The institutionalization of Aboriginal children in residential schools in Canada was part of a broader, European-based movement to regulate members of what were described as ‘the dangerous classes’ in society in the nineteenth century. Many observers attributed the growth of such classes to the process of rapid industrialization and urbanization underway both in Europe and North America. Writing in 1857, the British reformer Thomas Beggs bemoaned “the fever-nests of our large towns and cities,” from which were pouring out “the hordes of tramps, thieves, fallen women, and ragged urchins, which infest our crowded neighbourhoods, and from these classes, which constitute what are called our dangerous classes, are recruited mainly the juvenile delinquents.” Beggs commented that a similar class of lawless youth existed in Paris, whose members were “as barbarous and as brave as North American Indians.”1 In North America, those perceived as the ‘dangerous classes’ included Aboriginal people and an ever-growing number of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. Social reformers in Europe and North America established poorhouses, workhouses, prisons, reformatories, industrial schools, asylums, and penitentiaries. All of these institutions were intended to isolate, control, and reform populations thought to present a threat to social order
In English Canada, social reformers based in the Protestant churches often promoted the creation of these institutions. Protestant church leaders conceived of Canada as ‘God’s Dominion.’ Such a dominion would be Protestant, English-speaking, and governed by British political traditions. From this base, it would play a leading role in the conversion of the non-Christian peoples of the world. From the 1880s onwards, prominent Protestant figures believed that Canada’s status as God’s Dominion was threatened by the rising immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Few of these immigrants spoke English, and many were either Catholic or adherents of the Greek or Russian Orthodox churches. These anxieties led Protestant leaders to call for limits to immigration, an energetic campaign to Christianize and assimilate the newcomers, and a redoubling of efforts to assimilate Aboriginal people.2
These efforts drew energy from the Social Gospel, a reform movement within the Protestant churches that challenged those who believed the church’s role was only to ensure the salvation of the individual through faith. The reform movement claimed the church also had a social role to play. The Social Gospel, which did not abandon spiritual concerns, spoke of creating the “Kingdom of God on Earth.” This led its members to support controls such as prohibition, and reforms such as the provision of clean water, workplace health and safety laws, and improved welfare for the sick and aged. Not surprisingly, there were differences among the social reformers, with some keener to emphasize the need to end allegedly evil behaviours such as drinking and gambling, while others focused on reducing exploitation of the weak by the powerful. In the early years of the movement, however, the former prevailed.
The Social Gospel reformers carried out their work in poor urban areas, establishing missions often referred to as “settlement houses,” where they sought to convert immigrants while simultaneously addressing their immediate needs. Many of the reformers, influenced by popular scientific and social writings of the time, also were concerned with racial purity and the future of Canada as a Protestant and British society. They favoured limited immigration of groups other than northern Europeans, and saw schools as key instruments for assimilation of the “strangers within our gates,” a phrase that served as the title for one leading reformer’s book on immigration.3 Among the measures these reformers advocated were compulsory education and—in western Canada—the adoption of English-only education.
Many of the reformers focused their attention on those children, particularly boys, who were unable to fit into the highly regimented classroom of the nineteenth century. Once they were expelled from school, the boys spent their time on the streets, earning money from a series of part-time jobs. They often came to be labelled as “vagrant,” “neglected,” or “delinquent.” Both the police and social reformers viewed such young people, whose attendance at day schools was disruptive and irregular, as a growing threat to social order. Their solution was to institutionalize them.
The establishment of industrial schools was part of a growing international trend. Increasingly, industrial schools were being used to control the children of the industrializing world’s ‘dangerous classes.’ In Europe and North America, they were being established to ‘rescue’ the children of urban slums, and the United States was in the process of expanding its ‘Indian’ boarding schools. In places as distant from Canada as Nigeria and Australia, missionaries also were establishing such schools to separate Indigenous children from their parents. All these factors shaped the Canadian government’s 1883 decision to establish a residential school system.
