Although education is identified as a provincial responsibility under the division of powers in the Canadian federation, it was the federal government, operating under the provisions of the British North America Act, that took responsibility for First Nations and, much later, Inuit education.
While most provincial and territorial governments eventually adopted specific acts with detailed policies for education and schools, the federal government chose to address First Nations education through the Indian Act and the legislation that preceded it. The 1869 Act for the gradual enfranchisement of Indians contained a provision that allowed band councils to frame rules and regulations for “the construction of and maintaining in repair of school houses, council houses and other Indian public buildings.” Before they could be put into effect, those rules and regulations required the approval of the federal government.1 Adopted into the 1876 Indian Act, this was the Act’s first significant educational provision. An 1880 amendment allowed bands to select the religious denomination of schoolteachers. There was a significant restriction on this provision: the teacher had to be of the same Christian faith as the majority of the band members. The amendment also provided that members of the minority Christian faith, be they “Catholic or Protestant,” had the right to establish their own school.2 A decision to establish a school for those on the reserve who were members of a non-dominant Christian faith and a decision on the faith of the teacher were both subject to federal government approval.
The Indian Affairs annual report for 1870 listed only two residential schools in operation, both in Ontario: Mount Elgin at Muncey, with mechanical arts taught in workshops paid for by “Indian funds”; and the Mohawk Institute near Brantford. Mount Elgin, with thirty-four students, was reported as being funded by the Wesleyan Missionary Society, and the Mohawk Institute, which had ninety students, by the New England Company. There were approximately thirty-five day schools in Ontario, eight in Québec, three in Nova Scotia, and one in New Brunswick.3
The government had also begun to support day schools for First Nations children in the West. In 1880, there were nineteen Indian schools in Manitoba and Keewatin (the Keewatin District was established as a separate political district in 1876, and included much of what is now northern Manitoba, northwestern Ontario, and Nunavut), and nineteen in the North-West Territories, each funded to a maximum of $300 a year by the federal government.4 Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs Lawrence Vankoughnet outlined the government’s responsibilities to fund First Nations education in an 1882 memorandum to Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald. (In addition to being prime minister, Macdonald was also the minister responsible for Indian Affairs.) Vankoughnet took the position that while the Treaties said the government was bound to maintain schools, it did not have to construct them. Furthermore, in his view, maintenance did not include salaries for teachers or school supplies. By 1882, the government was prepared to contribute $100 towards school construction if the First Nation cut the logs and put up the walls. Often, this was not necessary because missionaries had already constructed a school. Vankoughnet noted that in the future the government might consider erecting schools on reserves, but these should be as inexpensive as possible, “compatible with comfort and convenience.”5
Attendance at day schools was a constant concern. Vankoughnet reported in 1878:
The difficulties attendant on the successful management of the Indian schools appear to me to be caused by:—1st. The irregular attendance of the children arising from the indifference and nomadic habits of the parents, and often from want of proper clothing. 2nd. The general lack of interest on the part of the teachers in their work, as well as of knowledge of the two languages, English and Indian. If, however, they possessed the first qualification, the matter might be readily acquired.6
Day schools on First Nations reserves were not the only schools in Canada with irregular attendance during this period. In 1880, over 20% of the school-aged children in Canada as a whole were not enrolled in school. The daily attendance of those enrolled in Ontario was 45.8% in that year—in all likelihood, a sign that many of the older enrolled children were not attending at all.7 Local school officials often attributed the non-attendance of these non-Aboriginal children to the indifference of their parents. In reality, many parents needed children to help out on the farm or at home, many of the jobs of the period did not require a significant level of education, and both parents and children recognized that the focus of the curriculum of the day met the needs only of the limited number of children who were expected to go on to secondary education and university. Even parents who wished to see their children gain access to the benefits of education sometimes found it necessary to withdraw them from school to help the family meet immediate economic challenges.8
