The children finally received a gift that seemed too good to be true in the fall of 1948: Sister Mary Leonard, who terrified them with her size and silent, swift violence, finally left the school. She was reassigned to the Sisters of Charity’s only other residential school, in Cranbrook, British Columbia, where she took a 40 percent pay cut. The exact reasons for her transfer aren’t clear, but perhaps Sister Mary Leonard got too strong a taste of the same fear she’d inflicted on the children when a knife was found in a young girl’s mattress, and she its intended target. The Sisters and principal interrogated the girl and her sister until they confessed they were planning to attack the substantial Sister with it. The Sisters said the girls were annoyed “about the vacation plans.” Isabelle Knockwood writes that, strangely, the girl who’d hidden the knife was not one of Wikew’s usual victims; she was known as a “pet,” someone who spied on the other girls and tattled on them. The police came and took the girls to the Convent of the Good Shepherd—in Halifax and Saint John, New Brunswick, respectively. The Sisters wrote that the local Indian Agent and a visitor on hand from Indian Affairs both approved of the action taken. “Our list was changed by only one name,” a Sister wrote of that year’s roster of nuns, “But what a big loss to the staff it meant to see Sister Mary Leonard destined for the West.” Sister Francis Marian replaced Mary Leonard, “with much fear and trembling,” as disciplinarian of seventy girls.
Bad Apples in a Rotten Barrel
Forty-five years after the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School closed, at the TRC in Halifax, Tony Mancini, the city’s Catholic archbishop, reflected on the abhorrent actions of nuns and priests. “Unfortunately, some of us, sometimes along the line, forgot why we’re here,” he said. Across the residential school system, religious personnel saw themselves as martyrs. They worked hard for nothing more than the joy of offering salvation to what they considered a less developed race. Any means necessary for this salvation, even the abuse of children, was therefore just. As were any small benefits they reserved for themselves, such as hoarding the best food available in an otherwise dreary institution.
In their minds, the Sisters and priests at Shubenacadie were fighting poverty, cultural backwardness, the worst tendencies of the children, and the devil himself. They had an impossible job. They weren’t allowed to get close to the children, yet they were to teach them. They had to remove their original cultures and instill another. For the most part they were unable to understand the cultural backgrounds of their wards—their traditions, or their contemporary lives on the reserves or even in foster homes. “I think they were so cruel and mean because they didn’t study up on the environment or our culture,” Isabelle Knockwood writes.
The residential school system, and Shubenacadie within it, was by design cruel and violent. Years after the school closed, survivor stories of severe and rampant emotional, physical, and sexual abuse emerged in the media. More than fifty years of psychological studies indicate that the innate violence of an institution will turn seemingly normal people into abusers. But at the same time, a small percentage of the general population has sociopathic characteristics, and it is possible that such individuals are drawn to positions of power over the vulnerable. Regardless, the residential school environment allowed the worst tendencies of teachers and principals to emerge. And the government did little to hold these individuals accountable for the welfare of Aboriginal children. Indian Affairs played at holding inspections at its remote facilities, warning the schools when inspectors were to arrive. The Department ignored ample evidence of abuse and neglect, making it all too easy for the worst offenders to get away with just about anything.
In 1971, four years after Shubenacadie closed, psychologist Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University conducted a controversial and influential experiment, known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. For it, Zimbardo recreated a prison environment with twenty-four psychologically healthy (although there is some controversy about his screening methods) male undergraduate students—half playing guards and half playing inmates—in the basement of a campus building. The “guards” were told not to physically harm the “prisoners,” but to use whatever psychological torture they thought would give them control. In many ways, the false environment Zimbardo created was more similar to a residential school than it was to a prison. Within days, the guards were manipulating prisoners with many of the same techniques used in residential schools, including replacing names with numbers, locking prisoners in a closet they called “the hole,” denying them food, dictating letters home raving of joyful times being had, putting on a good show for visiting parents, and making compliant “pet” inmates turn on those who resisted in any way.
All of these things happened at Shubenacadie. And, as happened among the adults at the school, about one-third of the guards were creatively sadistic, another third followed the rules of the game without exceeding their mandate, and the final third tried to help the inmates however much they could get away with, doing them small favours when they could. Just like at Shubenacadie, the nicer guards turned a blind eye to abuses committed by meaner guards. There was also overlap between these three categories—some of the nuns who dished out severe punishments in class were kind and patient at mealtime, in chapel, or during playtime.
Rita Joe wrote in her autobiography about the differences among the nuns. She remembered some of them fondly; these she considered friends. One worked in the laundry with Rita Joe. Every morning before they started working, Sister Justinian would reach deep into her habit pocket and pull out a little something for her—a hard candy, a notebook, a pencil, maybe even a whole box of crayons. She looked up to Sister Justinian like a mother. She never stopped loving her. But Rita Joe also remembered beatings and many, many commands, “military style.” The Sisters told the children when to eat and when to pee and when to pray, even when to cough. Led in their aggression by Sister Mary Leonard, the Sisters shouted constantly. By this time Father Brown had replaced Father Mackey. Rita Joe remembered him raising his voice only once, when Sister Mary Leonard severely beat Mary Agnes.
