Canada’s residential schools had their roots in the country’s broader Aboriginal policies. During the period in which Britain went from treating Canada as a colony to recognizing it as a nation, Aboriginal policy evolved in the opposite direction. Initially, Aboriginal people were treated as members of independent nations, military and diplomatic allies, and trading partners with rights to their lands, cultures, and languages. However, they came to be treated as colonized peoples whose lands existed to be exploited and whose lives were to be transformed in every way, and who were expected to live under laws they had no hand in formulating.
Although Aboriginal people negotiated Treaties with the British in what is now Ontario from the 1780s onwards, the terms of those agreements often were ignored by the British North American authorities, or interpreted in ways that left Aboriginal rights unprotected. It was in this period of transition that the country’s first permanent residential schools were established. This chapter frames the transition of Aboriginal policy, and the following chapter traces the development of residential schooling, during this formative period. Canadian Aboriginal policy was based largely on policies already established in the colonies of Ontario and Québec, when they were still referred to as the “United Canadas” before Confederation in 1867. Different policies were followed in Atlantic Canada and British Columbia, and the impact of those policies continues to the present.
Aboriginal peoples in North America had a long history of diplomatic relations. For millennia, Aboriginal nations had established and maintained Treaty and trade alliances to govern their relations with one another. Alliances were cemented through clearly defined rituals and ceremonies. In the years preceding contact with the Europeans, responding to incidents of warfare and skirmishes, several First Nations developed increasingly sophisticated forms of diplomatic engagement. In the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) developed a Great Law of Peace that bound the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca (and, later, the Tuscarora) nations, located south of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, into a single confederacy. The confederacy’s Grand Council regularly brought together fifty Elders and chiefs who reached decisions through consensus.1
The Huron League, whose formation began in the fifteenth century, brought together the Attignawantans, the Attigneenongnhacs, the Arendarhonons, and the Thahontaenrats in the area southeast of Georgian Bay. (A fifth nation, the Ataronchronons, may not have achieved full membership in the league.) The league’s diplomatic leaders met regularly to ensure that disputes did not erupt into violent conflict. A system of interrelated clans established a set of mutual obligations based on kinship ties among members of the Huron nations.2
Each nation had distinct diplomatic protocols involving ceremonies and the exchange of gifts that established, maintained, and repaired relationships, which were often expressed in the terms of a family relationship.3 In short, First Nations had already developed their own diplomatic traditions prior to the arrival of the Europeans. The concept of nation-to-nation relations was not new to them.
European diplomatic relations were similarly complex. The French and English both claimed sovereignty over the lands they were colonizing in North America. But, within the colonies themselves, they were obliged to treat Aboriginal peoples as sovereign nations. They fought wars with them, negotiated Treaties with them, established trade relations, allied with them in struggles against other First Nations, and sought their alliance in wars against other imperial powers. Diplomacy was not always diplomatic. Beyond reasoned argument and appeals to self-interest, colonists also made use of bribery, coercion, and threats in their dealings with Aboriginal nations. However, like the French, the British did not act as though they were in a position to give Aboriginal nations the sorts of orders that could be given to subjects.4 In short, for Britain and for France, early Aboriginal policy was a foreign policy.
The priority of the European powers was to establish trade monopolies and agricultural settlements in the eastern part of North America. The contention between imperial powers created new tensions and challenges for Aboriginal people. In New France, where farming and settlement were limited to the St. Lawrence valley, and the economy depended largely on Aboriginal involvement in the fur trade, the conflict was muted. The French did not apply French law to First Nations people, and sought to respect their hunting and fishing rights, along with other land-use rights. However, in their dealings with other European powers, the French asserted they had sovereign rights over their North American colony.5 In the British colonies to the south, agriculture played a stronger role in the economy from the outset. By 1760, there were 1.6 million English colonists in North America.6 As a result, pressure on Aboriginal land was intense and unrelenting.7 Land was often purchased prior to settlement, but the sales themselves were frequently contentious. Land transfers often were coerced, with settlers making it clear that if Aboriginal people did not sell the land, it would be taken by force. In other transactions, Aboriginal people were deliberately left with the impression that they would be allowed to continue to use the land, particularly for hunting and fishing, after the sale. Purchasers also misrepresented the amount of land being transferred and even forged documents of sale. In still other cases, land was purchased from people who had no right to sell it.8 These practices were so common that the British Royal Proclamation of 1763 referred to the discord created by the “Great Frauds and Abuses [that] have been committed in purchasing Lands of the Indians.”9
While they were sometimes driven to war with the colonists, First Nations recognized that direct military confrontation was risky, as was an alliance with only one power. Aboriginal diplomacy sought to preserve a balance between the English and French that would contain both powers and allow First Nations to retain their autonomy. The Iroquois maintained diplomatic and trade ties with both British and French colonists.10 In the 1701 Great Peace of Montreal, for example, they pledged their neutrality in any conflict between France and England.
