Indian School Road

by Chris Benjamin

  A decade after Davin’s report, thousands of students nationwide, aged six to sixteen, attended schools far from their communities, traditions, and the public eye. The federal government provided land, buildings, fences, equipment, books, and police to hunt down escapees. Churches helped pay for repairs and medicine and kept detailed records of attendance and expenses. The government’s constant worry about costs meant that buildings were badly designed, poorly constructed, and lacked proper lighting, heat, and ventilation. Each school was essentially identical, following the same bland industrial design that allowed for quick, cheap construction. The children were poorly fed, despite most of the schools having livestock and crop operations on-site, run on student labour.

  The Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, which opened in 1930, was a relative latecomer to this national system. It was one of more than 150 government-sponsored, church-run schools that existed between the 1870s and 1996. In all, more than 150,000 Aboriginal children attended these schools.

  Battle of the Bureaucrats

  In 1907 Frank Pedley, the superintendent general of Indian Affairs, asked the Department’s chief medical officer, Peter Bryce, to examine the health of residential school students. Pedley wondered if the schools were fully Canadianizing Indian children. A report of a few years earlier had shown that only 40 percent of graduates went on to any kind of success in life. The other 60 percent were either dead or had “turned out badly.”

  Bryce spent three months examining students and talking to staff members at thirty-five schools in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. He found that one in four children had died of tuberculosis at school or soon after leaving it. He estimated a death rate at the schools of between 35 and 60 percent. Bryce, who had co-authored the Ontario Public Health Act in 1884, resisted popular but unproven ideas. As a result he butted heads with his superiors until they forced him out. At a time when most white people assumed their inherent superiority over others, Bryce looked scientifically, to environmental factors, to explain the difficult situations of non-whites and immigrants. He used his position to conduct extensive studies over many years of how urbanization was creating poverty for these groups, making them dependent on others to earn low wages, and putting them at greater risk of disease and of committing or becoming a victim of crime.

  The “inadequate government funding, poorly constructed schools, sanitary and ventilation problems, inadequate diet, clothing and medical care” disgusted Bryce. School staffers usually shut off the ventilation in the winter to save on heating costs. Sick students were commonly admitted without a medical checkup, despite rules requiring they see a doctor first. He noted a complete lack of exercise other than forced farm and domestic labour. In all, students put in fifteen-hour days including classroom time and labour. Disease spread in overcrowded dorm rooms. The churches tried to maximize the number of students—well beyond building capacity—to get more funding. Bryce recommended what he thought were low-cost solutions, including hiring nurses familiar with tuberculosis to work at the schools.

  Bryce sent his report to Pedley, as well as Duncan Campbell Scott, then superintendent of Indian education (and whose only child had died in a boarding school in France two years before Scott had taken charge of the residential system in Canada), and several MPs and church officials. Frustrated by the lack of response from his superiors, Bryce published articles about the residential school deaths in the Ottawa Citizen and Saturday Night Magazine. The Indian Agents weren’t surprised; they knew the conditions at the schools were bad. But the churches got defensive because Bryce had partially blamed the deaths on the confusing arrangement between church and government, whose roles were usually unclear—and who had a history of blaming each other for any problems.

  Duncan Scott was also annoyed. At forty-five years old, he was a discreet career bureaucrat who had worked his way up from junior copy clerk and would eventually put in fifty-two years, growing the residential school system to its peak. But he was also an avid outdoorsman, poet, and piano player, a Renaissance man of sorts. His well-loved “Indian poems” lamented the very effort to eliminate indigenous cultures that he was responsible for. In his poem “The Half-breed Girl” he wrote of one, “free of the trap and the paddle” yet for whom, “something behind her savage life / Shines like a fragile veil.” Lines like these had made him famous, the toast of high culture.

  Scott’s day job would earn him a different reputation among his wards, the Aboriginal peoples of Canada. He was a well-known fiscal conservative, a real penny-pincher. Disturbed by the high cost of the treaties between Canada and First Nations, he was determined to cut every corner possible. He cut the salaries of Indian Agents, clerks, and residential school farming instructors. Even Bryce’s modest recommendations got Scott’s goat. He figured they’d cost a great deal, which he was “not able to recommend.” Indian Affairs did create a maximum enrollment rule, increased funding by twenty-five dollars per student to improve facilities, and asked schools to keep a room available to isolate tuberculosis patients, but Bryce was infuriated by these meagre responses to a crisis situation of tragic proportions: children were dying by the hundreds if not thousands. He wrote to Scott’s superiors, claiming that Scott was “counting upon the ignorance and indifference of the public to the fate of the Indians.”

  At this point, Indian Affairs stopped using the phrase “industrial schools,” which had developed a poor reputation. The Department published statistics showing attendance below capacity, but medical observers visiting the schools noticed a different reality. The heat of the sensational newspaper articles cooled away, but at least the growth of the residential school system had slowed. There were now nearly four thousand students at seventy-four schools: about one in every five Aboriginal children between six and fifteen.

