Isabelle Knockwood writes of a mini-purge at Shubenacadie during the late 1960s, when the school was winding down. Father Paddy Collins, the principal, asked a First Nations janitor to burn the school’s records. But the man refused, afraid he would be breaking the law. So instead, Collins bought off a white employee with a bottle of rum, and the white man did in the paper trail with a bonfire. Knockwood also notes that the Audette Report, the result of a 1934 federally commissioned public inquiry into the severe beating of nineteen boys at Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, is mysteriously difficult to locate. Only one copy of the original seven remains. “Other evidence surrounding the March 1934 beating seems also to have been destroyed,” she writes, including the formal complaint about the beatings filed by an Indian Agent. These are part of a four-month gap, from December 1933 to April 1934, in the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School files of Indian Affairs at Library Archives Canada.
There were other fires, and floods too. The Sisters of Charity (SOC), a congregation of nuns in Halifax, taught at the school, and the Catholic Archdiocese of Halifax ran it. SOC’s original mother house burned down in 1951, likely taking school records with it. But the Sisters don’t have many documents from the school after 1951 either. Much of whatever survived the 1951 fire may have been burned by Father Collins, or with the school itself when the building, closed in 1967, burned down in 1986. The Archdiocese and the Sisters say they sent whatever they did have to the TRC, which has a court-ordered mandate to uncover and publish all information about residential schools.
That leaves little to go on in understanding the story of the nuns who taught at the school. Their perspective has always been a bit of a mystery. SOC offers no journals and only minimal records of who taught at Shubenacadie. There was a book of Annals—sort of a collective journal of the goings-on at the school, kept by all the Sisters who taught there—but they didn’t enter their names, their record keeping was inconsistent, and the book was open to the Sister Superior or the principal, so the Sisters likely didn’t record their truest feelings. Still, the Annals should provide clues. But SOC refuses to let me see them. The material is too personal. SOC did allow Marilyn Thomson-Millward to see the Annals as part of her Ph.D. research in the mid-1990s. And so with Thomson-Millward’s permission I’ve relied heavily on her interpretation of the full Annals, which she wrote about in her 1997 dissertation “Researching the Devils.” With the help of SOC’s communications director, I also interviewed three active Sisters to get their thoughts on the Shubenacadie school and the reconciliation process. Only three of the Sisters who taught at the school are still alive. Two still live in Nova Scotia, but are elderly and declined being interviewed for this book. Even when they were alive, none of the Sisters who taught at the school spoke with researchers from the media or academia. Instead, various SOC communications professionals have acted as the main spokespersons about the organization’s involvement in the school since its closure.
The government records in Ottawa are rich but incomplete. Daniel Paul, who worked for Indian Affairs from 1971 until 1986, recalls accessing records that were illegible due to water damage. “A lot of the records from the Shubenacadie Indian Agency were destroyed by flooding in the 1960s,” he says. The information challenge is a national one. Even the TRC had to take the Government of Canada to court in 2013 to get access to millions of archival records. This fight happened several years after a settlement had been reached between residential school survivors, associated churches, and the federal government, obliging the feds to disclose all relevant documents to the TRC.
The TRC was originally supposed to complete its work by the summer of 2014, a deadline that was extended a year when Library and Archives Canada released nearly one hundred thousand previously withheld Indian Affairs documents in April 2014. By that time, little had changed since Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) reported earlier that year, “nearly three years after the work began and with a year left before the money runs out, no one knows how much it will cost to gather all the historical documents, who will pay for it or what materials are even ‘relevant’ for the project.” APTN journalist Jorge Barrera estimates that it could take ten years to find and digitize all the documents. That estimate seems conservative. Aboriginal Affairs is one of more than thirty federal government departments and agencies with somewhere between 5 and 50 million files—that’s one hundred thousand boxes of documents—that may or may not be relevant. Then there are the various provincial, university, and museum archives. There are also eighty-eight church archives to go through. Not only have the churches often resisted the TRC’s efforts, but according to several sources, the Catholic Church is infamous for not being forthcoming with its records on the residential schools, repeatedly making claims of privacy. “I’d be surprised if the TRC has been sent everything,” says Jennifer Llewellyn, a Dalhousie University law professor who has been deeply involved in the truth and reconciliation process.
