And now they lived in a residential school. There was nothing in the stories about residential schools. As the textbooks explained it, all human progress came from Europe, especially Britain. The most intelligent and noble people all had their origins there. Europeans, finding the rest of the world uncivilized, had improved things everywhere. The children learned—in story, song, verse, and image—how Britain had come to a wild, savage Mi’kma’ki and civilized it. “Rule Britannia! / Britannia rule the waves / Britons never, never, never shall be slaves,” the Mi’kmaw children sang. Christopher Columbus was also honoured. He “sailed across the sea and found this land for you and me,” they sang. Curriculum included a song called “The Canadian Way”: “We work together / we learn together / the good Canadian way.” From another songbook they sang all praises to the brave, strong white men who had discovered and conquered an unfriendly landscape. “This land was built by pioneers,” they sang.
The texts showed First Nations people, too: the province provided texts with pictures of Hurons scalping missionaries. It wasn’t discussed, just shown as if it spoke for itself. The children learned of the inferiority of their cultures’ ancient political systems. “We must not suppose…that the Indians all had strong governments like those of the French and English,” one textbook read. They learned of a few ill-advised, weak attempts by their people to resist progress. “Indians found it difficult to learn the white man’s ways,” the students read in a textbook called The Story of Canada, which went on to say that the Indians would trade anything for liquor and behaved badly when they got drunk. “Not all the white men…were willing to let the Indians carry on so foolishly,” it assured them. The children learned that their people were still in a prehistoric state, that they needed to learn farming as well as proper dress and behaviour, to become more like Euro-Canadians, the more advanced race. It started with small groups organized by family and moved into tribes. Eventually the tribes formed a nation with a royal family. Ultimately, the nations get together and form a commonwealth.
The study of the White Man’s hard-working habits was supplemented with actual labour. The gleaming walls and floors of Shubenacadie always impressed visitors. This was the work of the children. They had “chores,” jobs that took most of their time. On Saturdays, older kids supervised while younger ones cleaned. They swept and mopped and waxed the floors until they could see their faces in them. Some knelt, scrubbing so long they suffered painful inflammation in the knees. This is how they learned to be properly “civilized” homemakers and farmers. Every afternoon the children—boys and girls—made socks, mittens, blouses, skirts, and pants, repaired shoes, did hemming, patchwork, mat-hooking, and quilting. During the war years they “knit for Britain,” making socks for soldiers. Each child made a pair a week. “The children are usually deft with their fingers,” the Catholic Diocese wrote. The younger girls did laundry. Every weekday morning and afternoon, except Tuesdays, they washed school uniforms, sheets, blankets, towels, and the Sisters’ and principal’s clothes, often by hand. They ironed and dried them using the mangle, which Isabelle Knockwood described as a one-by-two-metre “red monstrosity of a machine” with three long rollers, ten centimetres in diameter, surrounding a larger central roller.
Older girls worked the kitchen, where survivors remember many accidents.Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives
Knockwood remembers witnessing a young girl nearly lose her hand in a gruesome encounter with the mangle. The girls tried to turn it off but the propeller broke and the emergency switch was too high to reach. The girl screamed for several minutes until the Sister in charge came running in from her tea break. The girl’s hand was missing a layer of skin. She was pale, her lips purple. She fainted, and was rushed to hospital where she stayed several months. Her fingers never totally healed, but crochet work helped bring back some dexterity. When Father Mackey reported the accident, he said the girl had found she could warm her hands on the mangle. She’d already done it once, Mackey said, almost getting her hands caught the first time. “No one questioned how her hands could be cold working on a steaming machine in a hot laundry,” Knockwood notes. No safety device was ever installed and no safety training ever given. Knockwood remembers five girls who were maimed by the mangle or dough mixer in her eleven years at the school. The girls worked unsupervised.
