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Western Oblate Studies 2

Procliaming The Gospel to the Indians and the MétisResidential schooling at fort chipewyan and fort resolution 1874-1974

Robert Carney, Professor
Faculty of Education
University of Alberta

 

Over the past twenty-five years many historians1 and social scientists2 have accorded an identical interpretation to Indian residential schooling in Canada, whatever its location, its sponsorship or period of operation. Much of the literature which examines these institutions indicates, at least implicitly, that the majority of school-age Indian children attending boarding schools during the first half of this century, went to these schools unwillingly, usually without the consent of their parents, and were forcibly kept in residence for years on end. The conditions of Indian residential schools, according to these accounts, were not only foreign to the pupils' religious and cultural beliefs, they also involved instructional arrangements which had little to do with their after-school lives. Criticisms of residential schools also abound in recent media reports which have focused attention on alleged instances of sexual, physical and emotional abuse.3 Much of the research for these assertions, which have become increasingly pronounced and which invariably reflect negatively on those who operated such schools, has been based on contemporary interpretations of government and missionary documents and, to an increasing extent, on the testimony of former students.

Holy Angels School (1874-1974) at Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, and St. Joseph's School (1903 1958) at Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories were among the four Roman Catholic residential schools and an equal number of pupil residences which operated in what is presently the Roman Catholic Diocese of Mackenzie-Fort Smith. Like many Indian residential schools in the prairie and parkland regions of the Canadian West, the institutions at Chipewyan and Resolution, which are examined in this paper, were managed by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Sisters of Charity of Montreal, the Grey Nuns. The children who enrolled at Holy Angels and St. Joseph's until the 1950s were less subject, however, to the civilizing and integrating pressures which are generally held to have been experienced by Indian pupils in southern residential schools. Unlike programmes at the latter institutions, the ones at Chipewyan and Resolution were based on a view which saw the wilderness as a continuing source of Native subsistence and general well-being. For much of their existence, therefore, Holy Angels and St. Joseph's functioned in a manner which encouraged the relatively small number of school-age Métis and Indian children who attended them to follow their parents' Christian beliefs and practices and their livelihoods as hunters and trappers. Accounts by former students and others indicate that the schools' goals were in keeping with the circumstances of the time and the students' own preferences. As will be shown, the schools' wilderness orientation and unintrusive nature were severely compromised by a host of government educational programmes in the 1950s and 1960s which sought to direct Natives away from the land to wage employment elsewhere. Notwithstanding such measures, the traditional links to the land held by most Native people persisted and reappeared as the rationale behind a number of schooling initiatives in the 1970s. Some of these initiatives reflected cultural orientations which had been promoted at Holy Angels and St. Joseph's earlier and which had their origin in a commonly-held view of the wilderness.

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