From the earliest grades, the Sisters taught children about respecting other people’s property using The Primary Grade: A Teaching Outline. Some of the teachers used a guidebook called Civics and Citizenship Grades 7, 8 and 9: A Guide for Teachers. With this text in hand, the Sisters focused on the importance of the church and school as part of the community, and taught the children why they must respect authority and be good citizens of Canada and the British Empire.
Sisters tried to incorporate Indian culture into school events. Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives
Despite admonishing the children for their cultural background and calling them racist slurs, the Sisters tried at times to celebrate “Indian culture.” They were supported in this, in theory at least, by Indian Affairs, which in 1937 reported having an objective to create “an adult Indian population proud of their racial origin and cultural heritage.” The Sisters wrote of their pride in the students’ natural neatness and skilled craftsmanship. The school made a great show of its children for visitors, especially on holidays. The Sisters worked hard to make sure there was plenty of “Indian dance” and craft visible—the children made birchbark place cards and toy Indians to give school visitors—but, despite the nuns’ efforts, they failed to reproduce the Mi’kmaw culture of most of the students. You can’t teach what you don’t know.
Given that the children had been separated from their elders and forbidden to speak their language, it’s hard to know how accurate the cultural symbols created in the school were. Adult survivors of the school remember that any time they tried to show their real culture—by speaking Mi’kmaw or even of their traditions—they were beaten. The Sisters’ knowledge of Mi’kmaw culture was limited and likely twisted by their own European-Canadian point of view, as it was in 1939 during a streptococcus epidemic when Sister Superior Mary Charles got all the children together to pray to Kateri Tekakwitha, the only Mohawk saint, who had died of an illness at twenty-four and who, according to a Jesuit priest, became finally pure on turning white in death. The children begged the saint for a cure and the Sisters reported that the ten sick kids were back in class the next day, healed. “Our cases all cleared up and we haven’t had any since,” Dr. McInnis said years later to a news service. “I have been medical attendant at the school since it was opened, and I have been in practice twenty-three years. I am a Scottish Presbyterian…I am simply stating the facts.”
When the Sisters did work on the “three Rs”—reading, writing, and arithmetic—English-language lessons took most of the time. “Every effort must be made to induce pupils to speak English and to teach them to understand it,” Indian Affairs’s teaching guide reads. “Insist on English even during the supervised play. Failure in this means wasted efforts.” The Sisters spent hours getting children to pronounce sounds that don’t exist in Mi’kmaw, like “th.” It took students many years to lose their Mi’kmaw accent, and some never did. Sisters also made students enunciate distinctly when they read aloud. School inspectors had complained that “Indian children either mumble inaudibly or shout their words in spasmodic fashion.” Spelling was also a challenging subject. But the Sisters also had to cover math, social studies, history, and music. Hours were spent taking the children through drills on the times tables. Textbooks were usually at least a decade old, and sometimes remained in use as long as thirty years. Indian Affairs saved money that way: old ideas were cheaper. Not to mention the Sisters’ own version of sex ed, in which “all bodily functions were dirty,” as survivor Isabelle Knockwood puts it. A Sister of Charity once wrote in the Annals, “All well physically but the discovery of notes of a questionable nature among the girls left us all very sad. Father Brown gave the senior girls a talk on purity which should be a help with tomorrow’s confession.”
Pottery
In 1940 someone discovered that the side of a ditch about a hundred metres from the school provided “unusually fine” clay in red or white, which inspired cooperation among the principal, teachers, staff, Indian Affairs, and the provincial government to raise money for the school by selling the children’s pottery. Edward McLeod, the carpenter-engineer, fashioned a potter’s wheel out of an old broken potato peeler. “Of course it has only the one speed, and does not run exactly true,” Father Mackey wrote.