The older girls got kitchen duty. Four at a time worked with two Sisters and a famously cranky, and sometimes cruel, cook in the kitchen. They got up at 4:00 or 5:00 A.M. to get the coal fires going and put on two giant aluminum pots of porridge. They each sliced and buttered a few dozen loaves of bread, boiled a couple hundred eggs, and made soup. They worked until 6:30 P.M., a fourteen-hour day. It required lugging ten-gallon milk pails around. Some of the girls weren’t tall enough to reach the stovetops and had to stand on stools. When they started they were partnered with another girl who’d been at it awhile, and the Sister might show them how to clean the fireplace and light the fire. It was children training children to use knives and machinery, including an industrial milk-and-cream separator, and a dough mixer. The kitchen-girls spent about an hour a day in class.
Three months after the first children arrived at Shubenacadie, two girls got their hands caught in the dough mixer. The first had been cleaning the mixer; the second, not noticing where her friend’s hand was, turned the machine on. She reached in to help the first girl. A Sister heard their screams, turned off the machine, and took them to the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax, forty minutes away. The second girl lost most of a finger. “They were warned many times about tinkering with the machines,” Mackey wrote.
Each girl worked four weeks at a time in the kitchen, twice each term, in rotation so that a new girl was added each week. During preserving season, two more girls were brought in. Survivors remember being severely punished for mistakes. “Sister Maria Adrian has beaten me many times over the head and pulled my hair and struck me on the back of the neck with a ruler,” one fifteen-year-old girl told RCMP officers and the Indian Agent at Shubenacadie in 1936. She said the Sister also beat her on the back with her fists. She had run away after five years at the school. Eleven weeks in the kitchen had been her breaking point. Another Sister made her clean windows by tying one end of a rope around her waist, with a little girl holding the other end, and having her climb out the top-floor window. She chose this task over a beating. The girl told the police this treatment was common. “After we get a beating we are asked what we get the beating for and if we tell them we do not know we get another beating,” she explained. The Indian Agent reported the incidents to J. D. Sutherland, acting superintendent at Indian Affairs. Sutherland passed the complaints on to Mackey, who took them to Sister Maria Adrian, who denied the incidents. Nevertheless, the girl was discharged and went to day school.
Unknown male student, 1932. Collection of Elsie Charles Basque, Nova Scotia Museum
The kitchen work was meant to groom the girls to be housewives, with a focus on cooking. They made basic Canadian food: bread and buns, meat and vegetables, pies and cakes. Survivors recall that the food was often rancid, and always scarce. But the Sister in charge of the kitchen made a special breakfast for the principal and teachers. The children learned how to set a proper table and serve a three-course meal on china in the principal’s dining room, which had a mahogany dining set and high-backed chairs under a crystal chandelier, and lace curtains.
The boys didn’t have much time for class either. As Mackey said in a letter to Indian Affairs, they were too busy with “work other than reading, writing, and arithmetic…By the time we have ball playing, coasting, skating, and keeping the house clean, the day is pretty well used up.” Mackey started each year by making a list of twenty to thirty boys, fourteen and older, of a certain size to do the hardest work. He divided these up into five or six teams, each with a few experienced farm and carpentry workers. He posted the lists in his office, t
he dairy barn, and the recreation room. Any boy from Grade 5 up worked half of each day on the farm or else stoking the furnace. The furnace boys shovelled 200 tons of coal every year and cleaned out the ashes daily. They worked from 4:00 A.M., relieving the night watchman, until 7:00 P.M., a fifteen-hour day. The farm boys planted and tended the fields, producing 15 tons of turnips and 25 tons of potatoes each year, as well as other fresh produce. They fed and later slaughtered the hens, cows, and pigs. There were also fifty head of Ayrshire cattle on the farm, producing 142 litres of milk each day.
