The Department had changed its policy on summer vacations five years before Collins became principal, but Mackey hadn’t asked for summer travel funds for the children because he hadn’t thought their homes were suitable. Collins was the first to take advantage of the new policy and funds, in 1957. He wanted the children to go home for Easter and Christmas, too. Collins and Sister Roberta, who played piano, started a new music program as well. Father Collins bought a guitar for a gifted older student; Roberta led the choir at daily chapel and holiday programs. “Sister Roberta wanted her students to have as normal a life as possible,” one survivor told student researcher Kathleen Kearns in 1990.
The most significant change Collins implemented—though it happened eleven years after the special joint committee released its report on Indian Affairs, recommending a more academic focus at residential schools—was the shutting down of the school’s farming and labour operations. Collins leased the land to a local farmer and had the barns converted to a gym and houses for kitchen and laundry staffers.
Music became a prominent activity in the 1960s. Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives
Collins also hired women—many of them Mi’kmaw—to do the cleaning, laundry, and cooking the older girls had always done. Until 1955 Saturday had been cleaning day for every child at Shubenacadie, the older ones supervising the little ones as they scrubbed the school clean, top to bottom. Indian Affairs had finally put out the official word that Indians be hired whenever possible at the residential schools. Mi’kmaw men on the other hand still had trouble finding work at Shubenacadie. The white male bosses of the school—in the church and government—still saw them as lazy Indians.
Collins did, however, bring in white men, unordained Brothers, to supervise the boys’ dormitory. Alex Sampson held that role in 1960 and wrote one of the few first-hand accounts of what it was like working at the school. “It meant being with the 75 kids 24 hours a day except when they were in school,” he wrote. “Get them up in the mornings, showered and dressed, to Mass, to breakfast and get them ready for school. It meant you chased after runaways or sat up all night with a young fellow who wanted to jump out the third storey window to go home.” He wrote of organizing games for the younger children to play while the older ones went fishing, skating, or swimming. It was exhausting work. “I used to be so tired, if I sat down for a few minutes, I’d just fall asleep. I could sleep through the noise, they could tear the place apart, but let one child cry, and I’d hear it.”
There was a greater focus on learning during the later years. Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives.
Father Collins was the second-longest serving principal of the school. After a decade there, he left in 1966. Father Michael Kearney took over for the final year before Indian Affairs finally closed the school and sold the property.
Things Change; Things Stay the Same
The counterculture decade of the 1960s, which brought the North American mainstream a paradoxical mix of heightened individual freedom and Cold War fear, also gave Canadian Aboriginal peoples the legal right to vote for the first time. The civil rights movement had caught on, and white Canadians were becoming more interested in Aboriginal issues. Many were writing letters to Indian Affairs demanding a better education system. The Department responded with a memo to its senior staff responsible for residential and day schools: “Your personal involvement in this sphere…is most essential because it is your attitude to public inquiry which will create in the minds of the people the image of Canada’s concern for the Indian problem,” it said. Bureaucrats were urged to reply to all inquiries—to non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal Canadians. In the past, many such letters had simply been filed away.
At Shubenacadie, for the first time in the school’s history, enrollment was at, rather than over, its capacity of 125 children. Yearly attendance had averaged 123 students over the last seven years. While the integration of day and residential school students into public schools was never complete, dozens of Shubenacadie children did end up in public schools. The first agreement with a Mi’kmaq First Nation—Eskasoni—had been struck, allowing its children to attend public high schools, and soon Mi’kmaw students across the province were attending schools including Shubenacadie Public School, Mount Saint Vincent Academy in Halifax, and the Agricultural College in Truro.
A quarter of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw students were in public schools early in the decade, including 80 in high school, 9 in vocational school, and 7 in university—2 on Indian Affairs scholarships. They were part of the national integration effort. Across Canada, the number of Aboriginal students at public schools jumped from 600 in 1948 to 6,000 in 1966. In that time, Indian Affairs closed more than a dozen residential schools. Another sixty-six stayed open. At Shubenacadie residential school, despite the new focus on teaching and academics, in 1964 only 9 of 110 students had made it to Grade 8. Some of the teachers were certified only at the lowest allowable level, and throughout the fifties and sixties the average teacher stayed at Shubenacadie only two or three years. Indian Affairs noted the school’s high turnover rate—almost 30 percent a year—in its 1965 annual report. Some of the nuns were retiring or requesting reassignment to more comfortable environments. The Sisters of Charity still supplied most of the teachers at the school. The new policy said that Indian Affairs was to hire and manage teachers, but in reality they mostly continued to leave those decisions to Mother Superior Stella Marie, in the mother house at Mount Saint Vincent. Mother Stella Marie would write to the district superintendent each year to let him know of any staffing changes. They would write back and thank her.