The French and English also saw the advantage of diplomatic relations with First Nations. This task was always more difficult for the British, given their colonists’ hunger for more land. Colonial administrators were caught between settler demands for military action to acquire or protect newly, and sometimes illegally, settled land and the costs that such action entailed. In 1676, colonial officials refused to send troops out against the Doeg Nation, which had been provoked into military action by settler raids on Doeg communities in the Maryland and Virginia colonies. The settlers, outraged by this lack of military support, took up arms against the colonial government in what became known as “Bacon’s Rebellion.”11
To forestall conflicts of this sort, the British began appointing special Indian commissioners to serve as ambassadors to the First Nations. One of the first, Arnout Veile, was appointed special commissioner to the Five Nations in 1689.12 In what is now the United States, the Iroquois and the commissioners developed a complex alliance that came to be known as the “Covenant Chain.” This was an extension of Iroquois diplomatic practices that had developed out of their relationships with Europeans. Its maintenance and modification required annual meetings to discuss military and trade agreements, and eventually involved numerous Aboriginal nations and colonial governments. The Iroquois and representatives of the New York colonial government played leadership roles in maintaining and developing the covenant. As Onondaga Chief Sadekanarktie said in 1694, “We have made a Generall and more firme covenant which has grown stronger and stronger from time to time, and our neighbours seeing the advantage thereof came and put in their hands into the same chain, particularly they of New England, Connecticutt, New Jersey, Pensilvania, Maryland and Virginia.”13
In 1756, the British Colonial Office appointed William Johnson, a trader and landowner who had extensive experience living and working with the Mohawk, as superintendent of Indian Affairs for the northern colonies. Edmund Atkin, also a trader, became head of the southern department.14 Johnson emphasized the importance of a nation-to-nation approach to Aboriginal people. He challenged the references to Aboriginal people as British subjects, saying they “desire to be considered as Allies and Friends, and such we may make them at a reasonable expense and thereby occupy our outposts.”15 The diplomatic nature of Johnson’s and Atkin’s appointments was underscored by the fact that both reported to the commander of British forces in North America.16 The appointment of these two superintendents and creation of their administrative offices marked the origins of what eventually would become Canada’s Indian Affairs department.