The reformatory in Citeaux, France, served as a model for First Nations industrial schools. It was only one in a network of reformatories for young people established in France in the nineteenth century.4 Most of these institutions, both in France and Britain, drew their inspiration from the Mettray reformatory, a private initiative founded in 1839 by Frederic Demetz. The Mettray reformatory took in boys under the age of sixteen who had committed crimes but, because of their age, were not being sent to jail. At Mettray, boys lived in “cottages” that housed about forty, under the supervision of two older boys and an adult staff member, and were subjected to unremitting labour in the surrounding fields.5 Demetz’s motto was “Improve the man by the land and the land by the man.” In 1850, the French government began to fund such institutions.6 The British parliament adopted the Reformatory Schools Act in 1854 and the Industrial Schools Act in 1857. Over the next two decades, more than sixty institutions, most based on the same principles as Mettray’s, were established in Britain.7 By 1882, over 17,000 children were in Britain’s industrial schools.8
By 1879, the United States had a long history of residential schooling for Native Americans. During the early years of British colonization, a variety of missionary organizations, such as the New England Company, had attempted to establish boarding schools, with limited success. After the 1776 American War of Independence, American, rather than British, missionaries took the lead in efforts to convert Native Americans living in what is now the United States.
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was established by Presbyterians and Congregationalists in 1810. As in Canada, there was debate within the churches over whether it was necessary to civilize Native Americans before they were converted. Some felt that only by bringing Native Americans to a higher level of education could they grasp the Christian message. For others, the Gospels themselves were the great civilizer. In reality, the two tasks were interwoven: to the missionaries, civilization was, by definition, “Christian.”9 The missionaries had little concept of culture and its value. They believed that rational individuals, once presented with the option, would seize the opportunity to participate in a more civilized society. It was a replacement model that expected Native Americans to simply abandon one way of life for another.10
Schooling loomed large in the missionary project in the United States. In 1804, Presbyterian missionary Gideon Blackburn opened a boarding school for Cherokee students in Tennessee.11 In 1816, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions established a mission and school in Brainerd, Tennessee.12 These were manual labour schools in which students spent half their day in the classroom and the other half in workshops, sewing rooms, kitchens, barns, or the field. The churches’ work received a significant boost from the 1819 Civilization Fund Act, which committed the us government to spending $10,000 a year on civilizing and educating Native Americans. Rather than carry out this work directly, the government chose to fund missionary work. By the end of 1824, the Office of Indian Affairs reported that it was supporting thirty-two boarding schools, largely in the eastern United States.
The work of these schools was cut short by the federal government’s relocation policy. A number of Treaties had been signed with Native Americans, and lands assigned to them in the eastern United States. The government came under increasing pressure to terminate those Treaties and relocate Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi River that the us had acquired from France in 1803.13 The removal was supposed to be voluntary. Native Americans were to be paid for the land they were giving up and be supplied with suitable lands in the West. In reality, the Removal Bill of 1830 authorized what amounted to a forced population transfer. Those who refused to relocate risked the loss of their lands and their right to govern themselves.14
Many did not go quietly. The Seminoles, the Creeks, and the Sac and Fox, in particular, undertook military campaigns in defence of their territory. Lands in the West where Native peoples were relocated were not always suitable; speculators cheated Native Americans out of the money they were supposed to receive for the land they were leaving behind; and the journey was often one of tremendous suffering, undertaken without having received the promised supplies and supports.15
‘Removal’ was given an altruistic justification. It was argued that the Native Americans could continue to pursue their traditional livelihood in the West for a little longer, while, at the same time, missionaries could continue the process of civilizing them.16 The reality was thirty years of slow, steady, ongoing settler encroachment onto Native American land in the West, coupled with frequent and bloody wars. In 1869, President Ulysses Grant initiated his Peace Policy. Churches were to appoint the field staff, federal spending on education was to increase, and an independent Board of Indian Commissioners would oversee the development and administration of Indian policy. Two years later, Indians were effectively wards of the state.17
Catholic and Protestant missionaries also were given government support to establish boarding schools throughout the West. The Catholics quickly surpassed the Protestants, and, by 1886, they operated thirty-eight of the fifty church-run boarding schools that received government support.18 In addition to learning English and some basic academic subjects, the boys were trained in the skills that would be of use to a farmer: carpentry, stock raising, harness making, and blacksmithing; the girls were taught to keep house. The schools operated on the half-day system and were expected to be self-supporting.19 From the outset, it was recognized that children in boarding schools were, in effect, hostages. As long as they remained under government control, their parents would be unlikely to resist settler incursions into the homelands. John Miles, an Indian agent who worked with the Cheyenne, wrote, “I am yet to know of the first individual Indian on this reservation who has joined in a raid, that has had his child in school.”20
The us government signed several Treaties that provided for geographically defined Indian reservations, promised assistance in a transition to agriculture, and made a strong commitment to providing Native Americans with schooling—in one case, a school and teacher for every thirty children.21 Treaty promises were broken, and many people moved onto reservations only when forced to by the military.22 During the 1874–75 Red River War in Texas, the us army rounded up over seventy Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and Caddo men. The army originally intended to try the men under military law, but, because Indians were legally wards of the state, a decision was made to hold seventy-two of them indefinitely at Fort Marion, a military base in St. Augustine, Florida.23 Placed in chains, they were sent east under the command of Lieutenant Richard Pratt.