In addition to Mount Elgin and the Mohawk Institute, by the late 1870s there was also a growing number of church-run boarding schools. In Ontario, the Anglican Shingwauk Home at Sault Ste. Marie opened in 1873, and the Roman Catholics began taking in boarders at their Wikwemikong boys’ and girls’ schools on Manitoulin Island in 1878.9 There were also Roman Catholic schools at St. Albert, Fort Chipewyan, Lac La Biche, and Fort Providence in the Northwest. In British Columbia, by the early 1880s there was the Anglican school at Metlakatla, the Methodist school at Fort Simpson (later Port Simpson), and a Roman Catholic school at what was then called “St. Mary’s Mission.”10 In 1877, the federal government had agreed to provide a grant of $300 a year to the schools at St. Albert and Lac La Biche.11 In 1882, Prime Minister Macdonald, echoing Vankoughnet, wrote that although the day schools in the North-West were suffering from poor attendance, due to the “indifference of the parents,” and from “incompetent” teachers, as a result of the remoteness of the schools, the residential industrial schools of eastern Canada had “improved greatly during the last four or five years.”12
In December 1878, J. S. Dennis, the deputy minister of the Department of the Interior, prepared a memorandum for Prime Minister Macdonald on the country’s Indian policy. Macdonald and the Conservatives had regained power in the September 1878 federal election, after spending five years in opposition. Their proposed National Policy had been the centrepiece of the Conservative election platform: high tariffs to protect Canadian manufacturing from foreign competition, the construction of a continental railway, and the settling of the Prairies with immigrant farmers. Dennis, a surveyor by training, had his own history with the Prairie West, having been run out of Red River by Louis Riel in 1869.13
Dennis advised Macdonald that the long-term goal of Canadian Indian policy should be to instruct “our Indian and half-breed populations” in farming, raising cattle, and the mechanical trades, rendering them self-sufficient and “thus paving the way for their emancipation from tribal government, and for their final absorption into the general community.” It would be the end of a separate Aboriginal identity and government. This outcome could be achieved “only” through the establishment of industrial schools:
One or two such schools, established at convenient points in the Territories, where a certain number of young Indians and half-breeds, intelligent and willing, selected from the different tribes or bands, would be taught some practical farming; some the care of stock, and others the various more useful trades—would prove most powerful aids to the Government, both morally and materially, in their efforts to improve the condition of those people, and to gradually lead them to a state of civilization. The expense of such schools would be trifling compared with the value of the results which would be obtained from them.
It was his opinion that “in a short time they might, by good management, be rendered, to a considerable extent, self-sustaining institutions.”14
From its outset, Indian residential schooling was linked to broad Canadian policy objectives, and constituted a rarely mentioned part of the National Policy. The colonization of eastern Canada by the French and then the English had been undertaken in a relatively slow fashion, without widespread use of residential schools. In the 1840s, after seeing industrial schools in operation in Europe, Egerton Ryerson, the newly appointed superintendent of schools for Upper Canada, recommended the establishment of residential schools for Aboriginal children. Efforts to establish such schools, however, had largely been rejected by Aboriginal people and judged as failures by government. The colonization of the North-West was projected to take place at a much faster pace. As a result, this failed policy initiative of residential schooling was revived and applied with renewed vigour.
The development of a new school system was a matter of some urgency, given the failure of the buffalo hunt. Dennis feared that unless they were trained, First Nations people and “the nomadic element among the half-breed population” were likely to be “a very serious charge indeed upon the Government.” American-style industrial schools were seen as the “most available means of teaching these people self-reliance,” but the government needed more information on the costs and effectiveness of the American system.15
In January 1879, the federal government commissioned defeated Conservative party candidate Nicholas Flood Davin to conduct a one-person inquiry into the US boarding-school system to see if such a system was appropriate for the Canadian Northwest. Davin had immigrated to Canada from Ireland in 1872, and although he qualified for the bar in 1876, he devoted most of his energy to journalism and laying the groundwork for a career as a politician. In September 1878, he came within 166 votes of being elected as a Conservative member of parliament. There was nothing in his background to suggest he had any direct involvement with Aboriginal people or the Canadian Northwest. However, he and his supporters subjected Sir John A. Macdonald to a barrage of letters lobbying for his appointment to a government position. This campaign resulted in his being appointed in January 1879 to prepare the report on US boarding schools.16
Davin made quick work of the assignment and turned in his report on March 14, 1879. It was not a particularly thorough analysis. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania—the first large-scale, off-reservation, boarding school in the US—did not open until later that year. As a result, it received no attention in his report. Instead, Davin travelled to Washington, where he met with officials who briefed him on the history and economics of the US boarding schools, which he referred to in his report as “industrial schools.”
Davin observed that the United States government had concluded that adult Native Americans could not be assimilated.
