Indian School Road

by Chris Benjamin

  In July 1930 Curry visited the building along with Mr. Dunn, the project foreman. “Father Mackey pointed out the bad places—there was only one—about four feet square in the Girls Play Room and one about the same size in the Dining Room,” he wrote to Orr. He blamed wear and tear. “I have not seen a better concrete floor than what we have put in that building.” But he agreed to go over the windows with a cement putty to reduce leakage. In the end, Indian Affairs paid Curry in full and the principal had to finish the floors with Hippo oil.

  The press was thrilled with the facility. The Halifax Chronicle reported that it “rated as one of the best institutions of its kind in Canada.” The Catholics called it a “striking, semi-fireproof edifice of brick and granite.” Its accommodations for students and staff, they said, “leave nothing to be desired.” The paper described the classrooms as “large, attractive, and well equipped” and noted the well-lit, airy devotional chapel for two hundred worshippers and a sanctuary furnished by friends and colleagues of the principal.

  In fact it was the standard residential school design: a three-storey (plus a finished basement) brick and granite structure, forty-eight by twenty metres. The front door was ornate and appealing, but for the most part the building was a simple, inexpensive boarding school. In the basement were a playroom and three dining rooms (one each for the children, teachers, and male staff), laundry, and furnace rooms. The three classrooms, workshop, principal’s office, chapel with grand crucifix, parlour room, kitchen, children’s washroom, and principal’s office were on the ground floor. Upstairs were dorm rooms—the boys’ facing southeast and the girls’ northwest—a sewing room, four classrooms, and student washrooms. And on the top floor were the Sisters’ washrooms, bedrooms, and community room featuring a full-scale cross on the wall. Outside were two barns, a shed, cold storage, and outhouses.

  The building was atop a windy hill. Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives

  Many of the residential schools ended up burning to the ground. Like Shubenacadie, they were poorly constructed of cheap materials. Some even lacked fire escapes. But many were much older than the Shubenacadie building by the time they met their fiery fate. The Shubenacadie residential school nearly burned to the ground in the fall of 1936 after a fire started in the boiler room. A Sister knocked on Principal Father Mackey’s door just before noon. He ran to the basement and was quickly joined by several older boys. They ran a hose down to the boiler room, but it had to take several sharp turns to get there and the water wouldn’t go through. Mackey ran a second hose from the first floor straight through a basement window. Edward McLeod, the school’s carpenter-engineer, went out to the pump house and cranked the second pump to its highest pressure. Still the hose wouldn’t work.

  Eventually the townspeople of Shubenacadie arrived with two RCMP officers, and started a hand-to-hand bucket brigade to douse the flames. But the fire had spread from the boiler room through cracks in the surrounding metal and had gotten into a wooden beam. They had to cut open the chapel floor to find and douse the slow burn. Mackey blamed the older boys for the fire. He said they made a habit of smoking in the boiler room. In his report to Indian Affairs, Mackey promised to check into things with the boys. It’s unclear if he ever found satisfaction.

  The Men in Charge

  Father Mackey

  The government couldn’t run the schools without the churches, which provided administrative and teaching staff on the cheap. For the priests and nuns, working at Shubenacadie was to be a labour of love, part of their service to God. Other teachers expected competitive salaries and benefits suited to their education level, but Fathers and Sisters, having taken vows of poverty, were able to work on the minimal salaries offered by Indian Affairs.

  In the summer of 1927, A. J. Boyd and architect R. Gurney Orr met with a committee appointed by the Archbishop of Halifax, Edward Joseph McCarthy, who was personally unavailable—his health had been failing and he would pass away a few years later after twenty-five years as archbishop. Monsignor MacManus of St. Mary’s Cathedral led the Archdiocese committee. Boyd wrote to Duncan Campbell Scott saying the Archdiocese was eager to cooperate. Archbishop McCarthy waited until the next spring to appoint a principal. It was a difficult choice. The principal would be king of Shubenacadie. He would need to command the respect of the nuns who would teach there and the child-learners. Yet he needed the skills of an accountant and had to finesse a penny-pinching government department. He would have to be absolutely dedicated to the cause; the position offered few rewards. There would be no glory, no high society, no fine wines or delicacies. It would be a life of remote poverty and constant frustration.