The idea of the farm was to sell the vegetables, dairy, and meat, but some of it was eaten at the school. The boys rose even before the nuns to get the milking done by 5:15 each morning, and milked again in the evening. They also had to feed the animals, keep the barns clean, fertilize, hay, plant, harvest, and plow the fields. Each boy put in about ten weeks of work with the cows per term. A hired farmer and his assistant supervised when they were available, but sometimes the boys were on their own with the cows. And like the girls, the boys sometimes got seriously injured. One fell from the loft while pitching hay and broke his neck. He had to wear a brace for several months.
Older boys with a farm horse. Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives
Some boys rotated between farm work and furnace work. “I was as black as coal one day and stinking to high heaven the next,” one survivor recalled. These same boys also helped construct new buildings. Father Mackey stressed this in his letters to Indian Affairs, claiming that the lack of school funds for skilled labour created “a good opportunity [for the children] to learn carpentry work.” Mackey said the older boys preferred the labour to being in class. The smaller-sized teenage boys did other work: taking meals to sick kids confined to their beds, washing dishes, and cleaning common areas like the washrooms and refectory.
Superintendent General of Indian Affairs M. Christianson, however, was not impressed with the children’s labours. After visiting Shubenacadie one afternoon in the spring of 1937, he predicted that the graduates would soon join a lineup of “Indians depending, for a livelihood, on what relief they get from the Department and the sale of Indian handicraft.” He felt that the children should learn to make baskets and handles to sell for a living. If anything, Shubenacadie was too focused on book-learning. Mackey disagreed. He replied that the girls would only end up competing with their own people making baskets on the reserves: “The market for these things in this locality is over supplied.” If he had the money, Mackey said, he’d hire a domestic-science teacher. The girls would be more useful as proper homemakers, European style. It wasn’t the school’s job to teach about baskets and axe handles. It never occurred to either man that the students could learn to make handles and baskets, or how to keep a house clean, at home.
Hunger and Illustrious Visitors
At breakfast time the children ate a morning dose of cod liver oil. It was no worse than the food. Some remember a predictable diet of bread, potatoes, turnips, carrots, beef, and milk. Many remember the awful “porridge-like substance” that made them feel ill. But survivors have most often talked of a hunger that never went away. There just wasn’t enough food. At their most resourceful, the children ate meat off the bones they’d find in the principal’s garbage can. “There used to be a special garbage can called the river can,” one survivor told the Micmac News. It was the principal’s. “There would be very select pieces of roast pork or beef in this thing.” Some hunted pigeons or fished for eel in the lake. They used butter knives stolen from the kitchen to clean the fish, and hooked them with safety pins and string. They lit fires in eel barrels and boiled the fish in used cans. Boys on farm duty were hungry enough to slice up cattle feed and raw turnips and mix them into a chow. They also stole whatever milk they could drink and as many raw potatoes as they could eat.
Yet as the children starved, Indian Affairs turned a blind eye. The director of medical services, Dr. E. L. Stone, inspected Nova Scotia’s reserves and residential school in 1935 and found that the children at Shubenacadie were in better physical condition after a year at the school. Stone didn’t mention that two months earlier Indian Affairs had cut back on relief payments for the reserves. An agent had recommended they do so to motivate the Mi’kmaq to work harder at fishing and farming. Stone’s report was typical. Various visitors to the school, including H. W. McGill, deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, had reported witnessing shiny, happy students, clean and healthy. The Sisters led out the darkest students they could find, who were considered more representative of the charitable work being done there. Shubenacadie’s survivors remember being scrubbed and told to wear their cleanest clothes, and warned to be on their best behaviour for visitors. And to smile, masking any problems that might lie beneath the surface.
Indian Affairs sent inspectors, with plenty of advanced notice, every February and May. The cook always made a special meal for them. Survivor Isabelle Knockwood wrote that before an inspector’s arrival the priest gathered up the straps from the Sisters and had a student burn them in the furnace. The children were told to say they were well fed or else keep their mouths shut completely. And whenever newspaper reporters or members of the public visited, the children were to change from their everyday prison-style garb into their special-occasion formal wear.
