Forty years of haphazard policy: 1899–1937
Clifford Sifton’s memorandum of 1899, which allowed the admission of students who did not have status under the Indian Act to residential schools, was often cited by Indian Affairs officials as the basis of the departmental policy on this issue. However, the policy was never clear and its implementation was far from consistent. A constant tension existed within government between a desire to control costs and a desire to control a perceived social menace. The first impulse favoured a restricted admissions policy; the second, a more open policy. The churches, struggling with difficulties in recruiting sufficient numbers of students, often viewed the enrolment of children of mixed descent as a way to fill their schools. In some cases, they were able to charge Métis parents a fee. In other cases, provincial governments paid them to accept students; and in yet others, the churches succeeded in having the federal government agree to pay for the education of non-status children.
Sifton’s policy was not officially reversed until 1937, but there were times during this period when the federal government sought to reduce the enrolment of non-status children. Despite this, it is clear that during this period, Métis children were attending residential schools throughout the country. For example, in 1900, Indian Commissioner David Laird complained that Principal James Dagg “began rushing children into the Rupert’s Land School with little regard as to whether they belonged to Treaty Indian families or not.” Many of the students enrolled were not, in Laird’s opinion, “entitled to the privilege.”1
In 1905, the sister superior of the Roman Catholic school at Kenora, Ontario, asked Indian Affairs to provide grants to cover the expenses related to two “half-breed” orphan girls the church had admitted to the school “for charity’s sake.” The department turned down the request. The following year, Indian Affairs education official Martin Benson suggested that since the school’s permitted enrolment had been increased from thirty to forty and the number had not been met, the department should consider providing a grant, on the condition that it should not be viewed as a precedent.2 In January 1907, the department decided to receive the two children into Treaty, making them eligible for per capita support.3 In explaining the decision in a memorandum to his minister, department official Duncan Campbell Scott wrote, “I have been accustomed to deal with cases of this nature upon grounds of humanity and expediency, rather than rules or regulations laid down by law, written or unwritten.” He recommended that the children in question not only be accepted into the school, but also that they be taken into Treaty and made grant-earning students.4
Into the twentieth century, Onion Lake principal John Matheson continued to seek funding for “a large number of half-breeds and non-treaty children.” He had been keeping them in the school at his own expense, but was having “difficulty in filling up his school with Indian children.” The Indian commissioner ruled them not to be grant-earning students, saying that most of them were “orphans, children of Indian mothers by white or half-breed fathers, who deserted them. Mr Matheson says they are waifs and outcasts among the Indians and have none to care or provide for them and unless some institution takes them up they will undoubtedly form part of our criminal class.” They were also “living on the reserve and brought up as Indians.”5
By 1909, the High River, Alberta, school had a $1,500 deficit and was home to fifteen students who were not eligible for grants. Most of these non-grant-earning students were Métis children who had lost at least one parent.6 The presence of Métis children at the High River school was highlighted in 1914 by Calgary newspaper reports of the complaints of a Métis woman. She had gone to the school and discovered that her children’s feet were bruised and swollen, the result of having to do without boots for three months. Later that summer, a Saskatchewan lawyer, Arthur Burnett, wrote the department on behalf of a Métis man who complained that the principal would not let him take his children out of the school for the summer holiday. The man was distressed to discover his children were being poorly treated at the school. Indian Affairs official Duncan Campbell Scott asked Indian Commissioner W. A. Graham to investigate. Graham’s response was mixed. He recognized that some Métis children were being kept against their parents’ will, and they were sent home, but he was generally supportive of the school administration.7
In 1909, the government instructed some schools to discharge non-status students. This would have brought enrolment in the Methodist school in Red Deer, Alberta, down from forty-five to twenty-eight students (at a time when the approved enrolment was ninety). Not only would the numbers be a significant loss, the principal said, but also “some of the biggest and best trained boys and girls” were among the non-Treaty children. He said that “no quantity of new pupils could fill their place because all new pupils are young and untrained.”8 Duncan Campbell Scott informed the Methodist Missionary Society that the government, having no desire to see the Red Deer school close, was prepared to “wink” at the presence of Métis children in the school.9 The following year, in his annual report, Scott pointed to the education of non-status children as one of the benefits of the residential school system.