  McCarthy chose thirty-three-year-old Jeremiah Mackey, a dedicated priest from Springhill, Nova Scotia, a mining town of about five thousand residents and already famous for disaster. The Reverend Father from the small town had done well for himself, graduating St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish and Holy Heart Seminary. He’d been an ordained priest for ten years, having worked as a curate in Annapolis for two years and at St. Mary’s Cathedral, the second cathedral built in Halifax and the church’s historic flagship of the province. He was described as a “slight man of medium stature,” but he enjoyed boxing. Duncan Scott approved of the appointment, immediately sending the archbishop a letter saying he was impressed with Mackey, who he found to be a “youthful, energetic priest.” In Scott’s experience, the Catholics had always done a better job running residential schools. He asked Mackey to come live on the site before the school was built and to keep an eye on construction. He had high hopes for Mackey’s administrative abilities, and he wouldn’t be disappointed. “His zeal, energy and devotion to duty are unflagging,” states the church’s 1936 directory. “It is thanks chiefly to his administrative ability that the school enjoys the prosperity it does.”

  Mackey was the school’s first and longest-serving principal, putting in well over a decade at the school. His low-paid administrative efforts were just short of superhuman. But what drove him? A 1939 Halifax Chronicle article called “Indian Boys and Girls Get Valuable Training at School at Shubenacadie” described Father Mackey as having humanitarian and democratic principles. “We don’t know whether we are teaching them or they are teaching us,” the principal said in the interview. In 1937 he stuck his neck out, recommending a Mi’kmaw teacher for a day school in Cape Breton. When the local Indian Agent refused to consider it, Mackey demanded angrily that the agent be fired. The teacher was not hired. The public perception of Mackey while he was principal—in the church, with government bureaucrats, and in the media—was of a man dedicated to his work because he loved the children. He was reported to be a kind man of gentle disposition.

  The surviving wards of Shubenacadie’s early years remember Father Mackey very differently, and many of his letters show he held the same contempt for the Mi’kmaq as so many other white men, believing them to be unreliable liars and con artists. He himself refused to hire Mi’kmaw men at the school. Isabelle Knockwood wrote that some of the boys called Mackey “Scratch” because he lit a match for his pipe with the seat of his pants, leaving a permanent scratch. But she also recalled that “Scratch” was one of Satan’s nicknames. Some have called Mackey’s time as principal a reign of terror, and many of the thirty survivors interviewed by the Micmac News in 1978 remembered him as a sadist who “loved to dish out punishment” simply because “he was that type of person.”

  The punishments were severe, ranging from beat downs that left lifelong physical and emotional scars, to locking kids in one of two small closets—which the children called “the hole” or “the dungeon”—for days at a time. Some survivors recall that Mackey practiced “scourging,” the term originally used to describe the beatings Jesus Christ took while carrying his cross to his own crucifixion. In Mackey’s case, it involved taking a metre-long piece of polished horse harness, wrapping it around his wrist, and hitting children wi
th it. Occasionally, people who didn’t live at the school heard tales or saw signs of Mackey’s viciousness. Donald Reid, who grew up near the school, told journalist Heather Laskey that after he reported some Shubenacadie boys throwing rocks, Mackey invited his father to “come up to the school to see how they know the way to beat things out of Indian children.”

  Mackey also used psychological torture, turning children against one another if he could. He forced boys to box against each other and if the one he liked less was winning, he would step in, put on the gloves, and hammer on the winner. Knockwood wrote of a time that Mackey, in front of a full classroom, threw a fat fist into the jaw of a fifteen-year-old boy, knocking him unconscious. Other survivors recall him doing the same to girls, sometimes using both fists, ordering his bloodied victims to get up again for more. The children watching cried and screamed. Sisters stood and watched in silence.