Upon their arrival at Fort Marion, Pratt ordered that the leg irons be removed and the men be given haircuts and European-style clothing. The prisoners were given classes in English, and the opportunity to fish, do craftwork, and hold ceremonial dances. After three years of confinement, the men were released. While most returned to the Plains, twenty-two indicated they would be interested in further studies. Five were taken in by individuals, and seventeen accepted scholarships that allowed them to attend the Hampton Agricultural School for Negroes in Virginia. There, they again experienced the order and regimentation they had known at Fort Marion, but with additional focus on agricultural training and daily religious services.24
Pratt accompanied the men to the Hampton school. Once there, he was impatient at being the second in command to General Samuel Armstrong. He was also opposed to the Native Americans’ being forced to associate with former slaves, for fear this would doom Indians to the same social standing as African-Americans.25 He successfully lobbied the federal government to establish an off-reservation boarding school for Native Americans in the former barracks at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and to make him its superintendent.
Pratt thought there were few people who could have a better understanding of Native Americans and their educational needs than himself. After all, he had fought them, lived with them, and educated them at St. Augustine.26 Famously, in 1892, Pratt wrote that a great American general had “said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”27
Richard Pratt’s experience in transporting and later supervising the training and education of these prisoners led in 1879 to his being put in charge of the first large-scale, off-reservation boarding school in the United States at Carlisle. The school marked a break in approach from the smaller, church-run schools that had existed to that time. In future years, Canadian Indian Affairs officials would draw inspiration from the school.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was located in a rundown former military barracks, which was in need of significant repair. Most of the students travelled over 1,600 kilometres from their home communities on the western plains. On arrival at the school, the students were stripped of their traditional clothing, shorn of their hair, assigned new names, and introduced to barracks life.28 Years later, Luther Standing Bear, the first student to cross the school threshold, recalled, “After having my hair cut, a new thought came into my head. I felt that I was no more Indian, but would be an imitation of a white man.”29 The Carlisle school was not the first Native American boarding school in the United States, but it was the largest and most ambitious, and emblematic of all the schools.
