- In one 1935 letter, a father is told his food will be cut off until he surrenders his children at school
Tristin Hopper, National Post
While the discovery of 215 children’s graves at the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School have galvanized Canadian public opinion, the horrors of the Canadian Indian Residential School system were never a secret. Generations of Ottawa administrators were fully aware of the system’s deadly reputation, and while polite society at the time may have balked at the occasional story of abuse or mass-death, they largely endorsed the system’s central mission of forcibly assimilating Indigenous children.
In archives, filing cabinets and desk drawers across Canada lie the paper trail of Indian Residential Schools: How abuse was overlooked, how neglect was institutionalized and how state coercion was used to take children from their families. Below, a gallery of primary documents showing how the crimes of residential schools looked to the people who saw, experienced and perpetrated them firsthand.
“I wonder when the time will come when our pupils are permitted to take their place in ‘white’ social and industrial life”
The excerpt above comes from a 1940 letter written by the principal of Ahousaht Residential School. The letter is a thank you note to a Mrs. Goodfellow, a Princeton, B.C., woman who coordinated a donation of Christmas gifts to the school. After quickly recapping the success of their annual Christmas concert, the principal launches into the passage above, where he laments the “influence of the older generation” in the lives of the Ahousaht students. This was a common sentiment among the people who operated Canada’s Indian Residential Schools: They believed that outright assimilation into white society represented the only future for “the Indian,” and they regarded with disdain anything that seemed to compromise that mission, even if it was just talking to their parents in their own language.
“The Indians do not, unfortunately, seem to show any great appreciation of what we are trying to do”
It’s easy to forget that Indian Residential Schools were once a cause célèbre among Canadian progressives: Church groups held fundraisers for their nearest “Indian Home,” donors sponsored the tuition for individual children and reformers wrote editorials praising the effort to bring “civilization” to the Indian. The Shingwauk Indian Residential School in Sault Ste. Marie, operated by the Anglican Church, was one of the first in what would become a coast-to-coast Indian Residential School system. In this 1892 annual report, the operators of Shingwauk boast that the model they helped pioneer has now “blossomed out” across Canada. “If the system of gathering Indian children into an Institution were a failure, I think there would scarcely have been these results,” it reads.
The report also repeats a sentiment common to many operators of Indian Residential Schools: Bafflement at why Indigenous communities weren’t more grateful for their actions. “The Indians do not, unfortunately, seem to show any great appreciation of what we are trying to do,” it read. An appendix at the rear of the report belies its sunny claims, however. Of 140 students who attended the school in 1891, 30 are listed as having “left during the year,” including five who died.
“It will be your privilege this year to have your children spend Christmas at home with you”
The above letter, preserved by the B.C. Teacher’s Federation, has been making the rounds on social media as a particularly vivid illustration of the coercion integral to the Indian Residential School system. It was drafted in 1948 by the principal of Kamloops Indian Residential School, the very same school whose grounds yielded the recent discovery of up to 215 graves by ground-penetrating radar. Principal O’Grady occupied a position of such immense power over his pupils’ lives that he saw nothing amiss in telling parents that it was a “privilege” to have their children home for Christmas. Although only an ordained priest at the time this letter was written, O’Grady would ultimately become Bishop of Prince George, a position he would hold until 1986. That same year, the University of British Columbia would grant him an honorary degree for making “education more accessible to local communities in the Interior.”
“I have never noticed any suicidal tendencies”
In 1939, Kenneth Stonechild, a deaf child at File Hills Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, ran away from school and attempted to hang himself in his family’s barn. Fortunately, Stonechild’s father was able to discover him and cut the rope before it proved fatal. Above is the initial reaction from the school’s principal, who dismissed the boy’s attempt to take his own life as an attempt to “cause trouble or bring discredit on the School.” There is no mention of Stonechild’s hearing problems, which frequently earned him beatings from teachers. Instead, the principal chalks it up to “low mentality.” The region’s medical superintendent also dismissed Stonechild’s attempted suicide, saying in a letter to his bosses in Regina that the boy “wished to stir up dissatisfaction against the school and staff.” The RCMP and various Indian Affairs bureaucrats would interview Stonechild about the incident, in which he usually began crying and expressing his fear at returning to school. Despite this, all involved simply recommended that Stonechild be transferred to a different school farther from his family home. There is “no excuse to allow him to return to the Reserve to bum around and do nothing,” wrote the medical examiner.
