the Oblate provincial superior that it would be impossible to continue to provide seven sisters to the school at the rate of $16 a month. She also drew attention to the “dilapidated state of the house, the cold and other inconveniences,” all of which, she said, were “prejudicial to the health of the sisters.”³⁴¹ Her efforts to improve salaries at the Mission school had little success. She had asked that the Sisters of Saint Ann be paid $30 a month; the Oblates offered to pay $250 a year ($20.83 a month). She called this “a trifle” more than their current rate of $16 a month, particularly in light of the “absolutely detrimental” living conditions and the fourteen-hour days the sisters were required to work.³⁴² She reminded the Oblate provincial superior in the summer of 1928 that the order had its own financial obligations:

I request you to reconsider your offer of $250.00 per annum or what would be $20.83 per month and allow us the minimum wage of $1.00 per day or $30.00 per month. If you are not in a position to meet this at the end of September quarter, we will charge it up and consider it arrears until such time as you may be able to pay in full.

She concluded, “If you consider sixty years of service at $16.00 per month and the lives that have been exhausted during that period of time, there should surely be no hesitation in granting our request.”³⁴³

However, the best she could do was win a commitment from the Oblates in the summer of 1928 that they would pay $30 a month when they “were in a position to meet their obligations.” A year later, when her term of office as provincial superior of the Sisters of Saint Ann was up, the Oblates had yet to agree to her request.³⁴⁴ It was not until 1939 that the salaries of the Sisters of Saint Ann at the Mission school were increased to $25 a month.³⁴⁵

At the Cranbrook school, Oblates and the Sisters of Providence clashed over matters great and small. For example, the principal took offence when a sister had the presumption to tell the school’s hired man—in the principal’s words, “a servant, a non-catholic”—that the priest was able to drive a car.³⁴⁶ More frustrating was Father Maurice Lépine’s decision to hire a farmer whom the sisters had “many reasons to complain of,” and then to raise his salary, even though “the sisters could not meet their current expenses.”³⁴⁷ Their disagreements with the Oblates led them to leave the school in 1929.³⁴⁸

At the Wabasca school in Alberta, the Sisters of Providence were short of food in the early 1920s. In November 1923, Mother Bernard du Sacré-Coeur complained to Bishop Grouard that the sisters had not had a proper food supply for a year and had been reduced to writing letters to their families to ask for money and food. Two of the sisters had become so ill that they had to be given medical treatment.³⁵² At the Joussard, Alberta, mission, the sisters had to work by the light of 40-watt bulbs, while the Oblates were supplied with 100-watt bulbs. Another complaint centred on Oblate unwillingness to purchase baking ovens for the missions, which would have relieved the sisters from staying up all night to bake bread for the Oblates and the residential school students.³⁵³

At the Cluny, Alberta, school in 1908, the Oblate principal, Father Jean-Louis Le Vern, forbade social conversations between the Oblates and the sisters.³⁵⁴ Prior to 1934, the Sisters of Providence had been administering the Cluny school. In that year, they were obliged to turn it over to the Oblates. Under a new financial agreement, the sisters were expected to work for $15 a month. The Oblates claimed that this was all the school could afford, but the sisters, who were familiar with the school’s finances from the years they had spent running it, were not convinced.³⁵⁵

At times, the Oblates must have felt that the female orders had the upper hand. In the 1920s in Saskatchewan, Indian Affairs pressured the Oblates to establish a farm at the Delmas school on which boys could be taught farming skills. Father A. Naessens explained to Deputy Minister Scott that

in this School, the Rev. Sisters have practically the administration and the running of the Institution, they have been frequently told about the wishes of the Department with regards the training of the older boys in farming; but they seem to have objections towards complying with these instructions in that respect.

