Inuit resisting attack led by Martin Frobisher, 1575.
Painting by John White, 1585-1593. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Throughout the pre-Confederation period, European and Aboriginal peoples approached education and Treaty making with different purposes. Aboriginal peoples regarded Treaties as a tool to maintain cultural and political autonomy. Education was a means of ensuring that their children, while remaining rooted in their cultures, could also survive economically within a changing political and economic environment. The British viewed both Treaties and schools as a means of gaining control over Aboriginal lands and eradicating Aboriginal languages and cultures. They wanted Aboriginal people to abandon their languages and cultures. They also expected Aboriginal people to become subsistence farmers and labourers, remaining largely on the bottom rung of the Canadian economic ladder. British rhetoric calling for ‘assimilation’ of Aboriginal people into British North American society was tempered by a long-standing colonialist view that Aboriginal peoples not only had an inferior culture to their own, but that this alleged inferiority demonstrated that Aboriginal peoples were simply not as intelligent or as capable as people of European origin.
At the time of Confederation, only two residential schools were in operation in the four Canadian provinces: the Methodist Mount Elgin school at Muncey (or Munceytown), Ontario, and the Anglican Mohawk Institute at Brantford, Ontario. Of these, only Mount Elgin received government funding.1 In the years to come, the Roman Catholic Church would play a prominent role in establishing and developing residential schools. Its activities in Canada in the early nineteenth century, however, had been hampered by restrictions the British government had placed on the church after the conquest of New France in 1763, including a refusal to allow Roman Catholic orders to recruit new members. The last of the Jesuits in Canada had died in 1783, and the order was dormant here until the 1840s, when the British allowed the Jesuits and the newly founded Oblate order to send members to Ontario and Quebec.2 By the end of the 1800s, the Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Methodists, along with the Presbyterians, all would have committed themselves to establishing residential schools in western Canada. The dramatic expansion was undertaken even though the earlier experiment with residential schools in eastern Canada had been judged to be a failure. The schools failed despite the fact that Aboriginal parents often had been interested in seeing their children acquire the skills to succeed in what they recognized as changing economic conditions. Residential schooling in the pre-Confederation era exhibited many of the problems that would characterize the system’s entire history. Parents preferred to see their children at home and were reluctant to send them to school. At the schools, children were lonely and frequently ran away. School life was hard and often unhealthy, and education focused largely on work and religion. Those children who completed their schooling often found that their ties to their home communities and cultures had been severed, but they had not been given the skills needed to succeed in the broader society. First Nations communities had agreed initially to provide funding to the schools, but they later withdrew their support, based on their experience with a system that was unresponsive to their wishes, disparaged their culture, and failed to deliver the promised economic benefits.
The residential school system came into being in Ontario as the colonial government was laying the groundwork for a public school system. Education was not a major concern to the colony’s first lieutenant-governor, John Simcoe, who wrote in 1795 that schooling should be reserved for the “Children of the Principal People of this Country.”3 To learn what they would need to ‘get by,’ the children of those stationed at the “lower degrees in life” would have to depend on their “connections and relations.”4 In keeping with Simcoe’s views, the 1807 District Public (Grammar) School Act adopted by the colonial government authorized the establishment of up to eight grammar schools. The schools were to be administered by the Anglican Church, employ only Anglicans, and charge substantial tuition fees. As a result, only the colony’s elite could afford to send their children to school.5 However, the reality was that education was not necessary for survival. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most people farmed, fished, and logged. Households were centres of production; children were labourers. In such a world, children learned most of what they needed to survive from their parents. As this world gave way to an industrialized society, the demand for public schooling would grow.6
Public agitation for greater access to education led to the adoption of the Common School Act in 1816, which committed the government to funding any public school with twenty or more students. Individual communities were left with the responsibility of establishing school boards and building and maintaining the schools. Attendance was not compulsory. To cover costs, schools had to charge fees, with the result that education remained beyond the reach of many families. The government granted 100 pounds to cover teachers’ salaries at the elite grammar schools, but the grant to common schools was only 25 pounds.7 As historian J. G. Althouse commented, this meant “a teaching post was commonly regarded as the last refuge of the incompetent, the inept, the unreliable.”8 There were no provisions for teacher training or certification, and no standard textbooks. In many cases, there were no schoolhouses. Instead, classes might be held in homes, halls, and, on occasion, in old taverns.9
By 1838, almost 24,000 students were attending 800 common schools in Upper Canada. Despite this growth, the colonial education system was judged to be inadequate by a number of investigations, and measures were adopted with the goal of expanding education and placing it under centralized control.10 The leading figure in this centralizing movement was Egerton Ryerson. Born in Canada of Loyalist parents in 1803, Ryerson was driven from home by his Anglican father when he was drawn to Methodism at the age of eighteen. After teaching as an assistant at a local grammar school, then moving to Hamilton to attend the Gore District Grammar School, he became a Methodist missionary, working first as a circuit preacher and then with the Ojibway at Credit River in the 1820s. As a Methodist, he stood apart from the Anglican elite who dominated the colony. At the same time, he was in many ways a social conservative who distanced himself from the more radical reformers of the 1830s. Upon Ryerson’s appointment as assistant superintendent of schools for Canada West (Ontario), he undertook a year-long tour of Europe, where he studied various educational innovations.11 On his return, he summarized his beliefs in a detailed report. Education, he held, should be universal and practical: “every youth of the land should be trained to industry and practice,—whether that training be extensive or limited.”12 And it should be religious: this would include “a course embracing the entire History of the Bible, its institutions, cardinal doctrines and morals, together with the evidences of its authenticity.”13 Schools were to do more than instruct people in various skills and knowledge; they were to prepare students “for their appropriate duties and employments of life, as Christians, as persons of business, and also as members of the civil community in which they live.”14 Ryerson argued that since crime was the result of illiteracy and ignorance, money spent on education would be recouped in a reduction in spending on policing and jails.15
Ryerson’s report became the basis of the Common Schools Act of 1846 and served as the blueprint for the measures he would spend the next three decades implementing.16 In 1847, a teacher-training school (known as a “normal school” because it was to establish teaching norms or standards) opened in Toronto, providing Ontario with a local source of trained teachers.17 By 1850, school boards had the authority to tax property holders, allowing them the option of reducing or eliminating tuition fees for attending common school.18 In 1871, four years after Canadian Confederation, grammar schools were replaced by high schools and collegiate institutes.19 The public school system Ryerson oversaw was intended to be Christian, but non-denominational. However, he was obliged also to accept the existence of a separate, publicly funded, and largely Roman Catholic religious school system, a subject of ongoing political conflict throughout the nineteenth century and later.20
From the outset, the goals of education were mixed. The leaders of the rebellions of 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada wanted to see educational opportunity increased, to allow people to better identify and advance their own interests. The employers, particularly the new industrial employers, hoped for the creation of a docile and capable workforce. The political elite looked forward to the creation of a more harmonious society, as schools educated students about their civil responsibilities and instilled loyalty to the existing order. Church leaders expected that both public and Catholic schools would provide students with an education in Christian values.21 Despite this heavy set of mixed expectations, the schools were given little support. The average total expenditure in the pre-Confederation British colonies on “charities, welfare, and education” was 9% of their budgets.22 It was in this context that the early residential schools in English-speaking Canada were established.