As Indian Affairs superintendent, Johnson’s most immediate task was to renew, recruit, and retain Aboriginal allies in the Seven Years’ War with France. (The war became a worldwide conflict that involved several European powers and their overseas colonies. It ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763.) Johnson had to renew the Covenant Chain, since the colonists had already neglected its provisions. He sought to convince the First Nations that the “French and Indian War,” as it was called in North America, was being fought for the protection of Aboriginal rights to land.17 In keeping with this promise, after their conquest of Montréal in 1760, the British made a commitment that those First Nations that had allied themselves with the French “shall be maintained in the Lands they inhabit, if they chose to remain there; they shall not be molested on any pretence whatsoever, for having carried arms, and served his most Christian Majesty; they shall have, as well as the French, liberty of religion.”18
Under the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Britain gained Canada, all French territory east of the Mississippi, and the islands of Trinidad, Tobago, Grenada, Saint Vincent, Dominica, and the Grenadines. The Treaty also placed restrictions on French trading rights in India.19 Much of the land in North America that the French ceded to Britain was, in fact, Aboriginal land. Arguing that they had neither been defeated in war nor consulted about the terms of the Treaty, many Aboriginal leaders were unwilling to accept its validity.20 The situation was not eased when cost-cutting measures led the British to abandon the gift giving that had long been a central element in the diplomatic relations between Aboriginal people and colonial representatives.21
At the same time, new pressures were placed on Aboriginal lands. The Anglo-American colonists, who had felt hemmed in by the French, were now looking forward to extending their settlements inland.22 Breaking a promise made to Aboriginal peoples during negotiations for the Treaty of Easton in 1757–58 that settlement would not extend west of the Appalachian Mountains (which run from Pennsylvania to Virginia), the British established a string of forts throughout the territory and opened the area to settlement.23
In the spring of 1763, Aboriginal peoples allied under the leadership of Odawa (Ottawa) Chief Pontiac. Together, they sought to expel the British from their own traditional lands that the French had surrendered.24 At first, they were successful but, in response, the British recalled troops from the Caribbean. As part of their offensive, the British experimented with germ warfare, distributing among the Indians blankets that were from a smallpox hospital at Fort Pitt.25
Although Chief Pontiac’s rebellion eventually faltered, it helped spur the British government into action.26 The cost of maintaining a standing army in the British colonies was 4% of the British budget.27 The government feared that the settlers’ ongoing and unauthorized expansion would provoke a series of financially ruinous Indian wars. To control the pace of such expansion, Indian superintendent Johnson recommended a “certain line should be run at the back of the northern Colonies, beyond which no settlement should be made, until the whole Six Nations should think proper of selling part thereof.”28
In response to all these events, in October 1763, the British government issued a document that is commonly referred to as the “Royal Proclamation of 1763.” It was intended to control the pace of colonial expansion into Aboriginal land, in keeping with commitments the British had made during the Seven Years’ War to their Aboriginal allies. To this day, it remains one of the founding documents of Canadian Aboriginal policy.29
The Royal Proclamation recognized that “Great Frauds and Abuses have been committed in purchasing Lands of the Indians, to the great Prejudice of our Interests and to the great Dissatisfaction of the said Indians.” British interests and the security of the colonies required that settlement be banned from lands that “the several nations or tribes of Indians, with whom we are connected, and who live under our protection” had not ceded or sold to the British Crown. Settlement without the permission of the Crown was banned in “all the Lands and Territories not included within the Limits of Our said Three new Governments [Québec, and East and West Florida], or within the Limits of the Territory granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company, as also all the Lands and Territories lying to the Westward of the Sources of the Rivers which fall into the Sea from the West and North West as aforesaid.”30
The proclamation not only protected Aboriginal lands, it also limited the conditions under which they might be sold. “If at any Time any of the Said Indians should be inclined to dispose of the said Lands,” they could do so, but land could be sold only to the Crown, and the sale had to be at a meeting of Indians that had been held specifically for that purpose.31
The Royal Proclamation, in effect, ruled that any future transfer of ‘Indian’ land would take the form of a Treaty between sovereigns.32 In this, it stands as one of the clearest and earliest expressions of what has been identified as a long-standing element of Canadian Aboriginal policy: the protection of Aboriginal people from settlers; in this case, settlers who might fraudulently seize their land.33