  Bryce wasn’t the only one complaining. A group of well-known lawyers, church officials, educators, and Indian Affairs bureaucrats worked to have the worst of the schools shut down. They argued that the Department could save a lot of money by getting rid of them. Higher-ups in the churches and government shut down their efforts, and the deaths at schools did not stop, even as reports from Bryce and other doctors flooded the Department. In 1914, Scott, now deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, had “the troublesome Mr. Bryce” removed from “Indian work” to focus on immigrant health. “The cost of compiling such statistics far outweighed the benefit of the information,” he wrote of Bryce’s most impassioned work. Dr. O. I. Grain replaced Bryce and found the residential schools in satisfactory condition.

  After Bryce was forced to retire, he wrote The Story of a National Crime. In this booklet, published in 1922, he accused Scott of having a cold indifference to the health of his wards, to their lives and deaths. He cited several efforts on his part to convince his superiors they were dealing with a humanitarian crisis. He gave statistics backing his belief that the federal government didn’t care about Aboriginal health. He pointed out that the City of Ottawa, with a population about the same as the nation’s Aboriginal population, spent more than three times the total budget of Indian Affairs on tuberculosis patients.

  Bryce’s publication embarrassed the government further, which responded by asking the churches to list the kind and quantity of food served each day, an attempt to more closely monitor nutrition levels. But little changed at the schools, and by the early 1920s Aboriginal leaders had mostly turned against them. They’d wanted an education for their children, not a cultural makeover and forced removal into a disease pit. Some leaders petitioned instead for more day schools, where at least the kids could come home at night for deprogramming and a traditional meal. Despite growing evidence that it was killing children rather than culturally assimilating them, the residential school system was strengthening with the enthusiasm of Duncan Campbell Scott.

  In 1920 Scott urged the government to make school attendance mandatory for Indian children between the ages of seven and fifteen. Parents who t
ried to keep their children close would be penalized. “I want to get rid of the Indian problem,” Scott told a parliamentary committee. “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”

  A School for Maritime Indians

  The Targets Were Children

  In its thirty-seven years, more than two thousand children were taken to the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. Many were traumatized by the school’s environment of fear and self-loathing. As a school, Shubenacadie fails any modern academic standard, and any similar test of its day. The records that weren’t destroyed and the testimony of its survivors show that the institution was really a self-sustaining work camp, complete with livestock and produce, for much of its existence. The real reason for the institution wasn’t education. It had two main functions: house poor or parentless children and assimilate Indians into the dominant culture.

  Although Indian Affairs had officially dropped the goal of getting Indians to give up life on the reserve and become part of Euro-Canadian society in 1899, comments from Department officials show that the Shubenacadie residential school was at least partially designed to assimilate the Mi’kmaq. Officials hoped to eliminate Aboriginal cultures and languages by creating a break between young people and their families and communities. This process has been called cultural genocide.

  More than many other residential schools, Shubenacadie was closer to an orphanage—with all the worst connotations of that word—than a school. The targets were children from the poorest eastern First Nations families, mainly Mi’kmaw, Wolastoqkew, and Peskotomuhkatiyik—orphans and foster children who had limited means to resist. Children without access to on-reserve day schools were also targeted—even though many reserves lacked schools because Indian Affairs would not pay for them. The creation of the Shubenacadie residential school went hand in hand with Indian Affairs’s ongoing attempt to centralize the Mi’kmaq into as few locations as possible. It was seen as the cheapest and most effective way to deal with them. But the assimilation effort was too poorly funded to work. A lack of funding resulted in overcrowding: the school was built for 125 students, but its enrollment numbers were never so low until its final decade. Sickness and injury were rampant. For the students, who were not allowed to leave and were punished seemingly at random, it was a prison. The conditions were so bad that one resident, who later became a POW during the Second World War, told CBC that of the two experiences, one was no worse than the other.

  The Only Region Without

  a Residential School

  It was a strange time to open an Indian residential school. The Mi’kmaq population continued to struggle, with only around two thousand left in the region. Recent studies had shown that most of the youth leaving residential schools in the rest of Canada returned to their reserves, having lost their mother tongues, and had no chance of finding employment in white Canada.

  Political cartoonist Michael de Adder’s astute depiction of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School as it was seen by the outside world versus the experience of its child residents.

