Community Responses
From the beginning, the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School had a poor reputation when it came to learning. A letter from a Mi’kmaw man in a 1931 issue of Truro Daily News described it as a place “Where everything ‘Indian’ is to be forever obliterated or cast into the Bottomless Pit.” The results of the “millions and millions of dollars” spent on the residential school and the day schools in the province, the letter argued, were that, “We have not one single Injin who can earn his bread and butter, through or by the use of his pen.”
The general population of Nova Scotia had some idea that all was not right at the school, though the worst of it was usually ignored, if not whitewashed by the media. The 1934 public inquiry into abusive punishments presided over by Judge Audette (who sympathized with white people who didn’t want to live near Indians) in which the staff members of the school were exonerated, resulted in jubilant media coverage that sometimes mocked the children’s complaints. The Halifax Herald depicted the boys who testified to having been severely physically abused by the principal as disgruntled whiners lacking ethics and sincerity.
Many complaints had reached Indian Affairs. The police knew of the violence at the school—some elders have since reported that RCMP officers once intervened to stop the beating of a child there but ignored many other testimonies of abuse. If the police responded at all, it was to tell a family to stop making up lies just to get its children back. After the first school year, Chief Dan Francis of the Cambridge reserve in Nova Scotia wrote to Indian Affairs. He was disgusted by the violence the children reported when they returned home for the summer. “I thought that the school was built for Indian children to learn to read and write,” he wrote. “Not for slaves and prisoners like jail…one Indian boy of this reserve was so beaten by Father Mackey he was laid out for seven days.” Indian Affairs forwarded the letter to Mackey, but explained that the Department “did not place much reliance in [Francis’s] charges.” Francis’s complaints were the first in a twice annual—spring and fall—cat-and-mouse tangle between Maritime First Nations communities, Indian Affairs, the principal of Shubenacadie, and the RCMP.
In 1932 Chief Ben Christmas of Membertou wrote to Mackey on behalf of a parent who didn’t want to send her child back to the school. She was concerned that after two years he hadn’t learned anything; he’d only lost his “own graceful tongue.” She was upset that he could no longer pray in Mi’kmaw. She promised to enroll him in a mission church Sunday school and to pay back the cost of a return ticket that Indian Affairs had paid for. The results of her petition are unclear.
Some parents went to their Indian Agents, but rarely found a sympathetic ear. Others, lacking confidence in the agents, wrote to Indian Affairs in Ottawa. These letters were often forwarded to the school principal. Other parents wrote to the principal only to be passed back to the Indian Agent. This bureaucratic dance was further complicated by the church’s involvement. Some parents enlisted white lawyers. A former resident at the school hired attorney R. H. Butts in 1936 to keep Mackey from taking his younger sister and brother. He claimed he was abused and overworked when he was at the school, that he received no real education. He didn’t want his siblings to go through the same. Mackey dismissed the man’s claims: “To keep them from spreading falsehoods,” he wrote to the Indian Agent who relayed Butts’s message, “about those who try to do something for them, seems hopeless. And why white people fall for such stories is hard to explain…I never hope to catch up with the Indian and his lies.” Mackey went on to attack the complainant, calling him a “big body in the mind of a ten-year-old child,” and defended the school vigorously: “Each child spends far more time in the classroom than the regulations call for,” he wrote. “To make an Indian work is the unpardonable sin among them…I am getting a bit tired of playing square with the Indian and in turn have him cut my throat.”
Lawyers weren’t the only white experts parents sought for help. In the fall of 1937, after Mackey threatened a man with sending “the RCMP [to] take [your twelve-year-old son] back to the school and he will remain until sixteen years of age and have no further vacations,” the man took a tremendous risk. He ignored Mackey’s threat and took his son to see a Fredericton doctor. The boy had received such severe beatings he was scared to return to the school. “We have a nice little home and there is nothing to hinder me from keeping my family together from now on which they haven’t had for some time,” the father wrote. “They think a lot of one another and there will not be any need of separating them anymore.” The man brought Mackey’s threatening response with him to Dr. H. S. Everett, who in turn wrote to the local Indian Agent, stressing that the father was not reliant on welfare. “[He] has a home in Rollingdam right across the road from a rural school which [the boy] can attend…I think he would be OK at home,” he wrote. “[The father] hasn’t had any help from the Department for some years and is self supporting.” The man’s Indian Agent, R. Lee McCutcheon, then wrote to Mackey questioning the use of threats: “Is this a bluff?” he asked. Mackey denied the boy had been beaten. “That is the usual line of the Indian,” he wrote. “It should be impressed upon the Indian that he cannot have his own way in matters concerning which the Department has set regulations.” But in this case, Indian Affairs decided to discharge the boy from Shubenacadie. It happened sometimes. Two years later, in 1939, nine students who didn’t return after summer vacation were discharged.