In the winter of 1763–64, the British distributed copies of the proclamation to First Nations and invited them to meet at Niagara in the summer of 1764, where Johnson hoped to conclude “a Treaty of Offensive & Defensive Alliance.”34 At that meeting, attended by chiefs representing twenty-four nations, Johnson presented gifts, read the proclamation, and then invited them to enter into a Treaty that would be symbolized by the presentation of a wampum belt, the traditional belt of shell beads used to commemorate Treaties and other significant events.35 From the Aboriginal perspective, the proclamation, in conjunction with the ceremony at Niagara, constituted recognition of their right to self-government.36 Up until the present day, First Nations leaders have regularly reminded British and Canadian officials of the commitments made at Niagara.37
The proclamation was of direct benefit to the British. During both the American War of Independence and the War of 1812, many First Nations allied themselves with Britain against the Americans, whom they viewed as the primary threat to their lands.38 American colonists, however, were displeased by the proclamation. Some viewed it as a temporary, if necessary, measure and hoped it would be revoked in a few years. Others, including future US president George Washington, simply ignored it and continued to buy land illegally.39 Anglo-American expansionists such as Washington were displeased that despite their lobbying against the provisions of the proclamation of 1763, the Quebec Act of 1774 strengthened the hand of the British by giving control over the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region to the governor of Québec. As a result, the Royal Proclamation and the Quebec Act became items in the catalogue of grievances against Britain that led to the American War of Independence.40
When the American colonies rebelled against Great Britain in 1775, the superintendent of the British Indian Department, Sir John Johnson (William Johnson’s son), secured the support of a number of Aboriginal nations to the British side by committing Britain to protecting Aboriginal land interests. The British betrayed that promise. The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the War of Independence and confirmed the existence of the United States of America, made no mention of Aboriginal claims, and neither did Jay’s Treaty of 1794 between the United States and Britain, which recognized the Ohio Valley as part of the territory of the United States.41
The Indian Department’s most pressing challenge was to find land for more than 6,000 people who had sided with Britain in the war. These “United Empire Loyalists,” as they came to call themselves, had travelled north to Canada at the end of the war. To accomplish this, between 1763 and 1841, the department negotiated more than twenty Treaties with the Ojibway and other First Nations to allow the loyalists to settle along the Niagara and St. Lawrence rivers and the Bay of Quinté. By 1791, there were so many English-speaking colonists in British North America that a separate colony, Upper Canada (the future Ontario), was created.42 At the time, most Aboriginal people in the old colony of Québec lived either on reserves or in hunting territories that lay beyond the portion of the colony that was settled by Europeans. In some cases, the reserves had been granted directly to the First Nations; in others, religious orders had developed the reserves on behalf of the First Nation.43
The early Treaties marked the beginning of a process through which, by 1850, the Ojibway of southern Ontario would find themselves confined to a series of small, remote reserves.44 The first Treaties involved one-time-only payments of cash and goods, and did not establish reserves. Instead, the Ojibway simply moved onto new lands, with the promise that the Crown would protect their fishing rights, which were crucial to their economies. Although the land transfers were supposed to be voluntary, there is evidence they were often coerced.45 The Treaties suffered from many of the same deficiencies as the land purchases in the American colonial period: the meaning of the agreement was not clearly spelled out, neither the boundaries nor the compensation to be paid were well defined, oral promises to allow the First Nations continued use of resources were not included in the written documents, and agreements were reached with individuals who had no right to give up the land in question.46 Although a 1794 order from British Governor General Dorchester called for an improvement in the Treaty process, the procedures outlined in the Royal Proclamation—such as the requirement that a special meeting be held to discuss transfers—were not always fully implemented.47 It is not surprising that historian L. F. S. Upton concluded that fraudulent would be the best word to use in describing the dispossession of Aboriginal people during this period.48
Among the people for whom the British had to secure land within Canada were the Aboriginal nations who had fought on their side in the American War of Independence. Their traditional lands had been claimed by the United States, so they had to relocate north of the new American border. The British purchased land on the Grand River from the Ojibway to give to the Six Nations (Mohawk). Land was also acquired from the Ojibway for a Mohawk settlement on the Bay of Quinté.49 Two groups of Delawares also sought refuge in Canada: the Moravians, who had been converted by Moravian missionaries; and the Munsees.50
