Indian School Road

by Chris Benjamin

  Maritime Indian Schools

  It wasn’t until decades after the Capuchin séminaire closed, with the Siege of Port-Royal in 1710, that Britain took permanent control of peninsular Acadia. They renamed it Nova Scotia. While the French had tried to teach the Mi’kmaq their ways, for more than a century the British showed no interest in Mi’kmaw education. In We Were Not the Savages, Mi’kmaw historian Daniel Paul shows that while the French had made efforts to trade and coexist with the Mi’kmaq and other First Nations, by comparison the British saw them as obstacles to be subdued or eliminated. Treaties were one tactic of subjugation. The first was signed in 1725 and made King George “the Rightful Possessor of the Province of Nova Scotia.” But the Mi’kmaq and the king’s representatives had different ideas about what they were signing, and the treaties have stayed contentious for nearly three hundred years. For the British, the treaty meant that, among other things, they owned all the land and whatever they gave the Mi’kmaq was a kindness. The Mi’kmaq would be “granted” the worst pieces of their own land, and over centuries new settlers would chip away at even those allotments. Throughout the 1730s, colonial authorities granted Mi’kmaw land to newcomers, sometimes granting as much as four hundred hectares to a single family.

  “Centralizing” the Mi’kmaq, moving them onto fewer plots of land for easier management, would become a British then Canadian obsession. When Edward Cornwallis arrived as the new governor of Nova Scotia in 1749, he wrote to the Board of Trade arguing for a final solution to what would more broadly become known as “the Indian Problem.” He wanted to wipe out the Mi’kmaq, and he put a bounty on their heads. That year, 150 men went into the forests to find and kill any Mi’kmaq they found. Cornwallis only wished he could do more, believing that with naval reinforcements he could “root them out entirely.” At this point the Mi’kmaq were suffering and had become outlaws in their own home. They found themselves without their traditional hunting lands, exposed to new illnesses from the Europeans, and at risk of state-sanctioned murder by mercenaries. By 1752 there were only twenty thousand Mi’kmaq left. There had been at least two hundred thousand before European contact. Their situation only worsened when their allies, the Acadians, were expelled three years later. The Mi’kmaq had little choice but to accept whatever form of peace, and accompanying rules, the British imposed.

  Over the next few decades, boatloads of poor European Protestants arrived to flesh out Nova Scotia, each having been promised at least 20 hectares of land, tax-free for a decade. It was a giant leap in social class in exchange for the work of clearing land. Higher-ranking military personnel could take 240 hectares. What was promised to the Mi’kmaq, via treaty, was further subdivided and given to the newcomers. Tracts of Mi’kmaw land were torched to drive them out.

  In 1801 the colonial government created 3,442 hectares of “Indian Reserves,” on “swamps, bogs, clap pits, mountains and rock piles,” Daniel Paul writes. The traditional hunting grounds that had sustained the Mi’kmaq for centuries were no longer accessible. Settlers drove the Mi’kmaq population downward to fewer than one thousand by 1848. Those who survived did so in abject poverty, often forced into begging. This situation forced the British to show some interest in Mi’kmaw education. In an effort to halt starvation and disease, the province passed in 1842 an Act to Provide for the Instruction and Permanent Settlement of the Indians. It appointed a part-time commissioner of Indian Affairs to establish schools for Mi’kmaw children, with a tiny budget of £300—only £50 less than the province’s governor had paid for twenty-five Mi’kmaw scalps in 1744.

  The 1842 act was a half-hearted measure and did nothing to stop the loss of land and food that was killing the Mi’kmaq, who would have preferred to learn to read and write on their own terms, and use such knowledge to transmit their own culture rather than that of the British. But it did result in a few education efforts, thanks in part to the work of Reverend Silas Tertius Rand. The Protestant minister, who arrived from London in 1845, found that many Mi’kmaq had already taught themselves to write using an English-style script that read like French. A passionate believer in the value of formal education, Rand spent several years raising money to set up day schools on reserves throughout the province. As a Protestant, he had to rely on Joe Ruisseaux Brooks, a Frenchman fluent in Mi’kmaw and English, for assistance. Mi’kmaw children could attend school in the day while still living in their communities, learning to read and write a new Mi’kmaw roman script that Rand had developed. They also learned the virtues of the Protestant faith over their own. While the schools were poorly funded and closed within a few years, Rand was satisfied that many Mi’kmaq had learned to read.

  It took the passing of another couple of decades and the creation of Canada for day schools—twenty-eight in all—to become more permanent features in the Maritimes. In 1872, day schools, now paid for by what would become Indian Affairs, were once again established on three reserves: Bear River, Whycocomagh, and Eskasoni. Once again, low attendance was a problem and the Bear River school was shut down within two years. In 1876 the Shubenacadie Band asked Ottawa for a day school. They wanted their children to learn English and other skills that would eventually help improve conditions on the reserve—and they weren’t the only ones asking. Aboriginal communities across Canada were requesting day schools. Treaties from this period included a promise by the Canadian government to provide on-reserve schools “whenever the Indians shall desire it.” But this promise was quickly broken due to a chronic lack of funds for education. Indian Affairs considered the day schools that did exist “very inferior” to the dozen or so residential schools it funded in Ontario, Northwest Territories, and the western provinces, where students lived permanently in off-reserve schools. The Department was deliberating closing day schools altogether. And yet, low-quality day schools continued to be built in the Maritimes until most Mi’kmaw children could walk to one in 1900, by which point, Aboriginal parents across Canada had come to see residential schools as a bad idea.

