Despite warnings from the Department, Brown kept up his vigilance with runaways. He’d lost a boy to industry in the United States, but he was determined to make an example of the boy’s fifteen-year-old sister. She ran away on a cold night in February. Four days later, when she was caught five kilometres from the school, Brown sent her to the Good Shepherd Reformatory in Saint John, New Brunswick. The next summer, when a thirteen-year-old boy ran away, Brown asked the RCMP to use a police dog—a German shepherd named Chips—to hunt him down. The dog caught the scent quickly and followed the boy until he surrendered. That fall, a ten-year-old boy reached Halifax by train on his second runaway attempt. RCMP officers found him there and turned him in to the Saint Patrick’s Home. He was the last runaway on record from Shubenacadie.
In 1947 Brown had a seizure. Indian Affairs, via the Catholic Archdiocese, asked him to retire. He was saddened, but did as he was asked. He’d been hoping to stay on at the school until his seventieth birthday. Instead, he finished the 1947–48 school year.
“No one could show a more fatherly interest in the Indians,” the director of Indian Affairs wrote Archbishop McNally when Father Brown retired. “He has endeared himself to these people and has always been their champion.” The Sisters expressed sorrow. “A very definite feeling of sadness pervades the house as our dear Father Brown shares a hard obedience,” one wrote in the Annals. He visited twice after he retired, first in October 1948; he told the Sisters “old stories oft told but never losing their interest.” His last visit was in 1951, three weeks before he had a second stroke and died.
The Teachers
“God Bless You” Ringing in Their Ears
Early one cold morning in late January 1930, three Sisters of Charity nuns—having already completed their 5:00 A.M. morning mass, extensive prayers, and chores—gathered their bags, and said goodbye to the other Sisters and Mother Mary Louise and all her “mellow wisdom, calm judgment, quick observation, and wide experience,” her “gleam of genial humor.” The Sisters were leaving behind their beloved mother house by the sparkling Bedford Basin and the most beautiful chapel in Canada, with its twelve pillars and twenty-seven windows amply lighting the stunning Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception painting and arched ceilings. The younger Sisters were graduating from a sheltered six years as novices at the mother house. They didn’t know the real world yet.
With a “loving God Bless You ringing” in their ears, the three Sisters headed from the mother house in Rockingham to the new white limestone, high-arching-ceiling train station opposite Cornwallis Park, downtown Halifax. It was always bittersweet parting for a new assignment, leaving others behind but headed for divine fulfillment. While their backgrounds and motivations for becoming nuns varied, an educated woman at this time was unlikely to find such fulfilling work outside the church. She’d be expected to settle down with a man and keep house while he pursued more intellectual work. With the Sisters, at least she could get an education and have the chance to fulfill a calling, do a social good, without being any man’s woman. She might even get a chance to work on overseas missions, see more of the world.
But these three Sisters, and another three who would meet them at the school the next week—the original six included Sisters Madeline Leo Buchanan, Mary Louisita Flynn, Mary Etienne Beaulieu, Jean Berchmans de Coste, Mary Brendan McBride, and Philomena MacEachern—were headed for a less exotic destiny. They were going to rural Nova Scotia to do “Indian work.” It wasn’t exciting or glorious, but it was their sacred duty and it was teaching; it was what they were trained to do. And, it was an adventure in its own way, a chance to do a social good without fighting tropical illnesses or mosquitoes or time changes. “Why long for the Foreign Missions when souls need us right here?” one Sister wrote. Mother Mary Louise chose the Sisters from whoever was available at the mother house at the time and had teaching qualifications. There was no screening beyond that, no interviews about attitudes to the assignment or toward the Mi’kmaq or indigenous cultures in general. They were not asked how well they dealt with stressful situations. No love of children was required. Indeed, the Sisters were discouraged from getting too close to the children. They were Sisters of Charity and they went where they were assigned. Cheerfully.