One of the most well-known Treaties from this period was the 1787 agreement involving 101,171 hectares (250,000 acres) of land that includes all the land within the boundaries of present-day Toronto. The one-time payment for this land was 1,000 pounds in the province’s currency.51 (By comparison, in the same year, the British parliament granted the Prince of Wales a one-time payment of 161,000 pounds to cover debts from his extravagant lifestyle.)52 The failure to properly record and implement this and other Treaties meant that they remained subject to dispute into the twenty-first century.53
The value of the nation-to-nation policy to British interests was reinforced once more when Britain and the United States clashed in the War of 1812. That two-year struggle threatened the British colony’s very existence. Under the leadership of Tecumseh, a Shawnee from the Ohio territory, the Aboriginal forces played a key role in securing victories at Michilimackinac and Detroit. After the war, the British found themselves once more obliged to relocate Aboriginal allies from the United States.54 In the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, the British failed to gain American recognition of a clearly defined Indian territory, but they did require the Americans to restore to the Indian nations that had fought on the British side all rights, possessions, and privileges they had enjoyed prior to the war.55
The development of more positive relations with the United States in the years after the War of 1812 led the British Colonial Office to re-evaluate its Indian policy. Officials might have continued to view First Nations people as brave and independent, possessing the skills to extract a living from a harsh environment, but they had less need for them as military allies than they had had before the war. As the economic focus of the colony moved from the fur trade to agriculture, settlers became increasingly interested in gaining access to Aboriginal land.56 From 1814 to 1851, the population of Upper Canada increased from 95,000 to over 950,000. During this period, the Aboriginal share of the population declined from 10% to close to 1%. Consequently, the British government grew increasingly unwilling to protect Aboriginal interests.57 As the Indian Department and the churches were becoming ever more closely allied, they began to treat Aboriginal people as colonized people whose lives it was their responsibility to control and change, rather than as independent, self-governing nations.
With the end of hostilities with the United States, the British Colonial Office sought to reduce the cost of the Indian Department. In 1818, it announced that it would no longer provide colonial administrations with the funds to purchase Aboriginal lands. In Upper Canada, Lieutenant-Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland solved the financial challenge of this policy by ending large, one-time payments when negotiating Treaties. Instead, he offered smaller, annual payments, termed “annuities.” These annuities were to be paid in goods such as ammunition and blankets, and were to be funded by the sale of land to settlers. The annuities were not a welfare payment made by a generous government—they represented a way in which a cost-cutting government sought to reduce the cost of purchasing Aboriginal land. They represented a deferred payment of what was owed to Aboriginal people.58 Indeed, as historian J. R. Miller has remarked, Maitland had managed to transfer the cost from the Colonial Office to the First Nations themselves.59
By the end of the 1820s, Treaties also began to include provisions for the establishment of reserves for First Nations.60 These small reserves usually were located at a distance from settler communities in the hope this would avoid the negative impact the settlers could have on reserve life.61 These provisions mark the entrenchment of another long-term element of Canadian Aboriginal policy: the separation and isolation of Aboriginal people from Canadian society.
During these years, First Nations had continual problems with the enforcement of their Treaties. Their fisheries were not being protected, and they could not get confirmation of their rights to the reserves that had been established beginning in the 1820s.62
In 1820, in a precursor to what became known as the “civilization policy,” Lieutenant-Governor Maitland proposed an economic development and education plan for Aboriginal people at the Grand and Credit rivers. Maitland argued that the plan—which would have included the establishment of boarding schools—would supposedly pay for itself, open land to settlement, and allow Aboriginal people to adapt to new economic opportunities.63 In the proposed boarding schools, the students were to be converted to Christianity and instructed in reading, writing, and arithmetic, with the boys being taught to farm and work a trade, and the girls taught in sewing and dairying.64