  Several survivors have also accused Mackey of sexual assault, including raping boys. “I went up to Father Mackey’s office and he penetrated me,” one Elder told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at Indian Brook. These allegations did not arise until long after Mackey’s death in 1957, when the victims were mostly still young and the school was still open. Survivors never had a chance to confront Mackey, and he never had a chance to respond. But survivors of his reign as principal have never forgotten him. Many still have scars to remember him by.

  Bureaucratic Struggles

  The Shubenacadie residential school opened during hard financial times for Canada and for Indian Affairs in particular. Budget cuts were chronic. Toward the end of its second year, the Department told Father Mackey it was cutting his budget by 10 percent. “With the Sisters receiving only three hundred a year, with ten days allowed for their retreat, to reduce their income seems absurd,” Mackey responded. “For the past year there has not been any money spent by the Department for this school.”

  The Great Depression landed hard on Shubenacadie. Budget cuts were an annual event, predictable as Christmas carols. Sometimes Indian Affairs took away as much as 15 percent of the school’s annual budget. But the churches lobbied against the Department until the cuts were completely reversed by 1939. Just in time for the Second World War, when the government quickly re-established the budget cuts as every resource was put toward the fighting in Europe. Generations of Shubenacadie’s residents would suffer leaks and creaks, insufficient space, and worse as moisture built up between the walls, the floors and plaster warped, compromising the air quality.

  In sewing class, children made their own clothes. Library and Archives Canada

  Mackey needed to justify every expense not already covered in the annual budget. Approvals were unpredictable. In one request to Indian Affairs, Mackey explained why the school needed a forty-four-dollar attachment for the farm’s manure spreader. The attachment was approved, along with replacements for seven sewing machines that had been in constant use for eleven years (students made hospital gowns, pajamas, scarves, and sweaters for servicemen during the war), but his request to replace a twelve-year-old fridge was denied. At one point, toward the end of his term as principal, Indian Affairs surprised Mackey with a new car. His old one was notoriously in need of repairs, and the Sisters had joked about it in their school Annals. “Dear Phil,” Mackey wrote by hand to Philip Phelan, the head of Indian Affairs’s training division. “Just a line to thank you and to let you know the Ford has come. The first trip was out for blueberries, not to [sic] plentiful.” Other years, the Department denied requests to have children’s cavities filled, tonsils removed, or medicines provided. Indian Affairs couldn’t be accused of overspending, but it certainly took better care of some of its wards than others.

  The Department sent Mackey plenty of letters in return, including instructions on the running of the school. At first the information focused on his responsibilities to the children. There was little to indicate how cost-conscious he was expected to be. But when the cost of maintaining or repairing the building, or of various medical expenses, came up, Indian Affairs was quick to remind Mackey of its limited budget. It took him some time to get a handle on reporting every expense to the Department. His first accounts, once the school opened, were returned for being “full of errors.” Duncan Scott sent Mackey a letter sternly reminding him that he was responsible for preparing a quarterly fiscal statement with receipts, and that there would be a monthly school inspection and annual audit of the books. Perhaps overreacting to earlier admonishments, in his first year running the fully operational school Mackey sent a request for a potato peeler and was informed, “It is not the policy of the Department to supply this type of equipment.”

  One of Father Mackey’s first duties was the hiring of school staff members. Indian Affairs made it clear that staff should be from Hants County, where the school was located. His hires included a doctor (Dr. McInnis), farmer (Stewart Etter), assistant farmer (Mr. Parker), carpenter-engineer (Edward McLeod), and a night fireman. At least, they were his hires in theory. Indian Affairs policy said the churches would hire and supervise the staff and the Department would step in only if there was a problem. But for the most part, Duncan Scott asked J. L. Ilsley whom to hire and Father Mackey followed through on the MP’s advice.

  One such political appointee, Dr. D. F. McInnis, the school physician, arrived at the school to find it already populated by several dozen children who had not yet been examined. His job was to examine each child twice a year and do any minor surgeries they needed, but the pay did not impress him. “Your prices offered are contemptible,” he wrote to Indian Affairs, “you must be taking me for a boob.” Dr. McInnis compared the Department’s offer to what an unskilled labourer might earn. He said that any decent general practitioner could do better, and wondered how they expected to get good doctors interested in “Indian work” at that rate. Regardless, Dr. McInnis took the job. Indian Affairs also employed a nurse who travelled the reserves and institutions with various medicines.

