To ensure that any change in dental health was really because of the vitamins, Pett told Indian Affairs, “No specialized, over-all type of dental service should be provided, such as the use of sodium fluoride, dental prophylaxis or even urea compounds.” Once again children at Shubenacadie were denied dental treatments, even while children at other residential schools received them. When he spoke of the work, Pett talked about students at “boarding schools.” According to Ian Mosby, the University of Guelph food historian who uncovered information about the study in a 2013 paper, human research was common at the time, but researchers were smart enough to be discreet about it—the general public was squeamish about the idea. It was easier to get away with if your research subjects were considered public burdens.
In the end Pett found “no beneficial effect” to the supplements, and the research did little if anything to change the food situation at Shubenacadie or any other residential school. “Their findings were not important,” Mosby tells me. “They were rarely cited. They were not addressing the root causes of the malnutrition they saw.” Undaunted, Pett planned a second experiment at Shubenacadie using enriched flour, the same kind that had been found to potentially cause anemia. But the experiment never happened and the team of researchers and their food supplements disappeared from the children’s lives, leaving them to their hunger.
Discipline, Punish, and Abuse
Survivors remember a dizzying, wickedly creative array of punishments, physical and otherwise. There were too many rules to remember, and the punishments seemed arbitrary anyway. They came between bouts of gentleness, out of the blue, swift and hard and often vicious. The children lived in fear, never knowing when it was coming or what exactly “it” would be and who would deliver it. They felt the sting of a harness-leather strap—or a steel ruler, wire pointer, bamboo ski pole, long-handled shoehorn, chalkboard eraser, fist, open palm, or else they’d be shaken or feel their ear pinched—if they snuggled with a sibling, ran in the halls, spoke too loudly, avoided eye contact with an adult (which they had learned in Mi’kmaw culture was the respectful thing to do), or didn’t pray properly. Yelled insults accompanied the physical punishments. Besides beatings, Sisters would make boys wear dresses or would rub medicine on their genitals. Children were denied food or made to do the worst chores or given extra work, locked in the “dungeon” or “the hole,” had their mouths washed with salt or soap or lye, their heads shaved, or were made to go barefoot in the winter.
Some survivors recall that darker-skinned children, those without parents or with disabilities received more beatings. Disciplinarians also targeted children whose parents lived far away and couldn’t visit, and told those with parents nearby that it was wrong to say what went on at the school, that to do so would be a betrayal. Some pundits have pointed out that corporal punishment was the norm at all schools during this time. But survivor testimony—to community Elders, police, and Indian Affairs while the school was open, and publicly after its closure—shows that even by the standards of the day, some of the nuns and priests crossed way over the line between corporal punishment and abuse. Children were whipped and beaten bloody, and many survivors still have scars. One boy couldn’t feed himself after his hands had been sliced bloody by the edge of a ruler.
Many survivors recall being force-fed rancid or wilted food, having their faces shoved into it when they refused, and being made to eat their own vomit. There was a great deal of sickness at the school in general, paired with another commonly reported form of abuse, neglect. Sick children were often ignored and sent outside during playtime even on the coldest winter days. Some survivors remember receiving serious beatings for complaining of stomach pains or diarrhea. Others remember the Sisters and priests humiliating, belittling, and shaming them. And a great many remember being sexually abused by a nun or priest or both.
One survivor told Isabelle Knockwood, when she was researching for Out of the Depths, that Father Mackey demanded oral sex from him as a boy. When he refused the priest gave him the strap. Some remember the physical and sexual abuse as separate things, but sometimes they were related. One man told the TRC in Halifax about falling sick at the age of seven. A Sister gave him a sponge bath and “took liberties.” When he resisted, she had older boys come and beat him, leaving permanent scars. Another former resident told the TRC that a Sister gave him candy hoping he would give her oral sex. His brother told him the same Sister had given him oral sex many times, until he urinated in her mouth.
Women also remember sexual abuse at the school. Several survivors have memories of a Sister who liked to watch the girls take their underwear off and then would go look inside them. “We were all sexually abused by the priests and the nuns,” another survivor told the Commission of her and her siblings’ experience at Shubenacadie. “[The Sisters] told us the more pain we had, the closer to heaven.”
Aching for Home
The children did their best to let their parents and other elders in on the abuse and neglect they experienced at the school. But the Sisters told them not to tell. They said that good children were loyal to their school. Letters home were screened and censored, as was any mail children received. Other times, a Sister would dictate a letter home, or write it on the chalkboard, and the children would write it down. Every parent received the same happy message. Sisters also monitored parental visits, which happened on Sundays in the visiting parlour on the second floor. The room had a piano and several books the children weren’t allowed to touch. Some survivors remember toys being put there for visits and then mysteriously disappearing soon after the parents left. The visits were stale, uncomfortable events for the children. They could only speak English, a difficult language for many of the parents. But it was better than nothing, which is what children whose parents lived far away got. Until the mid-1940s, Indian Affairs didn’t allow these children to go home in the summer. “If the children from New Brunswick who are attending Shubenacadie Residential School were allowed home for holidays there would be, in many cases, considerable difficulty in having them returned,” wrote J. D. Sutherland, acting superintendent of Indian education, in June 1936. “At the same time, it is doubtful if the parents would provide the cost of their transportation, and, as our funds are limited, the Department is not in a position to incur the expenditure….” Some parents offered to pay for a return train ticket. Indian Affairs ignored them or told them it wasn’t possible.