Nothing was done at the time, but eight years later, the plan was revived. In 1828, Lord Goderich, the colonial secretary, recommended that the Indian Department be scaled back and eventually wound down.65 Major General H. C. Darling, the chief superintendent of the Indian Department, proposed that rather than the department’s being disbanded, it should take on a new role. Instead of serving as an arm of British diplomacy, it was to be transformed into a domestic bureaucracy whose prime focus was the control of Aboriginal people. Pointing to what he saw as the progress Methodist missionaries were making in their work with the Ojibway of Upper Canada, Darling said the Indian Department could “encourage the disposition now shown generally amongst the resident Indians of the province, to shake off the rude habits of savage life, and to embrace Christianity and civilization.”66 As an agent of civilization, the Indian Department would settle First Nations in Aboriginal villages; provide them with the support needed to take up farming; and ensure they received schooling, religious instruction, and vocational training. At annuity time, farm equipment would be provided instead of hunting supplies. He claimed all this could be done at “trifling” expense: “a small sum, by way of salary, to a schoolmaster wherever a school may be formed … and some aid in building school houses.”67
There was an element of national security to this plan. The colonial governors, all members of the Church of England, were pleased by the work the Methodist missionaries were carrying out among the Ojibway. But, they were alarmed that these missionaries were affiliated with an American-based branch of Methodism; that they might be instilling “objectionable principles” in the minds of their converts.68 As a result, the next lieutenant-governor, Sir John Colborne, dispatched Anglican missionaries to Aboriginal communities in an attempt to undermine the work of the Methodists.69 Since he had greater confidence in the loyalty of British rather than American Methodists, in 1832, he encouraged British Methodists to send missionaries to Canada.70 He also promised government support to several leading Aboriginal converts to Methodism if they further converted to the Church of England.71
In 1830, the Colonial Office endorsed the civilization policy, committing the department to “gradually reclaiming the Indians from a state of barbarism, and introducing amongst them the industrious and peaceful habits of civilized life.”72 Separate branches of the Indian Department were created for Canada West (Ontario) and Canada East (Québec) and placed under civil rather than military control.73 (The department had also been under civilian control from 1796 to 1816.) The civilization policy sought to create Christian, Aboriginal farm communities on reserves.74 It was in keeping with the aspirations of the evangelical revival movement in England that stressed the importance of converting all of humanity to Christianity.
The adoption of the civilization policy marks the introduction of a third ongoing element in Canadian Aboriginal policy: the attempted assimilation or ‘civilization’ of Aboriginal people into Canadian social and religious values, if not always into the larger society. The British policies of protection, separation, and civilization were all placed at the service of the overriding colonial goal of gaining access to Aboriginal lands at the least possible expense. The policies were at times contradictory and almost always underfunded. Taken together, they marked the abandonment of the old policy of nation-to-nation relations. Deprived of control of their land by paternalistic policies of protection, and separated physically and socially from the centres of economic and political activity, Aboriginal nations were threatened with destruction as political and cultural communities.
Many of the missionary societies enjoyed support from senior government officials. During the first half of the nineteenth century, several leading Colonial Office officials and colonial governors, including Colonial Office secretary Lord Glenelg and Ontario Lieutenant-Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland, were members of the Anglican Church Missionary Society.75 The efforts of Protestant missionaries in England contributed in 1836 to the creation of a special parliamentary committee to investigate the treatment of Indigenous peoples throughout the British Empire.76 The evidence presented to the committee suggested that colonialists were dispossessing, corrupting, and killing Indigenous people rather than civilizing them or converting them to Christianity.77 The committee’s report quoted the comments of a Canadian Aboriginal leader that his people were not adopting European habits because “they could see nothing in civilized life sufficiently attractive to induce them to give up their former mode of living.”78 The committee concluded that Britain was obliged to civilize Indigenous peoples as a Christian duty. Such a policy would also improve colonial security and be economically beneficial, since it would prevent Indigenous peoples from becoming dependent on the state for their survival.79 The committee’s work led to the formation of the Aborigines Protection Society in 1837. Five members of the committee that prepared the Aborigines Report were among the new society’s founders.80 Egerton Ryerson, who would play a leading role in Canadian educational history, was the society’s Canadian representative.81