Little can be done with him. He can be taught to do a little at farming, and at stock-raising, and to dress in a more civilized manner, but that is all. The child, again, who goes to a day school learns little, and what little he learns is soon forgotten, while his tastes are fashioned at home, and his inherited aversion to toil is in no way combated.17
Similarly, day schools were judged ineffective “because the influence of the wigwam was stronger than the influence of the school. Industrial Boarding Schools were therefore established, and these are now numerous and will soon be universal.”18
Davin observed that while the long-term goal was to make the schools self-supporting, in the meantime, in its contracts for church-administered facilities, the US government provided $125 per capita for schools with enrolments of thirty or less, $100 for those with more than thirty, and an even lower amount “when the school is of considerable size.”19 The average per capita cost of government-run schools was $100.20 The more inexpensive of the US schools cost about $1,000 to erect, and Davin calculated that, given the supply of timber in Canada, such schools could be built for $800. The lower figure suggests that Davin knew little about timber supplies on the Canadian Prairies.21
While in Washington, Davin also met with representatives of the Cherokees, the Chickasaws, the Choctaws, the Creeks, and the Seminoles, a group of nations often referred to as the “Five Civilized Nations.” Originally from the eastern United States, they had been transferred, against their will, to the western territory. Davin was much impressed by reports of the progress they were making in agriculture and education, noting that they “have their own schools; a code of their own; a judiciary; a national council which enacts laws; newspapers in the native dialect and in English.” They were, in effect, “five little republics within the Republic.”22 He mentioned they were in Washington to observe the debate on a number of “Indian Bills.” Davin failed to mention that these bills were part of an ongoing legislative campaign to open up to settlement the territory to which they had been relocated and to destroy the self-government of which Davin was so admiring.23 Davin reported that the men from the Five Civilized Nations—none of whom, he noted, was “of pure Indian blood”—claimed that separating children from their parents was the only way of dealing with education for the “less civilized or wholly barbarous tribes.”24
Davin did not, however, visit the Hampton school in Virginia or any of the boarding schools of the five nations. The only school he visited was on the White Earth Agency in Minnesota, which was on the way to the one community he visited in the Canadian Northwest: Winnipeg. Davin’s report provides an extensive summary of the Indian agent at the White Earth Agency, whom Davin deemed to know “the Indian character well,” but no summary was provided of the views of the principal or the missionary, both of whom were of at least partial Native American ancestry.25 Davin devoted only half a sentence to describing the White Earth school—noting that the dormitory was plain but comfortable. Another half-sentence—an observation that the children looked well fed—was given over to food and nutrition. Education was dispensed with in two sentences: the school was “well attended, and the answering of the children creditable,” with the “quickest and brightest” being “mixed-bloods.” The superiority of “mixed” as opposed to “full-blooded” Indigenous people was an ongoing theme in Davin’s short report, leading to his conclusion that the person of mixed ancestry was the “natural mediator between the Government and the red man, and also his natural instructor.”26
In Winnipeg, he met with “leading men who could speak with authority on the subject,” including James McKay (a former Treaty commissioner and former Manitoba cabinet minister), Bishop Alexandre-Antonin Taché, and Father Albert Lacombe. McKay, whose mother was Métis and whose father was a Scottish-born trader, was the only Aboriginal person with whom Davin had been instructed to consult. Davin felt that the discontent he found in the local First Nations people he spoke with was “no more than the chronic querulousness of the Indian character.” The exceptions were the leaders of those bands “without a certain prospect of food in the future.”27 Davin certainly saw no need to provide the First Nations of the West with any input into the sorts of schools that were established, let alone give them the type of control that the Five Civilized Nations exercised in the United States. He thought it had been an error and an affront to Canada’s dignity to have included schools in the Treaties, since “it should have been assumed that government would attend to its proper and pressing business in this important issue.” More importantly, by including education in the Treaties, Davin thought the government had mistakenly given First Nations leaders such as Henry Prince in Manitoba the belief that they “had some right to a voice regarding the character and management of the schools as well as regarding the initiatory step of their establishment.” These decisions should be made by government, he thought, and not according to the “designing predilections of a Chief.”28 Chief Prince would eventually come into conflict with the government over its residential school policies.
Davin believed he was writing at a moment of crisis. There were 28,000 First Nations people in the area covered by Treaty. There was “barely time to inaugurate a system of education by means of which the native peoples of the North-West shall be gradually prepared to meet the necessities of the not distant future; to welcome and facilitate, it may be hoped, the settlement of the country; and to render its government easy and not expensive.”29 Making use of crude generalizations, Davin argued that First Nations people had no option but to be colonized. “The Indian himself is a noble type of man,” but, Davin argued, he was in a “very early stage of development,” and his temperament was “lymphatic” (meaning “lacking in energy”), while the Anglo-Celt was “nervous or nervo-sanguine,” possessing “great staying power, often highly intellectual, vigorous, of quick perception, and large resource.”30 It was clear to Davin which people would prevail in the Northwest. Residential schooling was, in his mind, an essential part of that process.
