Without an earnest attempt to understand Mi’kmaw culture and language—and with a deep-seated belief in its inferiority—it is not surprising that the people who founded the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School didn’t see these mathematical skills in their wards. They had no clue, for example, that counting in Mi’kmaw is complicated by the use of three different sets of number-words, depending on whether you are counting animate or inanimate objects, measurements of time, or age.
Like Mi’kmaw science, Mi’kmaw math is practical, driven by need. Both subjects are connected to the language. They evolve together within the culture. The Elders Lunney Borden learned of used math to navigate difficult waterways and to build tools and housing, to calculate complex spatial geometry, fractions and angles—all in their heads. They call it common sense. Western science, on the other hand, is more abstract—sometimes finding application after the fact. It thrives on the analysis of component pieces of systems, understanding how they work individually with less attention to the relationships between things. It’s easier to understand things that way, to measure them and be certain of their individual importance. But you can miss the big picture.
A Model Residential School
The concept of a residential school in what is now Canada goes all the way back to the spring of 1616, a year after three Récollet—members of an order of Franciscans focused on meditative practice—priests and one unordained brother landed in Québec City with Samuel de Champlain. It had been Champlain’s idea to turn the children of the “heathen savages” of New France into new Frenchmen. Supported by a royal edict, he had asked the Récollets to send some of their best men to find Catholic converts. Their superior was Denis Jamet, who influential Récollets in France had chosen for his administrative experience and astute political leadership. Joseph Le Caron, a thirty-year-old charismatic priest, Jean Dolbeau, a thirty-year-old mystic priest, and Pacifique Du Plessis, an apothecary (pharmacist) and unordained Récollet brother, joined Jamet. The four men established an ad hoc friary in Québec City, which Champlain had founded seven years earlier, and wandered the surrounding woods in search of “savages.” They were the first of the Catholic missionaries, signalling a shift from partnership with the First Nations to an attempt to change them and bring them under colonial control.
Le Caron and Dolbeau got together again the spring following their arrival in Québec City to chat about winter. They’d been busy baptizing Montagnais Innu and Wendat (Huron) folks as soon as possible so as not to risk losing them to Protestant competition. But they were frustrated by how quickly the converted relapsed into “savagery,” risking their immortal souls and those of the priests who had baptized them. The Récollets created several strategies for ensuring more permanent conversions. One of these was to focus on the children, whose culture, they believed, hadn’t set in yet. In their eyes, the children were a blank slate. The problem with giving adults the gift of Catholicism was that they took it and melded it with their previous beliefs, a religion-by-design that predated postmodern hippies by four centuries.
Paramount to this youth-focused religious and cultural education was to gain control and authority over the children. Youth—boys in particular—would need to be isolated from the influence of their elders, French-ified and Catholicized, then released back among their people as missionaries. The Récollets would teach these children just as young French children were taught: adhering to rigorous schedules and beaten upon any failure to obey and learn. The Récollets, failing to appreciate that both Innu and Wendat cultures garnered wisdom not from youth, but from Elders, founded a boarding school in Québec City, headmastered by the unordained, young Brother Pacifique. They called it their séminaire (seminary). There, sheltered from the dangers of their own communities and Protestant traders, a handful of Wendat boys were taught French and Latin, as well as the Catholic world view.
The Récollet school became an unintentional model for the Jesuits, who would replace the Récollets in 1629, and for the eventual Canadian residential school system. The Récollets recognized their failure to “civilize the savages,” and in their place the Jesuits built a schoolhouse farm with livestock in 1635 for Wendat and French children. The Jesuits also involved another institute of the Catholic Church: the Ursuline nuns, who established a convent upon the arrival of Mère Marie de l’Incarnation in 1639. She, along with Marie-Madeleine de Chauvigny de la Peltrie made a point of learning the Wyandot language. The nuns taught at Jesuit day schools as well as the boarding school, and were among the first to teach Wendat girls how to become “proper” housewives for French bachelors. (Their efforts, funded directly by the governor of New France, may have been in vain; it was more common that Frenchmen joined Wendat communities.) From there, just like First Nations and Inuit captives at future residential schools, the children would often flee, preferring their own homes and cultures. When the first bishop of New France, François de Laval, opened the Petit Séminaire in the fall of 1668 on the orders of the king, there were eight French and six Wendat students. Within a few years, there were no Wendat students.
