In 1883, the Canadian government established a partnership with the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches to open three schools in western Canada. The establishment of these schools, known as “industrial schools,” marked the creation of Canada’s formal Indian residential school system. The system was built on the foundations established by Catholic and Protestant missionaries who saw it as their mission to ‘civilize’ and Christianize Aboriginal peoples.
Under that system, the federal role was to fund and regulate schools for Aboriginal children, operated by Christian churches. Although the system was meant to be a national one, most of the schools were located to the west and north of Lake Superior. Most of these schools were operated by the Roman Catholic Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Many of the residential schools were located at Oblate mission sites that had been established in the nineteenth century. Oblate missions at Île-à-la-Crosse, Fort Providence, Fort Chipewyan, St. Albert, Lac La Biche, Fort Alexander, McIntosh, Kenora, and Lebret were all forerunners to Catholic residential schools in these communities.1 Also, the names of many of the nineteenth-century missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant—Bompas, Grandin, Grollier, Grouard, Horden, and Lejac—reappear in the twentieth century as the names of schools and residences. As these names suggest, the residential school system was, in large measure, the outgrowth of Canada’s colonization of the Canadian West and the role that missionary organizations, particularly the Oblates and the Anglican Church Missionary Society, played in that process.
For most of its history, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) ignored the provision in its charter that required it to promote the “moral and religious improvement of the Indians.”2 From the company’s perspective, there was little to be gained from educating Aboriginal people or converting them to Christianity.3 In 1822, Sir George Simpson, the company’s North American governor, complained that a plan to expand schooling opportunities to Aboriginal people at Red River would do nothing more than fill “the pockets and bellies of some hungry missionaries and schoolmasters and rearing the Indians in habits of indolence; they are already too much enlightened by the late opposition [the North West Company] and more of it would in my opinion do harm instead of good to the Fur Trade.”4
Simpson believed that exposure to missionaries could lead Aboriginal people to abandon fur trapping for farming.5 However, for their part, even the most daring and independent of missionaries relied on the Hudson’s Bay Company for transportation, supplies, accommodation, and companionship.6
By the early nineteenth century, the company was obliged to allow missionaries into its territory. In the field, the HBC was facing pressure from company officers who wanted teachers for their own children at fur-trade posts. In England, the company was coming under increasing attack for its lack of support for missionary work. Anglican missionary William Cockran put the issue starkly when he said that he doubted the company could prove it had “ameliorated the condition of one Indian family through the whole traffic of 150 years.”7 Pressure even came from evangelical members of the company’s board of directors, who began calling on it to support missionary work.
The company took the first step in opening Rupert’s Land to Christian missionaries in 1811, when it granted a tract of 116,000 square miles (approximately 300,400 square kilometres) to Lord Selkirk, a Scottish landlord and HBC shareholder. Selkirk proposed to establish Scottish and Irish peasants, who were being displaced by the introduction of new agricultural and land polices in the British Isles, in this colony. The “Selkirk Settlers,” as they came to be known, reached Red River in 1812. Poorly prepared for life on the Prairies and suffering from incompetent leadership, they became caught up in the commercial conflict between the HBC and the North West Company (NWC) and the latter’s Métis allies.8 Selkirk negotiated a Treaty with six Aboriginal leaders, including Chief Peguis, which provided them with an annual payment.9
Although the settlers Selkirk brought over were mostly Presbyterian, a large part of the early population of the Red River Settlement were Roman Catholic, composed largely of French-Canadian and Métis fur traders who had already been living at Red River when the settlement was established, or who had moved there to take advantage of the economic opportunities the settlement offered. Early on, Selkirk, the HBC, and the NWC had asked Catholic officials in Québec to send a priest to the Northwest, believing that missionaries could play a stabilizing role in a contentious situation. In 1818, Joseph-Norbert Provencher and Sévère Dumoulin arrived at Red River under instructions to rescue the Aboriginal people from the so-called barbarism they had come to be living in and to recall the Christian settlers to their duties. The priests were expected to learn Aboriginal languages, regularize marriages, end polygamy, support the existing political order, and avoid becoming embroiled in the ongoing conflict between the two fur-trading companies. Their arrival marked the beginning of permanent missionary work in the Canadian Northwest, and prodded the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) into action. Two years later, it provided support to John West, the society’s first missionary to the Northwest.10
In 1820, the Hudson’s Bay Company appointed John West, an Anglican minister, as chaplain to its trading post at Red River. The company expected him to provide religious instruction to its employees and to educate their children.11 West, however, had broader ambitions. Before departing England for North America, he approached the Church Missionary Society with a proposal to provide him with funds to set up a school for Aboriginal children.12 At the time, the focus of the CMS was on Africa and Asia rather than on North America, but since the HBC was already paying West’s salary, the CMS agreed to provide him with financial support for his proposed missionary work in Red River.13 West began recruiting Aboriginal students for his school at Red River shortly after he landed at York Factory on Hudson Bay in 1820. He convinced the northern Chief Withaweecapo to send his only son, the nine-year-old Pemutewithinew, with him.14 West wrote:
I shall never forget the affectionate manner in which he brought the eldest boy in his arms, and placed him in the canoe on the morning of my departure from York Factory….
I had to establish the principle that the North American Indian of these regions would part with his children, to be educated in the white man’s knowledge and religion.15
This belief in the need to separate Aboriginal children from their parents in order to civilize them would remain an underlying rationale for the residential school system throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At Norway House, West recruited Sakacheweskam, an eight-year-old boy, whose mother was a widow of mixed heritage.16 West later baptized the boy as Henry Budd.17 Under West, the teaching of English and Christianity were intertwined. By the time they reached Red River, West had taught young Pemutewithinew to recite the Lord’s Prayer in English.18
George Harbridge, a schoolmaster who had accompanied West, was put in charge of the small school at Red River. When Ojibway Chief Peguis asked what would become of children once they were educated, West replied that “they might return to their parents if they wished it, but my hope was that they would see the advantage of making gardens, and cultivating the soil, so as not to be exposed to hunger and starvation.”19 Peguis decided not to send his children to the school, but he did arrange for the son of his widowed sister to attend.20 Two of the first five students West recruited were orphans; the other three had no fathers.21 The underlying tensions of the residential school system were present from the outset: the schools’ desire to provide training that would discourage children from following their parents’ way of life, and the parents’ unwillingness to part with their children for schooling except in conditions of economic and social stress.