The first three Sisters travelled sixty-five kilometres north to join Father Mackey at the new Indian residential school. They were the first of ninety-one Sisters of Charity nuns who would work at Shubenacadie over the next thirty-seven years. Their ages varied, but most were in their late forties. The majority would work in administrative capacities, or doing cleaning and cooking. Some would be “disciplinarians,” in charge of the boys’ or girls’ dormitory. And some would teach. Each Sister would receive $300 a year—more a stipend than a wage. The Sisters later welcomed Anita Vincent Costello, who would be Sister Superior at the school. (She was supposed to have been on the train with them but had been in a car accident. Luckily she was okay.) A week later another Sister joined them, bringing with her the unusual cargo of cows for the farm. The nuns made a game of “counting the cows as they passed the kitchen window,” a Sister wrote. There were sixteen cows in all.
Whatever they thought of their assignment, the Sisters sometimes waxed poetic at the school’s setting. “What a friendly river!” one Sister wrote in their school Annals, even as it flooded and threatened to put the building under water. “It kept rising and rising and rising and coming nearer and nearer and nearer on all sides, until we were surrounded with the approaching waters of the beautiful Shubenacadie….” They watched from their windows and prayed until the waters went down again. Twenty-four years later, in the final years of the school, a Sister wrote approvingly of new renovations to the building. “Some of the older children should have liked to have stayed here for the summer,” she said, because the school was so much improved.
On February 5, 1930, the final two Sisters brought with them, from the Halifax orphanages also run by the Sisters of Charity, the first thirty children to attend the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. There were ten girls from the Home of the Good Shepherd on Quinpool Road, six boys from Saint Patrick’s Home on Mumford Road, and six girls and eight boys from St. Joseph’s on Quinpool Road, which had recently been expanded to add an auditorium, ventilated dorm rooms, and play areas because the children and teachers had long been confined to the basement. Two “big flat sleds each drawn by two large farm horses” picked up the two nuns and thirty kids from the train station. The Sisters had no time to settle in; they had to get the children fed and in bed. Classes began the next day.
Sisters of Shubenacadie
When Nova Scotia Indian Superintendent A. J. Boyd and Department architect R. Guerney Orr met with the Catholic Archdiocese in Halifax in the summer of 1927, one open question was who would teach at the school. Monsignor MacManus, acting on behalf of Archbishop McCarthy, recommended the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. They were a missionary organization and congregation whose Sisters had been teaching in Nova Scotia schools—including Indian day schools—and shaping the public education system since 1849. They also ran several orphanages. Lore has it that an orphan appeared on the Sisters’ Barrington Street door the day after their arrival in Halifax from New York. They took the babe in, of course, and never looked back.
After the meeting, MacManus, Boyd, and Orr drove straight to Mount Saint Vincent on the Bedford Highway to meet Mother Mary Louise. She called together her council, the leaders of the congregation, to meet them. “Their institution and the Sisters we met made a very favourable impression and they, too, seemed quite eager to go into Indian work,” Boyd wrote. “The Mother General of the Order is at present in Western Canada and she and her staff arranged to visit the Blood Indian Residential School, to get firsthand information concerning its conduct.”
The request was a formality. Mother Mary Louise knew it came with the support of Archbishop McCarthy. Whatever he asked of the Sisters, they would do. An u
nofficial part of a nun’s duty was to hold priests in reverence—they were placeholders for God Himself. Even if she disagreed with a priest, bishop, or any other superior, a nun learned the value of suffering powerful fools quietly, acceptingly, and faithfully. An archbishop’s request would never be denied. But it was a time of great expansion for the Sisters as well. The Shubenacadie Indian Residential School was just one of nineteen new endeavours for the congregation under Mary Louise’s first six years of leadership, from 1926 to 1932. Fourteen of these were schools. In all, under Mother Mary Louise, the Sisters started eighty-six new missions in three decades, including another Indian residential school in Cranbrook, BC, in 1936. The Sisters sometimes called her the “Mother of Missions.” Orr left his blueprints to the Sisters for review, and Mary Louise followed due process, meeting a few weeks later with her full council, which officially accepted the archbishop’s request. It seemed like a good idea anyway—teaching and ministering to poor Indians was part of what they did.