Acadia’s Mi’kmaw School
Not long after the Récollets started their school, in the early summer days of 1632, three members of a new and small Franciscan order of monks, the Capuchins, set sail from Auray, France, on the L’Espérance en Dieu (Hope in God). Isaac de Razilly, the new lieutenant general of New France, captained the ship. Three more Capuchins followed on another ship later the same day. Their job was clear: convert the locals to the true faith and make sure the French didn’t “go native.”
By this time, the Mi’kmaq had officially adopted Catholicism. Grand Chief Mouipeltu (Membertou) and 21 of his relatives , along with another 120 Mi’kmaw volunteers , agreed to let Father Jessé Fléché baptize them in the early summer of 1610—this after the French Jesuits apparently cured him of a terminal illness. Mi’kma’ki adopted Catholicism as its faith—though the Mi’kmaq have always remained free to choose Catholicism or their traditional faith, and many practice both. As Marie Battiste observes, “Micmac spiritual culture and sacred view of nature were broadened, not altered, by the Catholic theology…Micmac society embraced the two spiritual worlds as one, enlarging the rituals but not changing the ideological foundation.” But the Capuchins wanted to make sure Catholicism remained the religion of choice.
They landed at Port-Royal, now Annapolis Royal, centre of New France on what they called “la Baie Frangaise,” now the Bay of Fundy. Razilly was determined to establish a French, Catholic colony, and he would soon write to Cardinal Richelieu that “the savages obey all the laws one may impose upon them, divine and human.” Port-Royal had a large log church, decorated on the outside with evergreens and flowers, where Mi’kmaq and French worshipped and sang together, but the missionaries had yet to teach Mi’kmaw children French ways. It took several years, but with money given by Cardinal Richelieu (who was known as the king’s “first minister”) and Charles de Menou d’Aulnay, the governor of Acadia, the Capuchins created a séminaire boarding school, where they taught about thirty Mi’kmaw boys and thirty Mi’kmaw girls. The Capuchins had two houses built: the boys’ dorm was attached to their monastery; the girls’ was separate. The school was headed by Father Pascal de Troyes, whose letters to the Capuchins back in France show an unhappy time. He was unimpressed on the potential impact of his mission; he had hoped for a larger population to convert. Letters from others in the colony requested that de Troyes be removed. He drowned in 1649 and was replaced by the much more popular Father Léonard de Chartres.
De Chartres, now canonized, had been a monk for nearly twenty years and despite his reputation for oration was a true Capuchin, a great lover of silence. On his arrival at Port-Royal, de Chartres made the rounds of the local Capuchin posts and baptized Mi’kmaq. The Capuchin Friars’ website tells a tale of de Chartres being shot in the back with an arrow while administering the sacraments to a dying Mi’kmaw child. He lived, and was sen
t to Port-Royal to replace Father de Troyes. “Peace and happiness filled his life as he taught his red skinned scholars about the God who was his and theirs,” the website reads. “It was an inspiring scene to see the humble, brown clad friar with the Indian boys and girls sitting at his feet in open mouthed wonder and admiration.”
Several other friars taught at the school, including Fathers Cosmas de Mentes and Gabriel de Joinsville, the most experienced missionaries among the Capuchins. Many of the brothers learned to speak decent Mi’kmaw, something that would one day be discouraged at the residential school in Shubenacadie. Madame de Brice, a widow and the mother of two Capuchins, arrived in the summer of 1644 to teach the girls and recruit new students. I can only speculate as to what the Mi’kmaq thought of this school, but the French were thrilled with it. Governor d’Aulnay wrote reports to King Louis XIV that the school was a success, thanks to the dedication of the teachers and students. While the goal was to raise Catholics, it seems the students were already believers. Many of them had already been baptized, while others were preparing for the sacrament.
