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  • Residential schooling at fort chipewyan and fort resolution 1874-1974

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

 

Pas disponible in Francais.

ABANDONING THE EQUATION

The coming of public schooling to the North and a series of educational surveys that followed this development strengthened the federal and territorial governments' resolve to ignore Breynat's schooling proposals. Demands by whites for improved educational arrangements in Yellowknife and Fort Smith led to the creation of non-sectarian public schools in both communities by the late 1930s.52 White residents in Fort Chipewyan adopted the same course of action taken by their counterparts in Fort Smith. With the provincial government's support they established a public school district in 1945 to operate Chipewyan's Anglican day school.53 Schooling arrangements based on the Native-wilderness equation were rejected out-of hand by these groups. What they wanted for their children was a provincially authorized curriculum taught in English by certified teachers in up-to-date day school facilities. Although Indian and Métis children were mainly Roman Catholic, and continued to attend Catholic day and residential schools, the operating autonomy and wilderness orientations of their schools did not last much longer.

Schooling arrangements took a different course in Chipewyan and Resolution following a visit by Andrew Moore, a school inspector from Manitoba, to schools in the Mackenzie District in the summer of 1944. Although Moore's study was not initiated by the government, a copy of his report, the first survey of educational conditions in the District, was sent to the Northwest Territories Administration in November 1944.54

Moore's recommendation that there be a highly-centralized system of education to serve all children in the north was a godsend to the Department of Indian Affairs and the Northwest Territories Council which had often been at cross purposes in providing schooling for Indians, Métis, Inuit and white children. This recommendation became government policy in 1946 and a system of integrated education in which all children were taught together was firmly in place in the Territories by the mid-1950s. Despite many attempts to achieve the same objective in Chipewyan, a fully integrated school was not realized in that community until 1975.

Integrated schooling arrangements, such as those recommended by Moore, foreshadowed a number of federal northern and Indian policy objectives initiated following World War II. From these came programmes designed to increase native peoples' "self reliance and further participation in the life of the North”55 that would, according to an earlier government statement, eventually integrate them fully into "national life and activities.”56 The arrival of nurses, social workers, and day school teachers in places like Fort Resolution and Fort Chipewyan contributed to the view that the traditional economy was no longer viable and that it had to be replaced by some form of wage employment. Welfare services, housing programmes and medical facilities influenced many families to move from trapping areas and country food sources and to take up residence in the settlements. Settlement living and the increasing tendency of resident children to attend day schools made wilderness-oriented institutions like St. Joseph's anachronistic.

After St. Joseph's closed in 1958, the children of the decreasing number of families who stayed on the land and children who were thought to be neglected were sent to an integrated federal school (J.B. Tyrrell) and a government-owned, church-managed pupil residence (Breynat Hall) in Fort Smith. There they were taught by certified teachers who followed the Alberta curriculum which included virtually no reference to traditional cultures or languages. The pupil residence in Smith and the residential facilities at Chipewyan also became custodial centres for many children whom welfare or law enforcement authorities had determined were in need of remedial treatment of some kind. As an Oblate principal, Guy de Bretagne, declared in 1967, the enrolment at schools like Holy Angels no longer represented:

[the] normal children [who attended Indian residential schools] some 30 years ago .... Nowadays all that is changed. 80% of the children are 'welfare cases,' unstable, 'problem children,' sometimes delinquents, with no direct relations with our missions, being for the missionaries perfect strangers.57

His description of the curriculum of the early residential schpols as being one in which "practical aims" were "pursued for limited needs" aptly explains the educational arrangements of the Native-wilderness equation. But such curricular goals had become outdated at schools like Holy Angels where, according to de Bretagne, "the priests, brothers and sisters were mere government officials [who were] losing their good name for endorsing the governments' ... cheap way of getting rid of its welfare obligations...58 It is not surprising, therefore, that the Oblate administrator of Holy Angels recalled that it was a great relief to him and to his co-workers, the Grey Nuns, when a decision was made to close the residence in 1974.59

