A visit from the Indian Agent could mean anything, from new supplies to the disappearance of your child forever. Despite agents sometimes trying to keep families together, the residential school system was committing its first act of violence in taking the children en masse, by train or on the back of a truck, away from home. Uniformed RCMP officers ripped some children from their parents’ arms. They cried and clutched and grabbed desperately for the protection and love they’d known. They were supposed to be at least seven years old, unless they were orphans, or poor, or neglected. Agents took children as young as four. They cited all kinds of different reasons for taking kids to Shubenacadie. It might be a dead parent or one “of little consequence” or “low mentality.” Some parents were, in the opinion of the agent, “of such a character…entirely unfit to bring up a child.” Others were in jail or a mental hospital. Often the parents had a serious illness like tuberculosis. Sometimes the children were described as “illegitimate.” Or, the agents said, the parents had a “roaming nature.” And while it was common in reserve life, as in ancient Mi’kmaw tradition, for children to treat numerous houses as their own, “wandering about the reserve” was also reason to send children to residential school.
In other cases, children were taken to Shubenacadie not because of their parents but because they themselves were seen as delinquents, “of an unruly disposition…a difficult pupil in the day school,” “rather uncontrollable at home,” “saucy with the teacher.” One agent wrote, regarding a teenage boy he took to Shubenacadie, “It was reported to me that he was intoxicated.” Agents knew the students would be severely punished for such antics at Shubenacadie. Children and parents saw it as a reform school. Parents sometimes chose to send their children there. Many who signed application forms used an “X” because they could not write. They had no idea that a primary goal of the school was to assimilate children into mainstream Canadian culture, or that the children would be forbidden from speaking their mother tongues. Some parents didn’t have enough money to take care of their children. Others wanted to make sure they got the best education possible, hoping that by learning to write and speak good English they’d escape poverty. At least at the school they would have enough food. Most didn’t know they were surrendering their role and rights as parents, or that constant hunger would become one of the survivors’ most lasting memories of the school.
Suddenly Alone
Mi’kmaw children stood on the platform at every stop, alone and crying. “There were no families, no relatives, no uncles, grandfathers, nobody to say goodbye to them,” one survivor told the Halifax Media Co-op in 2011. Most had no clue where they were going or why they had been taken from their families, homes, and communities. They often wondered what they had done wrong. Some believed lies they’d been told. “We were there on the understanding that we were going to spend one night there, and leave the next day for home,” a survivor told the Micmac News in 1978. Some survivors remember their parents lying to them, saying they were just going for a walk or to see a sibling at the school. They just knew they were suddenly alone. Some children were haunted throughout their time at the school by the parting image of a mother or father, waving goodbye. The train ride was a long and frightening journey—leaving a small hometown in the morning, arriving in Halifax in the evening, and taking a second train to Shubenacadie, arriving late at night—longer if they came from New Brunswick or Prince Edward Island. Some carried written instructions from an Indian Agent. The principal or a Sister met them at the station.
The Shubenacadie school building was imposing to those who had spent their lives on humble reserves—tall, red brick against the skyline. It “looked like a castle: the ornamented door, the shiny waxed floors, the pictures on the walls and curtains on the windows,” survivor and poet Rita Joe would one day write of the school. First they had to climb “thirteen high cement steps,” writes Isabelle Knockwood, to two heavy wooden doors with glass panels. A priest in black stood just inside, his pale hand extended from under his robe. The children were shuffled in. The Sister Superior led them down a gleaming hallway. In her book, Knockwood describes the appearance of the school in detail. She remembers a picture on the wall of a guardian angel sheltering two small children, and standing in the chapel pews before a “small white altar with a gold cross painted on the front and mounted on a platform.” It was covered in white linen with embroidered flowers, fruit, and crosses. Everything ornate. A red candle was always lit. The Sister told them the chapel was a sacred place. There were pictures of Jesus hauling his cross as the soldiers watched. And there was a parlour across from the priest’s suite, which Knockwood describes as having a blue-patterned rug, lace curtains, and a bookcase filled with leather-bound books.
Older children stood eyeing new arrivals in front of the chapel. They looked a scary bunch, pale, hair cut short or shaved. They wore uniforms that were either black-and-white stripes or colourless. If the new ones were lucky, they’d find some children from their own reserve to commiserate with, kids who already knew their names. Those children who came with their parents inevitably had to say goodbye. First there was paperwork, then usually more tears and last words of wisdom. The older ones often heard something like, “Look after your little brothers and sisters here.” As the parents left, sometimes a Sister would give a crying child a candy. Although they were officially Catholic, many of the children had never been to school or seen a white person, let alone a nun. The white women, dressed all in black and white with veils covering their hair, were frightening for some—a ghostlike image.