Davin believed it would be impossible to educate and civilize most adult Aboriginal people, who had “the suspicion, distrust, fault-finding tendency, the insincerity and flattery produced in all subject races.”31 He insisted that Aboriginal people were not children and should not be treated as children. However, his description as to how they should be treated—with “firm, bold, kindly handling and boundless patience”—does sound like the advice one would find at the time on how to treat a child.32
He believed the focus had to be on raising the children away from the parents, and that “if anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young.” Once caught, they were to be “kept constantly within the circle of civilized conditions,” which, in his opinion, required boarding schools.33 Were it not for the fact that many of the First Nations and Métis populations of the Northwest were still migratory, Davin would have recommended “an extensive application of the principle of industrial boarding schools.”34 Instead, he recommended an extension of support for the church-run schools, which he described as “monuments of religious zeal and heroic self-sacrifice.” These schools had the additional virtue, in his eyes, of being economical, since they recruit “an enthusiastic person, with, therefore, a motive power beyond anything pecuniary remuneration could supply.”35 Davin acknowledged that a central element of the education to be provided would be the destruction of Aboriginal spirituality. Since all civilizations were based on religion, it would be inexcusable, he thought, to do away with Aboriginal faith “without supplying a better.”36
Other than calling on the government to continue, and expand, its support of existing boarding schools, Davin’s major recommendation was the establishment of not more than four industrial schools, to be operated by the churches. His suggested locations were Prince Albert (Anglican), Old Bow Fort (Methodist), Qu’Appelle (Roman Catholic), and Riding Mountain (Presbyterian). If the government were to establish more than four schools, the fifth should be at St. Peter’s in Manitoba.37
He did not recommend the immediate imposition of compulsory attendance, but he did recommend that such a measure be introduced “as Bands become more amenable to the restraints of civilization.” He saw the churches as being able to tap a zealous supply of cheap labour, yet he recognized that salaries must be sufficient to “induce good men to offer themselves,” with teachers to be paid according to their qualifications.38 Davin also made it clear he thought the schools should be open to both sexes. Talented boys and girls should be given the opportunity to train as teachers, civil servants, business people, and professionals.
He did make clear distinctions between First Nations people and Métis people. Davin made a strong case for providing residential schooling to children of the 1,200 Métis families he estimated to be living in the North-West. He thought they had “in high development many of those virtues which would make a useful official,” but their current skills were not enough. They “must be educated, and become susceptible to the bracing influences of complex wants and varied ambitions.”39
The recommendations in Davin’s report were not implemented for nearly four years. One of the reasons for the delay was the growing crisis created by the collapse of the buffalo hunt. In the spring of 1879, David Laird, the lieutenant-governor of the North-West Territories, questioned whether the benefits of industrial schools would be equal to their cost. In any case, he said, there were more immediate concerns. In order to avert starvation among the “Indians and half-breeds,” he thought, money for industrial schools could be better used to hire “a few practical men” who could teach Aboriginal people “how to plough, sow, and save their crops.”40
Archbishop Taché of St. Boniface had reservations about residential schooling. In an 1879 memorandum to Deputy Minister of the Interior J. S. Dennis on the “half-breed question,” Taché wrote that “the establishment of industrial schools for boys would necessitate a large expenditure of money without securing the desired result. The half-breeds are very handy, ingenious, good working men, and in many ways more skillful than most of the farmers of other countries.” Not only was such training unneeded, but he also doubted that their children “would remain long under such tuition.” He thought there was a need for industrial schools for girls, since “females brought up on the plains have no training whatsoever for the different industries required in a farmer’s house.”41
Bishop Vital Grandin of St. Albert (near present-day Edmonton) led the campaign for residential schooling. Convinced that Aboriginal people faced extinction, and doubtful that adult hunters and trappers could be transformed successfully into farmers, he argued in an 1880 letter to Public Works Minister Hector Langevin that “the only efficient means of saving them from destruction and civilizing the Indians of the N.W. is to begin with the young children, all other expenses incurred for this end will be nearly a dead loss.” Day schools could do good work, but the
young Indian living with his family will never attend regularly & if in spite of this he learns to read and write he will nevertheless live like his father by hunting and fishing only he will remain an Indian. To become civilized they should be taken with the consent of their parents & made to lead a life different from their parents and cause them to forget the customs, habits & language of their ancestors.