In some cases, parents relocated to Red River to be near their children in the school. As the senior missionary, West initially encouraged parents to visit their children, but later sought to keep them away, having concluded that the children who maintained an ongoing close relationship with their parents and homes had less success in coming to terms with the school routine.22 In the classroom, Aboriginal children were given a constant drilling in English, and spent much of their time memorizing and reciting religious texts and hymns.23 The student who had been renamed Henry Budd wrote a hymn with a verse that reflected both his new language proficiency and the new attitude he had been encouraged to develop towards his own native culture:
Oh let a vain and thoughtless race,
Thy pardning mercy prove;
Begin betimes to seek thy face
And thy commandments love.24
When they were not in the classroom, the students gardened. According to West:
We often dig and hoe with our little charges in the sweat of our brow as an example and encouragement for them to labour; and promising them the produce of their own industry, we find that they take great delight in their gardens. Necessity may compel the adult Indian to take up the spade and submit to manual labour, but a child brought up in the love of cultivating a garden will be naturally led to the culture of the field as a means of subsistence: and educated in the principles of Christianity, he will become stationary to partake of the advantages and privileges of civilization.25
West placed a heavy emphasis on farming, both because he wanted the school to be self-sufficient and because he believed that Aboriginal people would not survive unless they abandoned hunting, trapping, and fishing, for agriculture. Eventually, teacher George Harbridge complained that the boys were spending so much time in the fields, they were rarely in class.26
West’s career at Red River came to an abrupt end. He had become increasingly vocal in his criticism of the Hudson’s Bay Company, particularly its participation in the liquor trade. On the other hand, Governor Simpson of the HBC thought West spent too much time on missionary work. On a visit to England in 1823, West filed an unfavourable report on the company’s activities that led to his dismissal the following year.27 His stay at Red River had been short, yet the students he recruited and trained were to play an important role in what is often referred to today as the “native church.” Henry Budd went on to become the first Aboriginal minister ordained in the Anglican Church in North America.28 He established and ran a boarding school for Aboriginal children in The Pas, Manitoba, in the 1840s.29 Another of West’s students, Charles Pratt, served as a CMS-sponsored missionary to the Cree and Assiniboine, and was one of the interpreters during the negotiation of Treaty 4 in 1874.30
West’s replacement as superintendent of the mission at Red River, David Jones, kept the school in operation until 1832. After a female student was discovered to be pregnant in that year, the male boarders were relocated to a new mission project that had begun further downriver at St. Peter’s parish.31
Under the direction of the CMS’s Rev. William Cockran, the St. Peter’s school placed a heavy emphasis on education and agriculture.32 Cockran sought to improve what he viewed as the “immoral, capricious, intractable, indolent, callous, prideful, wayward, extravagant, ungracious, improvident and careless” ways of the Red River Settlement area.33 The school at St. Peter’s did not become part of the formal residential school system, and the reserve itself was relocated early in the twentieth century.
In 1833, a new school, the Red River Academy, was opened by Jones on CMS land for the children of the leading figures in the community. But, in the fall of 1835, in the space of two months, three students at the academy died of influenza.34 After the death of his wife, Jones returned to England. A former teacher, John Macallum, purchased the academy for 350 pounds in 1837. Letitia Hargrave, the wife of an HBC trader, commented critically in a letter to friends on the change of diet and discipline that Macallum imposed on the students.
Children who have had duck geese & venison 3 times a day are supposed to suffer from breakfasts of milk & water with dry bread, severe floggings, confinement after any fault & the total want of the following meal. The boys & girls are constantly fainting but MacCallum [sic] won’t change his system. Many girls have got ill, and as he makes them strip off their Indian stockings & adopt English fashion it is not surprising. They must take a certain walk every day, plunging thro’ the freezing snow. They wear Indian shoes, but without the cloth stockings or leggings over them the snow gets in.35
Macallum also refused to allow Aboriginal mothers who were not formally married to visit their children in the school.36 In 1849, the Anglican Church bought the Red River Academy from Macallum, renaming it St. John’s.37 Under that name, the former mission school developed into an elite, private boarding school that continues in operation to the present day.
After its experience with John West, the HBC did little to promote missionary work in the Northwest for another two decades. In St. Boniface, Manitoba, after his appointment in 1820, Bishop Provencher had constant trouble recruiting and keeping Catholic missionaries. Few stayed more than five years and they made little headway in their work with Aboriginal people.38
This all would change in 1840, when the Hudson’s Bay Company accepted a proposal from the British Methodist Missionary Society to establish a series of northern missions in a territory that stretched from James Bay to the Rocky Mountains. The fur-trading company expected these northern missions would limit the southern migration of valuable Aboriginal trappers to communities such as Red River to pursue their interests in religion or education.39 Church missions varied in size and scope: many of the early missions, like these Methodist initiatives, simply involved the placement of a missionary at a fur-trade post. Over time, they often expanded to include churches, hospitals, schools, orphanages, and convents. Missionaries might effectively declare their independence by locating the mission away from the local fur-trade post, and even engage in trade.