In 1828, Robert Lugger, an Anglican missionary working for the New England Company, established a day school at Mohawk Village at the Six Nations settlement on the Grand River, near what is now Brantford, Ontario. By 1834, the school was known as the Mohawk Institute and began boarding students.23 It would remain in operation until 1970, making it the longest operating residential school for Aboriginal people in Canadian history.24 The New England Company was itself one of the oldest Protestant missionary societies. It had been in operation for nearly two centuries in North America. It opened the Mohawk Institute after a failed attempt to establish a residential school in New Brunswick.
The Puritans who had travelled from England in the 1630s to establish their New England colonies in what is now the northeastern United States were strong advocates of schooling for all. They believed that without education, it was impossible for people to avoid the traps laid by Satan.25 They also claimed a special mission to ‘civilize’ Native Americans. For example, the 1629 seal of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay bore the image of a Native American with the legend “Come over and help us.”26 The phrase was a quotation from the Bible’s Book of Acts, in which the apostle Paul had a vision in which the Macedonians requested that he “Come over to Macedonia and help us.”27 The same legend and image were also included on the seal of the New England Company itself.
Two Puritan missionaries, John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew Jr., led the New England campaigns to convert and educate the Native American peoples of that area. To promote this effort, Eliot ensured that a written record of his work was published in England. These pamphlets influenced the British parliament, then under Puritan control. It passed a bill in 1649 incorporating the Society for the Propagation of the Gospell in New England, known in short as the “New England Company.” The English philosopher, chemist, and theologian Robert Boyle was prominent among the New England Company’s leaders, and was its long-time president. Boyle also served as a member of the board of the East India Company and was a founder of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.28
The New England Company initially raised and invested funds to support missionary work among Native Americans in New England. In addition to providing financial support to missionaries such as Eliot and Mayhew, the company employed Native American people as translators and teachers.29 One of the New England Company founders, John Winthrop, established a workshop in New England that employed Native Americans to make goods for the British navy.30 The work was conceived on a religious and political scale: a stronger navy would give Protestant England an advantage over Catholic France and Spain, while Aboriginal workers would be civilized and more likely to be won over to Protestantism. In addition, the Aboriginal workers would probably buy British-made products with their wages, improving the British economy.31 The New England Company’s missionaries emphasized the virtues of work, in the face of what they saw as the ‘idle ways’ of Native Americans. Working in a settled location was so central to its ideas of civilization and Christianity that the company’s charter committed it to finding a job for any Native American it converted.32
On his death in 1691, Robert Boyle left most of his considerable estate to an endowment to support “the Advance or Propagation of the Christian Religion amongst Infidells.”33 The money was used to purchase an estate that would generate an income of ninety pounds a year, to be paid to the New England Company. Half the money was to be used to pay the salaries of two missionaries; the other half went to Harvard College to support two ministers who would teach Native Americans in or near the college. Any amount left over was to go to the College of William and Mary in Virginia to establish an Indian school.34 The Aboriginal enrolment at the college varied, but at times was as high as twenty-four. Initially, the students were boarded in private homes where, according to one observer, “an abundance of them used to die … through sickness, change of provision and way of life.”35 In 1723, a separate building was constructed to house the students. Within a decade, much of the building was being used by the college library. Little is known about the students who attended the school. However, during a Treaty negotiation in 1744, the Iroquois were offered the opportunity to send children to the school. According to Benjamin Franklin, who attended the talks, the Iroquois negotiator turned down the offer, saying that the young people who had gone to the school in the past “were absolutely good for nothing being neither acquainted with the true methods for killing deer, catching Beaver or surprizing an enemy.”36 This is one of the first of many blunt Aboriginal assessments of residential schooling that would be delivered, and ignored by subsequent American and Canadian governments, over the following 250 years.
After the British defeat in the American War of Independence, in 1787, the New England Company transferred its support for missionary endeavours from the United States to what remained of British North America. The company’s initial venture into what is now Canada was undertaken in New Brunswick, centred in the community of Sussex Vale.37 This was not the first Protestant attempt at providing schooling for Aboriginal people in the Maritimes. In 1765, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospell had opened a school for Mi’kmaq (alternately Mi’kmaw) students in Nova Scotia. Despite the offer of free board, the school was not able to recruit a single student.38 Although the New England Company’s Sussex Vale initiative lasted longer, it too ended in failure.
