Bury wasn’t alone in this opinion. Cameron Heatherington, the Indian Agent for Guysborough, had already written to Indian Affairs requesting a residential school for those who didn’t live near a day school. A. J. Boyd, superintendent of Indian Affairs for Nova Scotia, also supported a residential school. He felt that Canada’s education policy was failing the Maritime Indian. He’d been to Western Canada to study the residential school system and found the schools “highly successful.” He had apparently missed much of the recent news on Peter Bryce, who had exposed the schools as death traps, rife with disease.
Boyd submitted a May 1925 report urging Indian Affairs to build a residential school and farm in Nova Scotia. “The current [day school] system is unacceptable,” he wrote. “It keeps the Indian down and does not advance him in any way towards becoming a self sustaining and useful citizen.” A residential school would isolate the young Indian from bad influences on the reserve, he argued, and teach him the “proper way of life.” It was essential to educate the Indian out of the Indian.
Father Ryan, perhaps sensing the momentum shift, resumed his campaign of fourteen years earlier. He again wrote to the Department advocating for a residential school in the Maritimes, mainly to house and school “delinquent Indian children,” particularly orphans. He argued this time that the building of the school was a matter of justice, that without it all Maritime Indian children were being dragged down into a life of delinquency. Ryan felt that nothing good had come from having “prosecuted Indian after Indian.” The school was the progressive thing to do. He wrote that the current “educational system is only good for a few, and these few are soon overcome by the conduct of the delinquent…all due to the want of this one institution.” His letter was ignored.
The next year Father Ryan tried again, this time using an economic report arguing that while a new residential school might seem expensive, the government actually couldn’t afford not to have one. The government was paying Mi’kmaw families to look after Mi’kmaw orphans, “a grave financial drainage,” and because those payments were making the families lazy, the government could solve the Maritime “Indian Problem” by sending those kids to residential school instead. “The Indian question in the Maritime Provinces will then, and only then, be solved for all time,” he wrote.
It’s Official
A. J. Boyd wasn’t a popular figure among the Mi’kmaq. They had petitioned Duncan Scott in Ottawa several times to fire Boyd. Ben Christmas, chief of Membertou First Nation, accused Boyd of drawing two salaries while the Mi’kmaq lived in poverty. He also said Boyd rarely visited the reserves and was “not capable to protect an Indian,” having let the reserves become “deplorable and a disgrace.” Nevertheless, given his position as superintendent for the province, Boyd’s voice of support for a Maritime residential school was hugely influential. In fact, his esteem with the Mi’kmaq, and their opinion in general, was of no concern to Indian Affairs. Despite the fact that Ottawa was just beginning to acknowledge the failure of the residential school system to assimilate Aboriginal peoples, Indian Affairs Deputy Secretary J. A. MacLean took Boyd’s letter seriously enough to tour the Maritime reserves in the fall of 1926. When he returned to Ottawa, MacLean wrote Boyd to say he agreed wholeheartedly with the need for a residential school “convenient to the railway and sufficient in size to accommodate 80 children under the Catholic Church as virtually all Indians in the area belong to that faith.”
Duncan Campbell Scott, the sixty-four-year-old deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, was also a supporter. In the previous few decades Scott had opened dozens of new schools, and he considered starting one on the East Coast a primary career goal. “When we have this school established one of the desires of my official life will have been accomplished,” he wrote to the Halifax Catholic Archdiocese in 1926. Doing so would make the residential school system coast-to-coast-to-coast, with schools in the west, north, and east. He also wanted the school within view of the highway and rails, “so that the passing people will see in it an indication that our country is not unmindful of the interest of these Indian children.”