Like most of the students, Standing Bear had been personally recruited by Richard Pratt, whose motto for the school was “To civilize the Indian, get him into civilization. To keep him civilized, let him stay.”30 Pratt was convinced that within a generation, all Native Americans would be assimilated—his school system would, he said, operate for such a short period that it would not have a history.31 By 1902, there were twenty-five off-reservation boarding schools in the United States, all modelled after the Carlisle school.32
Life at Carlisle was heavily regimented, with little deviation allowed from a rigid schedule for sleeping, rising, praying, studying, and working.33 Students had two complaints about the food: there was not enough of it; and what there was, was unfamiliar and unpalatable. Pratt agreed with the students about the quantity. To improve matters, he succeeded in having the school put on army rations.34
Much of the students’ education was focused on preparing them for the world of waged work. There were ongoing lectures on the value of time, the sin of wasting it, the importance of spending it wisely, and the virtue of promptness.35 The Carlisle school’s ‘outing system’ was an extension of Lieutenant Pratt’s experiences in St. Augustine, where the prisoners had been able to go ‘out’ and work in the community. It was thought this would allow the students to learn English, to internalize the community’s values, and to adopt regular work habits. Ideally, he would have liked white families to adopt all Native American children.36 Students were sent out to work for the summers, they were roomed with farm families for up to two years (during which they attended local day schools), and, in later years, they were boarded with urban families. Their wages were banked for them at the school.37
Despite the significant resources invested in the school and Pratt’s genius for publicity, the school’s educational record never matched Pratt’s rhetoric. The first students graduated in 1889, after the school had been in operation for a decade. There were only fourteen students in that graduating class and, in 1893, the number was down to six. By 1910, the school reported that 514 graduates were not living on reservations, but that only 54 of these were farming.38
Although Pratt’s initial focus was on recruiting students from the American West, children from approximately 150 indigenous nations from across the United States were sent to the Carlisle school. These included Mohawk children, most of whom came from the northeastern United States.39 Then, as now, there were strong connections between Mohawk communities in Canada and the United States. Since the late nineteenth century, for example, Mohawk men from Québec have worked in high-steel construction in Canada and the United States. The Akwesasne First Nation (also known as St. Regis) straddles the Canada–us border. Mohawk leaders maintained that they, along with the other Six Nations, were sovereign, and asserted this sovereignty in a variety of ways.40 The children of families who moved from a Mohawk community in Canada to one in the United States, or in the case of Akwesasne, from a portion of a reserve on the Canadian side to one on the American side, might be sent to Carlisle. Among such students was Mitchell Arionhawakon White. He was born within the political boundaries of Québec, raised at Akwesasne, and attended Carlisle from approximately 1909 to 1914. He eventually married a Mohawk woman who had been educated in a Roman Catholic convent in Québec. Neither of them passed on the Mohawk language to their children.41 In other cases, the families of Mohawk students who were living in the United States when their children were enrolled in the Carlisle school might have moved to Canada while their children were in school or some time afterward. Once they were discharged from Carlisle, these children might have rejoined their families in Canada. Because of these and similar processes, some children who were born into Mohawk communities in Canada attended Carlisle and children who attended Carlisle came to live in Mohawk communities in Canada once they left the school.42 As a result, the legacy of the Carlisle school was felt not only in the United States, but also in Canada as well.
Four, additional, off-reservation schools opened in 1884: Chilocco, Oklahoma; Genoa, Nebraska; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Lawrence, Kansas. Unlike Carlisle, these schools were built in the West, reducing parental opposition to recruitment and increasing the likelihood that graduates would return to their home communities.43 By 1900, there were 153 federal boarding schools in the United States (both on-reservation and off-reservation) with 17,708 students, as well as 154 day schools with 3,860 students.44
A third of the boarding-school students were attending off-reservation boarding schools, a figure that would increase to nearly 50% by the end of the 1920s. Many day-school and reservation boarding-school students ended up in off-reservation schools for the final years of their education.45