Not only are our schools every day removing intelligent Indian children from evil surroundings, but they are very often ministering to a class which would be outcasts without such aid; I refer to the illegitimate offspring of white men and Indian women who are thrown upon their mothers for support, and who have no legal status as Indians. This great charitable work, which parallels the efforts put forth by white communities, aided by provincial, municipal or private endowment, must be carried on by the Dominion government, aided by Christian missionaries and missionary societies.10
The 1910 contract between the federal government and the churches for the operation of residential schools addressed the issue of children of mixed descent, stipulating that “no Half-breed children shall be admitted to the said school unless Indian children cannot be obtained to complete the number authorized.” Admission still required the approval of the department, and no grant would be paid for any student admitted under this provision.11
Indian Affairs departmental secretary J. D. McLean wrote the Saskatchewan minister of education in January 1911, outlining the new policy. His letter suggests that the government was planning a much harsher approach than the contract stipulated. According to McLean, “in future no half-breeds will be admitted to Boarding or Industrial Schools conducted by this Department for the education of Indian children.” However, he said there was no intention of dismissing any “half-breed” children currently in the schools.12 The federal government was, ineffectually, attempting to force provincial governments to take responsibility for Métis education.
In March 1911, Indian agents were instructed to “check carefully all applications that come before you having particular reference to age and status of the applicants.”13 Staff expressed differing views on the issue. The Indian agent at Battleford, Saskatchewan, J. P. G. Day, wrote that the admission of non-Indian students would reduce the overall standard of care in the school. He pointed out that
when half-breed Children are admitted into a School as non-grant earners; there is very grave reason to believe that these Children are fed and clothed out of the per capita money Grant allowed by the Department for the other Pupils; and so they do not get the benefit they are entitled to, the School is also impaired in it’s [sic] efficiency, which in turn helps to defeat the object for which the Schools are established, i.e. the education and improvement of our Indian Children, with the ultimate aim of fitting them to become self supporting, and good citizens.14
Indian Affairs school inspector J. A. J. McKenna opposed the policy. When faced with the argument that it was the duty of the provinces to educate Métis students, he reminded officials that “there are no Provincial institutions in which the same can be provided, and that our Indian residential schools are the only existing agencies for the proper up-bringing of the unfortunate class of children.” In making this argument, he echoed Sifton’s memorandum. What, he asked, was to prevent non-status children “from becoming outcasts and menaces to society if they be not taken into Indian schools—schools established and maintained, be it remembered, not for the mere purpose of fulfilling the conditions of Indian treaties, but in the interest of the commonwealth.”15
Despite the policy, school officials continued to enrol non-Treaty and mixed-ancestry students. In 1912, for instance, the principal of the Lestock, Saskatchewan, school reported, “Under the present arrangement, there is ample accommodation for 25 boys and 33 girls, with a staff of 10. So we took in 11 half-breed children and 1 Indian child under 7 years of age, besides the number on the roll.”16 It was reported that at High River, the “66 children recently admitted are given as half breeds.” Frank Pedley, the Indian Affairs deputy minister, advised the minister, “The wholesale admission of the 66 Half-breeds to one Indian school is an indication of how extensively this work may be carried on if allowed to apply to the 19 industrial schools and the 54 boarding schools.” The situation at High River was complicated by the fact that 290 students were reportedly living in a school that had an authorized enrolment of 225.17
