Indian School Road

by Chris Benjamin

  Indian Affairs’s director of medical services, Dr. E. L. Stone, responded to Mackey’s report by requesting the clinical report on Josephine Smith from the Victoria General Hospital. The VG obliged with a letter detailing the events of her death, of post-surgical pneumonia brought on by her cold. A. S. Williams, acting deputy superintendent general at Indian Affairs, wrote to Mackey saying his investigation confirmed Mackey’s version of events. “I think it only right, however,” he wrote, “to say that when an Indian pupil in a residential school falls sick the principal is wise in promptly calling in medical advice if such is available.” Williams wrote to Dr. McInnis the same day. “If the Department has any further observation to make in this matter,” he said, “it is that it would have preferred to have been informed of the facts of the case at once rather than at some three months after the event.”

  Dr. McInnis fired back with an angry letter to the Department, accusing it of a cover-up and a complete disregard for the health of its wards. “The statement that [she] died of pneumonia is absolutely false,” he wrote. He demanded an inquiry and threatened to take the matter to Parliament, saying that those in charge of a school where such negligence occurred weren’t “fit people to be in charge…” “It is amusing to me to note,” he continued, “what length a Government Department will go to cover up the Criminal Negligence of one of its employees.”

  Dr. Stone, director of medical services, responded to McInnis a week later. “The Department has no desire to prevent any reasonable investigation or conceal any of the facts,” he wrote. He then reminded McInnis that while everyone agreed Josephine Smith had appendicitis, the hospital report was clear that the actual cause of death was peritonitis caused by pneumonia. “It is extremely regrettable that this child should have died but…it is doubtful, in the Department’s opinion, if any Departmental investigation could reveal any facts not already disclosed.” Stone closed the matter with an August 21 memo to his superiors: “It is not so very uncommon for a member of a private family to have appendicitis which goes on to peritonitis and death,” he said, “without anyone clearly recognizing the condition.”

  The case was not further investigated and didn’t go to Parliament, but a year later McInnis was still angry. He wrote again to Indian Affairs complaining about another child’s death at the school. “It is futile to report these cases to the Department as they probably feel as [Mackey] does that they go to Heaven and that it is not worthwhile trying to keep those poor Indian children alive.” He wrote another letter complaining that in general children at the school were neglected and ill treated.

  Within Reason

  Corporal punishment was the norm in most public schools of the time, and Indian Affairs officially endorsed it at day schools and residential schools, within reason. The Department didn’t clarify what “within reason” meant, however, until 1947, when it released a guide on proper strapping. Survivors recall Mackey and several of the nuns who taught there crossing the line regularly. Even when the school was open, testimony from some children to the RCMP and at a public inquiry condemned the rampant abuse at the school. Duncan Scott only said that it was his department’s duty to protect its wards from being mistreated. They were not inmates of a prison, he pointed out. Yet Scott consistently ignored reports of brutal abuse in residential schools across Canada, including the rape and impregnation of female students by priests. He would follow the same procedure with Shubenacadie, as would all of his successors at high levels in the Department. Most often, the church would be asked to investigate its own people when they were accused of abuse.

  The Department preferred to keep these things private rather than inflame unpredictable public opinion. While the general public liked the idea of assimilation via residential schools, child abuse crossed the line. Moreover, Indian Affairs needed the churches to make the system work, and no one wanted to offend them. The common tactic, which Father Mackey often practiced with expertise, was to attack the character of whistle-blowers. They were either disgruntled staff persons—hysterical women usually—or typical troublemaking Indians who didn’t understand what was good for them. Rarely were complaints investigated, even in the many cases when Indian Affairs staff flagged them as beyond normal discipline. Reassurances from the principals of residential schools were generally sufficient to file the matter away, or in some cases to remove the complaint from the files.