As early as 1887, Indian Commissioner John D. C. Atkins forbade the use of Native American languages in government and mission Indian schools—he claimed that the languages were not only of no use to students, but they were also a barrier to their advancement.46 An 1890 policy restricted corporal punishment to situations where a student had gravely violated the school’s rules. For students over the age of eleven, this meant they could be subject to corporal punishment if they persisted in using obscene language, engaged in lewd conduct, were insubordinate, lied, fought, destroyed property, stole, or engaged in “similar behavior.”47 In 1891, Congress gave the commissioner of Indian Affairs the authority to compel Indian children to attend school; two years later, officials were authorized to withhold benefits and annuities from parents who were not sending their children to school. Given that there were many more Aboriginal children than school spaces, the law was enforced only on a selective basis until well into the twentieth century.48
At the larger off-reservation schools, training included wagon building, shoemaking, tinsmithing, carpentry, painting, tailoring, and harness making. In 1881, Carlisle produced nearly 9,000 tin products, 183 double harness sets, 161 bridles, 10 halters, 9 spring wagons, and 2 carriages.49 In 1890, sixteen girls at the Albuquerque school produced 170 dresses, 93 chemises, 107 hickory shirts, 67 boys’ waists, 261 pairs of drawers, 194 pillowcases, 224 sheets, 238 aprons, 33 bedspreads, and 83 towels.50
Every off-reservation boarding school had its own cemetery. Six children died in the first year at Carlisle; several of the fifteen students sent home in poor health that year also died.51 No one has yet accurately determined the death rate in Indian schools in the United States.52 Tuberculosis was a major problem for the schools, as was trachoma, an eye infection that can lead to blindness.53 A 1912 us study found that of 16,470 Indian students examined, nearly 30% had trachoma. Oklahoma was worse than the national average; almost 70% of boarding-school students examined there suffered from trachoma.54 One inspector, William J. McConnell, noted that of the seventy-three students sent to boarding schools from the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming between 1881 and 1894, only twenty-six were still alive in 1899. The rest, almost two-thirds, had died in school or shortly after being discharged. In a letter to the secretary of the Department of the Interior, he wrote, “The word ‘murder’ is a terrible word, but we are little less than murderers if we follow the course we are now following after the attention of those in charge has been called to its fatal results.”55 The government opened four school sanatoria by 1915, although, with a capacity of only 222 patients, many tubercular children continued to be enrolled in, and attend, regular boarding schools.56
Parents often refused to send their children to the schools. When the Fort Hall, Idaho, boarding school opened in 1880, most parents boycotted the school. By 1892, the tribal police was refusing to assist the local Indian agent in his effort to take children by force. The agent fired the band officers, but could not recruit replacements. The government had to use the military to break the boycott. In 1897, forty-three armed members of the United States Cavalry were dispatched to force parents to send their children to school.57
The appointment in 1889 of Baptist minister Thomas Jefferson Morgan as commissioner of Indian Affairs marked the beginning of the end of American federal government funding of church-run schools. Morgan was a strong anti-Catholic and a fervent believer in the effectiveness of public schools in assimilating immigrants and Native Americans. He argued, “Education should seek the disintegration of the tribes, and not their segregation.”58 In 1892, the Protestants, who operated far fewer schools than the Catholics, decided to terminate their operation of government-funded schools. Four years later, the us government began a five-year phase-out of support for church-run schools.59
By the early twentieth century, government officials had begun to have doubts about the effectiveness of schools such as Carlisle. Instead of being assimilated into American society as Pratt had predicted, former students were returning to their reservations. The government also was not happy with the growing competition between schools to keep enrolments up. By 1902, the official government position was to prefer on-reservation schools.60 None of these changes pleased Pratt. He issued a public call for the elimination of the Indian Affairs office, and, in 1904, he was relieved of his position as head of the Carlisle school. After Pratt’s departure, the school suffered from a decline in leadership, culminating in an inquiry into allegations of physical abuse of students. In the wake of ongoing problems, the government returned the Carlisle facility to the army in 1918 and closed the school that fall. Another school, Hampton, stopped taking Native American students five years later.61 However, despite the concerns that had emerged about the effectiveness of the boarding-school system, once established, it proved difficult to dismantle. Like the Canadian system, the American system continued to operate well into the twentieth century.
As well as being aware of American boarding schools, the people who planned Canada’s residential school model would also have known of approaches being taken in many other parts of the world, particularly British colonies in Africa and Australia.