Protestant missionaries, who had a central part in the ongoing implementation of the civilization policy in Upper Canada, stressed the importance of establishing settled communities of Aboriginal people. The economy of these communities was to be based on agriculture rather than on hunting, fishing, trapping, and trading. The residents would live in nuclear families rather than in their traditional communal units, would accumulate wealth, and would own land. It would also be easier to ensure that people were following Christian teachings if they were living in settled communities.82 The establishment of such communities amounted to a major transformation of the lives of Aboriginal people, a kind of factory for creating ‘civilized Indians.’ They were given new names and told to abandon hunting and fishing in order to farm, using European methods.83 These communities were also intended to be places in which Indians would be protected from Euro-Canadian civilization. Missionaries recognized that governments and settlers presented a direct threat to Aboriginal people. Liquor traders threatened to undermine community morals, while settlers and governments alike were more interested in taking control of Aboriginal land than in protecting Aboriginal interests. For this reason, missionaries did not favour letting Aboriginal people have full control over their land.84
The successful implementation of the civilization policy was hampered by several factors. For many Aboriginal people, hunting and fishing were still viable and preferable to farming. Their attachment to Aboriginal culture also remained strong. Divisive conflicts between and among Anglican and Methodist missionaries served to blunt the effectiveness of the missionary efforts, while the ongoing plundering of Aboriginal lands by settlers only increased Aboriginal suspicions of European motives. The government’s continued unwillingness to make a significant investment in Aboriginal communities further undermined the project. Throughout the 1830s, for example, cost-cutting measures led to the dismissal of translators and other departmental staff.85 Those who remained were military men with little background in farming or teaching. Other staff members were corrupt, using their offices to increase their personal incomes at the expense of Aboriginal interests. Sir Charles Metcalfe, a former governor-general of India, lieutenant-governor of the North-Western Provinces in India, and governor of Jamaica, became governor-general in 1843. Before returning to England, he dismissed most of the Indian Department, including Chief Superintendent Samuel Jarvis.86 Jarvis, having thus been stripped of his authority in 1844, was, one year later, forced to pay back more than 4,000 pounds of Ojibway funds that he had diverted to his own use.87
Despite these problems, the civilization policy was not without its achievements. Under Aboriginal leadership, the Credit River community had forty houses, a hospital, barns, sawmill, and a two-thirds interest in a harbour, and was the centre of successful mixed farming.88 Communities such as Credit River were praised by Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Colborne, but not by his successor, Sir Francis Bond Head, who concluded shortly after his arrival in 1835 that the civilization policy was a failure. To him, Aboriginal people were a dying people who should be moved aside for settlers. He proposed relocating them to Manitoulin Island, where he expected them to live their final years in peaceful isolation.89 To achieve his goal, he organized what amounted to a forced surrender of over 670,000 hectares (1.5 million acres) of the Bruce Peninsula in 1836. In contravention of the Royal Proclamation, Head arranged the surrender at a meeting that had not been called specifically to deal with land issues. He told the Ojibway that settlers would be moving in, even if they did not agree.90 Head’s attempt to relocate the First Nations undermined the civilization policy. Throughout what is now southern Ontario, Aboriginal communities lost their investment in the improvements they had made to their reserves, as they were forced onto less productive land. Some stopped farming because they did not know if they would be able to keep their lands.91
The proposed relocation prompted a storm of opposition led by Methodist missionaries in Canada, and the Aborigines Protection Society in Britain.92 At the height of the campaign, Peter Jones, an Aboriginal convert to Methodism, travelled to England, where he met with the colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, a vice-president of the Anglican Church Missionary Society. Glenelg halted the relocation to Manitoulin Island, but the land surrenders were not reversed.93
Head’s mishandling of colonial politics contributed to the brief and unsuccessful colonial rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837 and led to his resignation in the following year. The Colonial Office issued a statement on Indian policy in 1838 (a year after the parliamentary committee submitted its report) that was in keeping with the idea of a duty to civilize. Under this policy, First Nations people were to be settled and made farmers, their lands were to be protected, and missionaries were to be encouraged to provide educational services.94