Other times, parents were hindered more than helped by the white men they enlisted. In 1941 a Cape Breton Mi’kmaw mother asked a lawyer, F. C. Cotton, to help her keep her child at home. She’d told Mackey the child was staying home after summer vacation, and Mackey had told the local agent to retrieve the child or have the RCMP do it. Cotton wrote the agent and reminded him the woman’s husband was sick, that she needed her children to help out at home. There was a day school in their community and she swore to send them there. “She says that she ‘loves’ her children,” Cotton wrote. But by putting the word “love” in quotation marks, he completely discredited her. The child was brought back to the school.
Parents also weren’t clear on how long their children would be gone. In some cases, once their children were taken they didn’t see them again for as many as twelve years. By the time some children returned home, their parents had forgotten their age. Other parents lied and said their kids were too sick to return to school, or that they were more than sixteen years old even if they weren’t. But the principal could retain students who were more than sixteen if he felt the youth had nowhere else to go, if he or she was too small, “simple-minded,” or otherwise “deficient.”
Parents tried to get their kids back in many different ways. Some encouraged escape. Others showed up at the school demanding their children back. Some issued legal challenges. But most followed the rules and wrote letters to agents, the principal, and to Ottawa bureaucrats. The federal government had long been too powerful and too ruthless a foe for most Mi’kmaw individuals or families to risk defying.
Freedom Day
Usually, students “graduated” from Shubenacadie at the age of sixteen, though the school principal could keep them longer if he felt they needed it. Some stayed there until they were twenty. Few graduates got past Grade 8, and almost none went on to other schooling. Some students were discharged before they were sixteen. Some went to on-reserve day schools. Others were deemed mentally incapable of handling school. Some were too sick to attend. Some died at school or at home during the summer.
The children called the day they left Shubenacadie “Freedom Day,” and sometimes the Sisters did too. In the early decades of the school, the children received no certificates or diplomas, no official indication that they’d been there or graduated but a new (second-hand) ill-fitting outfit for the outside world. School principals would often put the children on a train to the wrong reserve. The children, now young men and women, would arrive at a station with no one there
to meet them, lost and alone. Sometimes Elders from another First Nation would take them home.
When the first Shubenacadie residents came home, many on the reserves were shocked. The children had so quickly become like strangers. They could no longer speak the language. They no longer understood tradition and culture. They acted like outsiders; not like whites exactly, but different. Some were timid and nervous, and so quiet. Something was wrong with them—“not right in the head,” as some put it. Some told horrifying stories. Word quickly got around. Many Elders who hadn’t attended the residential school remember, as children, how their parents would threaten them, using the school as a kind of bogeyman. “If you don’t behave, I’ll put you in the residential school!” a mother might shout. It was an effective warning.
Life after Shubenacadie could be a traumatic experience. For many years residential school was all they’d known. In prison terms, residents had been “institutionalized.” But unlike inmates leaving prison, the children leaving Shubenacadie were given no help transitioning to the outside world—be it on a reserve or in a city. Survivor Rita Joe recalled sitting on the train and crying as she left the school for good. She was leaving home. But she was also relieved. Her soul was free of the nuns. “If I was going to commit a sin, I would commit it with my own free will,” she wrote.
Some had been at the school more than a decade. Whatever family they’d come from had changed. Parents had often died, or moved. “I didn’t remember my mother,” one survivor recalls. “Coming back into my community I felt as if I didn’t belong,” said another, “we no longer had that connection with family.” Like the children leaving schools in Sussex, New Brunswick, and Port-Royal, hundreds of years earlier, they found themselves stuck between a white world that would never accept them and a First Nations world they could no longer understand. Some found acceptance for a time in the army—especially during the Second World War—but struggled as veterans. Others entered public school and found they were far behind their peers. Even those who had been the best students at Shubenacadie often had to repeat grades in public school. But some persevered and went on to university or community college.
In many cases, Indian Agents took over for the school principal and teachers when children left the school. The agents would place a child in a suitable home back on the reserve—either with the family or elsewhere, sometimes finding them work and accommodation in white households as servants, an ideal situation from Indian Affairs’s perspective, which remained intent on assimilating Aboriginal children into white Canadian culture. “I have placed in the last four years some thirty girls in white homes as domestics,” Agent McCutcheon bragged in a report to his superiors in 1939. The arrangement did not always work out, he said, “But I am more than satisfied with the average.”
Many of the boys who graduated got work as farmhands. As with the girls, it often didn’t work out. Their education was poor, and it had failed to make them white. The children’s time at Shubenacadie also had no impact on white people’s ability to understand them, work well with them, or treat them respectfully. Many former residents quit their jobs to return home. Others, like Rita Joe, found work in the city. She was sixteen years old, and the Sisters of Charity had hooked her up with a job at the Halifax Infirmary, which they’d founded in 1886 and relocated to Queen Street in 1933. Others quickly “reverted to type,” as Indian Affairs put it. Having been “no trouble” at residential school, these youth became listless, wandering, often destitute, homeless, and suffering addictions. Many never returned to the reserve, shunning their own people and way of life. Some died this way.
