In May the Sisters had their farewell supper. Really it was for Sister Helen Patrick, who had been reassigned to an orphanage. But they knew their “own time for final departure” was just weeks away. They got their obediences on June 10. Two weeks later they would board trains to Halifax, some of them eventually bound to work at orphanages, schools, and hospitals in Québec and Massachusetts. But in the meantime they prepared the children for the closing of the school. The Grade 6 class wrote essays about their sadness at the school’s closing. One June 13 they held a goodbye picnic near Enfield.
On June 22, 1967, the school’s last principal, Father Michael Kearney, dismissed the students. They left as they’d come: taken away by white men. They were boarded on to trains that took them to reserves across the Maritimes. The first thing to do was figure which of the children would go home, and which would go to childcare agencies or foster homes. With the closing of the school, there was a massive spike in the number of Mi’kmaw children in these situations. Dalhousie University social work researchers trace the roots of this change back to 1951. This was when Canada added Section 88 to the Indian Act, giving provincial child-protection departments authority to expand their services onto reserves. It was the first time provincial social workers could go onto reserves and take children away from homes. But the federal government failed to pick up the costs. Since then, provinces and Aboriginal Affairs have fought over whose job it is to protect Aboriginal children.
The blinds are all closed in this June 1967 photo of the school.
In 1964, three years before Shubenacadie closed, Nova Scotia and Canada signed a new agreement that the feds would pay the costs for care and custody of Mi’kmaw children taken from reserves into care, plus salaries for child-protection workers. With the school’s closure, the shift toward Aboriginal education in provincial schools, and the involvement of the provinces in child protection, the number of Mi’kmaw children in protective government care spiked dramatically over the next two decades. Most children were fostered or adopted into white families, often in the United States. Their Aboriginal status was usually not recorded, so many disappeared without a trace. Some were placed locally in foster care. “It often left them in situations far worse than the residential school environment,” says Daniel Paul. Aboriginal Affairs tells it differently. “I’m told that the kids returned home and just went to local schools,” says Steve Young, a spokesperson at the Aboriginal Affairs office in Amherst. “There was no placement, so to speak.” Calls made to the Ottawa office of Aboriginal Affairs were not returned.
Some survivors remember feeling great sorrow at leaving the school for the last time. For some, whatever its dangers and flaws, the school had been the closest thing they’d known to a home. Those without families didn’t know what lay ahead. Indian Affairs scrambled to place them, sometimes splitting up siblings. A brother might be in Nova Scotia and a sister in Alberta with another in the States. Often that was the last they would see of one another.
Public School
In the final years of the Shubenacadie residential school, the media hailed an age of change and trumpeted Indian Affairs’s efforts to “educate-and-elevate the Indian from poverty and isolation to a proper place in the Canadian sun,” as a 1965 Chronicle Herald article put it. The story spoke of government and industry preaching these ideals to the Mi’kmaq. But the students who went on to provincial schools found new challenges. They had become used to the Sisters lecturing in English, a language some of them still struggled with. The Sisters had paid little individual attention to their actual learning needs. Many had failed the same grade numerous times. In public school, they became the oldest students in their class. They were used to curricula that taught them of the inferiority of their own people, and now encountered white peers who had learned only that version of history. Most of the white students had never before seen a Mi’kmaq or Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) person.
When Shubenacadie closed, the anthropologist Harry B. Hawthorn published the second volume of his massive three-year research report on the conditions of Status Indians across Canada, which echoed American work from forty years earlier. Hawthorn noted that the curriculum on “Indians” was “inaccurate, over-generalized, and even insulting.” He urged schools to drop it, focus on giving Aboriginal children a sense of self-worth. He said that Indian Affairs should work to provide updated content on Aboriginal history and culture. Unfortunately for the children coming from Shubenacadie and into Atlantic Canadian public schools, Indian Affairs ignored Hawthorn’s recommendation. The responsibility for curriculum was with provincial education employees, who likely never saw the report to begin with.
Besides obvious racialized and cultural differences, most former Shubenacadie students were poor. At least at residential school their clothing and some food had been provided. To the white kids they looked dirty, shabby. They were insulted and bullied and often dropped out as soon as they were old enough. Meanwhile, Indian Affairs was trying to wash its hands of education. Shubenacadie was just one domino in a rapid-fire closure of residential schools. Two years after its closure in 1967, there were fewer than eight thousand students attending fifty-two remaining residential schools. A decade later, fewer than two thousand residents lived at only a dozen schools.
Husk
The Nova Scotia Department of Welfare considered buying the old school building from the federal government, via its Central Mortgage and Housing department, in January of 1968. “We are impressed with the quality of it and the location,” the department’s deputy minister told the Chronicle Herald. The Herald reported that the building had been well maintained, and that the Province thought the facility might be a good home for “the mentally disabled.” In the meantime, with the Sisters, carpenter-engineer, janitor, cook, and children all gone, a few priests lingered on in the building—Father Kearney and his juniors cooking lonely meals on hot plates, as Isabelle Knockwood described it. But a Halifax businessman beat the Province to the punch and bought the building in August for storage. He told the priests to leave. They stayed with the parish priest at the nearby reserve.