Naessens said they would probably establish a farm if Indian Affairs directly instructed them to do so.³⁵⁶ The principal also wrote to explain that the sisters would be arranging the farming instruction, adding that he had no responsibility in the matter. Scott responded that the principal ought to have control of his school, and that a prairie school that did not provide instruction in farming was not likely to “remain a factor in our educational programme.”357 One Oblate, J. B. Beys, explained to Scott that “by special arrangement of our Bishops, in the early days the Sisters had the full management of the Schools. Little by little this has been changed in most Schools, but still prevails in the Schools of Delmas, Onion Lake and Hobbema.” He added that the Delmas school lacked the funds to purchase the needed farm equipment.³⁵⁸ By the early 1930s, however, the school had a small farm operation with sixteen hectares under cultivation.³⁵⁹

The personal relations between priests and nuns (or sisters) were very closely controlled. In 1890, Bishop Vital Grandin wrote the Reverend Mother Ste. Marie, the general mother of the Sisters of the Assumption in Nicolet, Québec, about the rules that should apply to nuns being sent to the Onion Lake school. He warned that the government recognized only one person as a teacher at the school and the grant for that teacher would be $300—“which is not sufficient.” In addition to teaching, the nuns were expected to wash and mend the church linens and the male missionaries’ clothing, prepare meals for themselves and the missionaries, and clean the churches and rectories. Contact between the missionaries and nuns would have to be closely regulated. Although the missionaries were to eat their meals in the nuns’ residence, they were to eat in a room that was completely separated from the rest of the building. The food was to be passed to the missionaries through a hatch. Nuns were to make their confessions to priests through a screen, never at night, and should not prolong these encounters by dwelling on minutiae. If it was necessary for a nun to speak to a priest, she should ensure that she was accompanied by another sister, or by a child—one who could not understand what was being said, but could serve as a witness to what was done. Illness particularly could give rise to temptations, since “it could happen that a patient who is normally very modest and scrupulous will request that we offer very delicate favours.” The concern was with both appearances and reality. Grandin noted that the sisters would be surrounded by people who did not believe in their virtue. He said it should be recognized that since both the missionaries and nuns were alone and isolated, the mutual favour and consolation they provided each other “could create certain dangers between the children of God, as saintly and perfect as they may be.”³⁶⁰

Aboriginal staff

Our efforts to develop native helpers in our Indian work has not been encouraging, but if we find some young men of good promise it might be well to do what we can to aid them; but these are cases in which we need to move with caution lest we find ourselves with men upon our hands for whom we have no appointment.³⁶²

Clifford Tobias, a former Mohawk Institute student, was considered for a position as a teacher in an Indian day school in Ontario in 1918. An unnamed Indian Affairs official opposed his appointment, not because of his age or limited training, but because he was Aboriginal. Based on his experience, the official wrote, he

In 1914, the Anglican Church recommended that the Reverend Louis Laronde be appointed as the principal of The Pas school. Indian Affairs official Martin Benson described him as “a French half-breed, a graduate of St. John’s College,” with experience teaching in day schools. Benson acknowledged that Laronde was fully qualified, but, in correspondence with Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott, he noted, “I think our past experience goes to show that we would be taking great risks in putting a school of this class in charge of a half-breed.”³⁶⁴ Indian Affairs informed Bishop Jervois Newnham that it would not approve Laronde’s appointment. However, the Anglican Church appointed him.³⁶⁵ Rev. Laronde served as principal of residential schools in The Pas and in Lytton, British Columbia.³⁶⁶