  With staff in place, Mackey turned his attention to the farm. He’d assumed the new barn would be built long before the students arrived, but the Department had still not approved the budget eight months before the school was to open. In the meantime Mackey had given permission to a neighbouring farmer to use the dilapidated barn already on-site. Without a new barn forthcoming, Mackey lacked a place to store seventy-five tonnes of hay, plus potatoes, oats, and turnips from six hectares of harvested land. Mackey went ahead and had a new barn built, paying the labourers with his own wages. Then, hoping to catch Indian Affairs in the Christmas spirit, or at least a piteous mood, he asked for more money in December. “Please let us have more money,” he wrote, “otherwise it is the poorhouse or jail for Yours Truly, Father Mackey.”

  Mackey also required a henhouse, hog house for twenty-five pigs, dairy house for twenty-five cows, tool shed with blacksmith shop and workshop, root cellar, and storage barn for flour and feed. He requested these in a single letter the month after the first children arrived. Indian Affairs responded, asking Mackey to prioritize the building needs as “only limited funds are available for improvements at your school this year.” Mackey decided the root cellar and tool shed were most important—a lot of the potato and carrot crop had already gone bad—but, he said, “It would be very convenient to have a dairy. So I cannot say which is more urgent.” He offered to buy flour and feed in small quantities. The children would go without eggs and milk. Mackey got his approval for the root cellar and tool shed and built them using lumber from the old barn. He had money left over and spent it on fixing leaks in the school building.

  At the end of the school year, Mackey wrote another request to the Department for funds for the other buildings. T. R. L. MacInnes, the acting secretary of Indian Affairs, approved $1,000 to build a hog house and dairy. Mackey built a smaller hog house than planned, along with the ice house and the dairy. As usual, the older boys helped with the carpentry work to save money and
to give them a learning opportunity. The buildings were far from satisfactory. For many years after the school opened, Mackey finagled small sums of money when he could to expand facilities, always relating his hopes of producing more food for the children. Most of his requests were denied or ignored.

  At times Mackey made requests on behalf of his employees. When the carpenter-engineer, Edward McLeod, announced his engagement in 1930, Mackey asked for $2,500 to build the new family a cottage on school grounds. There had been a fire in Shubenacadie Village and no rental homes were available. A. F. MacKenzie, secretary of Indian Affairs, suggested the happy couple live in the school building. Mackey asked again in 1931 and then once more in 1933, calling the situation “very trying.” Indian Affairs approved $3,500 for the house, but suggested Mackey use it instead for the pig barn, henhouse, tool shed, root cellar, and storage facility he’d asked for earlier. However, after an Indian Affairs official visited the school and reported back that, indeed, the house was needed because McLeod helped on the farm and did all the minor repairs, saving the Department a lot of money, Mackey finally got approval to build McLeod’s house.

  Mackey’s relief didn’t last long. A year later, in 1934, Mr. Parker, the assistant farmer, asked for a house at the school. Parker needed to be at the school farm for morning milking by 5:15 A.M., otherwise the boys would be alone in the barn. It had happened before, and “Needless to say that things do not go well,” Mackey wrote. Parker had been renting a house three kilometres down the road, but the owner wanted to live there himself, and there were no other livable buildings nearby. But by this time the school building was leaking all over, and there wasn’t the budget to deal with both problems, so Mackey requested funds to build a house for Parker and left the leakage for another year. Indian Affairs denied the request anyway, due to there being “no funds available…during the current fiscal year.” The acting secretary advised Mackey to try again the next year. Mackey did so, and also asked for a budget for general repairs. Indian Affairs approved “$1,000 for a residence for the assistant farmer and $300 for general repairs.” But as usual, it wasn’t enough money to cover labour, even though Mackey had already explained that there were no boys that year big enough to help.