Knockwood describes a sad last mass held, based on an account from an anonymous source in attendance. A small procession of white Catholics and a few Mi’kmaq walked reverently down the front steps. “The older priest seemed distracted at first. He turned back toward the school with tears in his eyes,” Knockwood writes. “He took a black prayer book out of his pocket and began hitting the palm of his other hand gently with the book and crying.” Then, according to Knockwood’s witness, the priest looked up at the building. “I don’t know if this building was cursed before but no matter what we tried to do, it never turned out right…I hope to the Holy Mother of God in heaven that this building is never used for anything else,” he called. The priests placed their things into two cars and drove away slowly. The businessman sold the school again less than a year later—to someone who wanted those Bluenose facing bricks, until he realized how easily they crumbled in his hands. For the next couple of decades the building sat vacant, decaying as local teens had parties there.
The morning after the fire, September 6, 1986.
Rita Joe and her husband visited the building then. The windows were smashed out. Her husband, also a survivor, couldn’t bring himself to go in. Something told him not to. “Maybe the spirits of the children who have died here are trying to warn us not to go in there,” she told him. But she forced herself. Inside, she saw plaster and pipes falling down. She left in a hurry. Later, at the end of the summer of 1986, Isabelle Knockwood also felt compelled to return to the building that had been such a source of pain for her. That once imposing institutional tower was crumbling, a broken-down shell of itself. Its graffiti, dated August 20, 1986, said it all: This was Prison for Indians. The Brave Die…Burnt in Hell. “The front door was hanging on one set of hinges and the front of the building had pock marks on its face, where people used
to take rifle shots at it,” she writes. “The chapel windows had been nailed over with some kind of tin sheeting [with] gaping holes in it.” The roof was gone too. Knockwood found her way inside and was struck by the garbage and rotting pigeon feces strewn across the swollen, uneven floors. The same floors that boys and girls had once scrubbed on hands and knees so they would gleam for visiting inspectors.
The site is a plastics factory now.Chris Benjamin
The property changed hands again in the mid-1980s and the new owner hired a man to rid his new land of the eyesore. A slow, controlled fire was the mode of demolition on September 4, 1986. It burned all day and all seemed well when the crew left the site in the early evening. Ninety minutes later, there was a steel-beam-bending explosion lighting the sky. The controlled fire was out of control. People from the village and reserve quickly gathered, sitting in their cars to watch. “It appeared as if spirits were dancing inside the tar and brick,” Knockwood recalls. The media reported the fire as suspicious and there were rumours that maybe a former resident had turned the controlled blaze into a farewell blast. According to Knockwood, no one called the RCMP or the owner to the site. The rapid spread of the fire through a building without much wood was confusing. There was fireproofing around the kitchen, where the controlled fire burned, and forty-six-centimetre brick-and-cement walls separating four different sections of the building.
The pump house never worked very well but it still stands. Chris Benjamin
Two days later, crews bulldozed the charred remains, at one point hitting a live wire that should have been shut off, sending sparks flying and forcing the municipality to cut power to the whole town. A crowd of Mi’kmaq cheered when the bricks finally came down. Some hadn’t come near the site in years, and doing so was still difficult. It brought back the memories they’d tried hard to destroy. As much as the school had been an evil presence, it was part of their lives. “Part of me has gone,” one survivor told CBC. “It has burnt. But the wounds are still there.”
Looking across the river at the site of the school. Chris Benjamin
The land is now owned by ScotiaPlastics, the site of its bright blue factory on Indian School Road. The old pump house that never worked so well is still there, between the lake and where the school used to be, its roof dilapidated, door and window long gone. The site is still surrounded by farmland. The hill doesn’t look like much, but the wind still whips around atop it with no trees or shrubs to stop it. When I visited the site on a mild December morning, it wasn’t hard to imagine the school’s residents shivering under threadbare, decades-old blankets. At the bottom of the hill are three boarded up wooden houses, the original farm buildings. One is still inhabited by the school’s last caretaker, an old man now, his memory failing. In front is a tall, dead, barkless tree, with an image of the school painted on the front and the words WE WILL NEVER FORGET over a set of claws. MI’KMAQ, it says at the base of the tree.
A simple memorial. Chris Benjamin
Children in Care
Sixties Scoop
The slow shutdown of the residential school system across Canada fed directly into what has been called the “sixties scoop”—a process of fostering and adopting Aboriginal children into white homes. It actually started in the early fifties when Indian Affairs empowered the provinces, via Section 88 of the Indian Act, to take children from homes on reserves. Indian Agents and provincial child-protection workers took twenty thousand Aboriginal children from their homes, or as they left closing residential schools. Nearly 80 percent were placed in non-Aboriginal homes.