  Father Mackey’s discipline made the news in June 1934 after nineteen boys were beaten, shaved, and starved for stealing fifty-three dollars from a cash box in the Sister Superior’s office which they spent on treats and toys before giving the rest to friends. Mackey enlisted an RCMP constable to interrogate the boys he suspected. Nobody confessed, so Mackey beat them all. He had the school handyman make him a leather strap with seven knotted tails. Mackey whipped the boys’ bare backs until he was tired, then had the handyman take over. He beat them so long and hard that one of the tails fell off and two hung so loose that he pulled them off. The RCMP constable and Mackey observed. Mackey then took away the boys’ eating privileges for five days.

  A few of the boys managed to run away to tell the local Indian Agent, Allison MacDonald. MacDonald wrote to the Department and somehow the complaint went public. An opposition MP even questioned the superintendent general of Indian Affairs about the incident in Parliament after reading about it in the news. Indian Affairs responded by creating an inquiry on the matter, presided over by seventy-eight-year-old retired judge L. A. Audette. Isabelle Knockwood found in her archival research that Audette came onto the case with some experience with the Mi’kmaq. In 1915 he “was in charge of the Exchequer Court when it forced the Mi’kmaq off the Kings Road Reserve in Sydney…to increase the assessment value of the land.” Audette had a clear perspective on the matter: “No one cares to live in the immediate vicinity of the Indians,” he said, calling the reserve “a clog in the development of that part of the city.”

  Mi’kmaq from the Shubenacadie reserve and locals from Shubenacadie Village came out en masse to watch the inquiry, filling the local Oddfellows Hall and spilling outside. The press followed them and reported that the Indians gave the inquiry a “picturesque touch.” The two Sisters of Charity nuns testifying on behalf of Father Mackey also added visual pizzazz. Despite medical experts testifying that months after the whipping seven of ten boys examined still had blue marks on their backs nearly eight centimetres wide, Audette let Mackey and the handyman off the hook in his fifty-four-thousand-word report, and the Halifax Chronicle cheered the judge and Mackey on in an editorial, calling the boys “mischief-makers” and mocking the idea of holding a Crown inquiry for a few malcontents. “Those administering the Dominion’s school at Shubenacadie may continue their splendid work among the Indians of the Maritime Provinces,” it concluded. Audette’s reasoning was that corporal punishment was good for society. “Reading the biography of the big men who molded the destiny of the British nation, we invariably find a reference to these corrective punishments,” he wrote. He also described Aboriginal peoples as “children having human minds just emerging from barbarism.”

  Several months later the Sisters and Father Mackey celebrated the “vindication of the Indian School staff.” One Sister copied by hand in the Sisters of Charity Shubenacadie Indian Residential School Annals, verbatim, a story from The Casket newspaper in Antigonish about Mackey’s exoneration. The story was unusual in that the reporter had interviewed some of the boys, describing them as “noble children of the forest.” The Indian Agent, it said, “‘bayed the moon’ at the treatment given his innocent charges,” and reporters “became more than usually incoherent as they played up the situation.” But like the Halifax Chronicle, The Casket “commended and congratulated” Audette on saving an innocent man from punishment.

  Father Mackey’s Departure

  The official records, contrary to the memories of many survivors, note sadness all around when Father Mackey left the school in 1943. The day
of his departure “dawned much as the day of a funeral might dawn.” It had been a tough year at the school. In the summertime, two fifteen-year-old girls from New Brunswick drowned in Snides Lake. Although many children died at Shubenacadie over the years, these deaths seemed to shake up the teachers and principal more than most.