In New Brunswick, the company appointed leading figures from the Anglican community to a board of commissioners that was to supervise the spending of what would turn out to be about 800 pounds a year over the following fifteen years, for missionary work in New Brunswick. For this money, the New England Company expected that Mi’kmaq and Maliseet children, whose families were Roman Catholic, would be taught to speak English, and, after initial failures at the schools, apprenticed to local employers to learn a trade, as well as be converted to the Protestant faith. Upon completion of their education, the children were to return to their communities, where, it was hoped, they would make further converts to both Protestantism and a settled lifestyle. The company’s expectations were frustrated: parents proved reluctant to send their children to the schools; those children who did enrol attended only sporadically; and, by 1803, no child had been apprenticed. Conflicts had arisen between parents and the school over the use of corporal punishment.39 To fill the schools, the company recruited the children of non-Aboriginal United Empire Loyalists, who were taught in classrooms set aside for them.40
Operations were suspended in 1804, only to be revived in 1807 on the basis of a proposal to separate Aboriginal children from their parents. In the words of one of the commissioners, John Coffin, “If you do not take the children early they are not only complete Indians but complete Catholics.”41 Under the new plan, the company would fund an infant boarding school and an apprenticeship program for Aboriginal people at Sussex Vale.42 Young people were apprenticed to families who were to board them and see that they attended school. Parents who gave their children to the school received a clothing allowance and a weekly cash grant. The early nineteenth century was a period of economic distress for the First Nations communities in New Brunswick, and, in the face of this crisis, parents, who were otherwise unenthusiastic about the Sussex Vale project, turned their children over to the New England Company.43
The local board of commissioners operated the apprenticeship system to their own advantage, disregarding New England Company policy and paying non-Aboriginal families who took in apprentices twenty pounds a year.44 Oliver Arnold was both the Sussex Vale schoolmaster and the local minister for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospell. He was paid to keep between four and seven apprentices at his home.45 One young woman apprenticed to Arnold was seduced by his son, and the child born of this relationship was raised as an apprentice.46 In 1818, of the fifty-three children who had been enrolled since 1807, two had died, eleven had either run away or been discharged, one was studying to be a missionary, twenty-six were undergoing apprenticeship, and thirteen had completed their apprenticeships.47
In response to complaints about the school, the New England Company commissioned two investigations, both of which concluded that the children were being used as cheap labour, were receiving little training, and were not being sent to school. In his 1822 report, Walter Bromley wrote that the apprentices were “treated as Menial Servants and compelled to do every kind of drudgery.” He found that the boys received little schooling; the girls, none. Upon completion of their apprenticeships, they returned to their home communities and to the Catholic Church. Bromley had particularly harsh words for Arnold, who, he believed, was using the New England Company’s money to line the pockets of his dissolute relatives.48 The Sussex Vale school had been intended solely for the First Nations students. Instead, it was being operated on a segregated basis, with 50% of the students being non-Aboriginal. The reports also uncovered incidents of sexual exploitation of apprentices. Those who managed to complete the apprenticeship were left in a precarious position: many of their links to their home communities had been severed, but they were still not accepted by the Euro-Canadian society. By retaining their language and culture, those who had not gone to school at Sussex Vale were seen to be better off than those who had gone there.49
On the basis of these reports, the company abandoned its work in New Brunswick and turned its attention to southern Ontario, where it built on the work that had been done among the Mohawk people.
Prior to the American War of Independence, the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospell had established a mission to the Mohawk at Fort Hunter, New York. The society followed the Mohawk to Canada after the war and established a day school at the Bay of Quinté in 1784.50 When the Mohawk settled on the Grand River, the British military had promised them twenty pounds a year to support a teacher, whom the Mohawk would select. A school opened in 1786, using readers and prayer books in the Mohawk language.51 One of the teachers at the school was Major John Norton (Teyoninhokovrawen). He had a Cherokee father and Scottish mother, was born in Scotland, and was educated at Dunfermline as a child. After migrating to North America—and being adopted as nephew to Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant—he served as schoolmaster with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospell.52 The promised funding for the teacher did not materialize, and the Grand River school closed. However, in 1822, while in England to lobby on behalf of Mohawk land rights, Joseph Brant’s son John petitioned the New England Company for a school and a mission at Grand River.53 The Anglican Society turned its mission over to the New England Company, and, in 1827, company missionary Robert Lugger arrived at Grand River.54 The following year, he hired a schoolmaster, and, two years later, he opened a mechanics institute, which became the Mohawk Institute. In 1832, two large rooms were added. In one room, the girls were taught to spin and weave; in the other, boys were taught tailoring, carpentry, and mechanics. In 1834, the school began to take in boarders, and taught farming, gardening, and trades. The trades included blacksmithing and the making of wagons, sleighs, and cabinets. Lugger died in 1837 and was replaced by the Reverend Abraham Nelles. By 1840, the school had forty students, and, in future years, there was a waiting list of students seeking admission.55 During this period, classes were conducted in English, but the students were allowed to speak to each other in their own language.56 After 1860, the school farm was used not only to teach children how to farm, but also as a source of food and income for the school.57 By 1840, the students were making all their own shoes and most of their own clothing.58
In the 1830s, a number of “shrewd and intelligent” girls had left the school because they objected to the amount of menial labour they were required to do. Mrs. Nelles, the new principal’s wife, took their side, and it was agreed that they would be readmitted to the school and exempted from certain chores. As a New England Company official noted at the time, they were to be treated “as boarders to a white school are treated.”59 The school appeared to have limited problems with students running away, although, in 1840, several of the new students, overcome with homesickness, returned to their parents. However, that year, three boys, including one promising young blacksmith, were expelled because they had become “very disobedient and unsettled.”60 For his part, Nelles constantly lobbied the New England Company for money to provide students who were leaving the schools with tools so they could continue their trades.61
In an 1844 address to Anglican clergy in Toronto, the Anglican minister and future bishop John Strachan spoke of the
excellent School of Industry for boys at the Mohawk village on the Grand River. The boys are taught useful trades, and the girls knitting, and sewing, and household work. At the same time, their religious education is carefully followed up. They are found to be docile and quick of apprehension and very soon become clean and tidy in their persons. Here again is a great advance if diligently improved, towards the conversion of the Indians. The Church can reach the parents through the children; and even should she be less successful with the adults, she can gradually get possession of the rising generation, and in half an age, the tribe becomes Christian.62
A new school building, capable of boarding sixty students, was constructed in 1859 and a farm was added in 1860.63 The Mohawk Institute also employed its own graduates during this period: in 1859, four former students were teaching at the school.64 By 1861, Isaac Barefoot, who had been teaching at the mission school, attended a teacher training college in Toronto.65 Another former student, Oronhyatekha (baptized Peter Martin) went on to study at Oxford University in England and graduate from the University of Toronto medical school in 1867.66
Although the Mohawk Institute was the New England Company’s most celebrated and longest-lasting boarding school in Ontario, it was not the company’s only such initiative. In 1842, a New England Company missionary at Mud Lake, in southern Ontario, began boarding eight male and female students. Given that none of the students lived more than three kilometres from the school, a decision was made in 1870 to stop boarding students and operate the institution as a day school.67
During the first thirty-five years of its operation in Canada, the Mohawk Institute was largely a church-run and -funded endeavour. The other major residential schooling initiative of this era was the product of a partnership between the government and the Methodist Church, and was closely linked to broader government Aboriginal policy.