Three of the Methodist missionaries from the Missionary Society came directly from England, and a fourth, British-born James Evans, came from Ontario, where he had already carried out missionary work among the Ojibway at Rice Lake. As mission leader, Evans was stationed at the HBC post at Norway House, which served as the centre of the Methodist initiative. The other three worked out of HBC posts at Lac la Pluie, Moose Factory, and Edmonton House. Assisting them were two Ojibway missionaries-in-training, Peter Jacobs and Henry Steinhauer. The Methodists were paying the missionaries’ salaries, and the HBC supplied them with food, accommodation, interpreters, and medicine. Given the level of support the company was providing, Simpson viewed the Methodists as little more than HBC employees, expecting them to consolidate support for the company among Aboriginal people. He did not take it kindly when the missionaries promoted views that undercut company interests.40
In his youth, Evans had trained in the grocery trade and had learned how to write in shorthand. In Ontario, he had used his knowledge of shorthand to develop a system of Ojibway syllabics, which he adapted to Cree at Norway House. The system could be learned quickly and was adopted by both Anglican and Roman Catholic missionaries, who spread its use throughout the North. Evans also sought to establish an Aboriginal Methodist community at Norway House. He promoted two Methodist values: sabbatarianism (refraining from work on Sunday), and independence (in this context, from reliance on the HBC). This brought him into conflict with the company, particularly when Aboriginal boatmen refused to work on Sundays, and other Aboriginal people began selling their furs to traders other than the Hudson’s Bay Company.41
The Methodist initiative in the North prompted a Catholic response. After working as an itinerant missionary in the region for two years, in 1844, Father Jean-Baptiste Thibault established a mission at Lac Ste. Anne, near Edmonton.42 Two years later, Evans set out westward in hopes of combatting the Catholic incursion. The expedition was cut short when Evans accidentally shot and killed his Aboriginal interpreter assistant, Thomas Hassall. (Hassall had been enrolled at the Red River school by West and educated by David Jones.43) Upon his return to Norway House, Evans also had to face allegations of sexual impropriety regarding his involvement with orphaned Aboriginal girls who had been taken into his home. Evans was recalled to England and died in 1846 before the inquiry into the charges completed its work.44 Two of the other Methodist missionaries also returned to England. A fourth, William Mason, remained in the West, but converted to the Church of England.
The HBC began to reduce its support for the Methodists. By 1846, it was barely tolerating them.45 In 1854, the Canadian Conference of the Methodist Church took over responsibility for the Northwestern mission field, including overseeing the Rossville mission that had been established at Norway House, Manitoba. In the 1860s, the Canadian Conference established a mission at Whitefish Lake, Alberta, under Henry Steinhauer, who, along with George McDougall, was among the leading figures in the return of Methodism to this region. McDougall established a new mission at Fort Edmonton in 1871 and, with his son John, also established the Morleyville mission in 1873.46 The Methodist residential school at Morley, Alberta, was an outgrowth of an orphanage the McDougalls opened in Morleyville.
Missionary activity was often highly competitive. When one church sent a missionary into a new region, the others were sure to follow. The Hudson’s Bay Company decision to provide Methodists with access to the Northwest, coupled with the Anglican appointment of Aboriginal catechist Henry Budd to The Pas, helped precipitate two of the most significant developments in the history of missionary work in the Canadian Northwest: the entry of the Sisters of Charity (the Grey Nuns) and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate into the western mission field. In 1841, Bishop Provencher asked Joseph Signay, the Archbishop of Québec, to send him some women who would serve as teachers. Provencher’s educational expectations were modest: “Our inhabitants’ daughters do not need an advanced education. Rather, our principal goal will be to teach them to live well and to become good mothers. This process will raise the country’s civilization level in accordance with the times.”47
The Sisters of Charity of Montréal had been founded in the eighteenth century by Marie-Marguerite Dufrost de Lajemmerais, the widow of François d’Youville, more commonly known as Marguerite d’Youville. After the death of her husband, she began sheltering destitute women in her home. In 1747, she, and a number of women working with her, was asked to take over the Montréal General Hospital. Their organization grew into the Sisters of Charity of the General Hospital, eventually becoming one of the largest Canadian Catholic teaching and nursing orders. Throughout their history, members of the order have been referred to as the “Grey Nuns.”48
In 1844, four Grey Nuns arrived in Red River, led by Mother Marie-Louise Valade.49 In the coming years, they would provide the teaching staff for many of the Roman Catholic boarding schools. At Red River, they operated a day school largely for Aboriginal children and, in the 1850s, they opened a boarding school. The hope was that the boarding school, which took in Métis students of both English and French ancestry, along with Ojibway and Sioux children, would foster future vocations in women from mixed-ancestry families.50 Louis Riel’s sister Sara attended the school and, upon completion of her education there, she commenced her three-year period of training to become a Grey Nun.51
The arrival of the Grey Nuns provided Provencher with a supply of teachers and nurses, but he remained short of missionaries. After being turned down by the Jesuits in 1843, he sought assistance from the Oblates of Mary Immaculate.52 The order, not even thirty years old, was still run by its founder, Eugène de Mazenod, the Bishop of Marseille. Although their initial focus had been the poor of rural France, the Oblates were beginning to take on work in North America. In response to a request from Québec Bishop Ignace Bourget, four Oblates had been assigned to work in Québec in 1841.53 Mazenod looked favourably on Provencher’s 1843 request and, two years later, two Oblates, Pierre Aubert and Alexandre-Antonin Taché, completed the journey to Red River.54 Over the next fifty-five years, 273 Oblates worked in the Northwest. Of them, 138 were from France, 19 from Germany, and 6 from Belgium. Most of the eighty-two Canadians came from Québec.55 In four decades, the Oblates established a series of churches, convents, schools, hospitals, roads, sawmills, and farms that extended their reach west to the Pacific Ocean and north to the Arctic Circle. The predominance of the Oblates in the world of residential schooling in the twentieth century has its roots in this remarkable period of expansion in the 1800s.