Parents wrote letters saying they missed their children. They asked to have them home for the summer. “We know the worry, the emptiness and the desolation of our homes because as parents our hearts are with our little children who are away at school,” one parent told Micmac News years after the school had closed. Indian Affairs or the school principal told the parents not to worry because the school was so much fun during the summer months, and besides it was too expensive to send everyone home. (One elder in Burnt Church had a stroke waiting for the Department to change its mind, after years of asking for his sons back. After the stroke, they sent home the eldest of the man’s two boys.)
The Department also denied vacations to some children who came from the nearby Shubenacadie reserve. If the principal thought a child’s family was a bad influence—or on welfare—that child could not go home. Indian Affairs wanted to avoid paying out extra relief so families could take care of their children over the summer. “The Department will expect the expenses to be kept as low as possible,” Sutherland wrote. For those few who qualified for summer vacations, parents had to pay half the rail fare. But Sutherland reassured an Indian Agent that the children enjoyed the school during summer because chores were lightened and they “are taken on picnics and…other entertainment is provided for them.” When children did come home for summer, some parents tried to keep them there come fall. For the school principal, September was about making lists of absent children. He’d then give these lists to Indian Affairs, who sent Indian Agents looking for the children, taking RCMP off
icers with them if need be.
Some survivors remember the summer being a better time than usual. “The nuns tried to treat us a little better,” Rita Joe wrote in her autobiography. She recalled eating cornflakes and juice every day for breakfast. The Sisters piled them into a pickup truck and drove down to the lake for a swim. There were more toys available, and no one felt like they had to fight over them. They even got to sleep in sometimes. The praying and church services were less frequent. Others remember it differently: they were forced to pick berries in the heat all day, and if the Sisters found any berry stains on their tongues they were beaten.
No child was allowed home for Christmas or other holidays, a policy that lasted until the 1950s. Indian Affairs told agents to reassure parents that Christmas at the school was a fun time, full of celebration and festivities. The children decorated the school with tied fir boughs. They were given special presents by the principal and teachers, as well as whatever their families sent. Many survivors remember the gifts bitterly; they received them only to have the nuns take them away again on January 6, locking them away, hanging them on the walls where they could be seen but not touched, or giving them to more favoured children. For some children it didn’t matter; it was more important that they got to spend a few precious hours with a sibling during the holiday. Others treasured the oranges they received so highly they put them away to look at rather than eat. They would have to throw away the fruit’s shrivelled remains in March. During Christmas 1939, parents from Cambridge reserve showed up at the school demanding their children. The children watched from inside as Father Mackey threatened their parents and ultimately sent them away empty-handed. Eight years later, on Christmas Eve, “Two inebriated Indian parents marred the quiet and peace of the house for some hours,” according to the Sisters’ Annals. The parents left, when the RCMP came, to avoid spending Christmas in jail.
Even when an agent took a family’s side, it was not a guarantee they would see their children. In Bear River, Indian Agent S. E. Darris requested that one family’s five children be allowed to go home for the summer of 1937. The Department denied the request and chastised Darris for being too soft. That same summer, Charles Hudson, Indian Agent in Restigouche, New Brunswick, argued that if parents could pay for travel the children should be allowed home. A father in Hudson’s jurisdiction wrote directly to Indian Affairs. “They never came home since they left,” he wrote of his three boys, who he hadn’t seen in six years. They were teenagers now but he remembered them as small children. “They wrote to us and they said that they were lonesome,” he pleaded. But here the Department policy was firm: no vacations except for those living very close to the school. Three years later, Indian Affairs changed its mind. It would pay train fare home for children from Restigouche; parents could pay for the return trip. This time Hudson kiboshed the idea, telling the Department, “In all cases home conditions are unsuitable.”
Many children decided not to wait for approval to go home. Several ran away from the Shubenacadie residential school nearly every year. In one three-year period, from 1939 to 1942, there were thirty-three reported escape attempts. Four were successful. The children couldn’t have known that hundreds of others like them were fleeing residential schools across the country. Escapees usually went straight to the reserve, but they didn’t always make it. Some froze to death, starved, or were attacked by animals or vigilantes. Suicides were also common in the residential schools. Indian Affairs responded by providing survival courses. If a body didn’t show up, the RCMP knew to look on the reserve. Some children simply walked away from the playground. Others went to more dangerous lengths, jumping out of windows to get away or tying sheets together and climbing down. Some got away “using a fire hose to climb down from the dormitory to the ground, using fire escapes, crawling out of basement windows, and in one case filing down a skeleton key to fit all the doors and leaving via the stairway in the middle of the night,” Isabelle Knockwood writes.