The Sisters continued to project a happy image of the school in their Annals and in photos of children skating and tobogganing, kneeling in prayer beside their beds—each of which had a doll on it—and doing an “Indian dance” at a concert. They “established a precedent” by eating with the children for the first time. “It was hard to decide which table to occupy because the children were all so anxious that we sit at all the tables,” one wrote in the Annals. When Sister Gilberta became mistress of the girls’ choir in 1960, singing became a popular activity. Her Christmas concert in the school’s final year was a massive hit and the children were invited to perform shows at the East Hants-Windsor Music Festival, East Hants High School, and on CBC television’s Firehouse Frolics. Shubenacadie’s flute band also took first prize at the Halifax Music Festival.
Indian Agents and the RCMP were much less likely at this point to force children to attend residential school. Indian Affairs cracked down on its own rule that parents had to sign consent forms, and the word was out on the educational shortcomings of the school—it was seen more and more as a form of punishment. In the early 1960s a Richibucto judge sentenced a First Nations juvenile delinquent to a year at the school, which was still a strictly regimented existence with harsh punishments.
Despite there being fewer children in residential school, the funding continued to increase a little each year as Indian Affairs continued pushing for better academic outcomes—with a focus on English language and math. In 1961 it dropped industrial arts and home economics for children below Grade 7 so that they could focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic (the three Rs). But not everyone agreed with the changes. Murray Campbell, a school inspector with the Nova Scotia Department of Education, visited Shubenacadie in 1964 and found the attitudes and habits of the children, and of the parents on the reserve, lacking. He did not think the Mi’kmaq were ready to integrate at an academic level and was baffled that practical training in industrial arts and home ec had been cut. Those classes “would better meet the potential needs of these students,” he said.
Wondering if Indian Affairs could perhaps improve both literacy and the employment prospects for its young wards at the same time, the Atlantic regional supervisor for Indian Affairs, Frank McKinnon, held a series of meetings that year with teachers from Maritim
e day schools and Shubenacadie. They were not enthusiastic about the Department’s new policy of preparing Indians to get by on their brains. They told McKinnon to bring back the half-day system, at least for the older male students who lacked “the mental capacity to go on to high school.” They could spend half a day in class and the other half in the industrial arts workshop. A language arts specialist brought in to test the kids and figure out who might qualify for such a program found forty-five children—including some in Grades 5 and 6 the teachers had given up on—who fit the bill. Most were in Shubenacadie, and were removed from regular classes to take industrial arts instead, with McKinnon’s approval.
“Vocational fitness” was now the thing, but the Department didn’t look too carefully into why Aboriginal graduates couldn’t find work. The poor education they received in residential and day schools was only part of the problem. There was also the racism of employers to contend with. As an unnamed Cape Breton Mi’kmaq was quoted in the Chronicle Herald, “Education without opportunity is no good, and there are no opportunities.” The half-day system had been abolished for several years, but Indian Affairs was having trouble getting the message across to principals and teachers. In 1962 the Department circulated a memo, clarifying that attending class was what mattered most for students. Principals were not to make the students do any other work that would prevent attendance. But some Shubenacadie survivors of this era remember being forced to labour well into the sixties. Boys still stoked the furnace, for example. Clothing still had to be made and repaired. The school was better funded, but it had lost its source of produce and free farm labour. It still needed the sweat equity of its wards.
The Sisters continued making students repeat grades—even against Indian Affairs policy—holding back more than 10 percent of Grade 1 and one-third of Grade 2 students for poor academic performance. Higher-grade failure rates ranged from 15 to 19 percent. In the early years, when the school was still a labour camp, Sisters had failed many students based only on their size. Chores were divvied up by grade, with higher grades using heavy machinery—you needed a certain size for that. To comply with new maximum class size rules, Father Collins had a sixth classroom added in the main building, for which Indian Affairs approved adding a new teacher. But class sizes remained well above provincial standards: forty-four students sat together in the Grade 4–5 class.
Outside of Shubenacadie, Mi’kmaw student performance was reportedly improving post integration. A 1965 Chronicle Herald article reported some curious figures. It said that the average education level among Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq was Grade 8—up from Grade 5 just a few years earlier—but that less than 2 percent of Mi’kmaq went beyond Grade 8. Those numbers would indicate that almost every single Mi’kmaw student got as far as Grade 8 and went no further. The Herald didn’t ponder why that might have been.
The End
In its final year, registrations at Shubenacadie were limited to about sixty children, half of the previous year’s enrollment and not enough for Indian Affairs to justify keeping the school open. The Indian Agent at Eskasoni, Ernest Skinner, purposely kept about sixty children out of the school, which he saw as a place for parents to dump unwanted kids, and sent many of them into foster homes instead. Nationally, more Aboriginal children were now attending public school than residential school. Fewer than 20 percent of school-aged Aboriginal children attended the sixty remaining residential schools. But by this point, pressure from Mi’kmaw communities had already ensured the Shubenacadie school would close. If Indian Affairs was pulling back from its commitment to the residential school business, Mi’kmaw leadership was happy to push them out the door.