In 1914, the Qu’Appelle school was discovered to have thirty-six “Halfbreed” students in attendance, even after they had discharged fifteen over the previous year. Indian Affairs threatened to cancel the grants if the children were not replaced with pupils who had status under the Indian Act by the next year.18 One of the non-status children at the school was Louise Moine, who grew up in a Métis family in the Lac Pelletier Valley in Saskatchewan. By 1908, there were ten children in the family. It was her mother’s decision to send the children to the Qu’Appelle residential school. Although the decision was not discussed at the time, in retrospect, Louise concluded her parents sent her and her siblings to residential school out of economic need and concern that their children receive a religious education. “There we would be housed, fed, clothed and educated at no cost whatever, except the train fare to and from the school. Also, it was a religious institution operated by priests and nuns, so my parents were assured that this part of our education would not be neglected.”19
In her memoir, Moine wrote that she knew that she and other Métis children were not supposed to be at the school. She recalled that Indian Commissioner W. A. Graham was at the school on a regular basis. However, she wrote, if “Mr. Graham noticed any little strays around the place we never heard, so we remained.”20 In search of new students, Qu’Appelle principal Hugonnard travelled to the Assiniboine, Moose Mountain, Pipestone, and Oak Lake reserves with little success, reporting that he had “been able to replace only six half-breed pupils by Indian ones.”21 In writing about the St. Bernard school in Alberta in 1913, Bishop Grouard said that “to have a school at all it was necessary to board” both “Half breed and Indian children.” The Métis children had not been numbered as Indians, and he had not collected grants for them from the government.22
By the end of 1913, Indian Affairs acknowledged that the 1910 contract amounted to a reversal of Sifton’s policy, and announced that it would once more be admitting students with Indian Act status. Once more, “all children, even those of mixed blood, whether legitimate or not who live upon an Indian reserve and whose parents on either side live as Indians, even if they are not annuitants,” would be eligible for admission to the schools. The policy change was accompanied by a warning from Duncan Campbell Scott:
Abuses, however, must be guarded against and every application for admission should be accompanied by satisfactory evidence that the applicant is a halfbreed to whom the rule applies, and not a person who has been adopted by or otherwise brought into association with Indians with the express purpose of gaining admission to our schools.23
The impact of the federal school-admission rules, and their inconsistency, on Aboriginal family structure can be seen in the story of the family of Thomas Desjarlais, a Métis man originally from Manitoba. In the 1880s, he was living in Lebret, Saskatchewan, and had married a Métis woman from the Dakota Territory. His brother and sister were living as Treaty Indians on the nearby Muscowequan Reserve, while his wife’s sister and husband were also Treaty Indians, living at the File Hills agency. Because Thomas Desjarlais and his wife wished to see their oldest daughter, Rosine, go to school, they arranged to have her adopted into her maternal aunt’s family. On this basis, she was able to attend the Qu’Appelle school. There, according to family lore, she learned to speak several Aboriginal languages from other students, although, in later life, she downplayed her Aboriginal heritage and rarely spoke any of these languages.24
Those provincial governments that recognized an obligation to Métis children began buying space for them in residential schools. Starting in 1914, Alberta began sending orphans to the Roman Catholic school in Onion Lake, Saskatchewan.25 Saskatchewan’s deputy minister of education wrote to Indian Affairs in 1918, asking if it would be possible to have “white and half-breed” children educated at the residential school run by the Oblates at Lac la Plonge.26 The Indian Affairs position was that they might be able to attend as day students, but could definitely not board at the school.27
By 1921, Indian Commissioner W. A. Graham concluded that “we are practically in the same position now as we were seven or eight years ago, by having our schools over-run by nontreaty Breeds.” Graham also asked Ottawa, “Can non-Treaty parents take out their children from school and decide when to send them back?”28 At the time, there were seventy-three Canadian residential schools in operation.29 Indian Affairs was still called upon to adjudicate individual cases whereby children appeared to be both Métis and ‘Indian’ by way of parental transitions in and out of marriages, on and off reserves, and in other ways that changed family status under the Indian Act.