  Silas T. Rand, c. 1880, Amherst, Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia Museum

  Shubenacadie did not get its day school until 1894, nearly two decades after the Band first asked, mainly because the cost of a building was too high. The school was eventually built for $600 and was drafty, dark, and full of leaks. This poor quality would prove typical, as Maritime day schools often lacked the money to buy books or desks, let alone weatherproofing. Twenty-five children enrolled for the Shubenacadie day school, but the average daily attendance of just twelve students did not impress the Department. While the rate wasn’t far off the Nova Scotia public-school average of 58 percent, over the next twelve years attendance declined steadily. Indian Affairs shut down the school in 1906, reopened it in 1911, and closed it again in 1912.

  Most of the day schools in the region suffered a similar fate at the hands of a department always reluctant to spend money. But Duncan Scott, the superintendent of Indian education, was hopeful that the day schools would help young Mi’kmaq overcome their difficulties, despite their parents being “prone to wander about from place to place, selling their baskets or squatting in the vicinity of towns….” In his 1911 report, Scott noted that on “several of the reserves successful day schools have been established.”

  The day school at Shubenacadie was reopened once again in 1913 and stayed open until 1930 (with a two-year hiatus from 1920 to 1922 when the Department couldn’t find a teacher), with an attendance rate of about 33 percent, which was typical of day schools across the Maritimes. When Indian Agents and others began lobbying the federal government in the 1920s for a residential school in Nova Scotia, they usually mentioned the low attendance rates at day schools. Not surprisingly, no one thought to ask Mi’kmaw parents if there was a better way to provide an education for their children, such as modifying the school calendar to work around hunting and harvest seasons. No one at Indian Affairs seemed to consider the fact that parents didn’t want to send their childre
n to schools with no desks, books, or heat. Often they lacked even a teacher—the pay was so low that anyone qualified chose to work elsewhere.

  Martha Walls, a professor at Mount Saint Vincent University specializing in Atlantic Canadian First Nations history, argues in a compelling paper in the Canadian Journal of Native Studies, “By allowing Maritime day schools to languish, the federal government was better able to compel students’ attendance at the more strongly assimilative Shubenacadie residential facility.” Walls also points out that many school inspectors didn’t bother with the day schools. “I used to visit them till I found that I had little or no influence,” one wrote in 1912. This lack of inspection continued for years after the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School opened, when a lone inspector was responsible for dozens of day schools across the Maritimes and central Canada. Some were literally falling over, yet Indian Affairs would not spend the money to fix them.

  The Canadian Residential School System

  Industry and Knowledge

  The idea of a school for Aboriginal children that mimicked a European settler community, with short-haired kids in European clothes learning to farm, was established in what is now Canada during early experiments in New France and Acadia. An earlier model of European industrial or reform schools for young people who broke the law or came from poor families influenced these early efforts in the “New World.” Similar schools also existed in the West Indies and United States, and like the Indian residential schools, became best known for rampant child abuse.

  Robert Bagot was the first to make the concept official. As Governor General of the Province of Canada in 1844, he proposed that Aboriginal children be separated from their parents and the “half-civilized” reserves, and absorbed into Canadian culture. “To civilize, Indians need industry and knowledge,” he wrote. Three years later, Egerton Ryerson, the colony’s most influential educator, added that the focus in these schools should be religion, to build moral character. Ryerson had already founded English Canada’s public school system with similar aims of improving attendance and “inculcating loyalty and patriotism, fostering social cohesion and self-reliance…the acceptance of the established authority.” Learning practical farming skills was to be part of the program at both public and residential schools. The big difference was that Indian children would be forced to live away from their families, with nuns and priests as fearsome parental replacements.

  The response from Aboriginal leadership was, at first, positive. Many communities set aside treaty payments to help pay for the schools. But the first residential schools, founded in Upper Canada soon after Bagot’s report, suffered from low enrollment, runaways, and graduates who went straight back to the reserve. The colonial government tried to sweeten the lure of “civilized” life with the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act. While offering residential school graduates twenty hectares of land, they would also be forced to give up their legal rights as registered Indians, and thus their cultural identities. This act was paired with a scheme of building planned communities around the schools for married graduates, but almost no one was interested in living there.