  Mary Ginnish and Doris Atquin had gone strawberry picking after lunch with a group of twenty kids, broken into smaller groups of two to four. After filling their buckets, Ginnish and Atquin found an old boat upside down by the shore. It was irresistible fun. They took off their shoes, dropped their buckets, and hauled the boat into the water—not knowing it was full of holes. They rowed out a ways before the water swamped them. They didn’t know how to swim. It was near supper when the other kids headed back to the school with their own buckets full. They saw the buckets and shoes. The boat had washed back ashore into some water lilies. No one had heard or seen a thing. They ran back to tell the Sisters. Father Mackey called the police, who found the bodies four hours later. According to the RCMP report, school authorities had neglected to remove an obvious danger. The next day Mackey and the Sisters took the students to the train station with the bodies. The train took them home. “God in his mercy…overlooked their childish disobedience or forgetfulness,” a Sister wrote in the school’s Annals. There had also been a diphtheria epidemic that killed a boy, and three escape attempts in the extreme cold weather by poorly clothed children. “God was generous with His Graces in the form of sickness and worry,” another Sister wrote in the Annals.

  All these things weighed heavy on Mackey’s heart. And his gut. The now forty-three-year-old became very ill with a chronic stomach condition, and possibly depressed. He spent several nights in hospital. “Finally just home from the hospital he was unfortunate enough to meet the doctor, on the doorsteps of the school,” Indian Agent Rice wrote, “come out with a child on a stretcher.” At that moment, Mackey decided on something he’d been considering for some time. He hurried inside to his office and wrote his resignation. “I have not been well,” he wrote. “Some of my years there were really enjoyable and we had smooth sailing, and others were tough going.”

  Mackey expressed mixed feelings of relief and regret in taking a position with a small church in Parrsboro, doing light parish work. Agent Rice wrote in his 1943 year-end report that “this centralization project lost…a good friend and an experienced advisor…We here at the agency and all of Shubenacadie were sorry to see him go but we feel that due to his health the step he took was necessary.” But there are rumours that Mackey did not leave willingly. One survivor told student researcher Kathleen Kearns in 1990, “Father Mackey was asked to resign by the Archdiocese due to reports of physical assault made by angry parents,” or perhaps charges of neglect related to the drowning of the two girls. Mackey’s health recovered, and in 1946 he moved on to an Amherst parish, where he was promoted to dean, an advisor to the bishop. Pope Pius XII further bestowed on him the title of Monsignor, recognizing his service to the church.

  Good Father Brown

  In 1944 the children quietly celebrated the end of Father Mackey’s reign of terror, when Father J. W. Brown of Cumberland County took over. “Good Father Brown…loves the Indians and is dearly loved by them,” a Sister wrote in the Annals. He was familiar with the school before taking the job there, having visited in 1940. “Their great tribute is thus worded, ‘Father Brown is so kind,’” the Sister continued. “This simple sentence speaks much in the Indian’s way of expression.” “He is a favourite of all children regardless of color or creed,” added H. C. Rice, Indian Agent for the Shubenacadie reserve. “[He] will have more trouble with ration coupons and pedigrees than managing 160 children. He too is a backer of the centralization idea and will do all in his power to help and speed the project along.” On the whole, survivors of the school remember Father Brown in a much more positive light than they do Father Mackey. He covered his walls with pretty, inviting pictures and was seen as a kind old man. In his letters to Indian Affairs, Brown wrote of the students as though he was fond of them.

  Brown came to the school with a good reputation. He had been Agent Rice’s parish priest in Kentville, and had also served in Enfield. “His knowledge of the Cambridge Indians is extensive,” Rice wrote. Brown was known to like the people he often referred to collectively and individually as the “poor Indian.” Brown took the job when he was sixty-three, twenty years older than Father Mackey. Immediately Indian Agents worried about his age. They wrote to the Department at various times that the Sisters were taking on a larger workload to make up for what Brown couldn’t do. He had a heart condition, they noted.

  Like Father Mackey before him, Brown struggled with the upkeep of the building. He too tried to solve the draft and leakage problems, and seemed to have more success spending money on these issues—possibly because several of the school’s systems failed at around the same time. In February 1944 Brown wrote Indian Affairs requesting a new washing machine, repeating Mackey’s request of four years earlier, a tractor—the horses being old and crippled—a new roof, and new pipes. Indian Affairs resisted the washing machine request without denying it, saying he’d waited until too late in the school year. Brown responded by mailing them wood pulp that’d once been the washing machine’s slats. He got his new machine within two months.