The school’s undoing started in 1650, when Governor d’Aulnay died in a boating accident. Emmanuel Le Borgne, a merchant who had lent the governor 260,000 livres, demanded repayment. In a dispute over the sum, Le Borgne had Madame de Brice, Father Cosmas, and Father Gabriel jailed for five months. When released, they caught the next ship back to France. Two years later, a small fleet of English ships on Port-Royal Harbour signalled big trouble for the French, and the Mi’kmaq too. The English sacked Port-Royal without resistance, shuttered the school, and expelled everything French. The friars were marched to the beach and thrown aboard English ships. Only Father de Chartres refused to leave, saying that his Mi’kmaw students—the boys—needed a spiritual father. The other Capuchins wanted to stay with him, but he told them to leave. As the ship headed to England and an unknown fate, de Chartres’s students and the other teachers heard the shot that killed their schoolmaster back onshore.
The New England Company
Was it better for the Indians to integrate with the growing white settlements, or to maintain separate Indian communities? This serious issue has dogged all plans and efforts to assist the original inhabitants of North America, even into the present.
–The New England Company, 2002
It wasn’t until the end of the Seven Years’ War, with the Proclamation of 1763, that the English took complete control of New France, from Newfoundland to the Rockies and from the Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. In Mi’kma’ki, the Brits had never taken up the effort of the French to provide the Mi’kmaq with formal education. From the closing of the Port-Royal séminaire in 1654, it would take more than a century until the idea cropped up again. When it finally did, it was ugly.
The New England Company opened the second residential school—though it wasn’t called that at the time—in Sussex, in the colony of New Brunswick in 1787. It was a disastrous experience, but one that would be largely forgotten by the twentieth century. The New England Company, a conservative Protestant organization with Puritan roots, was founded by Oliver Cromwell’s parliament in 1649 to spread the gospel “amongst the heathen natives in or near New England.” They believed that Christians had the responsibility to bring their faith to all races through teaching Indigenous peoples to read and write. Wealthy MPs, aldermen, and bankers—often with the Bank of England—sat on the board of directors. They bought up cheap land in New England, which had been taken from the same people whose souls they hoped to save, and used interest and rental income to fund their missionary work.
After the American Revolutionary War, English missionaries found themselves unwelcome south of the new border. The company moved its work to friendlier territory, specifically Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Its man in New Brunswick, Edward Winslow, wanted to open a series of Indian schools there. Settlers had by this point driven the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik into a state of deep poverty. The settler response was to try to convince the Indians to be less Indian, to stop moving seasonally to new hunting grounds and start farming. In the company’s previous missionary efforts in New England, teachers had generally made an effort to learn and teach in local languages. But in New Brunswick this wasn’t the case. The goal was to “civilize” Mi’kmaw students, equipping them with the English language, the Protestant faith, and the skills to farm, so they could in turn “civilize” the rest of their communities.
Though the land issue had largely been settled, the Catholics and Protestants still fought for Indian souls, and would continue to do so throughout the residential school era. More members meant more donations to the cause. The Catholics in New Brunswick had two major advantages: first, the Mi’kmaq were already Catholics and had been for nearly two centuries; second, the Catholics made every effort to learn the many Algonquian languages. This made for a better, more reciprocal—if still unequal—relationship with the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik. The fact that the Mi’kmaq had already been Catholic for more than 180 years only encouraged John Coffin, headmaster of the New England Company’s school. By 1787 Coffin produced a list of seven possible sites for Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik schools, succeeding in all but four of the locations, where company representatives failed to convince parents to send their children to the school, even after showering them with bribes.
