The Sisters did, however, take advantage of some opportunities arising from the new emphasis on education. They received a subscription to the Journal of Education, the Education Office Gazette, and regular bulletins, and could attend in-service training and conventions for “Indian school” teachers. For the particularly keen, the University of New Brunswick offered coursework on teaching at federal Indian schools. Just before graduation time in 1956, several Sisters drove over to the nearby Shubenacadie reserve for a teachers’ conference. “We enjoyed a very profitable day,” one wrote in the Annals, “discussing our problems with teachers from other Indian schools.” In the fall, they were at it again, with three Sisters attending a convention for Indian school teachers in Eskasoni. “After settling all the problems behind the Buckskin Curtain for another year, they returned to Shubenacadie,” a Sister wrote in the Annals.
But the Sisters also found themselves on the defensive as public attitudes toward their work changed. In November 1958, a busload of mostly Mi’kmaw social workers arrived to see, according to the Annals, “whether or not it was worthwhile sending children here.” The writer felt she and the rest of the staff did the best they could with what they were given. “We get only the problem children,” she wrote, “whose parents cannot possibly manage them; also, an occasional orphan case.”
The school grounds were notorious for biting winter winds. Collection of Elsie Charles Basque, Nova Scotia Museum
The Sisters, under increased scrutiny from Indian Affairs, struggled to teach and manage overcrowded classrooms, especially in the younger grades. In the late fifties, Indian Affairs ordered the schools to keep class sizes under 30 students, basing this number on the standards of the day in most provincial public schools. But at Shubenacadie the smallest class had 34 students. The largest, Grade 2–3, had more than 50. There was no way around it. In any given year the school had about 4 teachers and 4 classrooms, but 160 children lived at the school in a typical year. The inspectors weren’t impressed. Unlike their predecessors in the thirties and forties, cleanliness was insufficient. “The type of child coming to the residential school requires much more individual attention,” an inspector wrote in his 1957 report. A new teacher and classroom were added that year, but it wasn’t nearly enough. The principal proposed a new outbuilding with five classrooms, workshops, and a gym. The children would still live in the same dormitories in the old building. The new structure would cost $175,000, slightly more than the estimate for the original school building in 1926. Not surprisingly, the new addition was never built: budget constraints. While Indian Affairs was trumpeting its new focus on healthy learners, it still lacked the basic funds necessary to run a school system.
School curriculum was also evolving in the aftermath of the Second World War, Nazism, and the birth of the human rights movement. While Nova Scotia had a tendency to use texts for decades, there was a shift even here. Ironically, in a school designed to assimilate, new social studies texts urged “friendly fellowship [toward] people who live otherwise than we do and thus to counteract the tendency, natural to all children, to consider such peoples queer, strange, or inferior.” The new rules also allowed for more time spent outside playing, and limited religious instruction to half an hour per day. Indian Affairs also expected more reporting from teachers and principals on the academic progress of students. Like other residential schools, Shubenacadie’s academic success record was poor. Only 20 to 40 percent of its students got past Grade 3. Nearly half never got past Grade 2. The students consistently failed, despite a later policy not to hold students back. “Many pupils will need more than two years to be ready for Grade 2,” one inspector wrote. The agents now had to report monthly—instead of annually—on students’ well-being. The Department sent suggestions to principals based on these reports, but the Sisters, serving a higher authority than Indian Affairs, continued using religious texts as part of the curriculum.
By this time, some of the Sisters were lingering far past retirement age. This wouldn’t have mattered except that their teaching methods had also gotten old. “Were she replaced by a younger teacher who would introduce more activity and project work the learning situation would be considerably improved,” an inspector wrote in 1957 of seventy-year-old Sister Maria Ursula, a teacher for Grades 6 to 9. She had come to the school from St. Paul’s Convent in Herring Cove, Nova Scotia, six years earlier. She was indeed replaced at the start of the next school year. Another inspector described one Sister’s methods as “orthodox and stereotyped,” but regardless of the age of the teachers, the morality lessons continued. Survivors recall that even halfway through the twentieth century, the nun in charge of the girls’ dorm forbid pubescent girls from using feminine hygiene products at night. Yet if they bled on their sheets they were beaten.
Back into this picture stepped the now grown-up Rita Joe. The Sisters invited her to come back and talk to the older students about life on the outside. Rita Joe didn’t answer. She showed up on her own, wearing bright red shoes, a fancy dress, heavy-duty lipstick, hair flowing long—her body a message to the kids and the nuns: she would not be controlled. She spoke to the students—in Mi’kmaw. She told them about the racism she encountered in the city, that white people wouldn’t give them a chance. A Shubenacadie education wouldn’t be much help. They had to go further, it was the only way to find good work. Better to go back to their reserves, she told them, if they could. Safer, more family. They applauded and thanked her. She left and didn’t come back until long after the place had been shuttered. The bad memories were too strong.