By 1850, there were two, major, Methodist residential schools in southern Ontario: the Alnwick school located in Alderville and Mount Elgin in Munceytown. The establishment of these schools represented the culmination of Methodist missionary work among the Ontario Ojibway since the 1820s. Aboriginal people played a role in funding and establishing these schools. They supported them because they believed the schools would provide their children with the skills needed to navigate looming economic and social challenges. They further believed they would be able to play a prominent role in the operation of the schools.68 When those expectations were frustrated, Aboriginal support for the schools was greatly diminished.
The work the Methodists carried out in Canada was sometimes hindered by the fact that there were two, separate, and at times feuding, Methodist organizations operating in Canada for much of the early nineteenth century. One branch of Methodism, the Methodist Episcopal Church, was brought to Upper Canada by United Empire Loyalists.69 Although they were loyal to Britain, they maintained a connection with the us-based Methodist Episcopal Church.70 This alliance with an American church during a period of ongoing hostility between Britain and the United States created tensions and suspicions.71 In the aftermath of the War of 1812, the British Wesleyan Missionary Society had also sent missionaries to Upper and Lower Canada.72 For nearly fifty years, tension would persist between the British and American strands of Methodism. An initial 1833 merger collapsed in 1840. A lasting union of Methodists in Ontario was not achieved until 1847.73
Massachusetts-born William Case, one of the leading Methodist missionaries in Ontario at the time, was the driving force behind the early educational initiatives among Aboriginal people. After spending the duration of the War of 1812 in the United States, he returned to Canada in 1815.74 Under Case’s leadership, the Methodist Episcopal Church undertook extensive missionary work among the Ojibway in the 1820s. The American Methodist Episcopal Church provided ongoing financial support to this work and, by 1829, was contributing $700 a year to Aboriginal missionary work in Canada.75 Special fundraising tours of the United States raised additional funds; an 1829 tour brought in $2,400, and an emergency tour the next year raised $1,300.76
By 1830, the Methodists claimed to have converted over 1,000 Aboriginal people when the Ojibway population of the area stood at just over 1,300, and to have established nine missions and eleven day schools.77 The schools employed the Infant School System, an educational approach developed by John Heinrich Pestalozzi, a Swiss educator who believed that students should be allowed to learn from their experiences at their own pace. Instruction was provided in reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, astronomy, geometry, natural history, and church history.78 The Methodists had translated the Lord’s Prayer and numerous books of the Bible into Ojibway, and had published an Ojibway dictionary and a grammar book, allowing them to provide a bilingual education in many of their schools.79 Most of the school-aged children at Credit, Munceytown, Grape Island, Rice Lake, and Lake Simcoe were enrolled in school in 1835.80 The schools produced a cohort of Aboriginal leaders, including many missionaries and teachers.81
Case established a missionary reserve on Grape Island in Lake Ontario in 1828. There, he and the mission’s female teachers opened a small residential school, taking into the mission home four young girls to be educated in English, religion, sewing, knitting, housekeeping, and cooking.82 The missionary reserve eventually outgrew the island and, in 1837, the residents and the school moved to Alderville, Ontario. There, with financial support from Methodists in the United States and Britain, Case established a manual labour school.83 By the early 1840s, the school had thirteen boarders.84 That year, Alderville Chief John Sunday (also known as Shawundais, or Sultry Heat) gave the following description of the Alderville school day:
The girls spend also six hours a day in school: the afternoon half of which time is devoted to needle work—During the rest of the day, they are engaged in housework. The following is the daily routine of this department—They rise during the winter at five o’clock: and in summer at one half past four, the girls proceed to milk the cows: then prepare the breakfast; attend family prayers; and hear a lecture, or exposition of a portion of the Scriptures—The singing, and all the exercises are in English. The girls then set the cheese; and do housework—at nine a.m. they go into school—At noon dinner. at half-past one p.m.: school recommenses: then as above mentioned, needlework—school closed at half-past four p.m. At five, supper—at six, milking the cows prayers at eight p.m.: at half-past eight, they retire to rest.85
Under Sunday’s leadership, the Alderville band agreed in 1845 to a Methodist request to provide 100 pounds from the band annuity to support the school.86 In 1849, the new Alnwick school was constructed at Alderville, accommodating sixty residential students in addition to day students.87 By then, it was part of a broader movement within the church, the government, and portions of the Aboriginal community to establish residential schools. One of the leading figures in that movement was Peter Jones.