“I treated the prisoners like they were of a[n] inferior order than myself,” said the ringleader of the cruel guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment. The experiment had been called off because of escalating cruelty to its subjects. The ringleader had taken Dr. Zimbardo’s instructions and creatively applied his own brand of cruelty based on the authority given him. “Once you put a uniform on and are given a role, a job…to keep these people in line, then you’re certainly not that same person…it surprised me that no one said anything to stop me.” Just as this guard, who returned to being a regular undergraduate student, didn’t recognize himself in the role he took on during the experiment, the Sisters of Charity have had trouble reconciling their own memories of Shubenacadie with survivor testimony. “Some are certainly puzzled and saddened by some of the stories that don’t fit with their own experiences,” explains Ruth Jeppesen, Sisters of Charity communications director.
In 2002, academic researchers Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam recreated Zimbardo’s experiment for a BBC reality show, but added more stringent ethical controls and, unlike Zimbardo, did not give the guards instructions to psychologically manipulate prisoners. The researchers also looked at how high-ranking Nazis followed orders, making the Third Reich’s hatred their own. They found that people who “just follow orders” and commit crimes against humanity have to somehow identify with the mission of their bosses, who exert a strong influence.
The Sisters served many strong leaders, including the church, the mother house and Mother Superior, the Sister Superior at the school, and the priest principal, who was the highest ranking authority (excluding God) on-site. It is no coincidence that when Father Mackey, who survivors remember as a tyrant, was in charge of the school the Sisters there also acted violently. And Sister Mary Leonard could attack children so viciously because she believed the church’s, government’s, and Father Mackey’s
mission to civilize Indians was for the greater good. She identified with that mission and attached herself fully to it. The way she conducted herself was her own creative application of that belief. The behaviour of each priest and nun at the school was the result of a person reacting to a situation. Conversely, individual priests and nuns—through their creative discipline and bureaucratic finagling—shaped the situation as much as the government and church did. The school principals in particular were always responding to Indian Affairs’s vague instructions, putting their own spin on government policy.
Reicher and Haslam point out that “the more extreme the actions of…institutions, the more extreme the individuals that are drawn to them.” Shubenacadie may have indeed driven some of the adults in charge to be more violent than they otherwise would have been. But in the case of principals and other male staff members who had more choice in the matter, it is possible that the institution may have, by its extreme nature, attracted sadistic people who had never before had the chance to hurt people without consequence for themselves. And, as often happens in these environments, those who were gentler by nature likely felt too powerless to resist. “The nuns that were there at the time; this punishment stuff rubbed off on them [starting with Father Mackey],” a survivor told the Micmac News in 1978. “God was the main focus of their lives; the only way you were going to heaven is to have enough pain on this earth.”
The Children
“The House With Elastic Sides”
Shubenacadie was built for 125 child residents, but from the start it was overcrowded, taking 146 in its first year—70 boys and 76 girls. By far the biggest class was Grade 1, where the students ranged from 4 to 7 years old. At times, 62 of them crammed themselves into one classroom. The lower grades remained the most overcrowded through the lifespan of the school. By 1938 the number of child residents ballooned to 175, 15 more students than regulations allowed and 50 more than the school was designed to hold. But as one Sister quipped, “The house with elastic sides always has room for one more.” Father Mackey knew that the more kids he had in his school, the more money he’d have to run the place. It was a bit of a Catch-22. The school was perpetually overcrowded, but if it had taken fewer children it would have been extremely difficult for it to function on such a limited budget. While Indian Affairs paid a set amount to the church for each child who went to the school, Department accountants knew it was still cheaper than paying Mi’kmaw families welfare support. And it gave them more control over how exactly the money was used.
The first children arrived from three Halifax orphanages in early February 1930, with the last of the nuns. The next afternoon they attended classes with Sister Louisita, Grades 1–3, Sister Madeleine Leo, Grades 4–5, and Sister Superior Anita Vincent, Grades 6–7. The orphanages hadn’t exactly been the high life, but the school was harder. One survivor, who was sent to the Good Shepherd orphanage after four years at Shubenacadie, would describe it as “better than the Indian Residential School” because she got her own room. A week later, twin girls arrived from the Shubenacadie reserve. They were the first who hadn’t come from other institutions, and by April—when the doctor finally did a tuberculosis exam of all the children and vaccinated them—it was an overfull house.