The advance party for this missionary expedition, Taché and Aubert, spent their first winter at Red River studying the Ojibway language. In 1846, Taché travelled to Île-à-la-Crosse, where he studied Cree and Chipewyan and oversaw the construction of a mission, while Aubert was sent to what is now northwestern Ontario. Two other Oblates, Henri Faraud and Albert Lacombe, continued the Oblate expansion. Faraud went north, establishing the Nativity Mission at Fort Chipewyan (in what is now Alberta) in 1849 and the St. Joseph’s Mission at Fort Resolution in 1856.56 Lacombe went west, beginning his work in present-day Alberta in 1852.57 From their various mission bases, the Oblates spread out along a circuit, visiting numerous trading posts throughout the Northwest.58
Some Oblates, such as twenty-four-year-old Faraud, were young, had limited theological training, and received what amounted to rapid promotions. When Taché raised concerns about the quality of the men being sent to him, Mazenod’s response was that it was difficult to find people willing to submit to the difficult and, in his opinion, often terrifying life of a missionary in the Northwest.59 Their numbers were so few and the territory they covered so vast that these early Oblates might go for more than a year at a time without seeing another priest.60 Taché once went two years without seeing another Oblate, while Faraud once went at least two years without seeing another member of the clergy, noting that he could expect this state to continue for at least another year or two.61
The early missionaries had to build their own chapels and residences, maintain a garden, hunt, and fish, all the while attempting to learn an Aboriginal language and convert the local people to Christianity.62 The missions were expected to be largely self-sufficient, but, in some cases, the climate was too hostile or the land too stony to allow the Oblates to produce enough to meet their needs while continuing their missionary work. Imported items were costly, and, in the case of the more remote missions, supplies had to be ordered three years in advance.63 To transport goods to the missions, the Oblates were increasingly involved in the freighting business: cutting roads, digging canals, constructing carts and barges, and, eventually, purchasing steamboats.64
Anglican Bishop David Anderson wrote enviously of the Oblate missionaries’ willingness to ‘do without,’ asking the Church Missionary Society to send him missionaries who would be willing to “be content to travel with a single box or at most a couple.”65 Letitia Hargrave said that the Protestants compared poorly to the Catholics, who, “be what they may elsewhere,” were “exemplary” in Red River. “The Indians see them living perfectly alone & caring for nothing but converting them & and often they think more of such men than those who come with families & bully for every luxury & and complain of every appearance of neglect.”66
The Oblates were under strict instructions to learn Aboriginal languages, and, in the course of this work, prepared their own grammars and dictionaries. While a number of the Oblates were gifted linguists, others struggled with Aboriginal languages throughout their long careers in the Northwest.67 In their missionary work, the Oblates made successful use of a teaching tool that came to be known as “Father Lacombe’s Ladder.” Based on earlier illustrated timelines that set out humanity’s pathway to heaven, Lacombe’s version was novel in that it included a separate pathway to hell. As a sign that their cultural and spiritual ways were sinful, most of the Aboriginal people in the illustration were travelling this road. It was reproduced and used throughout the Northwest by the Oblates.68
The Oblate missions were ultimately run by the director and council of Oblates of Mary Immaculate, which was based in Marseille, France, until 1862, when it moved to Paris. Funding came from the Society for the Propagation of the Faith and the Association of the Holy Childhood. The second fund was intended to support the baptism and education of pagan children. In some countries, such as China, the Oblates used the money to actually purchase unwanted children. In Canada, the Oblates paid parents to allow their children to attend boarding schools. For example, in the 1860s, in western Canada, the fund was reported to be supporting forty-two Aboriginal children in four Oblate schools and two orphanages. In 1863, Taché received 55,000 francs from the Society for the Propagation of the Faith and 3,000 francs from the Association of the Holy Childhood, 6,000 in Mass stipends, and 8,500 in investment revenues. Of this, he spent 60,000 francs on northern mission work.69
As was the case with other missionaries, the Oblates and the Grey Nuns became increasingly convinced of the need to locate Aboriginal people in settled agricultural communities and to focus on the education and conversion of the younger generation.70 The experience of running a day school for Aboriginal students in St. Francis Xavier, Manitoba, for example, led the Grey Nuns to conclude that students could not make significant progress because their parents often took them out of school to spend much of the year hunting. In 1871, Sister Charlebois wrote that, with financial support, the Grey Nuns could “gladly take the entire charge of these little ones, and by this means civilize and instruct them.”71 As early as 1851, Mazenod had instructed the Oblates to establish schools in the West that would prepare students for a European-style life. Schools presented a disciplined and controlled environment. In them, children could be taught to be Christians and weaned away from a lifestyle of migratory hunting.72
In 1838, Hudson’s Bay Company factor James Leith died, leaving half his estate to be used to fund missionary work among Aboriginal people in the HBC territory. His will gave rise to a ten-year court case, so it was not until 1849 that funds were available to establish the Anglican diocese of Rupert’s Land, with David Anderson appointed as the diocese’s first bishop.73 Anderson was able to substantially increase the amount of support that various missionary societies were providing to the diocese. The number of clergy increased to the point where the HBC’s Sir George Simpson remarked contemptuously that Red River had more churchmen per capita than any other location in the British Empire. By 1864, the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the Colonial and Continental Church Society, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospell in Foreign Parts were supporting twenty-two missionaries in Rupert’s Land.74
As Simpson’s comment suggests, the Anglican missionaries of the period were often far less venturesome than the Oblates. They were better paid, more conscious of their social status, and less likely to travel far from the security of the local Hudson’s Bay post. The thirty-five missionaries the CMS sponsored in the Northwest from 1820 to 1870 have been described as being among the least promising of the society’s trainees, with the more talented ones being sent to India. Once in the West, they tended to spend most of their time in Red River, where they aspired to membership in the local elite.75
The exceptions to this were in the North, where, in the 1850s, the CMS undertook two successful missions. John Horden, a young man who had been trained originally as a blacksmith before offering himself to the CMS as a missionary, was sent with little notice or preparation to Moose Factory in 1851. Adept at languages, Horden adapted James Evans’s syllabics and used them with great success in the James Bay region. He also trained the Aboriginal minister Thomas Vincent, who was sent to Fort Albany to counter the Roman Catholic presence in that community. As a result of their work, many of the Cree of the James Bay area were converted to the Anglican faith and educated in English.76 The other campaign was carried out in what is now the Northwest Territories and the Yukon and is discussed in Part Four of this volume of the report.