Scott officially announced his intentions to build a “home and school” in Nova Scotia nine months later, in another letter to A. J. Boyd. “The children will receive academic training, as well as instruction in farming, gardening, care of stock, carpentry in the case of boys, and for the girls, domestic activity,” he wrote. There would be a barn and henhouse on site. A farm instructor and carpenter-engineer would be hired. A year before it opened, Scott wrote to the Halifax Chronicle about the school: “For some time it has been known at Ottawa that a school of this kind was needed in the Maritimes…the time has come when something should be done.”
Now the Department would be able to take Maritime First Nations children living in foster homes and in various other institutions—as many as 125 of them, anyway—and put them in a central location. The school would “consolidate Indian education work in the Maritimes,” the Halifax Chronicle trumpeted. Finally a home for the “underprivileged Indian child of Nova Scotia and the other Maritime Provinces.” It would “mould the lives of the young aborigines and aid them in their search towards the goal of complete Canadian citizenship.” No Mi’kmaq were interviewed for the article. Scott also wrote to the local Liberal Minister of Parliament, James Lorimer Ilsley, who was originally from the Annapolis Valley but had been a lawyer in Yarmouth and Halifax, explaining the many benefits of the school and its goal, which was to ensure that graduates “will become self-supporting and not return to their old environments and habits.”
Shubenacadie was the 78th federally funded residential school in Canada, the only one east of Ontario and one of the last built. The number of schools peaked at 80, with more than 8,200 children attending, in 1931. Just like the other residential schools, the church would run the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. The government would provide the building and pay $150 per child per year to cover expenses. The school farmer would sell the produce to supplement the grant and cover repairs, food, clothing, and fuel. Indian Affairs would cover the cost of classroom supplies and medical services.
The Site
Once Scott was on board, things moved quickly. The Department of Indian Affairs had its own architect, R. Gurney Orr, who designed the building. That is, he copied the design of every other residential school in the country. It would cost $172,500. By June, the Department was looking for a location. At this time Charles Stewart was the minister of the Interior and Mines, which included Indian Affairs. He had a lot on his plate regarding the Nova Scotia Indians. Indian Affairs was following through on Bury’s centralization plan, which went hand in hand with the creation of the residential school. Stewart was overseeing the forced movement of Mi’kmaq from other reserves to Millbrook. He told the Montréal Gazette that by summer’s end he’d have them all “comfortably housed, with school accommodations provided on the reserve.”
In reality, neither of these things happened. In March 1932 Indian Affairs finally axed eighteen Nova Scotia Indian Agents “for reasons of public economy.” But half the population of Mi’kmaq were still living spread out across fifteen different reserves. Indian Affairs was forced to hire nineteen new agents to replace the eighteen they’d laid off. Ten years later Indian Affairs tried again, but despite promises of jobs, housing, food, and schools, many Mi’kmaq refused to leave their homes for a new reserve. Of those who did move to the Shubenacadie reserve, many were parents of children in the residential school who wanted to be closer to them. Their new houses were, as per Indian Affairs policy, built as cheaply as possible. The foundations were of low-quality concrete, which soon crumbled. The lumber warped badly and after a few years houses had to be demolished. The school, once built, suffered similar problems.
A hand-drawn sketch of the newly acquired site for the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, which includes a portion of the Shubenacadie River, c. 1928. Library and Archi
ves Canada/Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development fonds/Reel C-8161
But first a site had to be chosen. Stewart assigned provincial Indian Superintendent A. J. Boyd to find some land. Boyd got help from a local landowner, Robert Gass, who offered to sell the Department “one of the finest farms in the Province, within sight of the Town, less than 1/2 mile [1 km] from Ry Depot, on the main highway, at a good elevation overlooking the Shubenacadie River and in full view from the Railway….” Gass repeated several times that he had “no axe to grind” and no particular desire to sell his land. He wanted only that the endeavour be popular, he said. He felt that Shubenacadie Village was the best place for the school, “situate [sic] on the CN [rail line] and on the main highway from Halifax to Truro, exactly in the centre of the Province, the best farming community…and the Indian Reserve of some 1800 acres [730 hectares] is only 5 miles [8 kilometres] distant.” For good measure, Gass suggested several other landowners—S. J. Etter, George Gay, Fred Etter, and Joseph Flemming—who had good locations worth considering.