The experience of Métis Elder Mary Vitaline Flammand serves as another example of the barriers facing Métis people who sought to have their children attend school.30 In 1922, her godfather and Cowessess band member Francis Delorme placed her in the Grayson, Saskatchewan, boarding school. She did not stay long: “I wasn’t there for two weeks and I was thrown out.”31 Her father, Alexander Flammand, then attempted to enrol her, along with a younger sister, in a public school nearby at Dubuc. Because her family was living on road-allowance land and therefore not paying school taxes, she was removed from there on her first day. “So we came home and told our dad ‘we can’t go to school there, the government won’t let us go to school there.’ So then, he came back home and told my mother ‘yeah that’s right, the kids can’t go to school there because we have to pay taxes.’ So that was it, I never did go to school again.”32
From the early 1920s until the 1940s, Métis parents faced numerous barriers if they wanted to provide their children with a formal education. Once again, the federal government had started to dismiss Métis students from residential schools, while the provinces, for cost reasons, were reluctant to ensure that they were admitted to public schools. In September 1925, Indian Affairs instructed the Beauval, Saskatchewan, school principal to discharge the forty-five “halfbreeds” at the school. According to the local Indian agent, Mr. Taylor, the school “could easily be filled” with Treaty children from the “Canoe Lake, Clear Lake, Portage la Loche and English River Bands.”33 Principal Lajeunesse responded that if Taylor were better acquainted with the “Chipewyan up north,” he would not have said the school could be easily filled with their children. “We have tried every means (except by force) to have their children. The very few who did consent to send them would not allow them to come back after a year or two.” He also pointed out that the school had never tried to hide the fact that the majority of its students were Métis. Furthermore, he said, only five of the forty-five students had living fathers and mothers. “You can imagine, the difficulty to find at once, where to place these destitute children.”34 The government dropped its demand for an immediate discharge of the Métis children, but expected that the majority of the students would be discharged by the end of June 1926.35 Two years later, in December 1928, Indian Affairs secretary J. D. McLean wrote to the Beauval principal to request that he discharge the eight “half-breed” children on the school register.36 The school defended their presence, referring to a November 19, 1922, memorandum from Indian Affairs Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott, and stating, “There is a departmental ruling to the effect that half-breed children living the Indian mode of life on a reserve are eligible for admission to the boarding school.”37
In 1927, the federal government gave the Oblate school at Brocket, Alberta, permission to admit female Métis students, on the condition that the band accept them as members after their graduation. Seven years later, when the principal repeated the request, he was informed that “absolutely no half-breed children can be admitted to our schools.”38
In February 1928, three “half-breed” children were admitted to the Onion Lake Anglican school after the death of their mother. This was done without the department’s permission. In December 1929, Commissioner Graham reported that the Indian agent was still trying to have the children removed from the school, into the custody of either their father or the provincial Department of Neglected and Dependent Children.39 Graham wrote that it had been “a hard struggle to keep halfbreeds out of our schools and if we are going to make exceptions and admit a few we are going to have a lot of trouble.”40 The following year, there were six Métis children attending the two residential schools in Onion Lake. Graham concluded that rather than remove the children, the Oblate provincial intended to let them remain there as long as Indian Affairs allowed them to stay.41
As the nation moved into a state of economic depression in the 1930s, Duncan Campbell Scott sent out instructions that children of questionable standing regarding their ‘Indianness’ should be discharged from schools “without delay,” stressing the costs involved in maintaining these students in the school and reminding all involved that “the Indian Department is not conducting charitable institutions. There are provincial homes for cases of this kind, and principals of our schools must not take in children for sympathetic reasons.”42
Persuading provincial governments to take responsibility for Métis children was proving to be a near-impossible task. In 1935, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Grouard pointed out to the Alberta minister of public works that for several years, Roman Catholic schools had been taking care of “quite a number of children (white and halfbreed) that really were or should have been wards of the Government.” At the time of writing, he said the church was taking care of at least 100 such children. Given that the provincial government had recently provided a grant to the Woods’ Home in Calgary, he suggested that a similar grant might be made to the Catholic Church.43
In 1936, D. Robinson from Koostatak, Manitoba, wrote to Indian Affairs Minister T. A. Crerar, seeking permission to have his four children accepted into the Brandon residential school. Robinson wrote that his mother was a “member of the St. Peters Band of Indians my father was a non treaty Indian and I was adopted by John B. Stevenson who was treaty Indian of the St. Peters Band and my wife is still taking treaty as a member of the Peguis Band.”