Once the documents are gathered, historians and database archivists need to review and organize them and make them searchable and accessible. In the meantime, TRC isn’t sharing. I spoke to Peter Houston, a TRC archivist. He wanted to share Shubenacadie records with me, he said, but his manager told him not to. The records are officially closed, sealed off from the public and from researchers until the National Research Centre, or NRC, on residential schools is established as a permanent memorial. On Llewellyn’s advice I also called Paulette Regan, TRC’s research director, to ask for help. She did not return my phone call.
Besides archival information, I’ve consulted several published and unpublished accounts and analyses—by journalists, government workers, research firms, students, and university researchers—of the Canadian residential school system, Mi’kmaw history and contemporary issues, and the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School itself. You can find information about these works in the Further Reading section at the back of the book. Every one of them is fascinating and educational. For the latter sections on Mi’kmaw children in state care and Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) education and language resilience and renewal, I interviewed experts from within the education system, provincial government, and local universities.
My Language Choices
Almost all of the children at the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School were Mi’kmaq. It was the only federally funded Indian residential school in the Maritimes during the residential school era, which ran from the late 1800s until the last school closed in 1996. A much smaller number were Wolastoqiyik, who are often called Maliseet, a Mi’kmaw word meaning “broken talkers.” And a very few were Peskotomuhkatiyik (Passamaquoddy) or of another First Nation. Whenever possible, I use the most specific and respectful terms.
I have also used the Smith-Francis orthography, which is officially recognized by Mi’kmaw chiefs in Nova Scotia and by the Mi’kmaq-Nova Scotia-Canada Tripartite Forum, with respect to the spelling of “Mi’kmaq” and “Mi’kmaw.” So, “Mi’kmaq” is used as a noun, singular or plural. “Mi’kmaw” is used as an adjective and also as the name of the language of the Mi’kmaq. When I’m writing about more general, Canada-wide policies, I revert to terms like “Aboriginal peoples” and “First Peoples” to describe all those descended from the original human inhabitants of what is now Canada. I use the term “Indigenous peoples” to describe First Peoples of all nations, including Canada. “First Nation” is another general term I use to describe all Aboriginal peoples of Canada with the exception of the Inuit, who are not First Nations people.
I use the outdated general term “Indian” only when quoting people or documents, describing their perspectives, or discussing official terms, like the name of a school or the Indian Affairs branch of the federal government. The branch was first founded in 1880 and has been housed within different government departments ever since, under different names. I tend to use “Indian Affairs” or “the Department,” and when speaking of contemporary issues, “Abo
riginal Affairs.” Another common usage of the word “Indian” in this book is when discussing various Indian Agents, local low-wage employees of Indian Affairs who managed various issues like education, employment, and health care on reserves for the Department. The term lasted until the early 1950s, when the Department changed it to Agency Superintendent, then later to District Superintendent and then again to District Manager. In 1971 Indian Affairs got rid of Indian agencies altogether and simply had a District Superintendent in each province. But “Indian Agent” remained in common usage.
When describing the children who went to the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, I most often use the term “survivors.” I sometimes use the word “residents.” I avoid the term “student” because it sounds too much like a typical young person going off to learn and grow. Even the most positive accounts of life at Shubenacadie do not match that image. Some children who went there did indeed go on to become first-class scholars, in part through sheer force of will, but their path to success was quite different from what most students experience. The word “survivor” is not perfect, and as you’ll see not everyone survived the school. But it honours, I hope, the resilience of the people who went there, and their culture.