The disenchantment at Holy Angels, and at St. Joseph's prior to its closing, can be partly attributed to a change in orientation which these institutions began to undergo in the 1930s. Until this time the principal role of the school was a saving one, involving orphans and a few other children who more or less came and went as their families pleased. This saving orientation began to change during the Depression when such factors as a scarcity of game and low fur prices prompted some land-based families to set up households in places like Fort Resolution. Ordinarily the children of settlement families went to the residential school as day scholars. It was generally expected, therefore, that the newly-arrived Indian and Métis children would follow the same practice. Those who did not conform caught the attention of the Indian agent and the RCMP, who attempted to make them attend (either as day or boarding pupils) despite the opposition of their parents and some of the chiefs.60

Such incidents were infrequent, but they presaged later developments, especially after World War II when government welfare workers and teachers viewed institutions like S1. Joseph's and its successor, Breynat Hall, as a convenient means of implementing universal and compulsory schooling.61 These establishments became important instruments in what is best described as a keeping orientation which sought to have all school-age children in integrated schools at least until they reached sixteen, which in part helps explain what many recent scholars have said about Indian schooling. Threats to implement the attendance sections of the Indian Act, the Territorial School Ordinance, and the Family Allowance Act served to increase school registration and pupil retention figures.62 While the number of formal actions taken with respect to the above legislation is not known, there is no doubt that the punishments meted out influenced the behaviour of parents.

Being unschooled was no longer the virtue it had been in the mission era. The new schooling and residential arrangements also made it plain that the wilderness was no longer a destination to be considered. In fact, when Joseph Katz reported to the federal government on territorial pupil residences in 1965, he ignored this option entirely. What was needed, according to him, was effective counseling by teachers to ensure that the transition to the new order took place.63 An outcome of this strategy can be found in George Caldwell's examination of nine Indian residential schools in Saskatchewan in 1967. His analysis of the reasons for admission to these institutions indicated that of the 1612 children registered, 973 or sixty per cent were in residence for social welfare or other reasons, including delinquency.64 Caldwell's contention that the residential schools were ill-equipped to respond to the needs of the majority of the children under their care was increasingly held by staff at institutions like Holy Angels.65

The change in the role of the residence from one of saving a few to one of keeping many had significant resource and personnel ramifications. The federal government generously funded integrated schools in the Territories after 1955. Alberta followed suit when it assumed responsibility for non-Indian schooling in isolated, northern communities such as Chipewyan by establishing Northland School Division in 1961. Neither government gave much thought to the facilities or programmes of the residences, which were separated from the schools and which remained under church management. As pupil residences like Breynat Hall were expected to emulate the parsimonious practices of the earlier residential schools, they were given minimal financial support. Conditions at Holy Angels were even more precarious than those at Breynat Hall, since it had to deal with three community schooling interests which were often at odds with one another.66 Nor would those who worked in the residences have been encouraged by the comments of professional educators, who saw the residences as auxiliary institutions and their staffs as performing little more than a custodial role.67 Employees in the residences, the child supervisors especially, never had the level of support, nor indeed the scrutiny, given school teachers who were seen as the principal change agents in the government's integration strategy.

As integrated school programmes all but ignored Native cultures, languages and economies, the residences were expected to do the same and to deal with the consequences, which Bernard Gillie, Chief Superintendent of Schools for the Western Arctic, described as follows in 1964:

It must have been obvious that if we were going to bring in education and social change we were going to change the people.... Certainly it is difficult and disturbing for the people themselves; you can't change a man s culture without, along the line, making him uncomfortable and downright unhappy.68

Gillie's views were commonly held by other government officials. Their beliefs remained the same until the late 1960s when the federal government finally took a look at employment conditions and child care standards in the residences. When one contrasts, for example, what was proposed for these institutions in a federally commissioned report in 1971 with conditions in Holy Angels and Breynat Hall, the differences are substantial, if not extreme.69 By this time, however, the church was in the process of withdrawing from further involvement in institutions of this type.70

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