Despite these prejudices, some Aboriginal people were employed in various regions of the system throughout this period. The most successful ones taught in eastern Canada. The Mohawk Institute hired former student Isaac Barefoot to work as a teacher in 1869. Barefoot went on to serve as acting principal. He later became ordained as an Anglican minister.367 Susan Hardie had a very long and successful history at the Mohawk Institute. A former student of the school, she started working at the institute shortly after she obtained her teaching certificate in 1886.³⁶⁸ She was the school governess as early as 1894, and was paid $200 a year.³⁶⁹ By 1915, she was the senior teacher at the school, and was placed in charge of the school during the absence of the principal in 1920. Her salary by then was $600 a year.³⁷⁰ She was highly regarded: according to a local Indian Affairs official, she passed “from 4 to 6 pupils into the High School every year.” In addition, he wrote, “a large part of her time is taken up after school hours in other duties pertaining to her over sight of the girls.” By 1920, she reportedly had been teaching for thirty-four years.³⁷¹ In 1921, she obtained a testimonial letter from Ontario school inspector T. W. Standing, who said that she was a “duly qualified teacher, having been trained in the Toronto Normal School.” He thought her to be an “excellent disciplinarian,” able to secure “the affection as well as the respect of her pupils.”³⁷² She retired at the beginning of the 1936–37 school year, and was given a pension of $50 a month.³⁷³ Martha Hill, who attended the Mohawk Institute from 1912 to 1918, recalled Hardie as a very strict disciplinarian, and described an incident in which Hill refused to put out her hand to allow Hardie to administer a strapping. According to Hill, Hardie gave her a shove. “I tripped on the radiator and I fell, and I laid there. By the scruff of the neck she shoved me in the seat.”³⁷⁴ Raymond Hill, who was at the school from 1929 to 1937, recalled Hardie as a capable teacher, adding, “We got a good education.”³⁷⁵

In 1903, Regina principal J. A. Sinclair could boast that one of his teachers, Miss Cornelius, was

a full-blooded Oneida Indian girl, and was trained in Hampton Agricultural and Normal Institute, Virginia. She has more than sustained the good record she made last year, and the presence among our pupils of an Indian girl, with all the refinement and capacity of the best white ladies, has been a great inspiration.³⁷⁶

Miss Cornelius left the following year, lured away to a better paying school in the United States. In making a plea for money to keep her at the school, Sinclair wrote, “Her loss will be little less than a calamity in the school, and indeed to our whole Indian work, as she is the most forcible answer possible to the common pessimism regarding Indian education.”³⁷⁷

In the early 1930s, the Brandon school hired former student Lulu Ironstar as a teacher.³⁷⁸ According to one teaching evaluation, she had “made a fine beginning” and was “thoughtful and effective in teaching.”³⁷⁹ After a few years, however, her name disappears from the record.

There was one little nun who was a full blooded Indian. She was gifted and talented and did most of the oil painting required in the school. I remember the roses and rosebuds she painted on the wide white ribbons that we wore as “Children of Mary.” It was a delicate work of art. She also did all types of handwork and taught handicrafts to the girls such as crocheting, embroidery and beadwork.³⁸¹

At the Anglican school at Fort George, a young Cree woman named Charlotte was hired in the 1930s to make parkas and moccasins for the children. According to the principal, Trevor Jones, she “also taught them how to make bear-paw snowshoes. She became, in fact, our childcare supervisor, with many of the matron’s duties.”³⁸²

There were also marriages between staff and Aboriginal students. After attending the Birtle school in 1910, Susette Blackbird took a year of training at the Presbyterian Missionary and Deaconess Training Home. She then returned to Birtle, where she married the school principal, W. W. McLaren. The mixed-race couple was not allowed to use a room in the school as their living area. Some teachers did not like the fact that Susette spoke to the children in Aboriginal languages, not because this was forbidden, but because it created a bond between them that did not include the other teachers. It was also felt that McLaren would not be able to maintain the requisite distance and dignity from the students if he were living in the school.³⁸³ In a letter to Indian Affairs, Presbyterian Church official R. P. MacKay wrote, “Mr. MacLaren’s [sic] marriage to one of the Indian pupils has embarrassed very much.” MacKay thought it might be necessary to dispense with McLaren’s services entirely.³⁸⁴

A deeply hurt McLaren wrote, “It is a poor lookout for the future of our church and our Dominion when the union of Christian people of different races is made a ground of offence.”³⁸⁵

McLaren had good reason to believe that he and his wife had been let down by a system that claimed to be struggling to eliminate barriers between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Nonetheless, one of the McLarens’ children, Elsie, was educated at the Brandon residential school. Her experiences of the school were positive and led her to go on to university. There, she met her future husband, Harry Meadows. He had taught at the Norway House residential school, where he worked to develop a curriculum that was more suited to the students’ needs, having concluded that the provincial curriculum was “impractical and almost useless.” Eventually, Harry and Elsie taught at the Norway House school.³⁸⁶

Challenges to the dominant values

You want to teach me your religion. Do you know the Great Spirit made that country where you came from and planted you there and gave you this religion. The Great Spirit gave you a land over there and people who grew up there got this religion. Then something got into your head to come to this country—my country—for God gave me this country, and all these Indians.