A Superiority Complex
First Nations Knowledge
Mi’kmaw is a language shaped, as Isabelle Knockwood puts it, by “the sounds of the land, the winds and the waterfalls.” In Out of the Depths, Knockwood recalls learning from her mother how to listen to her own footsteps in the woods so that when she returned home she would notice any difference if she strayed from the proper route. The first Europeans to arrive in Mi’kma’ki benefited from this learned ability to navigate by the senses. And yet, by the time Mi’kma’ki became part of the new nation of Canada, Euro-Canadians saw the Mi’kmaq as an inferior people. A 1947 Bachelor of Education thesis for Mount Allison University, called “Indian Education in Nova Scotia,” begins: “Determining the relationship between the Indians and the whites became an immediate problem with which the latter, because of their superiority, were forced to contend.”
A. A. Currie, who wrote this thesis more than six decades ago, shared the attitudes of the day, arguing that it was up to white Canadians to turn First Nations cultures around, so that they could adjust to new realities. Only education—Euro-Canadian education—could accomplish this, as evidenced by the fact that North America’s Indigenous peoples had failed to do the job themselves in thousands of years, and could never equal European culture, remaining “three millennia behind,” as Currie wrote. The Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqkew Elders likely could have told Currie different, had he talked to them. But few Euro-Canadians had bothered to ask, and they remained ignorant of the richness of the first human cultures of this land. Even in 1965, Indian Affairs bureaucrats shared Currie’s perspective: “The culture with the more advanced technology, the superior body of knowledge, and the facility for adapting to the accruing exigencies is invariably the one that dominates,” the chief superintendent of vocational training wrote that year.
The Mi’kmaq of Mi’kma’ki—which now includes the Maritimes, Newfoundland, northeastern Maine, and the Gaspé Peninsula (Gaspésie)—recognized seven districts, likely based on water drainage and river systems, with several distinct communities in each district. Extended intergenerational familial relationships were, and are, paramount. Because familial relationships extended beyond individual communities, children often lived in multiple homes, picking up skills from different adults on their travels. Adult mentors—including older siblings, parents, grandparents, and Elders—taught children skills like hunting, fishing, trapping, preparing fish, and curing caribou and moose hides. Parents were providers, but aunts, uncles, and grandparents could be disciplinarians. Everyone was a teacher and student, and children were not seen as burdens because the responsibility for raising them was shared among many. Women held positions of high esteem as givers of new life and caregivers.
Early Europeans were amazed by the kindness the Mi’kmaq showed their children, and wrote much of their incredible freedom and egalitarianism. The explorers were perplexed that these people lived more or less equally, with leaders taking on more power but also far more responsibility. The land was absent of dictators. Leaders seemed to have the genuine respect of their people. Yet there was complexity in their governance, which had three levels: local bands, district leadership, and band council. Modern democracies were modelled after indigenous systems.
In their 2012 book, The Language of This Land, Mi’kma’ki, Trudy Sable and Bernie Francis explore the culture and world view expressed by the Mi’kmaw language. It is a complex, challenging language evoking an active relationship with the environment, extended family, and community. Sable and Francis describe a pre-European-arrival Mi’kmaw perception of the landscape as alive, aware, and dynamic. “The Mi’kmaw language has its own language of science, language of spirituality and language of governance and law, which were sung and danced into being,” they write.
That Mi’kmaw science is well documented, increasingly so thanks to academics at Cape Breton University. Stephen Augustine, the principal of Unama’ki College at CBU, is a nationally recognized expert on traditional Mi’kmaw knowledge, something he started learning from Elders at a young age. Much of this knowledge was practical: “How to take a tree down and turn it into a basket or another kind of tree into a canoe,” he explains. Or moccasins, or a toboggan. “Understanding the elasticity of the wood, how to use it when wet.” Long before Europeans arrived in Mi’kma’ki the Mi’kmaq had learned, through meticulous observation and experimentation, about math, astronomy, physics, biology, and chemistry. They used this knowledge in fishing, trapping, hunting and gathering, as well as in their practice of medicine. Modern pharmaceuticals owe much to the advanced understanding of plants that existed in the “New World” before Europeans arrived here.