“This school is not a school at all, it is a jail house”
A top-down obsession with cost-cutting often meant that Indian Residential Schools kept their charges on near-starvation rations in order to save on food. On display at the Royal B.C. Museum is a pair of makeshift keys built by students at the Kuper Island and Kamloops Indian Residential Schools in order to break into food stores. Above is a 1933 letter written by Arthur Jeffries, a student at the Sechelt Residential School. “The food is pig food it is not fit for human beings to eat it. Some
… apple core, rotten spuds and worms and rotten meat and they force us to eat it that why some boys get sick,” Jeffries wrote in the letter, which was apparently addressed to his father. He added that students were forbidden from speaking to their families in the neighbouring community and that “this school is not a school at all, it is a jail house.” Sechelt had been subject to allegations of poor food and harsh discipline ever since its 1904 inception. In 1922, an unusually harsh inspector’s report declared “I do not think these pupils are well fed,” and the next year, parents would withdraw their children from the school en-masse in protest. A new principal was appointed and funding was increased, but as Jeffries’ letter from only 11 years later shows, even attempts at reform quickly wilted in the face of a fundamentally broken apparatus.
“The worst residential school I have had to visit”
The above letter, now held in the archives of the University of Regina, is a 1907 inspector’s report on the Crowstand Indian Residential School. The school was notorious, even by the standards of other Saskatchewan Indian Residential Schools, with a health inspector once calling it “the worst residential school I have had to visit.” The above report details how the school’s principal, a Mr. McWhinney, retrieved some “runaways” and then “tied ropes about their arms and made them run behind the buggy from their houses to the school.” The inspector wrote that McWhinney “has not adopted a wise method” and remarked that his actions had spurred some pushback. (“The Indians say that the children are not dogs.”) Despite this, McWhinney remained principal for another eight years until the school’s closure in 1915. Subsequent reports of poor conditions, abuse and even a sexual predator on staff would similarly do nothing to shake McWhinney’s authority over the school.
“I have to order that (rations) be cut off entirely until such time as I am able to reverse my decision”
This letter, which lay forgotten in an Alberta shed until 2013, documents what could happen to parents who attempted to pull their children out of residential school. When J.B. Gambler of Calling Lake, Alta., tried to do that in 1935, the government literally cut off his food. As the above letter states, only when his children were back at St. John’s Indian Residential School would his Indian Agent “feel able to reverse my decision.” At the time, school buildings at St. John’s were in such poor condition that federal authorities had been mulling the school’s closure for years. The school, which only enrolled a few dozen, had seen the death of a student, Annie Peters, only three months before this letter was drafted. The year before, it had seen the death of two more.
“The race has waned and left but tales of ghosts”
Right up until the 1960s, it was common to see popular media romanticizing the notion of Indigenous people as a dying breed. This 1930s-era poem Indian Place-Names isn’t all that out of step with plenty of other novels, postcards and comics from the time. But the poem takes on a chilling air when considering that the man who wrote it, Duncan Campbell Scott, held near-dictatorial power over the lives of the people whose culture he was already eulogizing in verse. Between 1913 and 1932, Scott was deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs, and the de facto head of the Indian Residential School system — a system that he singularly helped to expand. Despite knowing of the massive rates of disease and death within residential schools, in 1920 Scott pushed for a reform of the Indian Act that made residential school mandatory for every Indigenous child between the age of 7 and 15. “Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department,” he told a House of Commons committee at the time.