Around 1966 two prominent Mi’kmaw Chiefs, Ben Christmas of Eskasoni and Noel Doucette of Chapel Island/Potlotek, paid a visit to the regional Indian Affairs office and complained about the Shubenacadie school. Doucette, who was only twenty-nine years old at the time, was a survivor of the school, having lived there from 1946 to 1951, and would go on to found the Union of Nova Scotia Indians. (Five of the seven founders were Shubenacadie survivors.) Doucette was also instrumental in preparing the National Indian Brotherhood’s 1972 Red Paper, or Indian Control Over Indian Education—which would change education for the better for millions of children. Ben Christmas had long been a champion of Mi’kmaw rights, having been at the forefront among objectors to the centralization scheme in Nova Scotia. Indian Affairs saw him as a radical, but was willing to listen to him now: Canada had signed on to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Shubenacadie school was a black mark on Nova Scotia. The United Nations was now watching. According to Daniel Paul, Christmas and Doucette told Indian Affairs officials that too many complaints about the school had mounted over the decades, particularly from the 1930s and 1940s. It was outdated. It was a symbol of oppression. Its time had come.
The 1966 visit from Christmas and Doucette represented the highest level of Mi’kmaw resistance against the school in its history. Paul points out that Indian Affairs had all the power. Resistance could, and often did, result in the loss of one’s children. Meanwhile, most Mi’kmaq had only a Grade 4 or 5 education. “Most didn’t want to rock the boat,” Paul explains. “It took a few brave individuals to demand that the school be closed.” Only Shubenacadie (Indian Brook) First Nation voted to keep the school open—possibly because some parents relied on the handy seasonal childcare while they worked in the United States during the winter. Every other band favoured closing it. “As a member of the [Maritime] Indian Advisory Council in 1967, [Noel Doucette] led the way in insisting that the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School be shut down,” wrote Daniel Paul in a 1996 column for the Halifax Herald. In February of that year, it was Doucette who successfully motioned, at the Grand Council of Nova Scotia Indian Chiefs meeting, that the school be closed.
Indian Affairs agreed with the idea of closing the school, but for different reasons. To the Department, the school had done its job but was now obsolete. Department staff members had been complaining about it. “Practically all the children now in residence have been placed there mainly for reasons other than to facilitate school attendance,” wrote F. B. McKinnon, Maritime director of Indian Affairs. Cecil Thompson, assistant superintendent of the Shubenacadie reserve, added that he felt parents were only sending children they didn’t want to the school. Eskasoni Indian Agent Ernest Skinner wrote of children “crying for affections and attention as they huddled around the priest and teachers at the school.” He felt the school had become a welfare institution for children whose parents had grown tired of raising them.
In 1990 Skinner told student researcher Kathleen Kearns that it was he who suggested Indian Affairs close the school. He’d been uncomfortable taking children to live there and often took them to foster homes instead. G. Watts, a senior local official with Indian Affairs, said the Shubenacadie school was a “convenient dumping ground” for Mi’kmaw children the Department didn’t know what else to do with. He pointed out that no effort had ever been made to find a better option for the children. Unlike halfway houses or other institutions for poor children, there were no social workers at Shubenacadie. The children, McKinnon said, showed “serious psychosocial problems which require treatment.” The school wasn’t up to it. In truth, it never had been. Foster care was the only answer, McKinnon felt. The Maritime Regional Advisory Council on Indian Affairs passed a resolution on February 1, 1967, to close the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School at the end of the school year.
McKinnon and Director of Indian Education Charles Gorman visited the Sisters of Charity Mother Superior and her committee at the mother house in July 1966 to let her know they were shutting down the residential school. The Sisters’ main concern was that the children get a Catholic education, and so they suggested sending them to the public school in Enfield where they taught. “Although [government officials] were satisfied that many students from the residential school had made satisfactory adjustments to society, they noted
that the general attitude to the school in Shubenacadie was not good,” Mary Olga McKenna writes in her 1998 history of the Sisters of Charity. “There was a feeling that the children were being driven, not taught to make decisions.” But the government still had faith in the Sisters as teachers, and asked if four nuns could be supplied for the school in Enfield and two for a preschool on the Shubenacadie reserve. McKinnon and Gorman were also working to find places for the rest of the children—those without families they considered stable—to live. They figured it would take about three years to put them into foster homes. They would work with the Indian Advisory Board to place them.
In its final months, the school attracted more visitors than it had for some time. Gorman visited several times and, despite his criticisms of the school, praised the Sisters in their work. Sister Mary Matilda, the Sisters’ director of education for the Shubenacadie area, came by to make plans for the education of the children after the residential school closed. Government consultants did the same. The building was filled with things Indian Affairs no longer needed, including expensive equipment like industrial sewing machines . Isabelle Knockwood describes the furnace man paddling these out to the middle of the Shubenacadie River in a canoe and dumping them there. “A few people from the Reserves asked for beds and got them,” she writes, adding that staff members burned whatever school records remained on-site at this time. In March the remaining Sisters joined chiefs, band councillors, and Indian Affairs bureaucrats at a two-day conference on Indian Education. The Sisters were impressed by the “sincerity and eagerness of the various Indians who spoke about the necessity of a good education and character formation for their children,” one wrote in the Annals. In April, Chief Simon Nevin, an Indian Affairs official, and a Sister who taught at the school, participated in a panel discussion on “Indian education and the Closing of the Residential School.”
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