At a dramatic open-air Methodist revival meeting in 1823, Peter Jones, a young man of mixed ancestry, was converted to Methodism. Jones’s mother, Tuhbenahneequay, was the daughter of a Mississauga chief. His father, Augustus Jones, was a US-born surveyor who had come to Canada in the 1780s. Known to the Ojibway as Kahkewaquonaby (Sacred Feathers), Peter Jones was raised in his mother’s family until he was fourteen.88 One year after he had begun his conversion process, he was teaching at a day school at the Mohawk community at Grand River.89 He soon was working as a missionary, teacher, fundraiser, political adviser, and leader.90 To raise money for missionary work among the Indigenous peoples, he travelled to the United States and Britain and twice met with members of the British Royal Family. His 1831 tour of England raised over 1,000 pounds for missionary work in Ontario.91 He was also a hard-working advocate of the interests of the First Nations people of what is now southern Ontario, defending their fishing rights and holding government to account for proper payment of annuities.92 Early in his career, Jones developed a close relationship with Egerton Ryerson, the future Ontario superintendent of education.93 The two men worked together to establish both a church and a school at Credit River, where Jones had assumed the position of chief.94
Jones was one of a number of talented young Aboriginal men who converted to Methodism during this period. John Sunday and Henry Bird Steinhauer both went on to become ordained ministers, as well.95 Steinhauer, who was from Lake Simcoe, had been named Shahwahnegezhik at birth. After hearing young Shahwahnegezhik sing during a Methodist fundraising trip to the United States in 1829, an American missionary from Philadelphia had offered to pay for his education. As a result, Shahwahnegezhik took on his sponsor’s name: Henry Steinhauer.96 Another Ojibway convert, Peter Jacobs, worked with Jones and Sunday to translate hymns and scripture into Ojibway and create an Aboriginal framework for Christianity. These Aboriginal church leaders would play an important role in spreading Methodism across Canada.97
Visits to manual training schools for the Cherokee and Choctaw nations in the United States in the 1830s had left a strong impression on Jones.98 At these schools, which had been established by missionaries, students spent half their day in the classroom and the other half in workshops, sewing rooms, kitchens, barns, or the fields.99 The vocational skills taught in these schools could, he thought, serve as the basis of Aboriginal economic independence.100 By 1841, Jones had concluded that “the children must be taken for a season from their parents, and put to well-regulated Manual Labour Schools.”101 This was part of a growing missionary consensus. That same year, fellow Methodist missionary Sylvester Hurlburt called for schools “where the rising generation can be brought up entirely away from the instruction of their parents.”102 In an 1844 speech in London, England, Jones detailed his own educational vision:
Our contemplated plans are to establish two Schools; one for one hundred boys, the other for one hundred girls. The boys to be taught in connection with a common English education, the art of Farming and useful trades. The girls to be instructed in Reading and Writing, Domestic Economy, Sewing, Knitting, Spinning; so as to qualify them to become good wives and mothers. It is also our intention to select from each School the most promising boys and girls, with a view of giving them superior advantages; so as to qualify them for Missionaries and School teachers among their brethren.103
In the 1840s, Governor General Sir John Bagot commissioned a review of the colony’s Aboriginal policy. The report of the policy review, which has become known as the “Bagot Commission,” concluded in 1844 that the civilization policy had failed. Not for the last time, day schools were judged to be ineffective: attendance was irregular, the curriculum was irrelevant, and the influence of the parents was seen to be too strong. Pointing to what it believed to be successful boarding schools for Indigenous people in both Sierra Leone and Missouri, the commission endorsed the establishment of industrial boarding schools established in partnership with the churches.104 After the review, Jones called on the government to recognize Aboriginal peoples’ civil rights and land rights, to meet its financial responsibilities to Aboriginal peoples, and to fund industrial schools.105
Although the report recommended industrial schools, it contained no measures for paying for them.106 To find the money to support them, Bagot’s successor as governor general, Sir Charles Metcalfe, discontinued the supply of ammunition to several Aboriginal communities. The funds saved in this manner were to be divided among the proposed boarding schools.107 This move, as a subsequent government report noted, benefited only the bands that sent children to those schools. The other tribes, including the “Amherstburgh Indians, the Six Nations, and the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinté,” did not receive compensation for the loss of the ammunition supply, which was part of their Treaty annuity.108
The creation of the Alderville and Mount Elgin schools became tied to a larger scheme to relocate First Nations in southern Ontario. A key event in that process was a meeting held at Orillia in 1846, which became known as the “Conference of the Narrows” because it was held near the Lake Simcoe Narrows.