An even deeper relationship developed between Edward Ahenakew and the Matheson family. Ahenakew became the assistant principal of the Anglican school at Onion Lake in 1912. He remained a lifelong friend of Principal John Matheson and his family, eventually presiding over the funeral of Matheson’s widow, Elizabeth, in 1958.³⁹⁰ Matheson’s daughter, Ruth Matheson Buck, edited Ahenakew’s memoir, Voices of the Plains Cree.

Eleanor Brass recalled that a teacher at the File Hills school took a special interest in her, and even provided her with extra lessons to help prepare her for high school.³⁹¹ Edward Groat, who attended the Mohawk Institute in the 1930s, had very positive memories of the boys’ master, Roy Pengelly. He recalled how he helped the boys build a canoe, which they were allowed to take out on Mohawk Lake. “He taught us how to paddle a canoe. Here’s a white man teaching Indians how to paddle a canoe! But I have never forgotten that. He was never harsh but he taught us things. I think if he’d stayed longer than that we’d have learned an awful lot more.”³⁹²

Small acts of kindness were not forgotten. Mount Elgin principal O. B. Strapp, who was often remembered for his harsh discipline, discovered that a group of girls were secretly making extra pan bread for themselves because it reminded them of home. Rather than punishing them, he allowed the girls who worked in the kitchen to make one loaf of pan bread a month.³⁹³

Although the schools were intended to eradicate traditional Aboriginal culture, many of the staff members had a genuine, somewhat naïve, curiosity about the culture. Frances Walbridge wrote from Round Lake in 1939:

I thought I was dreaming the first time I saw an old Indian complete with pigtails and black felt hat. I am told that we shall be able to attend a Sun dance next spring although the Gov’t doesn’t permit them. Some of the children came to school with moccasins and beaded belts, though most of them are quite familiar with white ways.³⁹⁴

Once, she took twenty-eight female students for an evening swim. She wrote, “The lake was calm, the sunset was beautiful and a sharp new moon showed itself faintly. The children formed themselves in a circle and moved in the water as you have seen them in Indian dances. I am told they will tell old tales if they think you are sympathetic, and I’ve heard a few already.”³⁹⁵

After relating her attendance at an Inuit dance at Shingle Point on the Arctic Ocean, Adelaide Butler wrote, “Honestly, I like the natives better than the white people for some things, I don’t mean I want to go native, as I could not live like they do, nor eat their food, but they are kinder and merrier than some of the white people who are up here to teach them to live better lives—that sounds queer, doesn’t it?”³⁹⁶

A teacher at the Fraser Lake, British Columbia, school, A. C. Ockoniy, complained to Indian Affairs in 1922 that he had been unjustly criticized for not properly controlling the students. According to Ockoniy:

I am used to run [sic] my schools without punishments, except in very rare cases, and have been taught in the Normal School for three years all the little tricks to handle boys without a strap, I can do it. I have been a sergeant in the Army here for a year and in all this time I never have punished any of my soldiers; and if my company had been less well kept than others, I would not have kept my stripes very long, you know that. But the only discipline Father knows is to knock boys over the head or any place he can catch them and kick them etc. (I have to stop here, I might say more than I want to say at the present time.)³⁹⁹