Next the children shuffled up two sets of cement stairs with steel rails to the recreation hall, where there was a radio hanging from the ceiling. The floor was red cement and there were two large pillars. The Sisters stripped them down, marked their clothes, and put them into tubs. Some survivors remember the Sisters burning their clothes. They scrubbed them hard, as if “trying to take the Indian away,” as one survivor put it to the TRC session in Eskasoni. The children dried off and got their two new khaki outfits with vertical stripes—one for weekdays and a nicer one for weekends and outings. The uniforms looked like prison clothes. They rarely fit properly, and felt like rough, heavy canvas. The boys had a red tie—to match “their dark colouring” as the Sisters put it. The girls got plain wool skirts that blew up atop the windy hill. They were given hand-me-down shoes. The shoes fit some, but others got blisters. After years at the school, some children’s feet became disfigured from always wearing too-tight shoes. Many saved the shoeboxes to hold the trinkets they found like treasure. (Every now and then Sister Mary Leonard would dump these on the floor and have her favourites throw out the contents.) The Sisters cut the children’s hair short, gave each of them a number, and in many cases an English name, or sometimes arbitrarily changed their name—such as from Margaret to Marjorie or Peggy—to identify them by. “You have no parents or grandparents to help you,” one survivor recalled a Sister saying.
Quickly the loneliness and claustrophobia set in. Children used to freedom on the reserves, being able to play in the woods and learn directly from Elders, were suddenly stuck inside a cold, bland institutional building. In the evenings they watched jealously as the school’s farmer, assistant farmer, carpenter-engineer, and other staff members went home for the evening. The students could always see the school, even when a nun took the class for a walk; it was never far enough.
The school was divided by gender. Brothers couldn’t talk to their sisters. For some, this separation was the hardest thing. Siblings saw each other on occasion if they were lucky enough that their parents could visit. Boys and girls had separate sleeping quarters and playgrounds—both at opposite ends of the building—sections of the dining hall, chapel, and classrooms. This was standard practice in public schools as well, but the concept of separating boys and girls so completely was new to Mi’kmaw children.
Interactions with the opposite sex were strictly controlle
d. Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives.
Many of the children were strangers to each other. They had not yet figured out their own social order. Who would be the favourites and who would be the bullies? Who would be the protectors? In time the children did establish a hierarchy, as well as many close friendships. As journalist Conrad W. Paul wrote in 1978, they established “a mini-government, with its own laws and monetary system.” Survivors remember the Sisters having favourite students, whom the others called the “pets” or “squealers.” They kept their eyes on the other children and reported back any misbehaviour or rule breaking to a Sister. Sometimes they would be enforcers; the youngest children had to watch their backs. Some older kids were friends and protectors; others were dangerous. Survivors have haunting memories of abuse, the threat of which hung from many directions—the priest, the nuns, the older students. One survivor who was raped in the shower by boys who’d threatened him with a homemade knife kept it a secret until 1978, when he unburdened himself to the Micmac News. “You sorta had to take your showers with your own group for protection,” he said. If you wanted to avoid beatings you could pay for security with food, a scarce commodity. Some small children paid the older ones to beat up their enemies.
Decades later, at TRC events throughout Atlantic Canada, Shubenacadie survivors described a robotic numbness that set in and lasted several years—feelings buried as deeply as possible to preserve their sanity. This repression prevented the creation of memories, of conversations, of emotion or personal growth. For some, it took many more years to recover, to feel again, and to understand what had happened. Some families had as many as nine children taken away to Shubenacadie.
Rigour
Survivors have described being treated like a “herd of animals,” shuffled from one place to the next on the hour. They experienced a level of regulation they’d never known before, an hourly schedule and rules for how to sit, speak, and eat, regulated by a series of nine ringing bells throughout the day, beginning in the very early morning. The first bell called the Sisters to prayer and roused the children from bed. Sisters came into the dorm at 6:00 A.M., clapping their hands loudly to make sure everyone was awake. The children would then kneel down on the cold floor to pray. They prayed till their knees hurt, and longer. After morning prayers they marched downstairs to use the bathroom. Thirty sinks and fourteen stalls for each sex: lots of lining up and waiting your turn, fighting to get a look in the mirror.
Then came another lineup and another march, this time to mass, which started at 7:00 A.M. More prayer. Everyone attended mass, even if very sick. Then another lineup for breakfast in the dining hall in the basement before wolfing down some porridge fast so the nuns wouldn’t get mad. The boys did the dishes in the scullery behind the refectory and reset the tables for lunch. Another bell started morning classes at 9:00 A.M. The next bell signalled a fifteen-minute recess, a precious slice from the two hours of playtime each day. The games the children played then were a refuge from the strict discipline of the nuns and priest; it was their time to create their own rules within their own games. They had snowball fights, built forts, skated on the frozen marsh, jumped rope, and played basketball, baseball, marbles, hopscotch, checkers, and cards. The skipping rope, toboggans, and cards were all homemade. The skates were in hot demand, and the “pets” got first dibs.
At noon the lunch bell rang. At 12:30 the girls did the lunch dishes and set the table for supper. There was half an hour to play outside before the 1:00 P.M. bell, which brought the younger ones—under ten—back to class. For the older ones, it was time to do chores in the kitchen, laundry, or on the farm. Another bell granted a fifteen-minute recess at 3:30, giving the children an hour to play before the supper bell. After supper they knit for an hour, making and mending clothing for themselves, the Sisters, and the male staff members. At 7:00 P.M. they reported for benediction. The older children closed the day with an hour of study time.