The overall goals of the Protestant and Catholic missionaries were similar: to ‘civilize’ Aboriginal people, meaning to have them learn English or French and adopt a settled European lifestyle, and, most essentially, to convert them to Christianity. There were similarities between the social origins and experiences of Church Missionary Society and Oblate missionaries. The Catholic and Protestant missionaries often came from working-class or small-business families, were educated by their missionary agencies or societies, and lived lives of self-denial.
The missionaries also shared a disdain for Aboriginal culture and a deep hostility towards each other. On occasion, both sentiments could be brought together in a single burst of prejudice, such as Anglican Archdeacon William Cockran’s 1830 pronouncement: “These savages make good Roman Catholics; the priests sprinkle them with holy water and tell them they are safe; they hang a cross about their necks and tell them they are invulnerable. This symbolical deception suits their carnal minds, they go away satisfied with the lie which the mystery of iniquity had put into their right hand.”77 To John West, the First Nations people he encountered were “degraded and emaciated, wandering in ignorance.”78 Red River was, in his opinion, “a Heathen land, which Satan hath held bound, lo! not these 18 years or a century, but probably since the Creation of the world.”79 In the eyes of the Anglicans, Catholics were non-Christian purveyors of a superstition-laden set of ceremonies and beliefs. Medallions, holy water, celibacy, and papal authority were all signs of Catholic error and backwardness. To the Catholics, on the other hand, Anglicans were heretics who, if left unchecked, would lead Aboriginal people to damnation.80 Most nineteenth-century missionaries attempted to learn Aboriginal languages and, making use of Evans’s syllabic system, often translated prayers, hymns, and scripture into a variety of Aboriginal languages. This did not necessarily reflect a respect for Aboriginal culture. Rather, knowledge of the language served as a tool for undermining the culture.
The Oblates saw the Northwest as the Devil’s playground into which they had come to do battle with Protestantism, liberalism, secularism, and paganism.81 Of the Cree, Catholic Bishop Lafleche wrote,
I think it no exaggeration to say that in them we find the very lowest type of humanity. Their degradation and wickedness is the result of their mode of life. They are mostly in large camps of sixty or eighty, or more, wigwams. They lead an idle and wandering life, following the buffalo, which supplies them abundantly with food and clothing. After seeing the disgusting lives of those savages, one easily concludes that work is a blessing, if also a penance, for fallen man.82
Writing from the Arctic in frustration, Oblate Father Grollier concluded in 1860 that Indians were a hopeless people, impossible to convert, and that “I believe that an Englishman and a savage are perfectly identical.”83 The Catholics claimed that Anglican success in the Yukon was due to their liberality with tobacco, and further disparaged their missionaries, Kirkby and McDonald, because one was a former stable boy and the other a former brewer.84 Other Oblates taught that Protestantism was invented by perverse men, and accused a Protestant minister’s interpreter of paying people $15 apiece to be baptized.85
Often, their allegations mirrored one another: Father Lacombe lamented that the Methodists were burned with the “fanaticism of Wesleyanism,”86 while Methodist George McDougall wrote in 1870 that “the man of sin”—a common Protestant term for the Pope—“is powerfully represented in this country. There are five priests to one Protestant missionary; they are anti-British in their national sympathies; and if we may judge the tree by its fruits, anti-Christian in their teachings.” They were, he had to admit, untiring in their efforts to make converts.87 Oblates even accused Bompas of telling Aboriginal people that Catholics were god killers, pointing to the crucifixes that they wore as evidence.88
Both accused the other group of bribing people to convert, referring to each other’s converts as “tobacco Christians.”89 In 1862, Bishop Vital Grandin commented that an Anglican missionary at Fort Simpson had won converts through gifts: in his words, the converts “had sold their souls for some sugar and tea.”90 The Methodist William Mason claimed that the Roman Catholic missionary near Rainy Lake was enjoying success largely because he came “loaded with Pemmican, Tongues, Flour and Tobacco which he gives to the Indians.”91
Religious rivalry was coupled with ethnic distrust. To the French Catholics, the English Anglicans were seeking to impose Anglo conformity; to the Anglicans, the Catholics were the agents of a foreign power.92 Bompas held that if the North was not put under the authority of a Protestant government, it might fall “entirely under the influence of the Jesuits [who were not even active in the region], and become a hotbed of rebellion, with British interests completely forfeited.”93 These tensions based on religious denomination and national origin continued well into the twentieth century and played a significant role in shaping and directing the history of residential schooling in Canada.