Grandin was convinced that parents would willingly give their children to boarding schools. “The poor Indians wish nothing more than the happiness of their children. They foresee well enough the future which awaits them and often beg of us to take them so that we can prepare them for a better prospect.”42 In a letter to Prime Minister Macdonald in 1880, Grandin stressed the success that had been achieved at the missionary boarding schools, and reported, “The children whom we have brought up are no longer Indians & at the time of leaving our Establishments, the boys at least, do not wish to receive even the ordinary grants made to Indians, they wish to live like the whites and they are able to do so.” Given these successes, he proposed that the government “make a trial of letting us have children of five years old and leaving them in our Orphan Asylums & Industrial schools until the time of their marriage or the age of 21 years.”43
Grandin’s position came to dominate Catholic thinking, and, by early 1883, he was in Ottawa to lobby federal politicians directly.44 In February of that year, the Archbishop of Québec wrote to Macdonald on behalf of Grandin, who, he said, held
with profound grief the distress of these unfortunate people deprived of their hunting grounds by the encroachments of the Pale faces and the sufferings which are the consequence and which threaten to dessemenate [sic] and even to entirely destroy them. The only means one can see of preventing or at least delaying these fatal results is to labor to civilize their children and young men by accustoming them either to work the land or to learn a trade.
The Archbishop urged Macdonald to support the Oblates’ efforts by committing the government to funding schools, workshops, and farms “under the management of their zealous Missionaries.”45
In April 1883, Edgar Dewdney, the lieutenant-governor and Indian commissioner for the North-West Territories, wrote to Macdonald that “the time has arrived” when industrial schooling “might be carried on with great advantage to the Indians.” The evidence showed that such schools had “met with great success both in the United States and the older Provinces of Canada.” He recommended that one school be located on the North Saskatchewan River, one at Qu’Appelle, and one in Treaty 7 territory, in what is now southern Alberta. The former lieutenant-governor’s residence at Battleford could be put to immediate use, and new buildings would have to be constructed at the other locations. He recommended that a considerable area of land be attached to each school and that a farmer be engaged to “take charge of that part of the education of the pupils. By this means I think the Institutions might be made to some extent self-supporting.” Quoting Davin’s report, he stressed the advantages—including the economic savings—of having the churches supply the staff.
He estimated the Qu’Appelle school would cost $6,000 to construct. He sketched out the following budget for an operational residential school:
| Principal | $1,200 |
| Assistant | $800 |
| Matron | $400 |
| Farmer ($60 per month) | $720 |
| Cook | $240 |
| $3,360 | |
| Food and clothing for 30 children | $4,500 |
| Furniture and general equipment | $2,000 |
| $6,500 |
On this basis, he recommended that $43,000 be added to the Indian Affairs budget for the 1883–84 year. This would provide $12,000 to construct the Qu’Appelle and what would become the High River schools, $1,000 to refit the Battleford school, and $10,000 to operate each school.46
In large measure, most of the administrative costs of the Department of Indian Affairs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained as they had been since before Confederation, covered with money from the sale of First Nations land and from the sale of seized timber that had been illegally cut on First Nations land. Funding for industrial schools, however, would have to come from Parliament.47 In the spring of 1883, Public Works Minister Hector Langevin presented a budget to the House of Commons, based on Dewdney’s estimates. He argued that
if you wish to educate these children you must separate them from their parents during the time that they are being educated. If you leave them in the family they may know how to read and write, but they still remain savages, whereas by separating them in the way proposed, they acquire the habits and tastes—it is to be hoped only the good tastes—of civilized people.48
Parliament approved $43,000 in spending for the establishment of three new industrial schools.49 This decision was made at the same time as the federal government was reducing its spending on relief for First Nations in the West.
In July, the federal Cabinet adopted an Order-in-Council authorizing the establishment of three industrial schools. The Battleford school was to be located in the former residence of the lieutenant-governor to the North-West Territories (Dewdney’s former residence), and its religious orientation was to be Protestant. Anglican minister Thomas Clarke was to be principal, and his salary was to be $1,200 a year. When a sufficient number of students were recruited, some were to be taught trades other than agriculture, the two most likely being carpentry and blacksmithing. Dewdney was in charge of deciding where students came from, whether “one tribe, or differently from all the bands in a given area.” The other two schools were to be located in Qu’Appelle and in Treaty 7 territory. Archbishop Taché of St. Boniface was authorized to appoint the principal of the Qu’Appelle school and Bishop Grandin of St. Albert was to appoint the Treaty 7 principal. The Catholics were advised to seek out a person “possessed not only of erudition but of administrative ability.” Dewdney was to oversee the construction of the Qu’Appelle school, the cost of which was not to exceed $6,000. The Qu’Appelle school was to have the same staff complement as the Battleford school. Dewdney was advised to be guided by Davin’s report in establishing the residential schools.50
The Battleford school opened on December 1, 1883. It was the beginning of a new era in Canadian residential schooling. Before then, most of the initiative for residential schooling had come from the churches. They had built the schools, hired the staff, recruited the students, and made and enforced most of the policy. The federal government had limited itself to providing grants of usually no more than $300 a year. But, by establishing the three industrial schools in the North-West, the government was accepting responsibility for the creation of a system of residential schools. The schools were created on the basis of a government-commissioned report, and were intended to meet government policy goals, not those of the churches. And, while administered by the churches, the new schools were fully funded by the government. The system grew rapidly. By 1900, there were twenty-two industrial schools and thirty-nine boarding schools.51 In the twentieth century, the distinction between the two types of schools was abandoned and, by the 1920s, they were all called “residential schools.” The system remained in operation for another seventy years, until the mid-1990s.