The company had schools built in 1791 at Sussex Vale, Meductic, and Maugerville, but within a couple of years the board decided to save money by consolidating at Sussex Vale, where the treasurer, George Leonard, lived. Eight First Nations children attended the school along with twenty to thirty whites. Leonard invited the parents to squat on a small plot of land by the school and gave them clothing, blankets, tobacco, and supplies. But the parents had their own lives to lead, traditional territory and hunting grounds, and when they left their children went with them. The ones who stayed did poorly. They were supposed to apprentice in white homes, but Leonard failed to place any. Worse, he embezzled funds from the English backers. Three board members quit when they realized what was going on.
John Coffin took charge. He swore he would civilize the Indian children by removing them from their parents’ influence. “If you do not take the children early they are not only complete Indians but complete Catholics,” he wrote. His opinion was popular: his supporters wanted segregation; they felt the families’ influence undid the good work of the school. Company officials in England felt that taking children from their families was too harsh. In 1803 they shut down the school.
Two years later, Coffin wrote the board saying the Indians had a change of heart and wanted their children to be apprentices. In reality he had offered them gifts in exchange for their children. Families were too weakened, pushed to the point of desperation to say no. Twenty boys and girls, aged seven to twelve, were placed with white families, attended nearby schools, and apprenticed in a trade. Coffin even took infants and sold them to white families. Girl “apprentices” were often treated as slave girls were treated by white masters in the South. They were commonly raped and impregnated, birthing more children for the New England Company to take. Coffin was aware of the situation but brushed it off in correspondence with the English backers.
The board gave a grant of £20 to anyone willing to take a Mi’kmaw apprentice and teach him or her to farm. Apprentices did the work for free; farm labourers got £25 per year. This sweet deal didn’t impress the backers in England, who were concerned that a farmer could make more for taking an apprentice than he would pay a labourer. At the time, workers willing to do the hard labour of farming were scarce. After their apprenticeships, some graduates would be given eighty hectares of land to farm. This enfranchisement would become another lasting tactic in the attempt to assimilate Aboriginal people long after the creation of Canada.
The apprenticeship system was as big a failure as the residential school system that would eventually follow. Graduates became lost between two cultures. Rather than “civilize�
�� their own people, they rejected the Mi’kmaq completely. They could not have easily re-entered Mi’kmaw culture anyway; they had lost their language. And the whites rejected them, leaving them with no one. Many became despondent and turned to alcohol. Also like the residential school system that would follow, the Sussex Vale school’s misdeeds did not go unnoticed. Even the governor of New Brunswick, Sir Howard Douglas, energetically argued that Indian families be kept together, that they be given adequate reserves for hunting and gathering or farming, and that Catholic missionaries be sent to live with them rather than taking them to live with Protestants as parents. In the end, the Company sent Captain Walter Bromley, who was known to push for better conditions for the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, to assess the situation. He reported that the families taking on apprentices from the school were motivated only by money and brutally mistreated their wards. In yet another feature prescient of future residential schools, the apprentices rarely had a chance to return to school and spent much more time doing menial labour than learning.
In a follow-up to Bromley’s visit, Reverend John West noted that half the students at the school were actually white children taking advantage of a free education, though they were likely treated much differently than their Mi’kmaw counterparts. West was particularly disturbed that men of faith were sexually abusing the children. He described one priest as being more “like a mad dog—after his prey—than a Clergyman in the habit of praying for things requisite and necessary.” The students had learned very little, and could not read or understand the Bible. Coffin said it was the Indians’ own fault. They had never been enthusiastic about the chance their children were given, he said. Unconvinced, English backers pulled the plug on the school in 1826. More than a century later, the Canadians responsible for the education of the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik would fail to heed history’s lessons. The New England Company still exists today as a grant-giving charity, paying “each year for two Native Indians to travel to the Centre for Anglican Communion Studies” in Virginia.
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