“No matter how far he may roam, I want him brought back here,” Mackey told the RCMP of the first runaway of 1937. Officers found the boy working on a farm two weeks later. They put him in jail for a few nights and then returned him to the school. In July another boy ran away for eleven days. He made good distance before the RCMP tracked him down and called Mackey, who drove more than four hundred kilometres to pick him up. Three more boys ran away the next year. The RCMP had no trouble finding them. The runaways were trying on Father Mackey, who spent much time dealing with the RCMP tracking them down. Sometimes locals tipped Mackey off about a runner’s whereabouts—he was known to pay bounties for successful tips. “This is the fifth time during the past two years,” he wrote of one boy’s escape attempts. “I feel that Saint Patrick’s Home is the only place for that imbecile.”
The runaways became so frequent that in the spring of 1938, RCMP officers visited Shubenacadie to warn the boys about a new specialist in finding runaways and lost persons. The specialist was named Perky. He was a young Doberman Pinscher with eighteen months training. He could track runaways down by their scent. The general public didn’t yet know of the dog. The RCMP’s first use of their new dog was to find two Shubenacadie runaways—twelve and thirteen years old—a year later. The dog found the boys within an hour of their 6 A.M. disappearance, eleven kilometres from the school and deep in the woods. A newspaper article praising the dog said he’d tracked them across a frozen lake. Children ran away much less often after Perky joined the police force.
The runaways, who were mostly boys, were captured and punished severely, brought before the principal to be whipped on the bare buttocks, screaming as the other students were made to watch. One survivor told the CBC of a student who had run away in the winter, was caught, and spent several days in the dungeon living on bread and water before a Sister realized he had severe frostbite on his feet. When she yanked his socks off the skin came with it. They rushed him to hospital, where part of his foot had to be amputated. Other children pleaded with the authorities for their freedom. Few were successful. In 1936 a girl at Shubenacadie wrote to her sister asking for help getting discharged. The sister wrote to their agent, Dr. B. W. Skinner, but he was not supportive or helpful. The sister then wrote to Indian Affairs, mentioning that she also hoped to have her own children home for summer vacation. J. D. Sutherland, acting superintendent of Indian education, received her letter. He replied that the children would have a good time at school during the summer.
Good Memories
Since the 1970s, some survivors have defended the school, or at least pointed out that it wasn’t an entirely bad experience. Some told Micmac News in 1978 that they were glad to have learned English, or practical skills like sewing and knitting, even though they weren’t given a choice. Others recalled friendships that developed at the school. “It taught me how to look after myself,” another told the CBC in the 1980s. “A child needs discipline,” one survivor told the Halifax Daily News in the 1990s. “I don’t call it abuse. If we were punished we brought it on ourselves.” In her autobiography, Rita Joe wrote about the bad and good of the school. Despite its hardships, Shubenacadie gave her strength, she said. And she learned pottery, sewing, knitting—useful things. And occasionally fun things, like skating or the forbidden sweetness of passing “I love you” notes to boys—risky behaviour under the sharp watch of the Sisters. She made sure she got some book-learning too. If she finished her chores by 2:00 P.M., the teacher would unlock the reading room for her. The first time she entered she grabbed the first book she saw. Astronomy. She was astounded. She worked extra hard after that. There were other worlds locked in that room, and she wanted to go there. She managed it about once a week.
A woman who lived at the school from 1955 to 1962 wrote an article for the Micmac-Maliseet Nations News in 1992, saying she was well cared for at Shubenacadie, and that it was an improvement over the poverty she’d known living in Eskasoni. She recalled her summers at the school being “peaceful and
tranquil,” some of the best times of her life. She said she’d been free to speak Mi’kmaw and that older girls had even translated between her and the Sisters. She learned to play several instruments there, including the flute, piano, and organ. She also learned “love, care, responsibility, good manners, politeness, respect for others and how to pray and give thanks to God for what we had.” Any punishments, she said, were reasonable, and not physical. She remembered children being denied privileges like playtime and television if they disobeyed, and nothing worse.
Sister Donna Geernaert, who is now the chancellor of Mount Saint Vincent University and congregational leader of the Sisters of Charity, says that survivors sometimes approach her to confide having had positive experiences at the school. One student told her that she remembers Sister Gilberta very fondly. Sister Gilberta worked at the school from 1956 until it closed in 1967, filling roles as a teacher, sewing instructor, disciplinarian, and choir leader. She made a special effort to get gingham aprons for the girls so that they could make them into special clothing—something other than their uniforms. She was a talented musician and seamstress. When the school closed, she was transferred to the Academy of the Assumption in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts. The woman told Sister Donna that as a little girl she would lie awake in bed at night, afraid. She would go looking for Sister Gilberta, seeing if there was light coming from under her door at the end of the dorm. She’d knock gently and beg the Sister to come into bed with her. Sister Gilberta would not do that, but she took the girl gently back to her own bed with soothing words. However, not every student remembers Sister Gilberta so well. Others told Isabelle Knockwood that Sister Gilberta was one of the most vicious of the nuns during the last years of the institution. One recalled her strapping each of his hands ninety times every day for speaking Mi’kmaw.
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