Most, however, eventually returned to embrace their heritage and culture with the passion of the newly converted, eager to relearn the language, music, customs, and ways of living in community. In decades to come, some of these young graduates would grow into the most successful advocates on behalf of their people. Others became great leaders in the ongoing struggle for healing and justice. Rita Joe became a revered poet, never afraid to educate about the lasting pain of colonialism and the strength of Mi’kmaw culture. In taking a job at the Halifax Infirmary she had turned down the Sisters’ other offer, which was to study to become a nun. In fact, Rita Joe didn’t set foot in a church again for a year. “I was venting my anger at religion as I had experienced it in the school,” she wrote. When she returned to church, she said, it was on her own terms. As a parent, she taught her children “about religion but also about our Creator and Native spirituality.” The journey to reclaim such cultural confidence often took survivors decades. Today, many respected Elders are also survivors of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, and some have been outspoken about those experiences, patiently teaching their stories, lest they be forgotten.
Push for Change
Increased Scrutiny
In many ways, one year at the Shubenacadie residential school was indecipherable from another. The Sisters taught a curriculum designed for white children, the students walked a careful path amidst numerous threats to their health and safety, and the principal ran the show. But each decade there were several key shifts in how the school functioned, which had impacts on its hundreds of residents.
In the mid- to late 1940s, there was a societal shift to increased sympathy for poor people and children. Canada was laying the groundwork for a welfare system, and the residential schools were part of this system—they would continue to house the “neglected Indians.” The Family Allowance Act of 1944 required all families to send their children to school if they wanted to receive the “baby bonus,” a monthly allowance to help with childcare costs. For families on reserve who had few employment opportunities, this money was a powerful incentive when an Indian Agent came around talking residential school.
After the Second World War, the global human rights movement was born, and with it the concept of respecting all cultures found legs in the mainstream. Some Canadians grew to dislike the idea of kids being beaten in schools. More believed that to do well, students needed to feel respected and safe. The colonial idea of assimilating “lesser” cultures became disturbing to some. Aboriginal leaders and activists, many of whom had survived residential school and were aware of the changing sentiments of European-Canadians, pushed the federal government for change.
In part due to its gratitude to Aboriginal war vets, the Canadian government held a joint parliamentary committee of the Senate and House of Commons. Starting in 1946, it reviewed the administration of Indian Affairs. Missionaries, teachers, federal government bureaucrats, and Aboriginal leaders and Elders gave statements. It was one of the first times politicians heard directly from Aboriginal peoples, without Indian Affairs intermediaries. Aboriginal people lined up to make statements, criticizing, among other things, residential schools as a misguided attempt to assimilate their cultures with disastrous consequences. There were now generations of broken residential school graduates who had returned home to communities with high rates of sickness, alcoholism, suicide, and child abuse. They had learned from the adults who ruled their residential school lives that to raise a child was to beat a child. The abuse became cyclical. After graduation, Indian Affairs sent its agents in once again to scoop out the children, sending them away, often to receive beatings from someone else.
In the meantime, some within Indian Affairs would have been happy to shut down the residential school system completely. The schools were expensive, complex, increasingly controversial, and ultimately useless. The graduates were mostly returning to their reserves no better off. In 1945 only one hundred of the more than nine thousand residential school students had made it to Grade 8. No one had advanced past Grade 9. Even the highest-level bureaucrats had tired of watching children languish and suffer in the schools. Laval Fortier, the deputy minister, wrote in a 1951 letter about the dangers of sexual predators in residential schools. Fortier also worried of the ongoing spread of infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis. Decades after Peter Bryce’s wa
rnings, the schools remained dens of sickness and death. “If I were appointed by the Dominion Government for the express purpose of spreading tuberculosis, there is nothing finer in existence than the average Indian Residential School,” one Indian Agent wrote in 1948. The conditions of the schools were so bad that if they hadn’t been federally owned, local municipalities would have condemned them. Many of the schools burned down. But Indian Affairs was unable to shut down seventy-two schools with ten thousand students overnight. That would take it almost fifty years, as it turned out. Instead the Department focused on improving academic standards, better funding the schools, improving nutrition, and “integration”—moving as many students into provincial public schools as possible.
For decades, children in residential schools across Canada had participated in the “half-day system”—a half-day in class and a half-day doing farm or domestic chores, so they could learn “civilized” ways and provide food and clothing for the school. Indian Affairs had never provided enough money to properly feed and clothe the children, so in reality the principals and teachers worked them much harder than half of each day. In response to the pressures Aboriginal leadership placed on the special joint committee in 1946, Indian Affairs soon made changes, requiring that residential school students spend as many hours in the classroom as their public school counterparts. In effect, it abolished the half-day system. The changes were also meant to improve the quality of education at residential schools. Teachers would need to be better qualified, with teaching degrees. By this time, about 40 percent of the nearly two hundred teachers in Catholic-run residential schools had no professional certification. At Shubenacadie, the academic standards were higher. The Sisters of Charity had always prided themselves on teaching. From the fifties onward, all the teachers there had the same qualifications as required in public schools.
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