  The United States, whose residential school system had initially served as a model for the Canadian system, was now moving away from it, or at least reforming it to instill more respect for Indigenous American cultures. This change was based on three years of research by a team of legal, economic, health, educational, agricultural, and social work experts led by Lewis Meriam. In their 847-page report, entitled The Problem of Indian Administration and often referred to as “The Meriam Report” (published in 1928), the researchers wrote: “Provisions for the care of the Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate.” Specifically, it detailed that the children were malnourished and their health poorly cared for. Teaching standards were low and culturally insensitive. The schools only stayed open on the backs of student labour. Meriam recommended an education system based on integrating children into mainstream public schools, a policy Canada would adopt within twenty years. The report moved some white Americans to push for reform and greater respect for First Nations cultures within the education system. The idea of removing children from their homes, parents, and communities was suddenly being called out in the mainstream. In practice though, the American residential school system would survive another forty years, and Canada’s for longer.

  In Canada, the fifty-four-year-old system had long suffered criticism for its failure to educate or care for its wards. In short, it was doing a better job—at great financial expense—of infecting them with tuberculosis and other deadly illnesses than teaching them about the White Man or anything else. The Department of Indian Affairs was also well aware of allegations of physical and sexual abuse in many of the schools by this time. For the most part, these were either ignored or dealt with by moving the accused to another religious assignment or residential school. Despite losing their mother tongues, the children who attended the schools still had weak English skills. The focus on “vocational training,” via slave labour, to help supplement the costs of running a boarding school had not made the residents employable. It was clear that they’d have done better learning practical skills in their own communities.

  Years before Shubenacadie opened, residential schools had come to be seen in most of Canada as places of disease and death, a failed experiment. Minor changes were made. Teachers received raises. Residents got one warm meal a day and got to play games sometimes. More than five thousand children lived in seventy-one residential schools across Canada, but First Nations children in the Maritimes had so far avoided that fate. And yet, there were rumblings here. Even back in 1885, John A. Macdonald had lamented that “Maritime Indians” didn’t make their children go to school and thought perhaps a residential school was the answer. Edgar Dewdney, the superintendent general—now called deputy minister—of Indian Affairs, said the same thing to the Governor General a few years later. By this point, the Maritimes was the only region in Canada without one. Two decades later, a low-level bureaucrat and man of faith came to the same conclusion.

  Father F. C. Ryan was the New Brunswick supervisor of Indian schools in 1911 when he wrote to Ottawa urging Indian Affairs to establish a residential school in the Maritimes. Without it, he believed, the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik were unfit for “the battle of life.” He mostly worried for the boys. The girls at least learned sewing and knitting in day schools. The boys had nothing. They needed to learn useful skills, like carpentry, blacksmithing, tailoring, and farming. Father Ryan’s petition was ignored.

  Eight years later, another New Brunswicker took up Father Ryan’s call. H. J. Bury was the supervisor of Indian timber lands for the region, whose job it was to help make money off what was left of reserve lands. He wrote regular memos and reports to his superiors in Ottawa between 1919 and 1934. In numerous letters to his superiors, Bury noted that hundreds of Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia were squatting in shacks, especially in the Halifax area. The owners of the land had told them to beat it, but they found it impossible to make a living on reserve.

  Nova Scotia Indian Superintendent A. J. Boyd had long been pushing the Department to buy land for off-reserve Mi’kmaq, but Bury didn’t trust the Mi’kmaq to stay put. He wanted them relocated to Indian Brook reserve, near Truro, for the time being. Like many at Indian Affairs, Bury believed in putting the Mi’kmaq onto just a few large reserves. He suggested selling off the reserves with poor land and buying new, more arable land around Truro, Shubenacadie, and Whycocomagh. In 1924 he estimated that there were about 2,400 Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, with 1,500 living on the province’s twenty-six reserves. Many were still nomadic, but about 540 Mi’kmaq were squatting near the city. Bury was convinced that if the Mi’kmaq were given better land and taught farming as well as other trades, they’d be much better off.

  Like centuries of “Indian workers” before him, Bury saw farming as t
he only way to civilize the Mi’kmaq. The first missionaries had seen that the nomadic Mi’kmaw lifestyle made it impossible to keep pace and spread the word of Jesus. To the government, farming was the European, and later Canadian, way. And Indian farmers were as good as Canadian. Ironically, while federal government workers pushed farming on the Mi’kmaq, the Nova Scotia government profited on the image of the Indian woodsman. It toured elaborate displays in large American cities depicting Mi’kmaw hunting guides in buckskins. One guide demonstrated his moose-calling skills on NBC.

  Bury, on the other hand, suggested a residential school on a farm as the means to contain roving Mi’kmaw children in one place, to learn farming in a caring environment. Agricultural education in public schools was being phased out, but Indian Affairs still supported the concept in residential schools. The proposed school was a small ingredient in Bury’s larger plan to amalgamate the reserves, a process that would save a bundle by employing three full-time Indian Agents—who would presumably be better qualified—instead of nineteen part-timers. He suggested both of these things in a report to Duncan Scott. Bury noted with some envy that there were more than seventy residential schools nationwide, and none in the neglected Maritimes. He suggested Truro as the ideal location.