The British-based Church Mission Society (CMS) established schools in British colonies in Africa in the 1860s. In Nigeria, CMS missionaries concluded that day-school attendance was too intermittent, and began opening boarding schools in which students were taught the “Four Rs”: religion, reading, writing, and arithmetic. If there was a female teacher, girls were also taught sewing. There was no formal curriculum or system of inspection. The language of instruction was generally English; few of the missionaries knew the native languages. As the missionaries developed language skills, English remained the general language of instruction, but religious instruction was provided in the local native language. At the industrial school in Topo, Nigeria, children worked on the farm in the morning, studied in the afternoons, and returned to the fields until darkness fell. The reputation for severity was such that James Marshall, the chief justice of Lagos, began sentencing delinquent children to the school as an alternative to imprisonment.62
The mission schools consciously sought to draw children both physically and spiritually away from their families, and into the world of the missionary. One of the results was that some students came to view themselves as being superior to their parents and others who had not gone to school. One missionary worried that, through education, many students had been “rendered not only useless members of society but injurious to its well-being on account of their instrumentality in the diffusion of habits of idleness and extravagance.”63 When faced with the prospect of such “idleness,” the proposed solution was manual education. Significant effort went into sending promising young men to England for a brief period of artisanal training (and bringing artisans from England to provide training), and into boarding students as apprentices to local carpenters and tailors. In the case of printing, one missionary taught himself typesetting so he could teach it to students.64
In Australia, Indigenous children were separated from their parents through the century-long operation of a variety of state and federal laws. In some cases, the state simply took the children; in others, pressure was brought to bear on vulnerable parents who had little alternative other than to give up their children. From the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s, the policy was to separate full-descent Indigenous people onto reserves, and remove children of mixed descent from their parents to be raised in institutions, with the expectation that through a process of intermarriage, they would be absorbed into the broader population.65
Australian history was marked by violent conflicts between colonists and Indigenous people over rights to land, water, food, and even children, since Indigenous children often were apprehended and used as labourers. By the last half of the nineteenth century, the dominant settler belief was that the full-blooded Indigenous population was in decline and would eventually die out. However, the mixed-descent population was increasing. If mixed-descent children were raised in Indigenous communities, it was thought, they would be an ongoing social cost.66
In states such as Queensland and Western Australia, the policy was to remove children from parents living on mission stations and reserves. They were taken as young as aged four to be raised in church-run dormitories.67 The dormitory at Warangesda Station in New South Wales, for example, housed 300 girls over the years from 1893 to 1909.68 Under an 1886 law, all ‘half-caste’ boys were to be apprenticed or sent to work at thirteen, while girls of that age were to work as servants. They were not to return to their reserves to visit their parents without permission. Later laws would give the government the ability to send all children of mixed descent for care by the Department for Neglected Children or the Department of Reformatory Schools. Parents who resisted could be forced off their reserve.69 In Western Australia, the 1874 Industrial Schools Act held that children who were voluntarily surrendered to a school, orphanage, or institution were under the institution’s authority until they were twenty-one and could be apprenticed at age twelve.70 The assault on Indigenous people in Tasmania led to near elimination. By the 1830s, most of the remaining Indigenous people had been relocated to nearby Flinders Island, where the disease rate was such that most of the population died. The adult survivors were removed in 1847 and their children were sent to an orphanage in Hobart, Tasmania.71
In Western Australia by the 1840s, there were a number of boarding schools for Indigenous children. Only parents who had a child in school were entitled to receive a blanket on the Queen’s birthday.72 The funding provided to the dormitories and schools was limited. In some cases, the missions did not receive public support until the 1930s, and the results were predictable: poor nutrition, ragged and inadequate clothing, and limited medical care. Discipline was harsh and death rates were high. Expectations of the children’s future prospects were low; as a result, the education they received was limited and of little value. Children were not permitted to speak their native languages, family contact was severely limited and controlled, living conditions were harsh, and children were vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation. The impact on parents who lost their children was devastating—completely the opposite of colonists’ belief that people would quickly and easily adjust to the loss of their children. During their time at school, children had little opportunity to return to their homes, many felt their parents had abandoned them, and they were told their culture had no value. Cultural links were destroyed. It was common practice to give children new names and, in some cases, children grew up not knowing they were Indigenous. At age eighteen, children who had been taken into care and sent out to work could return to their families. But, by then, many did not know where they came from or who their parents were. Those who did return went back to a world in which their activities would continue to be regulated by church and government officials, and where there was little work, particularly for females. As they grew into adulthood, many had difficulty raising families, due to their own lack of positive experience of being parented as children. Compared to other Indigenous children, those who had been away to boarding school had more ongoing conflicts with the law and difficulties with substance abuse.73