The school sold children’s pottery to help cover operational expenses. Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives
When the Nova Scotia Department of Education started a summer school to train pottery teachers, it invited the Sisters of Charity to send someone to attend. Sister Paul of the Cross took two courses. Four classes—one for boys and three for girls—ranging from Grades 3 to 8 spent half a day each week harvesting clay from the back of the school, sifting out rocks and dirt, moistening and drying it, cutting it into strips, and “turning out objects of art that would grace any modern home”—as one newspaper told it—making clay ashtrays, vases, bowls, pots, and model animals. “It is our intention to concentrate as much as possible on Indian designs,” Mackey wrote. The children produced about fifty items a month, but until 1945 there was no kiln and they could not fire them.
E. K. Ford, Nova Scotia Technical College’s inspector, visited Shubenacadie and said the children’s skill as potters would give them real “economic possibilities.” He wrote Indian Affairs suggesting they buy the school a kiln, and McLeod went to New Brunswick to find blueprints for an electric one. McLeod hired a Mr. Smith, from Stewiacke, Nova Scotia, a man with “no degrees from any college” but “a very definite talent for things electrical,” to help him build it. It was the first electric kiln in the province.
“Ancient Indian Art Is Revived At Indian School,” 1943. Library and Archives Canada/Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development fonds/Reel C-8160
Mackey and the Sisters quickly took to publicizing this aspect of the school. When Agent Rice made a trip to Ottawa, Mackey gave him some pottery samples to show R. A. Hoey, superintendent of welfare and training at Indian Affairs. Hoey was impressed. A few newspapers took interest as well. They, in keeping with most of the press coverage of the school, heaped praise on the whole operation. “The girls are taught laundry work and sewing and the boys become proficient in their tasks on the school farm,” one article said. Mackey saw market opportunities for pottery that didn’t exist for handles and baskets. He also realized that the school had been open more than a decade and had done nothing to improve life on reserves in the region.
The children’s work was sold at agricultural exhibitions across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and at a store near the school. The Nova Scotia Technical College alone sold a hundred of the children’s bean crocks between Shubenacadie and Halifax. Buyers loved them and felt good supporting Indian education. The money went toward school expenses. This arrangement was not unusual in residential schools. Indian Affairs had a handicrafts section, responsible for marketing traditional products to non-Indigenous people. It shipped several thousand dollars’ worth of goods across Canada each year. That year, the section invited Father Mackey to provide “one or two small articles” to include in its catalogue.
The Sisters and priests respected the children’s skill as potters. Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives
Influencing the Bosses
Rarely did the Sisters get involved, in any kind of official way, in running the school. Given their entries in the Annals and general practices of the day, it is likely that they took their orders with good graces from the school principal. But on a few occasions they made their needs known to Indian Affairs. In the fall of 1936, Sister Mary Charles, the Sister Superior at the school, wrote to J. D. Sutherland, assistant superintendent of education at Indian Affairs. Sutherland had visited the school the previous summer and had apparently offered to approve the purchase of a hot water sterilizer for the third floor. Sister Mary Charles noted that without this devi
ce, “care of the sick means travelling over two flights of stairs for even a cup of hot water.” It had long been a challenge at the school to get hot water. “For the past two years,” Mackey wrote, “[for] both the girls’ and boys’ baths we had to carry hot water from the laundry. While this is an improvement over what the Indian had in his own home, nevertheless with the crowd we have it makes a mess job.” With her letter, Sister Mary Charles included a catalogue clipping for a $133 sterilizer. Sutherland approved the purchase a few days later and told Sister Charles of “pleasant recollections of my visit to the school last summer and of your kindness on that occasion.”
A decade later, Sister Paul of the Cross was in charge of four pottery classes, in which the children used a pottery wheel made out of an old industrial potato peeler by Edward McLeod, the school’s carpenter-engineer. The Sister whispered to an inspector visiting the school that she needed a proper pottery wheel—electric—and gave him a letter with catalogue clippings to give to Kathleen Moadie, who was in charge of Indian Affairs’s handicraft section. Sister Paul of the Cross didn’t need money. The school was already profiting from selling the children’s work from pottery class, which was of a high quality. She was willing to use that money to buy the wheel, but Indian Affairs still had to approve the purchase, “the necessary priority.”