Each of the denominations had to deal with both alleged and actual sexual misbehaviour involving missionaries and young people in their care. Methodist minister James Evans was obliged to leave Norway House in the wake of allegations that there had been improper relations between himself and young women boarding at his house. One of the Oblate missionaries to the Far North, Émile Petitot, became involved in sexual relationships with adolescent First Nation boys. Although he was disciplined for this behaviour, he continued, both as a missionary and with his sexual activities, for nearly a decade.94 In reaction to the projected Catholic school at Fort Providence, Anglican priest William Bompas constructed a school and orphanage on Great Bear Lake in 1865. The school closed in 1868 after the teacher, Murdo McLeod, was charged with sexually abusing two of his students.95
By 1870, just three years after Confederation, the Oblates already were running fourteen day and boarding schools in the Prairie West, most of which were for Aboriginal students.96 This far surpassed the Anglican or Methodist educational undertakings, which were limited largely to the establishment of day schools. Bishop Taché had concluded by 1858 that schools should be added to the Oblate missions.97 By 1863, the Oblates and Grey Nuns were running boarding schools in Île-à-la-Crosse, Lac La Biche, and St. Albert.98
The creation of an informal partnership between the Oblates and Grey Nuns in the Northwest marked a turning point in the Catholic missionary endeavour.99 The Grey Nuns were central to this. The Oblates had been trained to evangelize and convert, not to be educators. At some of their missions, they provided instruction in reading and writing, either in an Aboriginal language using syllabics, or in French, but this was intended to assist in the conversion process.100 Although most of the Grey Nuns were not qualified teachers, they were expected to take over teaching responsibilities. Indeed, there were few trained teachers in Canada at that time. The Toronto Normal School, for example, had opened only in 1847.101
The Oblates were required to limit their contacts with women and girls, which meant they were not supposed to teach female students. Therefore, the Oblate schools had to operate in partnership with a female order. The Oblates built the schools, obtained funding, and assisted with their maintenance, but turned much of the educational work over to the Grey Nuns.102 Once the schools were established, relations between the Oblates and the Grey Nuns were carefully regulated. They were not to speak to each other without supervision, and there were concerns about the conditions under which Oblates could have contact with the sisters. Oblate school supervisors had to give advance notice of visits to classrooms, allowing the mother superior to accompany him if necessary, and were to keep all visits as short as possible.103
There were three overriding goals for the schools the Oblates and Grey Nuns operated together: to provide children with a Catholic education, to provide an alternative to any schools operated by the Anglicans, and to provide a very limited secular education.104 Religious instruction took the form of ethics, catechism, music, services, and devotions. The hope was that with such an education, the student would not stray from the church after leaving school.105
Life in the schools was often precarious. In 1874, a decline in the fish harvest forced the nuns at the Île-à-la-Crosse school to ask parents to take their children back home, since the school could not feed them. Initially, the school matron slept on a pallet in the classroom, the female students slept on the floor, and the male students slept in the Oblate residence.106
These early mission boarding schools never recruited more than a small percentage of the number of school-aged children in the region. Those who did attend usually left after four or five years. Orphans were the ones most likely to stay for the longest periods.107 By 1889, the number of orphaned Aboriginal students at the school exceeded the number of children of HBC employees.108 By 1871, at Île-à-la-Crosse, there were twenty-six students in their boarding school, along with five orphans who were being cared for by the Grey Nuns.109
Religious instruction, which loomed large in the Oblate educational agenda, was often in an Aboriginal language. Other classes might as easily be in French as in English, since most of the Oblates and Grey Nuns were French speakers and were committed to the creation of a French-speaking Catholic identity in the Canadian West.110 At Fort Chipewyan, for example, French was the language of instruction until the 1890s.111 Sara Riel, by then a Grey Nun, created a crisis at Île-à-la-Crosse when she sought to introduce English as a language of instruction. The French-speaking Métis parents objected and, in 1875, the English lessons were temporarily dropped.112
An 1873 federal government Order-in-Council authorized a federal subsidy of $300 a year for the Oblate school at St. Albert. The following year, the government authorized similar payments to other schools for First Nations children, provided they had a minimum of twenty-five students. By 1876, at least three schools—St. Albert, Lac La Biche, and Île-à-la-Crosse—were receiving such support.
Bishop Vital Grandin of St. Albert played an important role in shaping the Oblates’ educational thinking. He was convinced that Aboriginal people faced extinction, and doubtful that adult hunters and trappers could be transformed successfully into farmers. He pinned his hopes for the future of Aboriginal people on the education and conversion of children. He proposed boarding schools at which children would spend much of their time outdoors, either at work or play, and would be converted to Christianity, fed local food, and provided with practical skills. Children who went through such an education at a mission school, he felt, would not be able to return to a life on the land. He boasted that the orphans educated at mission schools hated to be reminded of their Aboriginal ancestry. With ten such schools, he claimed, he would be able to redeem the Aboriginal race on the Prairies. He further believed that parents, aware of the future they faced, would willingly give their children over to the Oblates at a young age. By 1879, he had begun to lobby the federal government to provide funding for church-run schools that would educate Aboriginal children from the ages of five to twenty-one. He estimated the annual cost of boarding each of these students to be $80 a year, of which the federal government would pay half until the student turned sixteen. From that point on, the federal government would pay only $40 and put the rest into a trust account for the student, who would have access to it upon graduation. Grandin took his case directly to Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, saying that the Oblate success with schooling had been so great that, upon graduating, students so wished to live as Europeans that they refused to accept any grants intended for Aboriginal people.113
The federal government was increasingly receptive to Grandin’s proposals. In 1870, Rupert’s Land had been transferred to Canada. By 1877, missionaries had demonstrated their value to the Canadian state by assisting in the negotiation of seven Treaties with western First Nations. Canada’s Aboriginal policy, expressed in the 1876 Indian Act, was one of aggressive assimilation of Aboriginal peoples. An 1879 report prepared for the federal government on residential schooling recommended the creation of a network of industrial schools, to be established by the federal government and run by the churches.
Catholic and Protestant missionaries also undertook missionary campaigns in the Pacific Northwest in the middle years of the nineteenth century. These campaigns were carried out in the wake of two highly disruptive events, both of which were linked to the intensification of colonization of the region.