School life was chaotic from the start. That spring a girl lost a finger in the dough mixer. Twelve others had their first Communion. In the summertime, more than a hundred children stayed at the school. Forty went home for summer vacation and two didn’t come back—they were tracked down and sent to a juvenile jail. In September Archbishop O’Donnell (Archbishop McCarthy had died in January) visited from Halifax to speak to the children. He congratulated them on their faith and told them to be honest and proud of their people. The children later joined others from Shubenacadie Village in decorating a new war monument and singing “O Canada.” A dentist visited and filled or pulled more than 250 teeth. The Sisters of Charity’s Annal entries during the first full year of operation were mostly bubbly and proud. But in the spring, Mary Gehue, a seven-year-old girl, died from an abscess of the lung. Hers was the first death recorded at the school.
Taken
While the school was intended to house and educate orphans, and did have a significant number of them, most of the children at Shubenacadie were taken from reserves. Indian Agents identified children they claimed needed “maintenance,” who were then taken from families that Indian Agents felt were “semi-destitute”—be they foster families or parents. Other children lived where there was no day school available because Indian Affairs hadn’t built one, despite its promise to provide on-reserve education. Indian Affairs, as the legal guardian of all Status Indians, didn’t need to explain why it was taking the children, but a better education was usually the rationale provided.
The agents used their own discretion about who should go to the school. Collectively, they were a harrowing combination of power and unpredictability. But every agent was different. Some believed in keeping Mi’kmaw families together. Others felt the school was a better home for any Mi’kmaw child with only one parent. The rules weren’t clear and were constantly changing as the government responded to shifting political pressures. Any child whose parents were receiving relief payments from Indian Affairs was a likely candidate. Agents and band chiefs consistently described conditions on the reserves as deplorable, with families living in shacks with dirt floors, dirty water, and no heat. Jobs were scarce, and few white men were willing to hire “Indians” at all.
The Government of Canada, Maritime provincial governments, and settlers in general had created this abject poverty in which the Mi’kmaq found themselves on the reserves. While Mi’kmaw children may have been aware that their families lacked money for fine things, those on reserve were likely more aware of being loved, of belonging. In traditional Mi’kmaw culture, when there isn’t enough for everyone the children are often fed first. The colonialists had been so determined to win the “New World” that they’d brought newcomers by the boatload for decades and given them Mi’kmaw land, then moved the Mi’kmaq around, “centralizing” them to save money. They’d created in the Mi’kmaq a dependency on government support, and then withheld it as much as possible. As a result, almost any Mi’kmaw child at that time was poor enough to qualify for Shubenacadie.
Parents of Mi’kmaw children were supposed to sign application forms—as well as a Certificate of Health completed by a doctor—making the principal of the school the legal guardian of their children—even during the summer, whether or not they were home on the reserve. “I hereby make application for the admission of the undermentioned child into the Shubenacadie Residential School to remain therein under the guardianship of the principal, for such term as the Department of Indian Affairs deems proper,” the form read. In reality, Indian Agents, backed by RCMP officers—who were made official truant officers by Indian Affairs in 1933—rarely explained what the form meant to the parents, and often took children by force. In many cases Indian Affairs told its agents not to bother getting parents’ signatures on application forms. If the agent couldn’t find the parents, thought they were bad parents, or that they weren’t making their kids attend school regularly, no signature was needed.
In 1937 A. C. MacNeil, the Indian Agent for Glendale, Nova Scotia, was closely watching an older couple with four small children. The father wanted to leave his wife and take their kids to live with him in a shack. He asked MacNeil if the Department might pay to fix the shack up, make it livable. But MacNeil considered the man a hopeless wanderer. Without a mother, he figured, the kids would be neglected. MacNeil responded to the man’s request by bringing him forms for Shubenacadie, but the man refused to sign. MacNeil wrote his bosses in Ottawa. Indian Affairs responded by saying that one boy could be admitted without a signature, “the father not having shown very much interest in him in the past.” There was no indication of how the Ottawa bureaucrats knew anything about the father-son relationship in discussion, or how they
decided which of the four children would go to Shubenacadie. MacNeil hadn’t mentioned anything about neglect.
Reverend Chiasson, the Pictou Indian Agent of the late 1930s, was happy to send children to Shubenacadie without a parent’s signature when he felt it was in the best interest of the children. In one case, a teenaged girl was looking after her two younger brothers; their mother was dead. When the sister moved out, Chiasson felt that their father had neglected them. He was often away working and no one cooked for them, he said. The older boy drank and had gotten in trouble with the law. The police threatened reform school if he kept it up. Both boys skipped school often. Chiasson suggested that the father send them to Shubenacadie. The father said no, “believing, wrongly of course, that children there are not well cared for,” Chiasson wrote; he sent the boys to Shubenacadie without the signature.
Even seventeen years into Shubenacadie’s institutional life, agents were sending unsigned application forms to Ottawa. People on reserves never knew what to expect. In many cases Indian Agents did advocate on behalf of parents, if they figured a home was clean and cozy enough. “I would think it reasonable to let this girl remain with her father,” the Richibucto, New Brunswick, agent wrote Indian Affairs in 1937. “He has a good comfortable home but no one to take care of it as his wife is dead.” The agent found the girl big and strong and a good housekeeper.
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