Because he was not an Indian under the Indian Act, his children had not been allowed admission to the school. But, he wrote, he was “unable to provide sufficient food or clothing for my children owing to the lack of work or anything to enable me to obtain necessary supplies.” The principal of the Brandon school had informed him that there was room in the school for his children.44 His appeal was denied because he was “not a Treaty Indian.”45
The lack of education opportunities for Métis children on the Prairies led Métis political leader Malcolm Norris to observe:
I have always understood that it was against the law not to send the children to school, and Inspectors are maintained for that very purpose, but unfortunately our people have been discriminated against, and to such an extent, that even though they may pay taxes, no steps are taken by the authorities to see that their children are sent to school, apparently the Half-breed is not worth caring about.46
It was this sort of frustration that led in the 1930s to the creation of l’Association des Métis d’Alberta et les Territoires du Nord-Ouest (also known as the “Metis Brotherhood of Alberta”), under the leadership of Joseph Dion (a teacher at Kehiwin), James Brady, Felix Callihoo, and Peter C. Tomkins, to represent “non-status Indians and Metis.”47 In response to its lobbying, the Alberta government appointed a Royal Commission in 1934 to study living conditions of Métis in the province.48 James Brady made the principal Métis presentation to the commission, arguing for the establishment of self-governing Métis colonies. Education, he said, should be provided by Métis school boards on a non-denominational basis. His fear was that the government would establish government-administered colonies and schools, depriving the Métis of control of these central aspects of their lives.49 Bishop Breynat challenged the Métis opposition to denominational education, telling the commissioners that “you cannot go by his advice anyway, that is the type of man who does not know—he is a very poor man.”50
The commission’s 1936 report observed that many people were of the “opinion that it is advantageous to take the half-breed child into a large boarding school and teach him the conveniences and amenities of modern life. The argument is that when he returns to his former life he will do so with a desire to approximate as nearly as circumstances will permit, the better life of his school days.” Other presenters had told the commission that in such a circumstance, the student would be less able to meet the demands of life in a Métis community. In either case, it was obvious that where there was no white settlement, large numbers of children were growing up without any schooling.51 Some evidence given to the commission suggested that “80 per cent of the half-breed children of the Province of Alberta receive no education whatever.”52 The commission recommended the establishment of Métis agricultural colonies under the supervision of government officials. In schools on the colonies, children could be taught “reading and writing and elementary arithmetic. In addition, the boys should be taught stock raising and farming, while the girls should be taught the elements of sanitation, cleanliness, sewing and knitting.”53 The report led to the adoption of the Metis Population Betterment Act in 1938. Under the Act, provincial land was set aside for Métis settlements.54 As Métis leader James Brady had feared, the Alberta Bureau of Relief was given responsibility for services on the settlements, including education. Government-appointed officials administered the settlements.55 Although the initial Act endorsed the value of “conferences and negotiations between” the provincial government and the Métis, this language was dropped from the Act in 1940.56
In 1937, Indian Affairs formally reversed Sifton’s 1899 policy allowing the admission of Métis students to residential schools. In doing so, department secretary T. R. L. MacInnes wrote that the old policy had been adopted “at a time when the provincial governments and the government of the North West Territories were not in a position to provide educational facilities for the children of certain half-breed residents in the outlying sections of the Dominion.” However, he stressed, “There has never been, nor is there now, any statutory obligation upon the Dominion Government to provide educational facilities for half-breed children.” The federal government position was that the provincial governments—no mention was made of the territorial governments—were “now in a position to look after the education and welfare of these children.”57 Per capita grants would be made only “in the case of children of Indian paternal descent.” Children enrolled in residential schools prior to September 1, 1937, would be exempt from the ruling.58
From 1889 to 1937, the federal government’s admission policy for non-Indian students at residential schools had been far from consistent. There were two institutions during this period—the Île-à-la-Crosse school in northern Saskatchewan, and St. Paul’s Hostel in Dawson City in the Yukon—that further demonstrate this lack of consistency. Both institutions received federal funding at various points in their history, even though most of the students who attended them were of mixed descent.