  But Brown was more worried about the fifteen-year-old pipes, which had been a problem at least since 1933 and were beyond repair. He’d dug up thirty-eight metres of them and found pea-sized holes all through them. That explained the water pressure issues. The lake water was mineral rich and ate through the cheap material. A report by the Department of Mines and Resources recommended Indian Affairs install cast iron pipes as soon as the ground thawed, at a cost of $5,000. But more than a year later Brown reminded the Department that “thousands of feet of piping through the building…is in poor condition, and should be renewed with some other more resisting pipe.” There is no record of a response to this letter.

  The Department took more interest in the roof, telling Brown to repair it using existing school funds rather than replace it. But Indian Affairs changed its mind by the fall, when it wrote asking him to “take an amount of $3000 from your credit balance” to replace it. Brown objected. “The cost…was to have been paid from ‘House Money’ the savings in seventeen years by Father Mackey and Sisters,” he wrote. “May I suggest that it is a Capital expenditure…” meaning Indian Affairs should pay for it. But it would be another year before any work was done. “Our roofing repairs are being carried on as directed,” he wrote in October 1945. “We hope to have a waterproof building, and can begin the interior repairs to ceilings and walls brought on by years of delay in undertaking the present repairs.”

  In 1945 Brown bought the school’s first radio and record player for the music class. He also had all the window casings replaced, spent $15,000 to fix the plumbing and heating, put in a new boiler, and replaced the pumps. The school had to sell a war bond to cover half of these costs. “All went well for a week, and then we lost the water, and have had to draw it for every house service for nearly a month,” he wrote near Christmas. The only solution was new pipes, and moving the pump down to the lake—where it should have been in the first place—instead of halfway up the hill. “May I respectfully suggest that this work of replacement may simply not be set aside, cared for in the Spring, or ‘The Dept.’ has not enough funds to care for such costs,’” Brown wrote with a sense of snark that Mackey wouldn’t have dared. It didn’t help. The new pipeline from the school to the lake was not approved until two years later.

  Less than a year after the roof repairs, Agent Rice reported to Indian Affairs that the building was still leaking. Water came in through the windows and bricks. The pipes were about to burst. Rice recommended sending a qualified inspector to find a way to heat the building without destroying the pipes. The inspector came eight months later, in the dead of winter, but the inspection got th
ings rolling. “Arrangements are being made to treat the outside walls in order to prevent further seepage of water,” Indian Affairs wrote Rice. But the pipe problem inside the school proved a higher priority, and waterproofing would have to wait until the spring of 1948. In the meantime, Indian Affairs denied a seemingly more affordable request for 150 new blankets to replace the nearly twenty-year-old originals. “When Indian residential schools are first established the Department supplies blankets but it has not been our practice to supply replacements,” an official wrote.

  Brown struggled to keep on top of numerous smaller challenges with the school buildings and grounds. He needed a new cooling unit for the walk-in refrigerator—food was regularly spoiling—an employee’s house needed $500 of urgent repair, the sinks were leaking, the root cellar needed a new roof, and the sewage was backed up from an obstruction three metres from the building. In addition to his duties, Brown found time to buy, for himself, two two-hectare plots adjoining the school property. The farmer and the older boys used these to grow produce, and Brown charged Indian Affairs $75 to use his land.

  Also, at a time when Indian Affairs was becoming less interested in the schools and increasingly cost-conscious, Brown was determined to make an example out of any runaway. As he tried to bring back four boys who’d hopped a train and had been thrown off in Wolfville, the Department told him not to worry. The bureaucrats there fretted over the high cost of paying the RCMP to bring the boys back, but when Father Brown heard through the grapevine that one of the boys had moved to Portland, Maine, to work with his father at Maritime Shipyards, he made plans with Portland police to bring the boy back to New Brunswick. Brown wanted to charge the boy with stealing his school uniform and offered to pay the transportation costs, but Indian Affairs forbade it.