In 1840, Upper and Lower Canada were combined to form the United Province of Canada. During the following decade, the provisions of the Royal Proclamation were generally ignored. Prospectors and mining companies were granted licences to Aboriginal lands north of Lake Huron and Lake Superior. In 1846, Garden River Chief Shingwaukonse complained that miners had been improperly given rights to the land where his community’s village was located. Three years later, in what became known as the “Mica War,” First Nations and Métis men took control of a mining operation north of Lake Superior. Shingwaukonse and three other leaders were arrested, convicted, and later pardoned for their involvement in this protest.95 It was only when events had reached this dangerous point that the British sent out William Robinson in 1850 to negotiate what were to become the Robinson-Huron and the Robinson-Superior Treaties.96 These Treaties committed the government to paying annuities, and guaranteed First Nations the right to continue hunting, trapping, and fishing on Crown land that had not been developed.97 These were the first Treaties to commit the government to setting aside reserved lands for those bands that signed the Treaty. In justifying his decision to grant reserves, Robinson argued that since First Nations would be able to continue to support themselves by hunting and fishing on reserve land, they would have no future basis for claiming government support by saying they had had their means of livelihood taken away from them by the government.98
In 1850, the colonial government adopted An Act for the better protection of the Lands and Property of the Indians in Lower Canada, and An Act for the protection of the Indians in Upper Canada from imposition and the property occupied or enjoyed by them from trespass and injury. Both Acts were intended to protect Indian lands from speculators and trespassers. Reserve land was to be held by the Crown, and to be free from taxation and seizure for non-payment of debts or taxes. The law dealing with land in Lower Canada contained the first legal definition of an Indian in Canadian law: “All persons of Indian blood, reputed to belong to the particular Body or Tribe of Indians interested in such lands and their descendents.” That Act also recognized those married into the community and living with them, and the children, including those adopted in infancy, of those recognized as Indians who were living on their lands. In 1851, the Act was amended to exclude non-Indian males married to Indian women.99 The colonial government was now assuming both the right to determine who Indians were, and greater control of what was being described as Indian land, in disregard of the Royal Proclamation.
By 1857, the goal of the civilization policy had changed. The government no longer sought to create separate ‘civilized’ and ‘Christian’ Aboriginal communities on reserves that were self-sufficient. It now sought to assimilate Aboriginal people into Euro-Canadian society and gradually eliminate the reserves. This was to be done through a process described as “enfranchisement.” The preamble to the Act for the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in the Canadas stated that “it is desirable to encourage the progress of Civilization among the Indian Tribes in this Province, and the gradual removal of all legal distinctions between them and Her Majesty’s other Canadian Subjects, and to facilitate the acquisition of property and of the rights accompanying it, by such Individual Members of the said Tribes as shall be found to desire such encouragement and to have deserved it.”
Under the provisions of the Act for the Gradual Civilization, an Indian male who could read and write in either English or French, was free of debt, and was of good character, could receive all the rights of a British subject, fifty acres (20.2 hectares) of reserve land, and a share of band funds. As historian John Tobias has noted, the standard for Aboriginal people to become ‘citizens’ was higher than for white settlers—many of whom were not literate or free from debt, and whose characters remained unassessed.100 The Act for the Gradual Civilization stood in contradiction to the Royal Proclamation, which gave the Indian nations control over whether to sell or otherwise dispose of Indian land. Aboriginal leaders recognized the contradiction, calling the Act a betrayal of the proclamation and an attempt to break their community into pieces.101 Band councils protested in a number of ways: they petitioned for the repeal of the Act, they removed their children from schools, or they declined to participate in the census.102 There had been considerable Aboriginal support for policies of education and economic development. There was none for assimilation. Between 1857 and 1876, only one man was voluntarily enfranchised. The government did not interpret this lack of response as an indication of the strength of Aboriginal attachment to Aboriginal identity. Rather, the government blamed the failure of Aboriginal people to seek enfranchisement on the influence of their leaders. This only increased government hostility to Aboriginal self-government.103
In 1860, the British Colonial Office abandoned its responsibility for Indian affairs, transferring the Indian Department to the United Canadas and making it part of the Crown Lands Department. As Canada took direct responsibility for Aboriginal peoples, the often contradictory policies of protection, separation, and assimilation would be further entrenched to gain control of Aboriginal land and to marginalize Aboriginal people. Schooling and residential schooling in particular were a component of this contradictory and frequently ineffective policy approach.
Children were sent to the schools to ‘protect’ them from the influence of their own parents and culture. Like reserves, the schools themselves were places of isolation in which children were to be ‘civilized’ and assimilated. As with all Aboriginal policies, the schools were funded in such a cost-conscious manner that, no matter what one thought of their goals, they were doomed to fail from the very beginning.