Playtime. Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives
Additional prayers were thrown in throughout the day—while children waited in line for food, when they lined up for class, when class started, after first period. Before they slept, they knelt by their beds and prayed again, saying the rosary, once again long after their knees were sore. Prayer suffused quotidian life. “All we did was pray,” a survivor told Isabelle Knockwood. The Mi’kmaq had adapted the Catholic faith to their traditions and culture, for example singing traditional songs as well as Catholic hymns translated into Mi’kmaw and believing in a single Creator while maintaining a belief that all things, animate or inanimate, have that Creator’s spirit within them. Traditionally, God was a process, an act of creation and care, a relationship. But the God that Father Mackey presented in the chapel, the God the Sisters prayed to, was a different thing. Though most of the children were Catholic, many were used to praying in Mi’kmaw. And all things Mi’kmaw were frowned on.
Many, perhaps one-third of the children, spoke little if any English. But anyone who spoke Mi’kmaw—“gibberish” or “mumbo jumbo,” as the Sisters often called it—in any circumstance was severely punished. One survivor recalls witnessing a girl receive a vicious strapping by a Sister who screamed, “Speak English!” with every blow. The girl refused, no matter how long it went on. Older students translated this danger to new ones who did not yet speak English. Until they learned the language, they had a choice between being beaten and being mute. They could not safely ask to use the washroom. Many graduated still unable to read or write in English. Those who went on to public high school found themselves far behind their classmates.
The children at Shubenacadie learned that their own culture was inferior. Sisters and the principal used terms like “dirty savage” and “heathen.” They told the students they would “never amount to anything,” that they were stupid and no good, and repeated a popular refrain of the times: The only good Indian is a dead Indian. Their people were uncivilized. They were godless pagans. Isabelle Knockwood wrote of how the children resisted the strangely garbed women who imposed these rituals on them. The boys made up their own names for the nuns using obscene Mi’kmaw puns. They called one sister Bujig’m. It was nonsense, but implied that she was sexually loose. Knockwood also wrote of the boys peeing into the teachers’ and principal’s milk while working in the barn. During a hymn, a young girl changed the Latin words resurrecsit sicut dixit, or “he said he would rise again,” to resurrecsit kisiku iktit, Mi’kmaw for “when the old man got up he farted.” According to Knockwood, the Sister patiently stopped the song to correct the girl’s pronunciation, much to the delight of the rest of the children.
After a day of lineups, prayer, and labour, each child changed into flannel nightclothes and returned to a white iron bed with cartoon characters on the bedspread, in one of four long rows in a dormitory with several dozen other children. There were large statues of the Virgin Mary on the walls. When the lights went out, the boys could look out the window of their dorm and see the girls’ window, and vice versa. They kneeled again on the polished, cold hardwood floors for bedtime prayers. Some survivors remember being made to bend over and pull down their pants to be strapped on an almost nightly basis. They then crawled under blankets that had long ago worn thin—Indian Affairs refused to replace them—and shivered through the night. Finally, they were locked into their dorms. “There was a fire escape,” survivor Rita Joe wrote in her autobiography, “but I often wondered what would have happened if there was a fire.”
The children were supposed to remain in their beds. Many could not stop crying for weeks or even months, despite the consequences. Others listened to their crying through the night. The disciplinarians turned off the tap water each night. Survivors remember drinking from the toilets when they were thirsty. They were made to use the bathroom before bed and never during the night, so bedwetting was common. Some snuck to the toilets at bedtime and tried to sleep on one so they wo
uldn’t pee in bed. Sometimes a bully would pee on someone else’s bed to get them in trouble. The children tried to hide or dry it with their blankets. In the morning the disciplinarian Sister inspected the crotches of their underwear for stains. If she found anything suspicious, she would push the suspect’s face into the stains, strap him, or send him on a “pee parade” through the cafeteria in front of everyone, wearing wet, stained underwear or bedsheets as a hat.
Despite the risk involved, there was also a fair bit of sneaking around at night, especially among the older kids. Sometimes the boys would climb from fire escape to fire escape and into the girls’ dorm after the Sisters were asleep. But other times it was more innocent than that, just siblings seeking each other out to snuggle and whisper and check in on one another. Many children snuck out during the evenings to go to town, sometimes to take in a movie but mostly just for the sake of adventure and a little variety, risking severe punishment for the thrill.
Study and Work
In class the children knit, mended clothing, and studied—spending most of their time on English. But according to Knockwood, “The attempts at English-language teaching were quite rudimentary.” Their texts were religious and the stories they read had morals about being good Canadian citizens. They learned that their own culture was backwards, uncivilized, and that it was dying. It was not the way forward. The children could not identify themselves as good citizens, given that their own lives were nothing like the stories they were reading about white nuclear families. They had grown up among extended families and tight-knit communities. Their parents often travelled to find work and food. Many of the children had no parents at all. With their parents dead or away, uncles, aunts, cousins, siblings, and family friends took care of them. This way of living, they were taught, was wrong.
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