In 1929, when Lucy Affleck was teaching at the Round Lake school, she wrote a lengthy and highly critical letter about the school to Arthur Barner, who was then the superintendent of Indian missions for the United Church. Affleck felt that the conflicts between staff and the principal, R. J. Ross, were aggravated by the fact that the principal’s wife’s mother had served as school matron. She was unofficially replaced by the principal’s wife, who, since she also taught at the school, had little time to carry out these additional tasks. Relations were further strained by the fact that the principal and his wife had vacated their residence and were living in the school, making it difficult “to keep a qualified, efficient matron ‘on the job.’” According to Affleck, the principal’s wife, Mrs. Ross, “is a strong disciplinarian, wonderfully so, but the discipline is not the result of training or the rule of love.”⁴⁰⁰ Superintendent Barner responded to her letter by advising her that “steps would be taken at once to improve the situation.” A month later, Affleck was fired. In doing so, Principal Ross told her that “the church demands the immediate dismissal of any one disloyal to the staff.”⁴⁰¹

Affleck repeated most of her concerns in a letter to Indian Commissioner Graham after her dismissal.⁴⁰² Little of this would have been news to Graham. That fall, he had already received a highly critical inspector’s report on the school from A. G. Hamilton, who had disapproved of the fact that the principal and his wife were living in the school rather than in the residence provided for them, since they had turned rooms intended for school purposes into private rooms. At that time, there were already eight girls without beds, and four more coming. This corroborated Lucy Affleck’s charge that the school was overcrowded.403 Both Hamilton’s report and a recent school inspector’s report from the fall of 1929 had nothing but the highest of praise for Affleck’s abilities as a teacher.⁴⁰⁴ Despite this, Affleck was gone and R. J. Ross, who had taken over the school in 1922, continued on in his post as principal until his retirement in 1939.⁴⁰⁵

A broader critique of the government and church policies began to emerge by the late nineteenth century. Surprisingly, one of the most articulate exponents of these views was E. F. Wilson, the founding principal of the Shingwauk Home in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Over the course of his career, it appears, Wilson re-evaluated his views on the purpose of education. Initially, he was a proponent of the type of radical assimilation being attempted at the Carlisle school in the United States.⁴⁰⁶ An 1877 Shingwauk school document embraced goals that were typical of the schools of the period. The school was intended “to wean our Indian boys altogether from their old savage life; to instill into them civilized tastes, to teach them English thoroughly, to encourage their intercourse with white people, and in fact to make Canadians of them.”⁴⁰⁷

In his later years, Wilson became much more interested in Aboriginal culture and language. He founded the Canadian Indian Research and Aid Society in 1890. The following year, the society’s magazine, The Canadian Indian, published a series of unsigned articles that sociologist David Nock has argued were written by Wilson.⁴⁰⁸ These challenged the assimilationist goals that lay at the heart of the residential school endeavour. One article, attributed simply to “Fair Play,” came out in favour of Aboriginal self-government.

The policy of the white man’s government, it seems to me, both in Canada and in the United States, is to un-Indianize the Indian, and make him in every sense a white man. And it is against the policy that the Indian, whether in a wild state, or semi-civilized, or nearly wholly civilized, as it seems to me, is setting up his back. I believe it is this more than anything else that is hindering his progress, for he views everything that the white man does for him with suspicion, believing that this hated policy for the absorption of his race and his nationality is at the back of it. He is willing, ready to adopt the white man’s clothing, the white man’s laws, the white man’s religion, and, for commercial purposes, the white man’s language; but he is not willing to give up his nationality or his communism, or his native language in the domestic circle—he wishes to live apart from the white man, in a separate community, and to exercise, so far as is compatible with his position in the country, a control over his own affairs.

As a Christian missionary, Wilson could not abandon the goal of religious conversion. But he had come to question whether it was necessary for Aboriginal people to ‘Canadianize.’ Despite these changes in his thinking, Wilson had not abandoned his support for residential schooling. He remained as principal of the Shingwauk Home until his retirement in 1893, and, as late as 1892, he was writing positively of the residential school system’s potential.⁴¹⁰

Others began to speak of the system’s failure to respect Aboriginal parents and communities. In 1909, Red Deer principal Arthur Barner wrote of how parents “would like to have something to say about the education of their children and I believe more will be accomplished by confidence and cooperation than by any kind of compulsion.”⁴¹¹ Former Regina school principal R. B. Heron made a similar point in 1923, when he observed that parents have “no voice” in teacher selection, curriculum, or hours of school attendance.⁴¹²