Moadie went to Toronto after receiving Sister Paul of the Cross’s letter and found a foot-pedal potter’s wheel for only $76.50, which she could easily order. “I think you should be proud of the progress you have made in connection with the production of pottery and feel that your pupils will eventually be the nucleus of a pottery industry on the Reserve,” Moadie wrote. Sister Paul of the Cross responded with a brief handwritten letter politely thanking Moadie for taking such interest in the purchase of the potter’s wheel. But, she said, it really had to be electric because children as young as eight had to use it: “The one you suggested would be impossible for smaller children to use”; they wouldn’t reach the foot pedal. In all, it took only six weeks, with Sister Paul of the Cross’s gentle nudging, for Indian Affairs to buy the electric pottery wheel—a new Amaco Electric Potter’s Wheel “No. 2” for $377 from the Denver Fire Clay Company, paid for by proceeds from selling the children’s work.
Sister Sadism
A year before Shubenacadie opened, Pope Pius XI reminded Catholic teachers about the importance of discipline. Nearly three decades later, in slightly gentler times, Pius XII warned against vindictive punishment. Neither defined clear limits on how far corporal, or physical, punishment could be taken. Indian Affairs made the same mistake, warning against excessively harsh punishments but not correcting those who made children eat their own vomit. A survivor told CBC in the 1980s that a Sister once grabbed her by the hair and force-fed her until she threw up. The young girl hadn’t been able to eat because her tooth was abscessed, likely because Indian Affairs refused to pay for dentistry.
It is hard to reconcile the Sisters as they portrayed themselves in their Annals—as sweet and devoted lovers of children who bore a heavy burden—with the cruel and brutal tyrants many survivors can’t forget. Survivors have often said that some nuns were kind and others cruel. Some were both—sometimes a friend and sometimes a cruel foe—and many likely followed the rules of their many masters as best they could. The nuns had agreed to take on a difficult task, to remove a child’s culture and replace it with a foreign one in a remote institution. To the children’s detriment, some of the nuns likely believed corporal punishment was the only way to accomplish their religious and institutional goals.
It’s impossible to fully explain the extreme violence of some Sisters as reported by survivors. But regardless of the rules set out by the Catholic Church, the mother house, and Indian Affairs, the tone inside the walls of Shubenacadie was set by the school’s first principal, Father Mackey, who by a great many accounts used brutal violence and psychological torture to enact his “reign of terror.” He used fear to make the children obey, and several Sisters did the same. Survivors from each decade of the school remember this violence from their teachers, but it seems to have been most common in the thirties and forties, when Father Mackey was the principal and Sister Mary Leonard a disciplinarian, teacher, and secretary.
Mary Leonard isn’t the only Shubenacadie Sister remembered as a sadist. Sister Paul of the Cross, the first boys’ disciplinarian, is remembered for having strapped a boy’s genitals among other particularly vicious acts. But she wrote fondly of the Mi’kmaw children after being transferred to the Kootenay Indian Residential School in Cranbrook, BC. “The Micmac are far superior, better workers, happier, etc,” she said, than her new wards out west. Another survivor told the Micmac News of Sister Josephine Adrian’s cruel punishments. According to this account, Sister Adrian, who was at the school from 1943 to 1953, and Sister Justinian, 1946–55, whipped a boy on his bare back with a bamboo ski pole because he’d had trouble threading a needle when Sister Adrian was teaching him to sew. “She was full of that kind of stuff,” the survivor said.
But Sister Mary Leonard was by far the most frightening in her day. She was a very tall, large—about five foot ten and more than two hundred pounds—buxom, blonde, blue-eyed woman with a chubby pink face and fingers covered in freckles, Isabelle Knockwood recalls. And she was imposing physically but also in her way of talking, often monopolizing conversations even with other adults. She joined the school in 1934, replacing Sister Joseph Beatrice, and worked there for fourteen years, until being reassigned. She died in 1988.