In July 1846, British Assistant Superintendent General of Indian Affairs George Vardon and Visiting Superintendent General of Indian Affairs Thomas G. Anderson met in Orillia with thirty Aboriginal leaders and about eighty young Aboriginal men. They were there to debate a proposal that Aboriginal people abandon their existing small reserves for three large settlements to be established in Munceytown, Alderville, and Owen Sound. Those who relocated would be given deeds to the land in these communities. Indian Affairs officials also made commitments to build manual labour schools in these communities. In return, the bands were expected to commit a quarter of their annuities for the next twenty to twenty-five years to support the schools. At the end of that time, Anderson said, “some of your youth will be sufficiently enlightened to carry on a system of instruction among yourselves, and this proportion of your funds will no longer be required.”109
Anderson informed the chiefs that the civilization policy had failed. In Anderson’s words, the “large sums of money” spent on getting the Indians to abandon their customs and adopt “the arts of civilized life” had not yielded the expected results. This was not the fault of either the government or the missionaries, he told the chiefs, but “it is because you do not feel, or know the value of education; you would not give up your idle roving habits, to enable your children to receive instruction.” To remedy this, “your children shall be sent to Schools, where they will forget their Indian habits, and be instructed in all the necessary arts of civilized life, and become one with your white brethren. In these Schools they will be well taken care of, be comfortably dressed, kept clean, and get plenty to eat. The adults will not be forced from their present locations. They may remove, or remain as they please; but their children must go.”110
Several of the chiefs spoke out strongly against the proposal. Mississauga Chief Yellow Head said, “I am not willing to leave my village, the place where my Forefathers lived.”111 Another Mississauga chief, John Aisaans, agreed: “I do not wish to remove. I have already removed four times, and I am too old to remove again.”112 Others argued that schooling was necessary. An address presented by the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinté said that “the white man’s labour is fast eating away the forest, whilst the sound of his axe and his bells is driving the game far away from their old haunts; it will soon be all gone.” Given these developments, they supported a plan “to improve our young people by means of Boarding Schools, at which they will not only be taught book and head knowledge, but also learn to work with their hands; in fact, to make our boys useful and industrious farmers and mechanics and our girls good housekeepers.”113 Mohawk Chief Paulus Claus said,
As there was a time when the Indians owned the whole of this continent, from the salt waters; but no sooner did the white men come, than the Indians were driven from their former homes, like the wild animals. We are now driven far from our former homes, into the woods. I cannot see the end of this, removing from one place to another, going still farther into the woods, unless we exert ourselves to conform to the ways of the white man.114
Mississauga Chief Joseph Sawyer said, “Suppose I have four dollars in my hand, I willingly give one dollar for the good of my children.”115
According to a summary of his speech, Peter Jones told the chiefs that he “had long been convinced that in order to bring about the entire civilization of the Indian Tribes, Manual Labour Schools must be established. That I was glad to see the Gov. lending their aid in the work.”116 In his closing presentation, Superintendent Anderson said, “The Government want to see Indian Doctors, they want to see Indian Lawyers, and Justices of the Peace; Indians of all Professions and Trades; and that you should be like the white people. This is what the Government wish to see among the Indians.”117 Contrary to such stated wishes, it would be well over a century before the schooling provided to Aboriginal people began to train more than a handful of Aboriginal professionals.
In the end, most of the chiefs present at the Conference of the Narrows made a commitment to donate one-quarter of their annuities to support these schools. Within a decade, many had come to regret their decision.118 The Methodists also supported the move to concentrate the Aboriginal population, because it would make their work cheaper and more efficient.119
To assist in the implementation of the decision reached at the Conference of the Narrows, in 1847, Assistant Superintendent General of Indian Affairs Vardon asked Egerton Ryerson, who had become superintendent of schools for Upper Canada in 1844, to prepare a report on the “best method of establishing and conducting Industrial Schools for the benefit of the aboriginal Indian Tribes.”120 Ryerson recommended the establishment of residential schools in which Aboriginal students would be given instruction in “English language, arithmetic, elementary geometry, or knowledge of forms, geography and the elements of general history, natural history and agricultural chemistry, writing, drawing and vocal music, book-keeping (especially in reference to farmers’ accounts) religion and morals.”121 This he thought of as “a plain English education adapted to the working farmer and mechanic. In this their object is identical with that of every good common school.” Pupils should be “taught agriculture, kitchen gardening, and mechanics, so far as mechanics is connected with making and repairing the most useful agricultural implements.”122
Ryerson preferred that these schools be termed “industrial schools” rather than “manual labour schools” because they were to be “schools of learning and religion; and industry is the great element of efficiency in each of these.”123 To Ryerson, the word industry referred to both the mental and physical labour in which students were expected to engage.
In the proposed industrial schools, Ryerson believed, the goal should be to train boys to be farmers, and the classroom lessons should be limited to what would support that goal. He thought it did not make sense to train students for any additional trades, for three reasons: it would be too costly to hire skilled tradesmen as teachers, it would be too difficult to administer a school that provided many different types of training, and there was not likely to be much demand for Aboriginal tradesmen. Better, he said, simply to apprentice those youngsters who showed an aptitude and interest in the trades.124 The problems Ryerson identified were, in fact, to plague the Canadian residential system throughout its history.
The educational model he proposed was based on the Hofwyl School for the Poor, near Berne, Switzerland. In 1845, Ryerson had visited this school, founded by Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg, and had drawn on Fellenberg’s educational reforms in his 1847 Report on a System for Public Elementary Instruction for Upper Canada.125
The schools he proposed would run year-round. During the summer, students would work eight to twelve hours a day and study for two to four hours. During the fall and spring, classes might be cancelled altogether for two or three weeks to allow the students to work at either harvesting or planting. During winter, the classroom hours would increase and the time spent at work would decrease. To keep to this routine, the day would have to start at 5:00 a.m. in the summer, and perhaps an hour later in the winter.126 Students were to be enrolled for four to eight years.127
Ryerson wrote that it was necessary for the students to live together, though he didn’t explain why. “The animating and controlling spirit of each industrial school establishment should, therefore in my opinion, be a religious one.”128 It was impossible to civilize “the North American Indian” without religious instruction and religious feeling. Since he believed the schools should be providing religious instruction, they should be run by religious organizations, with government involvement limited to appointing the school superintendent, building the school, determining who could attend, providing ongoing funding, and inspecting the schools.129