More Money
Teachers at Shubenacadie started the 1950–51 school year making double their previous salary. They would now be paid almost as much as public schoolteachers in Nova Scotia. Some secular teachers were also employed at Shubenacadie, but they didn’t tend to last. Teaching in a remote residential school wasn’t something a young white teacher wanted to do for long. Mackey, the farm instructor, and the carpenter-engineer got significantly larger raises than the teachers.
Two fundamental problems with the schools were the overall insufficient funding and the per capita system—the government paying the schools a set amount each year per student—that rewarded churches for taking in more children than they had space for. In response to the special joint committee, the Department experimented with that funding formula. Some schools got a higher per capita rate. Others got the same rate, but the Department took on the burden of paying staff directly instead of through the churches. And it gave raises. It was a pilot project to see if paying salaries directly would increase the number of well-qualified teachers. Shubenacadie was one of the first schools Indian Affairs approached to test this new system. It would get the same per capita rate, but increased salaries and funds for other needs Mackey identified. The change caused some confusion when Mackey asked for an annual increase in the per capita amount, as he’d seen other schools receive. “Such adjustments were not made for schools in which the Department is experimenting with the payment of teachers,” the Department reminded him. Two months later Indian Affairs changed its mind and increased its per capita rate for Shubenacadie, from forty-five dollars per child to sixty-six, retroactive to 1948, giving the school a windfall for repairs and new buildings. But we don’t know how exactly this money was spent. After 1950 there are no publicly accessible records on maintenance at the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School.
Ultimately, Indian Affairs ditched the per capita grant system. From 1957 on, all school principals were to submit requests for real expenses. Daily necessities like food now had to be accounted for. The principals and teachers of all schools were to report directly to Indian Affairs, further reducing the role of the church. As part of its increasing oversight of the school, Indian Affairs audited Shubenacadie’s books in 1959. It found a $4,000 surplus. The new principal, Father Collins, reimbursed the full amount. However, he reimbursed the church, not Indian Affairs. He wrote the
cheque to Gerald Berry, archbishop of Halifax. Despite the new reporting arrangement, per capita payments to Shubenacadie continued at least as late as 1961.
Integration
By the early 1950s, bolstered by the human rights movement, integration was all the rage in Canadian education. White academics and activists began questioning the concept of race, and of dividing classrooms and schools based on this flawed concept. The change in public sentiment provided the perfect chance for Indian Affairs to move day and residential school students to provincial schools, where provincial governments could ultimately pay the cost of education. But the aim—assimilating Indians into white society—was the same. Indian Affairs’s 1959 annual report made this goal crystal clear: “The task of education is to assist acculturation.”
Six years later, a book written by various Indian Affairs bureaucrats showed a belief that Indians were finally ready for the “acceptance of responsibility on the part of Indian parents for the education of their children.” Ellen Fairclough, the minister of Citizenship and Integration, where Indian Affairs now lived, echoed that ideal in a speech to the Canadian Association of School Administrators. Fairclough was Canada’s first female cabinet minister, had made great gains in reducing racial discrimination in the immigration system, and was a champion of women’s rights. “The fundamental aim of the government’s policy toward Indians is the gradual integration of our country’s fastest-growing ethnic group into the Canadian community,” she said. By moving Indian Affairs into the immigration department, Canada sent a clear message: “Indians” were no longer a resource, and they were no longer “natives,” either. They were outsiders. The job of government was to integrate them into the role of Canadian citizen.
To the mainstream, integration was all about equality: give everybody the same opportunity, in the same institutions, together. As a concept it was flawed. It failed to account for the different places from which varied groups of people were coming. Young people leaving the Shubenacadie residential school were forced to compete with hostile white peers and judged by hostile white teachers and administrators in public schools. In practice, integration was never fully implemented. Half of the Mi’kmaw students in the Maritimes attended all-Mi’kmaq day schools after Shubenacadie closed.
The churches lobbied hard against integration. They had long battled over the souls of Aboriginal people, and they weren’t prepared to let the provinces have them. Religious education was too important, they said. The Catholic Church was particularly adamant. It fought to keep the residential school system alive with whatever political leverage it still had. The Canadian Catholic Conference warned that public school teachers were too ignorant of “Indian” culture to handle an influx of residential school survivors. Teachers at schools like Shubenacadie, it argued, were more likely to get to know “Indian culture and mentality.” Catholic residential school principals concluded that Indian education must be based on “respect for [the Indian’s] ethnic and cultural background and a desire to meet his special needs.” The “special needs” were those of children who had lived difficult lives, often bouncing from foster homes to orphanages to juvenile prisons to the residential school.