The Sisters’ Building
Mother Mary Berchmans, the vicar general for the Sisters of Charity, sent the school blueprints back to the architect with comments in November 1927. The Sisters had made several recommendations, some large and some small. Having wash tables in the dorm rooms would be unsanitary, they said. They should be moved to the bathrooms, which would need to be bigger. The fire escapes should be moved from the staff rooms to the dorms, which also needed closets added. Storage room in general seemed to be lacking. The school needed a workshop and home ec room so the boys could learn trade skills—and how would the girls learn homemaking? They foresaw the need for cold storage and hot water in the upper bathrooms. And they wanted their own rooms, rather than a single communal dorm for the Sisters. Of the Sisters’ many suggestions, Indian Affairs considered moving the fire escapes, adding a bathroom, and splitting the Sisters’ dormitory into three separate bedrooms. Rhodes Curry estimated the changes would cost $1,580 to implement. “That is hot and cold water in seven bedrooms and a bathroom for the Sisters,” the site inspector, James Crowell, wrote. The Department ignored the Sisters’ suggestion to provide separate accommodation for male staff members; Father Mackey spent years rectifying the oversight.
The Sisters told children to smile for photos. Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives
The dozens of Sisters at the school over the following decades worked long, hard hours and rarely had days off. They had an annual retreat, but otherwise stayed put. At the school they kept the same strict routine they had as novices: up early for intensive prayer, chores and housework, a little teaching, more chores and housework, and more prayer. They had many, sometimes competing, loyalties: God, the church, the congregation, their Mother Superior, and the mother house at Mount Saint Vincent. It was a hard assignment, being sent far from the city and the libraries where they were used to studying and pursuing intellectual interests. It was far from comfort, yet seemed to lack the learning opportunities associated with work overseas. They were expected to live a pious life cheerfully, under a vow of poverty. But, while a good Sister of Charity would never complain, caring for orphaned and sometimes “delinquent Indians” at a dreary residential school was not the choicest of jobs. Daniel Paul remembers a young nun assigned to the day school on his reserve who was so afraid of the “heathen savages” that she was sent back to the mother house. The Sisters were always on call, always available in an emergency involving a child or staff person. They disciplined, taught, and worked along with the children to keep the school clean, the meals cooked, and the residents clothed. During the Second World War, they and the children knitted for soldiers. “There seems to be no end to it,” one Sister wrote in the Annals. “One supply goes over to the Red Cross branch, to be replaced with a few more bales of sock yarn, navy blue for balaclavas, and a variety for sweaters, scarfs, and mittens.”
The work took its toll, largely because the Sisters were working with children they didn’t understand; the culture was somehow beyond them. In 1942, when Indian Affairs bureaucrats were working hard to get as many Mi’kmaq as they could to resettle at Shubenacadie and wanted a new day school and hospital there staffed by Sisters, a Sister quipped that they’d need “special five-year courses in Indian Psychology” if only such a thing existed. But, applying their own strict routines and discipline to their wards, the Sisters consistently impressed the inspectors who made annual two-day visits. The Sisters often wrote of dreaded inspections. They and the children put enormous work into preparing: making the building gleam and the children glow, providing the best possible food and plenty of smiles. They were relieved when the visits were over “with most complimentary remarks” and “glowing reports.” One inspector was “loud in his praise of the work being done.” The Sisters were thankful for the cook, who “made her usual good impression with a delicious dinner.” On the whole, the Sisters described inspectors as appreciative of the hard work they did, and understanding of the difficulties involved.
One consistent difficulty for the Sisters was visiting sick or dying children in hospital, one of the few occasions to leave school grounds. Some of the illnesses were mysterious. Some died unexpectedly after minor surgeries, like a boy in 1948 after a tonsillectomy, who was buried at the Shubenacadie reserve cemetery. Other times, the Sisters themselves needed hospital treatment, and they recorded some of these events with a humour the children may have never seen. A Sister who broke her arm the Saturday before Easter 1941 while waxing a floor returned from the Halifax Infirmary in an ungracious fashion and was treated to much laughter from her comrades. “Lo and behold she came back worse than she went,” someone wrote in the Annals. “Sister slipped while stepping out of the car and sprained her ankle, at the same time she hurt the knee of her other leg. It is a tragedy indeed when one cannot find something funny….”