The 1850 Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) and 1858 Fraser River gold rushes had brought thousands of Europeans to British Columbia. The miners and prospectors had little respect for Aboriginal people or their rights and sought to separate them from their land. Their mistreatment of Aboriginal people led to serious disputes and confrontations.114
In 1862, a smallpox epidemic broke out on Vancouver Island. Aboriginal people were the hardest hit by the disease, leading Victoria municipal officials to evict much of the city’s Aboriginal population as a threat to public health. Many of those who were forced to leave were originally from coastal communities. When they returned to their homes, they took the disease with them. From there, it travelled throughout the mainland of what is now British Columbia.115 According to one estimate, the epidemic killed nearly a third of the Aboriginal population in the region.116 These were dramatic and tragic events that left many communities demoralized and bereft of their traditional leaders. They also created an opportunity for Christian missionaries to provide Aboriginal people with medical treatment.117
Roman Catholic missionary work in what is now British Columbia remained limited until the 1860s.118 In 1858, Oblate missionaries who had been active in what is now the Pacific Northwest of the United States were authorized to move their operations north of the forty-ninth parallel.119 The Oblates opened their first mission on the British Columbia mainland at Okanagan Lake in 1860. In 1861, they opened the St. Mary’s mission at Mission, British Columbia, just east of New Westminster on the Fraser River.120 In coming years, missions would be opened at Williams Lake (1867), Stuart Lake (1873), and in the Kootenays (1874).121
Paul Durieu, who had come to the west coast as a priest in 1854, played a central role in the development of Catholic missions and schools in what was to become British Columbia. He worked in Esquimalt and Kamloops before being made the assistant to Bishop Louis-Joseph d’Herbomez at New Westminster in 1864. There, he served as the director of St. Mary’s Mission. He was appointed Bishop of New Westminster in 1890, holding the position until his death in 1899.122
Durieu has been credited with the establishment of what has been termed the “Durieu System,” a form of church-run government of First Nations communities. The system, which was not original to Durieu, was in fact an Oblate effort to follow the Jesuit reducciones in North America. The reducciones were church-governed communities intended to separate Indigenous people from their traditional ways of life and from settlers, who were viewed as sources of corruption. It was a hierarchical model, in which the missionary was in total control of the reduccione.123
Fellow Oblate E. M. Bunoz credited Durieu and his system with creating “an Indian state ruled by the Indian, for the Indian, with the Indian under the directive authority of the Bishop and the local priests as supervisors.” It was, in reality, far from being an Aboriginal government. In the communities in which Durieu and the Oblates established this system, the laws were “the commandments of God, the precepts of the Church, the laws of the state when in conformity with the laws of the Church, the Indian Act, [and] the bylaws enacted by local Indian government.” The local priest presided over the court that enforced these laws, with punishment ranging from “the lash, the fine, black fast [a highly rigorous fast] up to a short prayer.” The chief elected under the provisions of the Indian Act was viewed as being merely an honorary chief, with real authority resting with the “Eucharistic Chief” appointed by Durieu—and whom Durieu could depose. Others involved in administering the system were appointed sub-chiefs, watchmen, catchecists, police officers (in some cases), and bell-ringers (referred to as “cloche men”). These officials kept undesirable colonists, particularly liquor traders, away from the community and enforced discipline on First Nations community members. According to Bunoz, under the system,
late rising was not tolerated. They were all up at the first bell and at the second bell they all went to Church to say their morning prayer. Then breakfast and they went to their respective work. In the evening the bell called them again for their prayer in common. Later on at a proper hour, according to the season, the curfew was sounded; and all lights went out in a few moments.124
The Durieu System’s authority was called into question when, in 1892, the church-sponsored court on the Lillooet Reserve sentenced a young man and woman to a public flogging for having engaged in intercourse outside of marriage. The sentence was approved by an Oblate priest, Eugène-Casimir Chirouse. The young woman was flogged a second time shortly afterwards, this time for leaving the reserve with a group of young men and women. The case was reported to the local magistrate, who had the court members and Chirouse arrested. All were convicted at a trial in county court. Chirouse was sentenced to a year in jail, the chief of the court to six months, and the rest of the court to two months. After a campaign led by Catholic Bishop John Lemmens, federal justice minister John Thompson dismissed all the charges.125 Durieu’s successor as Bishop of New Westminster, Augustin Dontenwill, questioned the effectiveness of the system, which he viewed as being overly harsh.126 As a result, the system—whose efficiency was in all likelihood exaggerated by its supporters—fell into decline. Chirouse’s career, however, did not. He became principal of the Mission school in the 1890s and remained involved in the school’s operation until the 1920s.127 Durieu also supported the establishment of residential schools at Catholic missions. The first of these schools opened at St. Mary’s Mission in 1863.128 The principles of the Durieu System structured the students’ daily life. Although the forty-two boys the school initially recruited were given an introduction to reading, writing, and arithmetic, they spent much of their time in the fields, gardening and farming. The punishments employed included additional school work, being required to kneel for a period of time, confinement, isolation, humiliation, and corporal punishment. Rewards were given for good behaviour—these might be prizes or honours, such as the right to be referred to as the “Captain of Holy Angels.” From the late 1860s onwards, the school had a brass band, which was used in part to impress Europeans with the capability of First Nations students.129
In 1865, the Sisters of St. Ann, who had established a convent in Victoria in 1858, sent two sisters to New Westminster, where they opened up a girls’ school the following year. The school taught the children of both settlers and First Nations families.130 The Oblates promised to provide the Sisters of St. Ann with $200 a year for their services, plus $400 to outfit their convent, if the order provided two teachers for a girls’ school at Mission. When two sisters and seven students arrived in the fall of 1868, they discovered that the Oblates had not provided any furnishings, forcing their leader, Sister Mary Luména, to quickly make tables and dressers. In coming years, she not only built beds, tables, chairs, and washstands, but also felled the lumber from which the furnishings were constructed.131
The food supply at the Mission schools was always precarious. Supposedly because of the boys’ fondness for cabbage soup, the Oblates had them plant 4,000 cabbages in the spring of 1864. Whether or not the students were fond of it, cabbage dominated the menu the following year. In 1868, there was no bread, cereal, or vegetables: the staff and students lived on closely rationed potatoes and fish.132 The diet was monotonous and insufficient, so much so that the boys used to supplement it with apples they took from the school orchard at night.133
The priests and nuns thought that the traditional First Nations clothing was too extravagant. As a result, each new student was provided with a school uniform. The girls’ outfits consisted of a brown blouse, a cotton skirt, and a white bonnet.134
The Mission school was originally funded solely from Catholic sources, but, in 1865, the colonial government of British Columbia provided it with a grant of fifty pounds.135 In January 1874, Bishop d’Herbomez sought funding for the Mission school from Indian Affairs, pointing out that “amongst the Indian boys of our schools there are many who can scarcely learn to read and write correctly, the same boys can learn many things no less useful for them as (ex. gr.) [for example] to plough, to cut hay, etc. and even to play music.” At the schools, the boys “take early the habit of working, they acquire the love of order and discipline and prepare themselves to become useful members of the community.”136 The lobbying effort was successful: that year, the government provided the school with a grant of $350.137
While the Roman Catholic Church remained the dominant Christian denomination on the west coast, both the Anglicans and Methodists carried out high-profile missionary campaigns during this period. They too sought to establish missionary-governed Christian communities that would separate Aboriginal people from the broader community.