The Indian Workers Association of the Presbyterian Church for Saskatchewan and Manitoba in 1911 adopted a resolution calling for the education of First Nations children “in public schools, situated upon the reserves, or in school districts adjacent to them.” Where this was not feasible, the association members favoured small boarding schools in which boys and girls could “mingle freely and naturally under careful supervision.” This, they felt, was preferable to the “large industrial school with its institutional government, its rigid separation of the sexes, its atmosphere of suspicion on the part of the teachers.” Older attitudes were hard to discard, though. It was, for example, difficult for the Presbyterians to cast off the idea that children who had been educated needed to be separated from their home communities. Even as the Presbyterians called for reserve-based education, they also supported the creation of colonies where former students would be “protected from the parasitic habits of their worthless friends.”⁴¹³

At the senior level, there was recognition within the Oblate order that the emphasis on assimilation was ultimately undermining the schools’ effectiveness. In his 1936 report, Oblate Superior General Théodore Labouré questioned whether “the zeal for bestowing the benefits of civilization on the Indian was carried too far.” It was, he wrote, excellent to seek to substitute “education for ignorance” and “work for idleness,” but was it necessary, he asked, to attempt “to make everything that is Indian in our Indian races disappear?”⁴¹⁴ In the Northwest Territories, Roman Catholic Archbishop Gabriel Breynat sought to slow the pace of assimilation. He wrote in 1935 that he thought it would be best to “introduce Native languages in the Indian school together with courses in syllabic characters” to make sure the languages did not disappear.⁴¹⁵ In 1939, he recommended that there be programs training students in how to hunt and fish.⁴¹⁶ That same year, in an article in the Toronto Star Weekly, he wrote, “The story of the white man’s invasion of the Canadian Northwest may be named by future historians as one of the blackest blots on the pages of Canadian history.”417 He was also critical of his own Oblate order. In 1940, he resigned from the Oblate Indian Welfare and Training Commission, saying it had been ineffective in its efforts to protect Aboriginal people and advance their interests.⁴¹⁸ Despite these criticisms, the Oblates remained firmly committed to residential schooling.⁴¹⁹

At Fort George, Anglican principal Trevor Jones came to be an admirer of the Aboriginal culture. He observed, “The peace and harmony and satisfaction they derived from their way of life was such that I envied them. No doubt this influenced my determination in later years to work towards pursuing the churches and the Governments to recognize aboriginal land titles and self-government in Canada.”

When he left Fort George in 1937, he said, 700 people turned up to say goodbye to him and his wife.⁴²⁰ As he left, he questioned the mission legacy. He knew he was leaving behind “buildings and furnishings and a management schedule which would make it easier for our successors to follow an established routine.” But, he had come to recognize that Aboriginal culture had values and that he had been part of a process that put those values at risk. “In particular, I was concerned that their traditional beliefs and practices should not be tampered with, but that they should continue to be encouraged to preserve them and assimilate them into their Christian way of life.” This, he wrote, included a belief in a creator that was “responsible for everything that exists, and in the human’s responsibility to protect, conserve and live in harmony with all creation, as demonstrated by Richard Rednose feeding the mosquitos with his own blood.”⁴²¹

Jones’s changing views would have sat in uneasy contradiction with his commitments as a Christian missionary and educator. Such changes reflect the impact of the determination of Aboriginal peoples to maintain their own identities throughout this period. The adherence of Aboriginal people to their culture was powerful enough to lead missionaries such as Jones to re-evaluate their own views and attitudes. In such cases, it was the students and their parents who reshaped the staff, and not the other way around.