In 1847, Indian Department officials recommended the construction of residential labour schools at Alderville and Munceytown, abandoning the proposed school for Owen Sound that had been discussed at the Conference of the Narrows. These locations were seen as being convenient to the bands that were supporting the schools. Eighty-one hectares (200 acres) were to be allotted to each school. The officials also recommended that the British-based Wesleyan Methodist Society be given the responsibility for supervising the schools, in acknowledgement of their “liberality, courage and perseverance.”130
The Alnwick school, an expansion of the already existing Methodist school in Alderville, was completed in 1848 at a cost of $6,328. Over the next decade, a little over $500 would be spent on repairs. The school took in students from Lake Huron; Lake Simcoe; Saugeen; Owen’s Sound; Alnwick; Rice, Mud, and Scugog lakes; and some from Garden River.131 Mount Elgin, the school at Munceytown, was completed in 1851 at a cost of $5,500. It took in children from St. Clair, Chenail Escarte, Thames, and New Credit. The Indian Department had committed itself to insuring the school buildings, and paying for student board, clothing, and education on a per capita basis. The Methodists paid for furniture, books, stationery, livestock, and farm implements. They also paid salaries for teachers and superintendents, as well as “such assistance as would be requisite to efficiently conduct the institutions.”132 By 1855, the Methodists were spending $2,200 a year on the two schools.133
Peter Jones was supposed to become the superintendent of Mount Elgin. In 1847, he moved to Munceytown to oversee the construction of the school, but, by the time it opened, he had fallen ill.134 As a result, the first superintendent of Mount Elgin was S. D. Rice, a Methodist missionary. He saw Aboriginal people as “a once noble, but now deeply degraded and long neglected race.”135
Meanwhile, the bands near Owen Sound protested that the school promised for their community had never materialized. They went so far as to offer to pay half their annuity for two years to get the project underway. However, when Wesleyans declined to contribute to the construction, the proposed school was abandoned and the bands unhappily started sending their children to Alnwick.136
The students put in long, hard days at both schools. Mount Elgin students had less than one hour for recreation in a day that stretched from 5:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m. During that day, they were to spend five and a half hours at their desks and seven and a half hours at work. The students at Alnwick, along with one hired man, cared for 105 animals, farmed over thirty hectares of land, cut wood for ten stoves and fireplaces, made their own clothes, and did their own laundry.137 The Indian Department urged the schools to cut costs and become self-sufficient by taking advantage of the “availability of the gratuitous labour of the scholars.”138
A Methodist report gave the following description of a typical day at Mount Elgin:
The bell rings at 5 a.m. when the children rise, wash, dress and are made ready for breakfast. At 5.30 they breakfast; after which they all assemble in the large schoolroom and unite in reading the Scriptures, singing and prayer. From 6–9 a.m. the boys are employed and taught to work on the farm, and the girls in the house. At 9, they enter their schools. At 12 they dine and spend the remaining time till one in recreation. At one they enter school, where they are taught till 3.30, after which they resume their manual employment till six. At six, they sup and again unite in reading the Scriptures, singing and prayer. In the winter season, the boys are engaged in the Evening school and girls are taught needle-work until 9, when all retire to rest. They are never left alone, but are constantly under the eye of some of those engaged in this arduous work.139
Several teachers at both Mount Elgin and Alnwick were graduates of the Toronto Normal School. They were expected, at the outset, to use the public school curriculum.140 An 1854 report on Mount Elgin said that of the 107 students, 13 had made real progress in the study of English grammar.141 Religious instruction included daily prayers, church attendance, and the memorization of scripture; high praise was given to a student who had memorized thousands of verses of the Bible. Those who transgressed the school rules could be subject to corporal punishment, although one report from Alnwick in 1856 said that this step was seldom required.142
The Alnwick school was plagued by health problems. In 1855, a typhus epidemic killed one teacher and four students, leading to the school’s temporary closure.143 When it reopened in 1856, the school had an enrolment of fifty-one. By the following June, so many had run away that only twenty students were left.144 The new principal was Sylvester Hurlburt, a missionary who had previously indicated that he no longer wished to work with Aboriginal people.145 From then on, the school never had more than half its potential enrolment. When thirty-five students from northern reserves were allowed to visit their parents, less than one-third of them returned.146
An expansion at Mount Elgin in the 1850s had given it a capacity of eighty students, but it rarely had more than forty during the late 1850s. It took to admitting adults and non-Aboriginal students to keep enrolment up.147 Some parents found the regime too harsh and withdrew their children. Other students did not wait for their parents to take action: they simply ran away. At least one government inspector questioned whether the First Nations were getting good value for the money they were putting into the school.148
A Special Commission on Indian Affairs, chaired by Indian Department Superintendent General R. T. Pennefather, was appointed in 1856. Alnwick school superintendent Hurlburt told the commission, “I am well aware that the Indians of North America have not an equal capacity for self government, with the Saxon race, perhaps never will possess the same capacity, hence they will require the oversight and fostering care of their more intelligent friends who have the welfare of the Indians at heart.” Rev. Anderson from the Bay of Quinté said that parents should be forced to send their children to industrial schools at the age of four, where they should remain until they were fifteen. It was necessary to start them at such a young age to “prevent them acquiring the habit of roving about, which habit when once acquired, is not easily got rid of. The Indians generally take their children from school for the most trifling reasons: and perhaps keep them away for months: and when we succeed in inducing them to go again, they appear dissatisfied, hence the necessity of compelling attendance.” The Reverend William Ames, who worked with the Moravian Indians at Sarnia, said, “I think Industrial schools very important: I know of no better course than that pursued at the Mount Elgin and Alwnick Schools, in which religious instruction and habits of Industry are simultaneously imparted.”149
Although most of the missionaries who were consulted favoured residential schools, Rev. P. Chonet at Fort William said, based on his “knowledge of Indian character, that it would be utterly useless to establish amongst them industrial schools.” Chonet said that Indians could already meet their needs—thanks to the training they had previously received from missionaries. Qualified teachers were hard to recruit, and, in addition, there was not a great demand for skilled tradespeople.150