Throughout its long history, the residential school system constituted an attack on the identity and vitality of Aboriginal children, Aboriginal families, Aboriginal languages, culture, and spirituality, and Aboriginal nations. As official records show, these impacts were not unfortunate by-products of a well-intentioned system. On the contrary, they were the predetermined and desired outcomes built right into the system from the outset.
The attack on Aboriginal children was the most obvious and grievous failing of the residential school system. For children, life in the schools was lonely and alien. Supervision was limited, life was highly regimented, and buildings were poorly located, poorly built, and poorly maintained. The staff was limited in numbers, often poorly trained, and not adequately supervised. The schools often were poorly heated and poorly ventilated, the diet was meagre and of poor quality, and the discipline was harsh. Aboriginal culture was disdained and languages were suppressed. The educational goals of the schools were limited and confused, and usually reflected a low regard for the intellectual capabilities of Aboriginal people. For the students, education and mechanical training too often gave way to the drudgery of doing the chores necessary to make the schools self-sustaining—a fantasy that government officials indulged in for over a half-century. Child neglect was institutionalized, and the lack of supervision created situations where students were prey to sexual and physical abuse.
These things did not just happen: they were the result of government decisions. In July 1883, Prime Minister Macdonald wrote to Public Works Minister Langevin that the two Roman Catholic schools were to be “of the simplest & cheapest construction.” Macdonald thought that in two or three years’ time, the cost of building materials would have dropped to the point where the government could authorize “permanent buildings in brick.” In reality, once buildings were constructed, they often continued in operation until they burned or fell down.52 Dewdney closed his July 1883 letter of instructions to Battleford principal Thomas Clarke with the message, “I need scarcely inform you that the strictest economy must be practised in all particulars.”53 Problems soon arose from placing the Battleford school in what had once been a private residence, a decision intended to save money. In June 1884, Principal Clarke reported that “the need of having a good supply of water near the Institution is daily becoming more urgent.” The closest water supply was from the river, which was almost a kilometre away at the bottom of a steep hill.54
Even more serious were the high mortality rates associated with the schools. In October 1884, F. Bourne, a missionary on the Blood Reserve, raised objections to sending students to schools that were distant from their homes, because “from many years experience I find that often when thus treated, they die or pine from sheer home sickness.”55 Health problems led to problems in recruiting students. In 1886, the Indian agent at Onion Lake reported that, despite his requests, parents had refused to send their children to Battleford. They “did not like the way the boys were treated that had been sent there & that one died soon after & the other had been expelled on account of being a bad boy.”56 The “half-day system,” which meant students worked for half the day, and which Dennis, Davin, and Dewdney all believed would render the system self-supporting, came close to turning the schools into child labour camps. In 1898, very few of the students at the Brandon school could “attend school throughout the whole day, owing to the duties claiming their attention here and there about the farm.”57 Hayter Reed was highly critical of Mount Elgin and the Mohawk Institute, where older students spent two-thirds of the day in class. He wrote, “I cannot approve [of this system]; since, in my opinion, unless it be intended to train children to earn their bread by brain-work, rather than by manual labour, at least half of their day should be devoted to acquiring skill in the latter.”58 Aboriginal children were being educated to fill positions at the bottom of the labour market.