Knockwood also remembers Sister Mary Leonard having gold-capped teeth and gold-rimmed glasses. “Her pupils contracted and dilated as she spoke,” she writes in Out of the Depths. “The hair on her neck had been shaved…She wore a strand of large wooden beads around her waist and a wooden crucifix…bigger than the palm of my hand.” (She later removed her rosary beads so the children wouldn’t hear her approaching.) Other survivors told Knockwood they remembered Sister Mary Leonard—who they called Wikew, meaning “Fatty”—being sweet and kind on the first day of school. But she quickly turned on them, beating them regularly and seemingly arbitrarily. One survivor told the Micmac-Maliseet News that Mary Leonard beat her thirty times on each end with a strap three times a day. Even the Sister’s rewards felt like punishment to the children. Knockwood remembers her throwing handfuls of candy on the floor and watching the children scramble for them.
The children often wondered how so many cruel nuns had come to work with children, who they seemed to despise. They thought maybe Mary Leonard been sent there as punishment for breaking some Catholic Church rule. Rumours flew that she had chosen Shubenacadie over a leper colony as her punishment. The Sisters of Charity tell me they have no record of how or why Mary Leonard was assigned to the school or what she did before. They know very little of her. The children didn’t know it, but some senior staff at Indian Affairs believed the residential schools to be a dumping ground for incompetent church staff. In 1932 one official commented that the churches seemed prone to assigning “Indian work” to priests and instructors who had failed in other fields. However she got there, some survivors remember Mary Leonard not only as a sadist, but also as a murderer of at least two children. At the Truth and Reconciliation event in Halifax in October 2011, a witness had someone read his deceased aunt’s letter into the record. In it, she recounted rapes, horrible beatings, and seeing Sister Mary Leonard beat her sister’s head against a concrete wall; her sister died the next day.
In the early 1940s Mary Leonard sent Nancy Lampquin to the infirmary with a vicious beating, witnessed by all the children and other Sisters in the dining hall, after the girl tried to pocket her spinach instead of eating it. Isabelle Knockwood witnessed the beating and wrote about it in Out of the Depths. Sister Mary Leonard grabbed Lampquin by the hair and screamed at her, then force-fed her the greens as she cried and bled from the lips from the spoon being jammed in her mouth, making the nun madder. Mary Leonard then
force-fed her milk. “Nancy’s eyes began to roll and she seemed to be losing consciousness,” Knockwood writes. “Her mouth and cheeks were badly swollen and her lips were purple. She was sobbing and gasping for air and holding her back rigid and straight.” It was the last time Knockwood saw her friend alive. “Very delicate and sick for almost a year. Died,” Father Mackey wrote of her in the school’s records that year. He gave tuberculosis as the cause of death. Nancy Lampquin was the first child buried from the Shubenacadie school chapel. Knockwood told her father what had really happened to Nancy, but when he raised the issue with the principal, Mackey reminded him he wasn’t the girl’s next of kin.
The Sisters also wrote in their Annals of Mary Agnes Ward, “a good little patient, polite and grateful, pious and obedient” who, they wrote, died a “happy, holy death” at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Bathurst, New Brunswick, in 1947. Poet and Shubenacadie survivor Rita Joe, who always tried to accentuate the positive, remembered her friend Mary Agnes Ward’s death very differently. She described it in great detail to her friend and fellow survivor Isabelle Knockwood. There was some small rule infraction, she recalled, and the “fat Sister” hauled Mary Agnes over near the big boys’ table and began beating her and shouting at her as another Sister watched. Mary Agnes fought back, but was outmatched. Sister Mary Leonard, Rita Joe recalled, beat Mary Agnes until she was unrecognizable, swollen and bloody. Father Brown, who the survivors remember as a much gentler man than Father Mackey, was principal at the time. But on this occasion he lost his temper and yelled loudly at the Sisters. They took Mary Agnes to the infirmary on the top floor and later to hospital, where she died. “When Sister announced that she died because her bones were too big for her heart, I didn’t believe her,” Rita Joe told Knockwood.
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