In the spring of 1936, Dr. Thomas Robertson visited the school with a mission from Indian Affairs to report on the health and nutrition levels of the children. It was part of his overall objective of “investigating conditions among the Indians in the Maritime Provinces.” Like other visitors, he noted that the children were “neat and clean in dress and appearance. Apparently happy and well nourished.” The school itself was “scrupulously clean and orderly.” The staff was “doing everything for the betterment of the children.” It was noted that the children were weighed every month and that a doctor visited the school every other week to see sick children. Yet Robertson also wrote of his concerns with residential schools. He didn’t like that they broke up families, taking children away from good homes where they belonged with their loving parents. He admitted he hadn’t studied the impacts of the schools on the children (though others had found that residential school graduates were worse off than their counterparts on the reserves), but he suggested Indian Affairs consider looking into it. His report had no impact.
Despite the rave reviews of the health of the children, Indian Affairs was well aware of the constant hunger at this and other residential schools. Parents had been demanding solutions for hunger at the schools for decades. In the 1940s Indian Affairs used this widespread hunger as a chance to conduct experiments on the residents of Shubenacadie and five other residential schools without telling them about it. Dr. Lionel Bradley Pett, who was in charge of Indian Affairs’s new nutrition division, was the man behind the experiments. He would eventually use the results to start the Indian Health Services Branch of the Department of National Health and Welfare (now the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch of Health Canada). Pett saw the widespread malnutrition in residential schools as a chance to see if vitamin pills alone could improve health, independent of a good diet.
First, Pett needed a sense of just how bad nutrition was at residential schools. He sent dieticians into six schools for several hours or a full day. As always, Indian Affairs warned the schools in advance. The dieticians would interview staff members and children and review menus, grocery purchases, kitchen and storage facilities, the dining halls, and farmlands. The dieticians had a meal—bulked up with extra butter and meat for the visitors’ sake—with the children. They ultimately found that conditions at the schools were “overwhelmingly poor.” The students were underfed, sometimes to the point of sickness. Indian Affairs wasn’t meeting its own basic nutritional requirements. It was spending about half of what was needed to provide those basic needs. At Shubenacadie, they noted, “The school has a larger number of small pupils than is usually the case.”
In 1946 Pett hired nutritionist Alice McCready to do a follow-up study. She was “utterly disgusted” by the lack of progress from the Department’s new food-training program for cooks and the children who helped in the kitchen. She concluded that the training was wasted on kitchen staff who were paid so poorly by the Department that they never stuck around long. Conditions were perfect for Pett’s five-year experiment, which he started two years later with the help of Indian Affairs. It’s unknown how much Indian Affairs spent on the experiment, but the Department that was chronically underspending hired a large team of nutritionists, doctors, psychologists, nurses, dentists, photographers, and lab technicians to travel across the country conducting intelligence tests, blood work, and physicals on a thousand children. Pett chose Shubenacadie because the conditions were particularly poor there: the children’s diets were, even by residential school standards, deficient in vitamins A, B, C, iron, and iodine, the children had low levels of ascorbic acid in their blood during winter, and there were high rates of gingivitis, which was believed to be linked to diet.
At Shubenacadie and the other experimental schools, the team of professionals descended on the children, telling them they were “carrying on what we call a nutrition study…to help you and the school.” The government told researchers what to say to the children in its Outline of Talk to Children in Indian Schools Prior to Taking Dietary Records. As government wards and children, they weren’t asked for their consent. The experimenters divided the children into two groups. The first ate vitamin C pills and other supplements every day, and the second ate sugar pills they thought were medicine. The experimenters then tested the blood and checked the teeth of both groups to see if the vitamin C had had any impact. The five years of ongoing physical exams were intensive, exhausting, and sometimes painful. Researchers took dozens of photos, and the teachers had the children write thank-you notes afterward, in which they wrote things like, “The pokes that I got didn’t hurt me very much.”
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