Like those children who were able to go home for the summer, the Sisters grew excited at the end of the school year. They rarely left the school grounds from September to June and they were forever on call. The stress was immense and perhaps left them ill-tempered and mean. They couldn’t wait for the decreased workload of the summer months. “It is pleasant after the year has ended, to look forward to the summer, the smaller number of children, and the relaxation permitted, when the strain and worry of one hundred sixty is lessened to seventy or eighty,” one Sister wrote. But before they could take their summer break, the Sisters worked harder than ever. All the bedding and clothes had to be washed and the children going home had to have decent outfits and lunches for the train, trips that had to be arranged. Sisters had to write report cards as well. All this on top of their usual load.
The Sisters at Shubenacadie had the added challenge of turnover—not because they could quit, but because they could be reassigned at any time. The Mother Superior gave orders and they did what they were told. Every August the Sisters dreaded “those fateful envelopes, carrying God’s will,” that would take some of them away to new assignments. “We await the important letters that come only from Mount Saint Vincent,” a Sister wrote in the Annals in 1940. “We await the slow, but steady train to pull in, then the mail carrier…who brings us the fatal envelopes. East? West? North? South? for one or two or more of us.” They hated to leave one another. In some cases, they hated to leave the children. Their numbers increased over the school’s first decade, from seven (including the Sister Superior) the first year to ten in the third year and twelve by 1939. From then until the fifties there were around twelve Sisters each year, but by the time the school closed in the late sixties their numbers had dwindled back down to seven.
In these later years, though, the workload seemed as great as ever. Twelve Sisters didn’t seem enough to keep pace with “the constant demands in time, labour, and services” in 1958, yet two were reassigned and not replaced. “Ten Little Indian Nuns,” one Sister wrote. One of whom was later called away elsewhere to be a substitute teacher.
God�
��s Unwanted
The Sisters saw the children as God’s mission for them, and the school as a place “where God’s unwanted and uncared-for find shelter and loving care,” as one wrote in 1947. They shared Indian Affairs’s view that the children were part of a problem to be solved. “Word came today that four Sisters of St. Martha from Eskasoni were coming to visit us the weekend,” a Sister wrote in 1948. “They have the Indian problem as we do, so a little discussion should be of mutual help.”
(L) Guida McKenzie, (R) Elizabeth Paul, young girl in centre is unidentified, 1932. Collection of Elsie Charles Basque, Nova Scotia Museum
The Sisters wrote mostly positive things about the children in the Annals, often praising their participation in rituals like the annual May Procession, when the children sang, danced, acted, performed recital, and presented birchbark napkin rings they’d made with “a little Indian in feathers” for white visitors. “Our Lady [Mother Mary] smiled down upon her little Indians,” a Sister wrote of the procession in 1931. The Sisters’ positive writings about the children in the Annals even went so far as to empathize with their annual “mournful return to school and discipline which is so contrary to the Indian temperament.” They wrote of the extreme culture shock involved: “Now one has to sit in a big room with everything so shiny—and hear a person in black speak words that are not Micmac!” one wrote in 1939. But they also expressed certainty that this condition was temporary, thanks to their own efforts. “Kindness breaks all barriers and Sister Cyprian conquered! Soon her babes strut off to class feeling proud to Say, School! Supper! Sister! Bed! All in! All out!”
Given the Sisters’ religious mission, knowing how ineffective they were in improving the lives of their wards must have been difficult. During usually quiet farewells, right before the principal drove the departing children to the train station, the Sisters reflected on what lay ahead. “We hope they have profited by the years spent here,” a Sister wrote at the end of the 1937–38 school year, “and will try to inculcate the virtues and habits they practiced here, into the hearts of those at home.” They knew the children were excited to go home, but worried their homes were not good for them. “It is sad…[to] think of the…pangs of hunger that will be felt; the freedom, which the children consider happiness!” And they further worried for the graduates, that the outside world would be very hard on them—as it had been on most residential school graduates across Canada. “Little do they realize what is ahead of them,” one Sister wrote in 1944. “They have been instructed and warned.”
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