The need to heal the sick also necessitated proper use of plant medicine, which involved understanding a wide array of species. Laurie Lacey chronicles more than seventy plants used by the Mi’kmaq for medicine—likely a tiny portion of the total—that he learned from Mi’kmaw Elders. “Mi’kmaq knowledge of natural medicines was as effective as the knowledge of their European counterparts,” Lacey writes, “and in some instances surpassed it.” In his 1977 book, Micmac Indian Medicine, Lacey writes of “constant exchange of medical knowledge between the Europeans and the Indians.” Beyond understanding the properties of plants, skillful preparation was needed, whether it was boiling, steeping, or using the plant raw. Often a plant had to be broken into separate components, each of which was prepared differently. Many were mixed with an animal-fat base, also a medicinal ingredient, creating compound medicines that were either drunk, eaten, or applied as a poultice or salve. Some plants worked when masticated—chewed by mothers—mixed with antibodies, and fed to the children.
There were also specialized medicine people who played a spiritual and medical role and were able to make and read sacred markings on birchbark, cataloguing detailed rituals. Scholars, including Mi’kmaw author and educator Marie Battiste, have pointed out that with few exceptions European immigrants largely ignored this Mi’kmaw literacy, preferring to maintain the “myth of the illiterate savage.” Despite having learned much from the Mi’kmaq about health care, missionaries also discredited traditional medicine. When anthropologist Frederick Johnson visited Mi’kmaw communities in 1930, no one would admit to practicing shamanism, once a revered ability to heal people and interpret the spirit world.
Mike Isaac, a student services consultant with the Mi’kmaq Liaison Office of Nova Scotia’s education department, speaks of the Mi’kmaw story Muin and the Seven Bird Hunters, about a single part of the night sky. It contains detailed instructions on constellations and shows that patterns in the sky are connected to patterns on Earth, giving us a calendar, a measurement of time on a grand scale. The story identifies several of the same constellations identified
by the ancient Greeks as well as the North Star and its circumpolar stars. “You take that story and match it with other cultures doing the same study and there’s nothing different, from the Milky Way to the Big Dipper,” Isaac says. “We just interpret it differently through our stories but the knowledge and concept of it is universal—the understanding is equal.”
Lisa Lunney Borden taught math in a Mi’kmaw community school in Cape Breton for ten years, and did her doctoral research with Mi’kmaw Elders on the math they’ve used their entire lives. Whenever she asked questions like, “how many?” or, “how much?” they would say, “tepiaq,” which means, “enough,” and then make a gesture demonstrating a certain size. She eventually learned that they did so because, to them, the gesture more precisely showed “how much” than a number could. Space and shape were more important than enumeration. Lunney Borden remembers talking with the late Dianne Toney, a renowned quill box maker who learned geometry by making boxes with circular lids. “To find the centre, I just fold it in half twice,” Toney told Lunney Borden. Intersecting diameters. Then, to make a perfectly round ring, “You need to go across the centre of your birchbark three times and allow about the width of your thumb.”
And then it hit Lunney Borden: “My God that’s pi!”
Pi (π) is roughly 3.14. When multiplied by diameter (“across the centre”) it gives you the circumference (the perfectly round ring). Only in Toney’s pi, the 0.14 was judged by the width of her thumb. If she’d been making a hamper instead of a box, she’d have used a hand width instead of a thumb width.
Lunney Borden now teaches in the education department at St. Francis Xavier University and runs Show Me Your Math, a program exposing Mi’kmaw children to traditional math. She says there is an “inherent spatial reasoning” in the Mi’kmaw language, which she describes as a process-, action-, or movement-oriented, verb-based language. It is focused on relationships—between people, animals, plants, objects, and spirits. This is perhaps why the language quantifies things spatially, by the distances between them.
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