This “scoop” lasted for decades, and is, in a sense, ongoing. Across Canada, there are more Aboriginal youth in foster care than there were at any time during the residential school days. Child-protection workers today take three times the number of children as did Indian Agents at the peak of the residential system. According to the latest Statistics Canada data, nearly half of Canadian children under age fourteen and in foster care are First Nations, Inuit, or Métis, even though children in these groups represent only 5 percent of Canada’s child population. That’s 15,000 Aboriginal children in foster care. In all, about 27,000 Aboriginal children are in the national child welfare system. The problem seems to be getting worse, not better. From 1995 to 2001, child-protection workers increased the number of Aboriginal children placed outside their homes by 71.5 percent.
“The Sixties Scoop was not coincidental,” Patrick Johnston, who coined the term, wrote in 1983. “It was a consequence of fewer Indian children being sent to residential schools and of the child welfare system emerging as the new method of colonization.” Without the residential schools, many Aboriginal children had no place left to go. Their parents were either dead or considered—by Indian Affairs employees who acted on the children’s behalf—incompetent. The agents and provincial child-protection workers assessed competence on their own impressions, which could be influenced by anything from a cluttered house, to parents who moved around for work, to neglect and abuse. American agencies sometimes took $20,000 fees to place Canadian Aboriginal children with white American families. From the late fifties to the late sixties, the percentage of Aboriginal children in care went from just 1 percent all the way up to 40 percent—kicking off yet another national crisis.
At the TRC sessions held in Atlantic Canada, Shubenacadie survivors from the school’s latter years spoke of having their families split up by the scoop. Even in those years many kids had been sent straight to foster care or adoptive homes, with barely a trace. Indian Affairs withheld birth information from the children, believing that the knowledge of who they were and where they came from would somehow prevent them from “integrating” into their new family. The children were often told that everyone in their family had died, whether it was true or not. Siblings were split among different families. They ended up living in Maine, Ontario, Alberta, Atlantic Canada—all over. And they lost each other. Some tracked each other down decades later. Others have family reunions in the works. But ties were severed and the damage is not easily undone.
Placing Aboriginal children in non-Aboriginal families was another attack on culture. Even the most “culturally competent” white families—to use the phrase of Nova Scotia’s Department of Community Services—simply cannot raise a Mi’kmaq as a Mi’kmaq. To adopt a culture as your own, you must be immersed in it. Reading books and attending the occasional powwow is insufficient. First Nations and Métis people who had been adopted to white families spoke out in the 2010 book, Aski Awasis/Children of the Earth: First Peoples Speaking on Adoption, edited by Jeannine Carrière. In several cases, these children had grown up and reached out to their biological relations and found profound relief, a sense of belonging they’d always lacked. Until then, their entire sense of their cultural background had been defined by their white adoptive families and communities—people with different histories and traditions, people who didn’t know what it was like to experience racism and who could not explain or put it in context when their adoptive children went through it.
Instead, white parents often encouraged adoptive Aboriginal children to try to pass as white, in order to avoid racism altogether—a loving and unintended assault on their true culture. Their adoptive families took them to powwows as cultural tourists, not as insiders. One person interviewed had been told she was Cree, but it turned out she was actually Ojibwe. She had been learning about the wrong traditions. Not all adoptive families made the effort to connect their new children to their heritage. Some, despite adopting a First Nations child, were quick to remind the child how lucky he or she was to have escaped the drunk, lazy Indians. Often they changed the child’s name and his or her birth name was forgotten. Dr. Simon Nuttgens, in his research with the Graduate Centre for Applied Psychology at Athabasca University in Alberta, found that people of one culture who are adopted by people of another culture often experience a sense of
disconnection—exclusion, rejection, and alienation. Based on her research with First Nations and Métis people adopted into white families, Carrière found that, “even adoptees who reported they had received good parenting, love and stability did not successfully negotiate their adolescent years in the adoptive homes. Most…left home by the age of fifteen or sixteen years.”
First Nations pushed back against these latest attacks on their children and cultures. By 1982 there was a ban in all Canadian jurisdictions on sending the children to live with families in the US. Provinces and territories began amending their adoption laws to prioritize placing Aboriginal children with extended family or other families in their communities. In Nova Scotia, Mi’kmaw leaders advocated until they were able to sign an agreement with the Government of Canada and the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services in 1985. They created a new body called Mi’kmaw Family and Children’s Services (MFCS), which took over the administration of child and family services from the Province. MFCS was now responsible for investigating reports of abuse and neglect of children under sixteen on reserves, and taking the lead on the placement of Mi’kmaw children into foster care or adoption.
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