Boyd passed the recommendation on to his superiors. Later that summer, J. L. Ilsley, the local Liberal MP, met with Orr, the architect, in Shubenacadie. Together they visited four potential sites for the school, including Fred Etter’s and George Gay’s farms as Gass had suggested. Gass’s property wasn’t in the running. They were looking for at least twenty hectares of good farmland with space for twenty healthy milk cows. (The cows would be milked and the milk drunk by the children or churned into butter.) The location also had to be close to the hospitals and not too far from the Archdiocese in Halifax. In the end Ilsley and Orr chose Gay’s farm, about seven kilometres from Shubenacadie/Indian Brook First Nation. Its vegetable gardens and fertile fields abutted Snides Lake and Nova Scotia’s largest river, the Shubenacadie, or in Mi’kmaw, Sipekne’katik or Sikipne’katik, “land of wild potatoes.” The site would provide “ample opportunity for excellent drainage and water supply,” Orr wrote in his report to Duncan Scott.
“I did not in any way influence or try to influence the decision,” Ilsley wrote to Stewart. It was one of the few times in the early life of the school that Ilsley did not make specific recommendations on how to spend Indian Affairs’s money. He did, however, advise against plans to hire Gay and his son to work on the farm until the school principal arrived because they were Conservatives: “I am inclined to think that any such arrangement would be undesirable from the political standpoint,” he wrote. “The payment of government money to Conservatives is resented by Liberal workers in this province.” Ilsley also took pains to say he supported the purchase of the Gay property despite the fact that it was “bitterly resented by…the leading man in our party in the district, who called me up last night and indulged in much menacing talk about the support I would lose next election.” He concluded his letter by asking that he be consulted “in detail” about future property purchases and hiring for the school.
At this time, many farmers were eager to sell land and livestock, and the federal government was a reliable buyer. These were Ilsley’s constituents; he also took pains to recommend several other service providers for the school, including providers of bedroom, dining room, and living room furniture, kitchen utensils, and dry goods. Gay’s sixty-hectare farm and house was the best choice, they figured, in every way but one: its land wasn’t as productive as the Etter farm. But it was less than a kilometre from the train station, which would save a fortune on the costs of moving hundreds of children, plus the staff, to and from the station over the years, and about seven kilometres from the Shubenacadie reserve.
Indian Affairs paid $11,000 for twenty-six cultivated hectares, twenty hectares of woodland, four hectares of pasture, and seven hectares of wetlands that could be used to make hay, and the farmhouse. The site also had easy access to electric—a twenty-four-hour service from Avon River Power Co.—and telephone hookups. It was an easy decision, being $2,500 cheaper than the only other viable option. On top of being closer to the train station, it also had better amenities, including a road. Although it was rumoured to flood on occasion, Orr asked around and found that “the road was flooded for an hour or two a day in the spring of certain years only, but that it was not impassable even when flooded.” Eventually it must have posed a problem, because in January 1930, a month before children arrived, the school principal insisted that the Department of Highways of Nova Scotia bring in crushed gravel from its plant in Debert to fix the road, at a cost of more than $400—about half of what the job was actually worth.
Once the site was selected, Ilsley happily recommended R. W. McKenzie of Enfield to survey the site to ascertain acreage and elevations. He later recommended Stewart J. Etter of Shubenacadie be hired as resident farmer to lead the young boys working the fields. It is unclear whether they knew that they were digging at their ancestors. “At Shubenacadie, the Abanakees used to hold every year a ceremonial meeting,” the Catholic Diocese of Nova Scotia wrote in its 1936 directory. “Here, fittingly enough, the Department of Indian Affairs decided to build a residential school for their descendants.” It was, in fact, built over a sacred Mi’kmaw burial ground, which some say was why the school was cursed from the start.