It was not until 1889 that Indian Affairs officials recognized that “it would be well to have a code of Regulations, with which the Church authorities should be asked to comply, in obtaining children for their Schools, and in applying for the Grant.”59 Despite this belated recognition, no such code was developed at that time. In 1897, when a former school employee complained that the principal of the Rupert’s Land school in Manitoba was taking liberties with female students, Indian Commissioner Amédée Forget conducted a brief inspection, which led him to conclude that while it might have been imprudent, there was no reason to believe there were any criminal intentions in the principal’s behaviour. It would be another year before a different commissioner reacted to fresh complaints by firing the principal.60
In establishing residential schools, the Canadian government was essentially declaring Aboriginal people as a class unfit to be parents. Aboriginal parents often were labelled as being indifferent to the future of their children—a judgment contradicted by the fact that they often kept their children out of schools because they saw those schools, quite accurately, as dangerous and harsh institutions that sought to raise their children in alien ways. Once in the schools, brothers and sisters were kept apart, and the government and churches even arranged marriages for students after they finished their education.
Government officials and missionaries believed that children would grow up to be pagan, uncivilized, and lazy if they were left with their parents. While some, like Bishop Grandin, believed Aboriginal parents cared deeply about their children and would therefore surrender them to off-reserve schools, others charged that Aboriginal parents were at best indifferent and most likely to be a danger to the future of their children. When education was provided at day schools, Davin claimed, the “influence of the wigwam”—meaning the influence of the parents—“was stronger than the influence of the school.”61 In 1889, Dewdney, by then Indian Affairs minister, boasted, “The boarding school dissociates the Indian child from the deleterious home influences to which he would be otherwise subjected. It reclaims him from the uncivilized state in which he has been brought up.”62 Five years later, his successor, Hayter Reed, said, “The extension of educational work is being chiefly carried out in the direction of industrial and semi-industrial institutions, in which the children not only get the positive advantages of instruction superior to what could be given them on the reserves, but are removed from the retarding influences of contact with them.”63
In 1898, Indian Affairs school inspector T. P Wadsworth wrote, “It is from the children of graduates, that I expect to see the fruit of the system. But little permanent impression can be made on the child of a buffalo hunter, one who has heard from his parents’ lips, the fine times they enjoyed in the buffalo hunting, horse stealing, Indian wars, days.”64 Perhaps the most definitive expression of the rationale behind the war on Aboriginal families came from Prime Minister Macdonald, who told the House of Commons in 1883:
When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed on myself, as the head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.65
The residential school system was based on a racist assumption that European civilization and the Christian religion were superior to Aboriginal culture, which was seen as being savage and brutal. Government officials also were insistent that children be discouraged—and often prohibited—from speaking their own languages. Some missionaries who had been instructed to learn Aboriginal languages could be somewhat more tolerant of language use in the schools, at least in religious instruction. Indeed, the Bible had been translated into some Aboriginal languages by missionary linguists. Through this, some missionaries actually helped to maintain Aboriginal languages, but in ways that further undermined Aboriginal spirituality. The missionaries who ran the schools played prominent roles in the church-led campaigns to ban Aboriginal spiritual practices such as the Potlatch and the Sun Dance (more properly called the “Thirst Dance”), and to end traditional Aboriginal marriage practices. Although, in most of their official pronouncements, government and church officials took the position that Aboriginal people could be civilized, it is clear that many believed that Aboriginal people were inherently inferior.
The refusal to accept the legitimacy of Aboriginal culture as constituting a valid civilization is reflected in Davin’s claim that residential schools were required if children were to be “kept constantly within the circle of civilized conditions.” Dewdney recycled this language in his annual report for 1883: “we must take charge of the youth and keep him constantly within the circle of civilization.”66 Both Davin and Dewdney argued that education would make Aboriginal people self-sufficient, but they also expressed racist views in the way they perceived Aboriginal people’s natural abilities. In the same 1883 annual report, Dewdney repeated Davin’s claim that Aboriginal people had “inherited aversion to toil.” Dewdney’s only change was to substitute the word “labour” for “toil.”67 To overcome this supposed aversion to toil, the schools were operated on a highly regimented system that equated labour with spiritual grace. The program of studies the government issued in the mid-1890s stressed, “Every effort must be made to induce pupils to speak English, and to teach them to understand it; unless they do the whole work of the teacher is likely to be wasted.”68
Indian agents regularly reported on the religious status of communities, viewing the growth of Christianity as a sign of progress. Of the Gordon’s Reserve, Indian agent S. Swinford commented, “The old and middle-aged still cling to their old beliefs and the younger people do not take any interest in religion of any kind; the young children growing up at schools will in all probability incline towards Christianity, and their children will not know anything about their grandparents’ beliefs.”69
The missionary scorn for Aboriginal culture was palpable at times. William Ridley, the Anglican Bishop of Caledonia, saw the poverty of a First Nations community as a reflection of the people’s ‘spiritual failing.’