  Churches worked with governments from the earliest days to run Canadian schools for Aboriginal children. They used the same per capita system later adopted for the residential school system, in which government paid the churches a set dollar amount for each student. The more students a school had, the more money the church had to work with. This system would become the cause of much overcrowding and death. In early 2013 researchers from major national Aboriginal organizations, a national organization representing survivors, churches, the federal government, and academic John Milloy examined the number and causes of deaths, illnesses, and disappearances of children and the locations of burial sites. From one million government and school records—only one-fifth of the documents known to exist—they identified three thousand deaths at residential schools. The school principals hadn’t bothered naming almost a quarter of those children, and there were likely many more in the records that researchers weren’t allowed to access. The schools also stopped reporting deaths in 1917—thirteen years before Shubenacadie opened.

  Deaths at residential schools often went unreported even to the families, who were left to wonder why their children didn’t come home. And Indian Affairs refused to cover the cost of sending the bodies home. Children died mostly of disease, but also due to malnutrition and accidents, the researchers found. Some committed suicide and others died trying to escape. Death was always part of the plan at residential schools: architectural blueprints often included cemeteries. In February 2013, researchers had found fifty burial sites. There are rarely grave markers or names, and they have mostly grown over. In some cases, like at Shubenacadie, the government sold the land to private owners after the school closed.

  For the most part, the churches were the ones pushing for residential schools, which they saw as a tool for indoctrinating new believers and lifelong members. Sometimes the missionaries would take a role negotiating treaties and have chiefs request schools as part of the process. They would often go so far as to build a school and then beg funding from the government. The schools built by churches without government funding were usually rush jobs with low-quality materials and poor design. They were badly lit and lacked proper drainage, heat, and ventilation. They often burned down, and many didn’t have fire escapes.

  The government paid for the schools it chose to support, putting a portion aside to build schools, buy books, and pay teachers every year from 1838. Less than a decade later, the federal government decided to stop paying for gunpowder for reserves, instead putting that money toward Aboriginal education. Gunpowder would be used to hunt, a pre-civilized activity. For any funding other than for schooling and farming—the civilized way to get food—Aboriginal people would now have to make a special application.

  After Confederation

  The effort to assimilate Aboriginal peoples was made official with the British North America Act, which created Canada in 1867. The country’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, stated that an important goal for the new nation was “to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the inhabitants of the Dominion.” With this end in mind, the act gave the federal government the power to legislate on behalf of Aboriginal people, taking control of their property. They became federal wards and the government became the parent, responsible for their care and education. The federal government would educate Aboriginal people and the provinces would educate everybody else.

  But it wasn’t until the federal government created the Indian Affairs Department in 1880 to solve the “Indian Problem” that the strategy of “taking the Indian out of the child” was formalized. By this time, the First Nations had outlived their usefulness to the English and French as potential military allies and trading partners. They had become, quite literally, a liability, an expense to be minimized. The purpose of Indian Affairs was to figure out what an Indian was, who qualified, how many there were, and how much they would cost. The idea was that they’d be cheaper if they were “civilized”—they had to disappear into the fabric of Canada and become like everyone else.

  The hodgepodge of schools on and around reserves had already begun to gel into a system of day and residential schools in 1879. John A. Macdonald hired thirty-nine-year-old Nicholas Flood Davin, a writer for the Globe and Mail, to write a confidential report on industrial schools for “Indians and Half-Breeds” in the United States. He was to determine whether such a system would make sense for Canada. Davin visited with the US Secretary of the Interior and Commissioner of Indian affairs in Washington. They told him of “happy results which had attended the industrial schools wherever established.” The American schools included livestock and crops, and the boys learned farming, carpentry, or blacksmithing from a resident expert. Davin wrote that the farm revenue would soon cover all costs of running the schools.

  Davin regurgit
ated the wisdom of the day that “the day school did not work, because the influence of the wigwam was stronger than the influence of the school.” He noted that in the American system, an amount is paid per pupil, per year, by government to the church running each school, a system that deprived the children of sufficient food. Davin recommended against it. He included design plans for a school “of the cheapest kind” to build. He was enthused by the potential of the schools to prepare “the native populations of the North-West” for their new reality under Canadian rule. But he was cautious, noting that industrial schools would take “a generation or two” to work. One thing was for certain: “If anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young.” Davin urged the government to use existing missionary schools and set up four new industrial boarding schools right away.

  Davin’s report hit the mark with government. From the beginning, the residential school system defined itself with the violent idea that the government had to “catch” young Indians. The annual reports of Indian Affairs that year espouse the need for “emancipation” of young Indians from “the condition of ignorance and superstitious blindness” of reserve life.

  Lawrence Vankoughnet, the deputy superintendent—now called deputy minister—of Indian Affairs, was particularly enthused by the residential school concept. Going against the advice of the Americans, he suggested that Prime Minister Macdonald grant funds to churches based on the number of students in each school. Soon after, Vankoughnet took over all the costs of the missionary schools in the west. It took all the Department’s funds. Vankoughnet pushed that students be punished for speaking their own language through starvation and solitary confinement. English and French educators believed that Aboriginal languages were incapable of expressing European ideas and concepts. Vankoughnet’s successor, Hayter Reed, pushed this concept even further, instituting an official policy in 1896 that all teaching, and even recreational activities, be done in English. The policy was still in place, inscribed into the Programme of Studies for Indian Students decades later, when Shubenacadie’s first students arrived in February 1930.