The Building
Indian Affairs invited tenders in the spring of 1928 and immediately received a flood of unsolicited letters from companies offering their services in plumbing, refrigeration, barn building, well drilling, lightning-protection systems, coal supply, cream-separating equipment, and furniture supplies. Local businessmen were thrilled to have a new potential federal government customer in town. The Department chose a bid from the Rhodes Curry Company in Amherst, which promised a school “with all the modern convenience of a three-storey structure of brick and granite…spacious and well lit.” As per Indian Affairs policy, it was the low price that got Rhodes Curry the job. Its bid of $153,000 was $790.50 lower than the runner-up, a Moncton company. Rhodes Curry was a reputable business with a four-decade history building train stations and mansions. On Ilsley’s advice, Duncan Scott hired James Crowell of Windsor to inspect the company’s work. During construction, which was delayed several times and eventually came in nearly $75,000 over budget, Crowell gave handwritten updates, always starting with, “Regarding the progress of the work I might say…”
Architectural drawings for the school by Indian Affairs staff. Library and Archives Canada
The school was built at the highest point on the property, atop “quite an abrupt little hill,” as the school’s first principal, Father Jeremiah Mackey, put it. The hill began its descent toward the riverbank about twenty metres from the school, leaving little room for a lawn. There were no trees, opening the building to wind and rain from every direction, creating a whirlwind effect. For fifteen years, water would be pumped uphill from the lake seven hundred metres to the northeast of the school. Well water was hard and unpalatable but the lake was free of contaminants. A subcontractor, Canadian Fairbanks-Morse Co., installed an automated pump at the lake and a pump house halfway up the hill, four metres above water level. Getting water up to the school was a challenge. The architect, Orr, and the inspector, Crowell, wrote to Rhodes Curry several times on the subject. “It is very necessary that a water supply be put into that building before the ground freezes,” Orr wrote in early November 1928. “We will appreciate an answer stating just what your intentions are regarding water supply.” Several months later, the company president, A. Curry, wrote to Orr saying that the building would not be completed on time because the granite trimmings and flooring he’d ordered were months late arriving. He blamed the Department for switching to a cheaper material after he’d already placed the order, forcing a delay as he reordered.
“First Floor Plan” for the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, c. 1927. Library and Archives Canada/Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development fonds/Reel C-8161
In the summer, when Rhodes Curry declared t
he school complete, Crowell completed a final inspection with Principal Father Mackey and reported that “the only finish the floors have received was a coat of linseed oil & gasoline mixed,” applied unevenly. “Every strip seems to be a different shade.” This report started a lengthy battle between Indian Affairs and Rhodes Curry, during which at least one law firm was engaged. Curry, the company president, argued that he hadn’t budgeted on a “floor the same as a first class.” He claimed that due to delays in the project “beyond our control,” his company had made no money. “He seems to think this is a 2nd or perhaps a 3rd class job…as this school is only for Indians,” Crowell concluded.
The school’s exterior was glorious or ominous, depending on the viewer. Collection of Elsie Charles Basque, Nova Scotia Museum
More importantly for the people who had to live in the building, the roof leaked. A roofer had come to fix it, but it would remain a problem for at least another three decades. Orr was brought in to do his own inspection in fall 1929, and he concurred that the floors had not been properly laid. Indian Affairs informed Rhodes Curry it was withholding the final payment until the floors were fixed. Curry wrote the Department again on Halloween demanding payment. The Department paid all but the last $1,000 owed. Finally, in the new year, Curry hired a lawyer, J. A. Hanway, to dog Indian Affairs for the final payment. Hanway argued that the Department had never specified the floors needed to be waxed. Seven months later, Indian Affairs still hadn’t made the final payment. By this time the unfinished floors were being trampled daily by more than a hundred pairs of little feet.
Indian School Road Page 6