The houses are rotting, propped up, and patched. Squalid within and dismal without, they truly show the moral and physical condition of their ignorant and superstitious inhabitants. These cling with a passionate resolve to the yaok [a term that is not defined in the original document], or potlatch. ‘That is our mountain,’ say they, ‘our only joy, dearer than life. To prison and death we will go rather than yield.’ Yet this is their ruin. It is impossible to heighten the contrast between the Christless and the Christian people of the same tribes.70
The Bishop of Keewatin in 1908 said that if Indians lacked the moral stamina to compete with whites, they were doomed. Bishop Jervois Newnham of Saskatchewan questioned the intellectual capacity of Aboriginal people.71
In British Columbia, the Oblate Nicolas Coccola viewed the Babine people as congenital liars, recording in his memoirs that “of them we may say, ‘You lie like an Indian.’”72 In 1903, Qu’Appelle school principal Joseph Hugonnard, who had been in office since 1884, called on the federal government to eliminate the “pagan habits, customs, superstitions and mode of life,” that still held sway on the reserve. These “habits and customs,” he wrote, “must be eradicated, or at least suppressed.” He challenged those who might think this harsh to visit a dance where they could see former students “nearly nude, painted and decked out in feathers and beads, dancing like demented individuals and indulging in all kinds of debauchery.” In his opinion, Indian Affairs must adopt a strong uniform policy, “totally prohibiting dancing and its attendant pow-wows.”73
Residential schools were an essential element in the federal government’s policy of using enfranchisement to eliminate Aboriginal governments and its own responsibilities to Aboriginal people. It was conceived of, and implemented by, the same people who confined Aboriginal people to reserves, declined to fulfill Treaty obligations, outlawed cultural practices, and, in 1885, had either executed or jailed many of the Prairies’ First Nations leaders.
The missionaries quite consciously saw themselves in a struggle to overcome a sense of national identity among Aboriginal people. In 1882, Sister M. U. Charlebois, assistant to the mother superior of the Sisters of Charity of the General Hospital in Montréal, petitioned Macdonald for an increase in support for the schools her religious order was running in the Northwest. In her letter, Charlebois spoke of the battle the order was waging against “national prejudices” against residential schooling. “Ignorant themselves, the Indians depreciate the benefits of education—lazy and indolent, they despise labor—loving their children as the wild animal does its young, they are loth [sic] to entrust them to strangers, while the little ones reared to roam free could ill bear restraint.”74 In 1903, the Church Missionary Society (CMS), in one of its resolutions on the “Administration of the North-West Canada Missions,” observed, quoting long-time CMS secretary Henry Venn, that “although the Indian tribes are but remains of nations, they are living remains.”75
The goal of the nation’s Aboriginal policy in 1878 was to clear “the way for their emancipation from tribal government, and for their final absorption into the general community.” Deputy Minister Dennis believed that the road to his goal would be paved by residential school graduates.76
If adult First Nations people were not prepared to be enfranchised, the government anticipated that former students, who had been raised and educated in a new culture and language, and kept away from their homes, would choose not to return to their reserves, but to assimilate with the white population. Prime Minister Macdonald said as much when, during a debate on the future of the Mi’kmaq of the Maritimes, he told the House of Commons that while they were “improving by slow degrees,” he feared “that in a few generations they will have disappeared altogether or be absorbed by the white population.”77 The industrial schools were established without consultation with parents. As has been noted, Davin thought that even including education in the numbered Treaties had been a mistake. In drafting his report on the need for such schools in Canada, he never spoke to any students in the United States.78 Indeed, in his 1883 annual report, Macdonald acknowledged that the government was aware it was introducing a form of education that Aboriginal people did not support. “The Indians,” he wrote, “show a reluctance to have their children separated from them.” He expected that initially the schools would be filled with “orphans and children who have no natural protectors.”79 In 1891, the government rejected a suggestion from Anglican Church officials that it provide “leading Indians on Reserves” with the details of vacation and discharge policy. Deputy Minister Hayter Reed explained he would make all school regulations known to “Agents, Church authorities, and Teachers, but so far as Indians are concerned, I think it will be best to deal with them, in so far as matters, such as the one now under consideration, are concerned, individually, as each case presents itself.”80 And, if those leaders thought to make trouble, the children attending residential schools would serve as hostages. One year after the 1885 rebellion, school inspector Andsell Macrae commented that “it is unlikely that any Tribe or Tribes would give trouble of a serious nature to the Government whose members had children completely under Government control.”81 This is the sort of coercive and threatening language that would be used to describe a colonial educational system. It reminds us that Canada’s national policy on Aboriginal education was at heart a colonial policy.