In 1857, William Duncan, a recent graduate of the CMS’s Highbury Training College, arrived at the HBC post at the northern coastal community of Fort Simpson (now Port Simpson), where he evangelized among members of the Tsimshian First Nation.138 By 1859, there were 200 students in the school he had established. Religion was central to his curriculum. In his journal, he wrote, “I spoke to them in the morning about what God expects from us, being our maker, which is point No. 1 in my course of oral lessons.”139
Duncan and 400 Tsimshian converts sought to isolate themselves from what they saw as the corrupting influences of the European settlers and non-Christian First Nations people by moving to the former Tsimshian village of Metlakatla (alternately Metlakahtla). They made the move in 1862, establishing what Duncan (who had learned to speak Tsimshian by then) hoped would serve as a model Christian village.140 Life at Metlakatla was not dissimilar to that under the Durieu System: traditional ceremonies, gambling, alcohol, and work on Sunday were banned, and school attendance was compulsory.141 A sawmill was built with the profits from the community store. Lumber from that mill was used to build houses, a church that could seat over 1,000 people, a day school, and a house for students.142 Beginning in 1874, the federal government provided funds to the school, which reportedly had 304 students, 168 of whom were adults.143
Duncan exercised considerable power over both students and community members in general. In his journal, he recorded how “last night I had to chastise Susan for inattention and gave all a very severe lecture on their careless, dirty and lazy habits—I had Margaret in prison (the cupboard under the stairs) two days and nights for pilfering and also added a severe beating.”144 As magistrate, he commanded a force of uniformed Aboriginal constables. He did not flinch from imposing harsh punishment on those who violated the community’s laws: people could be jailed, exiled, or flogged.145
For many years, Duncan’s work at Metlakatla was held up as an example of missionary accomplishment. The 1874 Indian Affairs annual report described him as “a man whose earnest labours on behalf of the Indians of British Columbia are above all praise.”146 However, he eventually came into conflict with both church and government officials. When Duncan refused to accept the authority of the CMS, he was dismissed. In response, he and 600 Tsimshian people left for Alaska, where they established a community that came to be known as “New Metlakatla.”147
Thomas Crosby, who was born in England and raised in Ontario, came to British Columbia as a lay Methodist missionary in 1861. Four years later, he became an itinerant preacher, working on the east coast of Vancouver Island.148 In 1874, he arrived in Fort Simpson, which would be the seat of his activities for the next twenty-three years.149 Crosby learned Aboriginal languages, attended ceremonies and feasts, and paid close attention to Aboriginal orators and storytellers. He had regard for what he saw as being the generosity of Aboriginal people, their natural piety, and their musical ability. But he viewed their spiritual and cultural practices as the devil’s creation. He wished to bring about a complete transformation in their lives: Aboriginal people not only had to come to Christ, they also had to be taught to attend school or work regularly, abandon communal homes for single-family dwellings, and take up farming.150 There was little in Aboriginal life that pleased him. He wrote, “Their old houses and their surroundings were wretchedly filthy and disorderly, and little calculated to help them in their efforts to rise.”151
He too sought to establish a church-run government for the First Nations people of Fort Simpson. Under his leadership, a village council at Fort Simpson was formed. The council appointed watchmen to enforce laws on the observance of the Sabbath, drinking, marriage, schooling, and domestic disputes. With a new religion came new names. By the 1880s, most members of the Methodist Church in Fort Simpson had European names.152
Crosby was greatly aided in his work by his wife, Emma. The Crosbys initially took young girls, some of whom were orphans, into their home to raise.153 This undertaking expanded to the point where, in 1879, the Crosby Girls’ Home opened.154 Emma Crosby’s fundraising efforts on behalf of this work contributed to the establishment of the Methodist Women’s Missionary Society.155 Strict routine and regimentation were imposed by staff at the Crosby Girls’ Home.156 One of the matrons felt that frequent punishment was “the only way to make them mind.”157 Two girls who ran away in 1883 were locked up in the workroom for nearly a week.158 By the late 1880s, Crosby’s influence over the Tsimshian had gone into decline, as dissatisfaction with the church’s ability to protect Aboriginal land rights led to a split in the church and the emergence of an Aboriginal-led church society known as the “Band of Christian Workers.”159
Both Duncan and Crosby came into conflict with the federal government over Aboriginal issues. Duncan argued that the Indian Act, which he viewed as restrictive, should not apply to the Tsimshian of Metlakatla, while Crosby advocated on behalf of Aboriginal land rights. At one point, Indian agent J. W. MacKay recommended that restraints be placed on missionaries such as Duncan and Crosby, whom he saw as being the instigators behind Aboriginal land claims.160 Their efforts on behalf of Aboriginal rights did not succeed, and the model communities they sought to establish did not take root. Those communities did, however, serve as models for residential schools. In coming years, an industrial school would be established at Metlakatla, and the Crosby Home was incorporated into Canada’s residential school system.
Throughout the Northwest and British Columbia, Christian missionaries, and the Oblate order in particular, were strategically placed to seize the initiative when, in the 1880s, the federal government began to implement the 1879 proposal to establish industrial schools in western Canada. The schools that were established in the following decades were in large measure extensions of the early mission schools: they were intended to separate children from their families, impose new spiritual beliefs and practices, provide a very limited academic education, instill a sense of the moral value of work, and prepare students to take up farming as opposed to returning to the lifestyles of their parents.
The intense conflict between Protestants and Catholics carried over into the residential school era. It fostered a patchwork distribution of schools, which left some areas with no schools while, in others, Roman Catholic and Protestant schools were located a few kilometres from one another. This competition not only led to duplication, but it also created deep and long-lasting divisions within First Nations communities.