The 1858 Pennefather report acknowledged the support the churches had given the schools, but concluded that the “good effects which were expected to result from the establishment of these schools are not apparent.” Former students were “contented as before to live in the same slovenly manner, the girls make no effort to improve the condition of the houses, nor do the boys attempt to assist their parents steadily on the farm.” The school farms were intended to make the schools self-sufficient, but the commission concluded that, after seven years, “the expectation that by this time they would have become nearly self-supporting has certainly not been realized.”151 The commissioners did not attribute the failure to those who ran the schools. In the commissioners’ opinion, they were “eminently fitted for the work” and had “spared no pains to give the undertaking a fair trial.” Rather, the problem lay with the students.152
Because they were too old by the time they entered the school, the report concluded, the students had already “acquired idle, filthy, and in some cases vicious habits, and have arrived at an age when it is difficult to attain any control over them, or eradicate the evil practices to which they may be disposed.” Not only were they too old in coming to the school, but they also did not stay long enough. Parents often “remove their children after a very short residence. The pupils themselves too frequently abscond, and return to their homes without permission, finding the wholesome restraint of the school irksome. It is an evil impossible to prevent.” Nor was there much of a future for those who graduated. Although the government had promised to give every male student a portion of land when he finished his studies, this was not done. As a result, the commissioners said, “Their children therefor worked without the stimulus of reward, and learned to regard the establishment rather as a prison than a place where they might acquire the means of advancing themselves, and of improving their position in the country.” As well, due to a lack of funds, plans to provide training in the “mechanical arts” were never implemented.153
The commissioners recommended that the deductions from band annuities end and Alnwick and Mount Elgin schools close, with Alnwick school to be converted to a government building and Mount Elgin to be used as an Indian orphanage.154
Although the commissioners concluded that the existing industrial schools had failed, they did not give up on residential schooling. They recommended industrial schools and model farms be established among “the more numerous and important Tribes.”155 At these schools,
Great stress should be laid upon instruction either in French or English. It is true that the Missionaries in the North-West districts urge the propriety of some instruction being given in the native tongue, and no doubt it may facilitate the important object of spreading Christianity among the adults. In our opinion however nothing will so pave the way for the amalgamation of the Indian and white races, as the disuse among the former of their peculiar dialects.156
Alnwick closed in 1859 as recommended, and the school buildings burned down within the next few years.157 Mount Elgin remained open but, by 1862, was on the brink of disaster: the bands had stopped funding it while an infestation of lice had led to an emergency closure.158 Following the death of Principal Rev. Thomas Musgrove in 1863, the school remained closed until 1867, when it reopened with almost fifty students.159 An experiment that had started with high hopes and considerable initial Aboriginal support had been judged, in large measure, a failure. Despite this, within two decades, the newly formed Canadian government would commit to a significant expansion of residential schooling in western and northern Canada. That expansion would build on the work of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries in the Northwest.
Inuit resisting attack led by Martin Frobisher, 1575.
Painting by John White, 1585-1593. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Protestant missionary John Eliot’s work in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was supported by the British-based New England Company.
Mary Evans Picture Library, 10005205.
Francis Xavier, founder of the Jesuit Order, picture bringing a dead man back to life in Japan.
Mary Evans Picture Library, 10004975.
The Ursuline Convent, which served as a boarding school for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal girls in Quebec.
Soeur Georgina Vanfelson, Vue du premier monastère des Ursulines de Québec, v. 1847. Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada, Ottawa. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
A Church Missionary Society grammar school, Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Mary Evans Picture Library, 10825826.
Roman Catholic missionary giving religious instruction to Chinese children.
Mary Evans / Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo, 10627805.
Mohawk Village on the Grand River, 1793. In 1828, Robert Lugger, an Anglican missionary working for the New England Company, established a day school at Mohawk Village at the Six Nations settlement on the Grand River. By 1834, the school was known as the Mohawk Institute and began boarding students.
Painting by Elizabeth Simcoe, Courtesy of the Archives of Ontario, I0006349.
Sussex Vale, New Brunswick, site of the New England Company sponsored residential school in the early nineteenth century.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D. C. 20540 USA, Reproduction Number: LC-USZC2-3058, Currier & Ives : a catalogue raisonné / compiled by Gale Research. Detroit, MI : Gale Research, c1983, no. 6395. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b50932.
Kahkewaquonaby (Many Feathers) or Peter Jones in 1832. Jones was an Ojibway chief who worked with Methodist officials to establish the Mount Elgin residential school in Munceytown, Ontario.
X2-25, Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.
Sakacheweskam (Henry Budd) one of the first students at John West’s boarding school at Red River.
Courtesy of the Saskatchewan Archives Board, R-A4814.
Egerton Ryerson. In 1837, Egerton Ryerson, the superintendent of schools for Upper Canada, prepared a report recommending the establishment of residential schools for Aboriginal children in what is now Ontario. He recommendation that students be instructed in “English language, arithmetic, elementary geometry, or knowledge of forms, geography and the elements of general history, natural history and agricultural chemistry, writing, drawing and vocal music, book-keeping (especially in reference to farmers’ accounts), religion and morals.”
Library and Archives Canada, Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana, e010957333.
First Nations leaders and Methodist missionaries from Western Canada in Toronto in 1886. Left to right: Reverend John McDougall; Samson, Cree; Pakan, or James Seenum, Cree; Reverend R. B. Steinhauer; James Goodstoney, Stoney.
Glenbow Archives, NA-4216-33.
Father Lacombe’s ladder.
Missionary Oblates, Grandin Archives at the Provincial Archives of Alberta, Accession PR1971.0442/100A.
Oblate missionary using Father Lacombe’s Ladder to instruct Aboriginal children at Beauval, Saskatchewan.
Deschâtelets Archives/Archives Deschâtelets; Ottawa.
Staff and students at the Fort Simpson, British Columbia, school.
The United Church of Canada Archives, 93.049P142.
This “Sun Dance” ceremony was one of the Aboriginal spiritual practices outlawed by the federal government in the nineteenth century.
Library and Archives Canada, Trueman, C-0104106.
Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, founder and superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Pratt favoured a policy of aggressive assimilation, saying “All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-26798.
The tuberculosis sanatorium at the Phoenix, Arizona, Indian boarding school.
National Archives photo, no. 75-M-27.
Carlisle Indian School Band seated on steps of school building.
National Archives photo, no. 075_EXC-7.
Physical drill class at the Victoria Industrial School school at Mimico, Ontario.
Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library, B3-51b.
A boy ploughing at Dr. Barnardo’s farm in Russell, Manitoba, 1900.
Library and Archives Canada, PA-117285.