Name	Duties
Rev. Father Hugonnard	Principal
Rev. Father Dorais	Assistant Principal
Mr. E. D. Sworder	Clerk
Mr. H. F. Denehy	1st Teacher
Mr. J. A. Joyce	2nd Teacher
T. Redmond	Farming Instructor
R. Meehan	Carpenter
D. McDonald	Blacksmith
C. Miles	Night Watchman, Stone Mason and Gardener
A. Goyer	Shoemaker Instructor
E. G. F. Werer	Baker
Rev. Sister Goulet	Matron
Rev. Sister Bergeron	Cook
Rev. Sister St. Alfred	1st Teacher
Rev. Sister Vincent	2nd Teacher
Rev. Sister Elizabeth	Assistant Cook and Laundress
Rev. Sister St. Thomas	Seamstress
Rev. Sister Lamothe	In charge of boys’ infirmary, boys’ clothing and laundry.
Rev. Sister St. Adèle	In charge of girls’ infirmary, dormitory, clothing and laundry.
Rev. Sister St. Armand	Supervises the housemaids, their work in the dining-rooms, and the ironing of all linen.
Doctor Seymour	Medical Superintendent

Name	Duties	Hours Required
Rev. A. J. A. Dugas	Principal	Not limited
Rev. Kalmes	In charge of boys	Not limited
Rev. M. Mercure	Farm instructor	Not limited
Rev. E. Gauthier	Engineer & Plumber	Not limited
Geo. J. Harrison	Accountant & Band Instructor	Office 9 A.M. to 4 P.M.
H. Town	Senior Teacher	9 A.M. to 4 P.M.
A. McLennan	Junior Teacher	9 A.M. to 4 P.M.
J. Z. Lafleur	Baker & Butcher	Until work complete
M. Salamon	Shoemaker	7 A.M. to 6 P.M.
James Condon	Assistant Shoemaker	7 A.M. to 6 P.M.
Baptiste Blondeau	Assistant Farmer	7 A.M. to 6 P.M.
Reverend Sister Baulne	Matron	Not limited
Reverend Sister Cloutier	Senior Teacher	9 A.M. to 4 P.M.
Reverend Sister St. Alfred	2^nd Division	9 A.M. to 4 P.M.
Reverend Sister Gregoire	3^rd Division	9 A.M. to 4 P.M.
Reverend Sister Dauost	Infirmarian	Not limited
Reverend Sister Lamontagne	In charge of senior girls	Not limited
Reverend Sister Delormier	In charge of junior girls	Not limited
Reverend Sister Sauve	In charge of junior girls	Not limited
Reverend Sister Holy Name	In charge of kitchen	Not limited
Reverend Sister Ledwin	In charge of dining room	Not limited
Reverend Sister St. Amour	Charge of boy’s sewing room	Not limited
Reverend Sister Champagne	Assistant boy’s sewing room	Not limited

	1926	1930	1935
Ontario
Public (elementary) schools	1,248	1,270	1,128
Separate (elementary) schools	763	771	810
Manitoba
All schools (median)	1,008	1,012	685
One-room schools (median)	879	877	484
Saskatchewan
Urban elementary	1,287	1,316	914
Rural elementary	1,055	1,076	465
Alberta
All teachers	1,204	1,242	971
First class teachers	1,386	1,439	1,072
Second class teachers	1,118	1,138	855
British Columbia
All schools	1,430	1,528	1,300
Elementary schools	1,242	1,393	1,140

CHAPTER 31

The staff experience: 1867–1939

Motivations

The missionary societies

The Anglican missionary societies

The Methodist missionary societies

The Presbyterian missionary organization

The United Church missionary organization

The Protestant women’s organization

The Oblates of Mary Immaculate

The centrality of female labour in the Roman Catholic schools

The Sisters of Saint Ann

The Oblate Sisters of Mary Immaculate

The work and the workers

The principal: “Responsible to the Church and the Department for every phase of the activity”

Life in close quarters: The Protestant experience

Relations between the Roman Catholic male and female orders

Aboriginal staff

Challenges to the dominant values

Church	Number of schools	% of total number of schools
Roman Catholic	44	55
Church of England	21	26.25
United Church	13	16.25
Presbyterian	2	2.5