In Canada, orphanages were established, often by church organizations and private charities, in major population centres in Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Montréal, the Protestant Orphan Asylum opened in 1822 and the Catholic Orphanage in 1832, the Female Orphan Asylum opened in Québec City in 1830, and the Orphans’ Home opened in Kingston in 1857.74 These institutions took in both orphans and the children of parents who could not support them.75 In Ontario, the Penetanguishene Reformatory for Boys opened in 1859. Its inmates were often youngsters: in 1889, forty-seven of the eighty-five boys committed to the institution were under the age of fourteen.76 Penetanguishene itself was little more than a prison. It provided almost no meaningful training to the more than 300 boys who lived in its two dormitories.77
The reformers believed the boys needed a sense of home and belonging, rather than living in the prison-like surroundings that existed at places such as Penetanguishene.78 In 1862, the Board of Inspectors of Prisons, Asylums, and Public Charities of Canada commented that although reformatories might reform a criminal youth, they would do nothing to help a poor boy who needed to learn a trade. Instead, the board called for the creation of “ragged schools” and industrial farms—in essence, industrial schools. Unlike reformatories, they were not intended to house young lawbreakers, but rather the poor, vagrant, neglected, or homeless children. In order to separate the child from an unwholesome family environment, advocates believed, industrial schools had to be residential institutions.79
In 1874, the Ontario government adopted the Industrial Schools Act. It gave Ontario school boards the right to establish industrial schools to which magistrates could send children to live when they deemed the children to be neglected.80 Nothing more was accomplished until 1883, when leading members of the Toronto business and political community established the Industrial Schools Association of Toronto. The association planned to create industrial schools for “children found begging, wandering without shelter, destitute, unmanageable by their legal guardians, or without adequate parental control.” In these schools, they would be given the training needed to make them “useful citizens.”81 Toronto mayor William H. Howland, one of the school’s founders and promoters, predicted, “There will not be any trouble in placing them and eventually they will be holding land of their own and we will have good citizens manufactured out of so-called bad boys.”82
After a four-year fundraising campaign, the Victoria Industrial School opened in Mimico, just west of Toronto. The school’s underlying philosophy was that children became criminals because they had fallen under bad influences; usually, this meant their parents, family members, or friends. The children could be rehabilitated by removing them from these influences and placing them in a setting where they would be taught “industry, sobriety and discipline.”83 The rural location was selected to remove the students from the city and its temptations. Since parents were numbered among the potentially negative influences, they were allowed to visit their children only once a month.84
At the start, municipalities with students in the school were expected to pay $2 a week per boy, and the Ontario government paid seventy cents a week. Parents were expected to make a contribution “in proportion to their means.”85 Under Ontario’s 1880 Act for the Protection and Reformation of Neglected Children, a judge could send children under the age of fourteen to an industrial school, where they might be required to stay until they turned eighteen.86 In 1889, half of the 140 boys at the Victoria Industrial School had been placed there by their parents.87
On the school grounds were six, two- and three-storey, red-brick buildings, referred to as “cottages.” Each was capable of holding thirty-five to forty boys. They were supervised by a male and female officer, often a married couple.88 There were ongoing problems with the water supply and sanitation, contributing to outbreaks of scarlet fever, malaria, and diphtheria. Strict quarantines established in response to these outbreaks often led to students’ being kept in the school longer than necessary.89
The boys rose at 6:30 a.m., then put in four and a half hours of manual labour, three hours in the classroom, and one hour at religious studies. They had only one hour a day of unsupervised activity and were to go to bed between 8:45 and 9:00 p.m. Along with their manual training, they were required to do housework, knit, launder clothes, cook, bake, and serve meals. Manual training included tailoring, farming, carpentry, painting, printing, and shoe repair. Working in the laundry, one of the least desirable jobs, was reserved for the newly arrived or those being punished.90
Indecent language was punished with two slaps; and stealing apples, with two days on bread and water. Whippings on the bare back and legs were the punishment for other offences. A school employee was once fined $5 for striking a boy. In the 1920s, there were allegations in the press that one boy had been shackled to his bed for a month, beaten with a leather strap, and placed on a bread-and-water diet for two weeks. The parents of a boy who died at the school claimed his death was due to inhaling lead paint fumes, as he was a member of the school painting crew.91