At Shubenacadie, the orphaned and delinquent children kept arriving by train, new ones every year. The application forms from this time show a litany of crises—impoverished children and families with mental and physical health issues, addictions, parents in jail or who couldn’t afford to care for their kids. The residential system as a whole had become more like Shubenacadie over the years—housing Aboriginal children who had fallen through the cracks. By the early fifties, Indian Affairs considered more than 40 percent of residential school children to be “neglected.” As always, Indian Agents took them from home at their own discretion. The Catholic Church correctly predicted that such children would get little respect in public schools. It also foresaw that because the children of Shubenacadie were from poor families, they would hit class barriers in public schools. White children would not accept Mi’kmaw peers. Mi’kmaw children would feel squeezed out from the privileges and wealth enjoyed by their white peers. The Catholic Church wanted to rid the residential system of the provincial curriculum that had always been used.
In a reversal of roles, the Catholics, who feared losing control of the schools—and the souls therein—to the government, cautioned the government about wasting money. The new system of integration would cost 50 percent more than the old one, they argued. The principals felt that before integration could take place, the children of Shubenacadie would need to learn more about life with the White Man, a “frank, pleasant, gradual and methodical initiation to the uses and customs.” Otherwise Mi’kmaw learners would become bitter. Rather than integrate into white society, they would feel more separated than ever. Indians had to be recognized as a distinct learning community, the principals argued.
In many ways, the provinces weren’t able to take on the now more than eleven thousand children in residential schools—a number that was still on the rise. It was not just a matter of education. Who would care for these children? Who would love them? Who would teach them values? It wasn’t just ideas about education that were changing, the childcare model had changed too. “It was considered better psychology to give these [orphan] children a normal home environment or what approximated it,” Sister Maura writes in her account of the Sisters of Charity’s first hundred years in Halifax. The Sisters’ own orphanages were, like the residential school system, slowly winding down. That left Indian Affairs in a pickle: what could it do with all these “delinquent” Indians? To ease itself of its burden, the Department simply revised the Indian Act in 1951, extending legislation in the provinces to protect those very children. The welfare part of the “Indian Problem,” at least, was to become a provincial matter.
The Last Decade
Father Collins
Monsignor Mackey died in the spring of 1957, at the age of sixty. Though he had been seriously ill for two years—Father Myles Power took over as principal in 1955—he’d remained at the school until the end. Mackey’s body was “laid out in an expensive coffin in the main parlour,” Knockwood writes. Survivors of that time remember having to line up to pay last respects to their tormentor, then kneeling and praying for him. “It was especially gratifying for the Sisters to see the many Indians from Shubenacadie and the former students,” a Sister wrote in the Annals that year. “Monsignor dearly loved the Indian children, and the tears and wet cheeks testified to all that the feeling was mutual. The visits to the parlor were almost constant and the Hail Marys were surely heard in Heaven…his little Indian charges will never forget him.” “I didn’t pray,” a survivor told Knockwood. “I just knelt there and I was sort of happy.” Mackey’s funeral was held in Springhill, his hometown, which was an hour from the school. “No one except the Chief, John Bernard, attended the funeral,” writes Knockwood.
In 1956 Father Paddy Collins took over from Father Myles Power, who’d been assigned to temporarily replace the ailing Father Mackey. Power had already agreed to take a post as a pastor in Flin Flon, Manitoba, after a year at the school. Originally from Ottawa, he’d spent a few years as an assistant priest at St. Patrick’s Parish in Digby. Father Collins, an Irish-Scottish immigrant, had spent his entire twenty-four-year career doing “Indian work” in British Columbia, and his uncle (after whom he was named) had a seventy-year career doing the same. Collins would remain the principal of Shubenacadie for a decade. He had “a lot of compassion for his students,” wrote Ernest Skinner, assistant Indian Agent of Eskasoni. “He was a fairly good man,” a survivor told Micmac News in 1978. After Monsignor Mackey died, Collins looked through the third-floor storage rooms and found a wealth of new shoes, stockings, and linens. But they were moth-eaten and fell apart. It seemed they had been there since the school opened in 1930.
Collins worked to make the children more comfortable and better prepared for life after residential school. He let them l
eave the school more freely to visit the nearby village of Shubenacadie, or the reserve. He brought in the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and encouraged the children to join. They learned drills and did relay races for an audience at graduation. More significantly, after thirty years of priests and nuns forcibly separating siblings, Father Collins let brothers and sisters visit with each other in the parlour and sometimes even play together during recreation time.
The rules segregating the sexes were relaxed some in the later years.Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives
Collins also let female students perm their hair and allowed monthly birthday parties. He added colourful touches to the building, had the dorms painted and tiled, and hung pictures on the walls. He added sofas and a fish tank to the common room. He bought bicycles and even a television set. He wrote that he wanted the children to feel “wanted and loved.” He used the increased funding from Indian Affairs to buy new textbooks and recreation equipment. He told the Sisters to stop punishing students for speaking Mi’kmaw, to remind them to use English instead. Several of the older Sisters who’d served under Father Mackey left the school. Younger, more qualified nuns replaced them. Indian Affairs, in its continued efforts to improve the residential school system it was slowly shutting down, assigned a dietician to visit the school twice a year. The food improved. The cook and older girls made bread daily. The Sisters served milk and fruit three times a day.
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