Runaways were not uncommon. When four boys ran away in 1896, the principal decided not to go after them, since they had all run away and been returned at least five times each in the previous year. In 1921, twenty-two boys ran away at once. More seriously, one boy assaulted a matron, and another boy shot and wounded one of the staff.92
In 1892, the Alexandra Industrial School for Girls opened in what is now Scarborough. It was followed by two Catholic schools, one for boys and one for girls, both in Toronto. Québec already had four industrial schools by the end of the 1880s. By 1910, Manitoba and British Columbia had established similar schools.93 From 1875 to 1899, the number of youngsters in provincially funded institutions doubled from 970 to 1,855.94 At the Manitoba school, located in Portage la Prairie, boys went to school half-days and spent the rest of the day taking lessons in farming, carpentry, tailoring, and shoe repair. The Saskatchewan government had been sending boys to the school, but was unimpressed by the quality of trades training and, reasoning that the farming skills the school focused on could be gained by fostering children out, withdrew its students.95 In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Vancouver Trades and Labor Council called for an investigation into allegations of excessive flogging by the principal at the BC industrial school for boys. In his defence, the principal said he whipped only boys who ran away. At the Halifax Boys Industrial School, first offenders were strapped, and repeat offenders were placed in cells on a bread-and-water ration. From there, they might be sent to the penitentiary.96
The industrial schools and reformatories in Europe also served as a source of child immigration. Between 1867 and 1917, a variety of British charities and social service agencies sent over 80,000 British children to Canada.97 Their numbers were made up of orphans, street children, or youngsters who had run afoul of the law, or who had been abandoned or relinquished by their parents to orphanages, children’s homes, or industrial schools. All the institutions faced an ongoing problem: what to do with all the children they accepted? Many of their directors became convinced that the children could have a fresh start in Canada, where, it was thought, the children could be boarded with families where they would be raised and trained in work such as farm labour and domestic service.98
As a result, many children were permanently separated from their parents. The best known of these child immigration agencies was run by Thomas Barnardo. Between 1882 and 1915, Barnardo’s Homes transported nearly 25,000 children, mostly boys, to Canada. He also established a number of receiving homes in Canada, including an industrial farm in Russell, Manitoba.99
Life in a new country was fraught with difficulty. Although the goal was to board the children out, many children languished in poorly funded receiving homes and industrial farms. Those who were boarded out were often sent back: they were deemed too young, too slow, or otherwise unsuitable. Little was done to supervise their lives on farms or in homes. They were frequently overworked, underpaid, and at risk of a variety of abuses.100 In 1910, the supervisor of the Barnardo operation in Canada was accused of sexually abusing a number of girls. Despite ongoing allegations of abuse and neglect, no formal action was taken against him for another nine years.101 One sample study found evidence that 9% of the girls and 15% of the boys sent out by Barnardo were the victims of excessive punishment.102 It also noted that 11% of the girls became pregnant while under the authority of the Barnardo agency.103 The link between the work of the industrial schools for the children of the urban ‘dangerous’ classes and the residential schools for First Nations was made explicit by the Anglican missionary E. F. Wilson, who was the founding principal of the Shingwauk residential school in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. His stated goal was “simply to do the same for the Indian children of Canada that Dr. Barnardo has been doing for the street children of London and other English cities.”104
The strongest criticism of the industrial schools came from Toronto journalist J. J. Kelso. The organizer of the Toronto Humane Society, a forerunner of children’s aid societies (CAS), Kelso opposed institutions because they did not allow “the ordinary joys of childhood and the endearments of home ties.”105 It was his preference to place neglected children in family settings. As the CAS model gained favour, funding for the Victoria Industrial School, which was always modest, went into decline.106 Due to Kelso’s efforts, by 1907, there were over sixty children’s aid societies in Ontario. In large measure, the institutional approach had been abandoned in favour of providing care in a family setting.107
The children’s aid societies, which were intended to be alternatives to institutions such as industrial schools, engaged in their own form of institutionalization. When the Ontario societies apprehended a child in the 1890s, they were supposed to house them in a shelter prior to placing them with a foster family. Ideally, the shelter would have a workshop in which boys could learn manual trades, a sewing room for girls, and a small garden where they could learn agricultural skills. Many did not live up to the ideal. Some—locked and barred to prevent escape—more closely resembled jails. In at least one case, the medical health officer and staff inspector of the police in Toronto noted that a shelter was overcrowded and had poor sanitation.108 Despite these limitations, the CAS model had come to dominate child welfare by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Residential schooling was now reserved largely for Aboriginal children.