Between 1831 and 1996, residential schools operated in Canada through arrangements between the Government of Canada and the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, United and Presbyterian churches. This partnership ended in 1996, with the Government of Canada taking over the management of residential schools and beginning to transfer control to Indian bands. The last federally-run residential school, Gordon Indian Residential School in Punnichy, Saskatchewan, closed in 1996. One common objective defined this period — the assimilation of Aboriginal children.

“Wanduta” (Red Arrow), Dakota First Nation, Oak Lake area, Manitoba, ca. 1913
Photographer: H.W. Gould
Library and Archives Canada, PA-030027

This next photograph was taken in Manitoba, circa 1913, in the city of Brandon, the man Wanduta is Dakota and from the Oak Lake area. He was photographed in the studio of H.W., Gould and is seen wearing a cloth shirt and an eagle feather headdress, a symbol of his position in Dakota society. Around his neck is what appears to be a treaty medal, both symbols of the clash of cultures Wanduta witnessed. He was also seen as a trouble maker by local authorities and ended up in jail and on trial for a public ceremony in which it was alleged a give-away ceremony had taken place.
The give-away ceremony was an integral part of many First Nations cultures and also outlawed by the federal government.
A Saulteaux First Nation family, Manitoba, October 16, 1887
Photographer: J.B. Tyrrell
Geological Survey of Canada
Library and Archives Canada, PA-050799
Reading the three photographs from left to right:
A Saulteaux First Nation family, Manitoba, October 16, 1887. Photographer: J.B. Tyrrell
Geological Survey of Canada
National Archives of Canada, PA-050799

This Saulteaux family was photographed in an unidentified part of Manitoba on October 16, 1887, by J.B. Tyrrell a photographer working for the Geological Survey of Canada. Treaties had just been signed at the beginning of the decade and the transition from tribal society to reserve culture was just beginning.
The Saulteaux family represents what I suggest is a form acculturation. They have adopted western style clothing, yet they still live in the tradition tipi, the male figure is seen holding a rifle that may well have been used in the traditional buffalo hunt, but by this point in time the great herds have disappeared. The tipi would have been made from buffalo hide but here it appears to be made from canvas. The mother is seen holding a baby in the traditional cradle-board used by indigenous people across North America. They appear to be doing well, despite the government assertion that indigenous people were not taking care of or providing a “proper” lifestyle for their children. This child very well could have gone to a residential school.

Sisters outside the Pukatawagan day school with a group of boys wearing Plains Indian-style headdresses made from paper, ca. 1960s
Attributed to Sister Liliane
Library and Archives Canada, PA-195120

This leads to the next photograph, which was made in the reserve community of Pukatawagan, also in Manitoba. The exact date of the photograph is not known but it is sometime in the 1960s and shows ten little Indian boys posed in front of the day school. The symbols of power seen in the photograph reveal the complete erasure of the family and replaced by the sisters.
The boys wearing paper headdresses and are now under the supervision of the sisters. Their headdresses are juxtaposed against the crucifix and the banal school façade. The photograph was taken by Sister Liliane of the Sisters of the Soeurs du Sacré-Coeur d’Ottawa. Her collection of photographic negatives eventually made their way to the Library and Archives Canada collection, saved from the dump by the new teacher who replaced the sisters.
More photographs made by Sister Liliane are seen later in the exhibition and provide a unique window into the world of assimilation as seen through the lens of Christianity. The assimilation process was a two pronged assault on indigenous cultures that began in the 15th century and was carried out in the residential schools.

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What kind of Indians are Hayter Reed and the little boy, his stepson, Jack Lowery? Mixed messages and irony…the point is to raise vigilance as to how we look at archival photographs. Also to explore the significance of 1885 which was a turning point and when residential schools began to be used as a weapon. In the fallout of the 1885 Resistance there was a much harsher system of assimilation implemented of which Hayter Reed was a strong proponent. This was really the catalyst of the Residential School System. The negotiations that were going on the east, with the Reverend Peter Jones and the churches, was more of an education partnership, before 1885. There was a slow burn of assimilation which accelerated and became much harsher and purposed after 1885. These images are meant to inspire questions. Why are these three images displayed together? I hoped to provoke people to get them talking, to provoke the communities to add their voices to the exhibition.

Ironically, the portrait of Reed with his stepson Jack Lowery was made the same year Thomas Moore appeared in the 1896 Sessional Report. Reed acquired the tribal outfit while serving as an Indian agent in the west and Lowery’s outfit was made out of paper and facial paint was used to darken their skin. The dignitaries who took part in the costume ball picked various historical figures for their costumes and Hayter Reed chose the fifteen century Iroquoian leader Donnacona for his costume, but the clothing Reed is wearing is not what a fifteen century Iroquois would have worn. In fact he acquired the clothing while serving as an Indian agent in the west. Historically, when Donnacona and Jacques Cartier met near present day Quebec City, Cartier abducted Donnacona’s two sons had took them with him on his return trip to France, where they were educated. Could Reed have had this in mind when he chose Donnacona as an important historical figure?
Reed’s ran the Department of Indian Affairs, including the residential school system and one might think the young boy standing next to Reed is Aboriginal but he is not. Question: Why are they dressed in the type of clothing worn by First Nations people from the prairies, for the 1896 costume ball?

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Proof of Progress

“Beaver Foot is a full-blooded Indian, and is the most advanced farmer on the reserve Alexander’s Band, Cree, Treaty 6, signed 1876). He is a young man, has a family of: himself, wife, one son and one daughter; his farm is a regularly improved homestead, after the fashion of a well-to-do, industrious white farmer; his buildings are all constructed of well-made square timber, and are as follows: dwelling-house, milk-house, pig-house, shed for implements, three stables, two cattle-sheds; three well-fenced corrals calf, sheep and pig pastures; 1,000 acres fenced as a cattle and horse pasture his hay meadows are also fenced to prevent cattle from grazing on them; his live-stock are: two oxen, three cows, five steers, twelve large, good work horses; his implements are: mower and rake, farm wagon, breaking-plough, cross-plough, iron harrows, whip-saw, grindstone, land roller, ox yoke, ox harness, two sets horse team harness, two bob-sleighs, crosscut saw, logging-chain, augers, axes, hay-forks, saws, hammers, spade, scoop and other shovels, hoes; his house is comfortably furnished with cooking-stove, tables, chairs, bedsteads, churn, milk-pans, & c. Beaver Foot came to settle down on the reserve in 1889, owning then only a team of ponies. The agent lent him a yoke of oxen and a cow, but no implements, so that his present possessions are the result of economics and careful industry. His fences are strong and straight, of tamarack stakes and spruce rails. When I was at his place he was engaged in bauling rails with one of his large, horse teams and strewing them along where he intended to build this new fence. His character is that he is reliable – ‘his word is his bond’; would that there were more like him. I had almost forgotten to mention his crops. They consist of ten acres of wheat, ten acres of oats, ten acres of barley, one acre of potatoes and one acre of garden-total, thirty-two acres.” Hayter Reed, Deputy Supt. General of Indian Affairs.

Government Indian agent reports often described how indigenous families were not capable of taking proper care of their children as used it as a justification for taking their children away to residential schools, this section asks: Do these families appear unstable or unloving? The fact of instability in reserve communities came from family providers having to make the transition from hunters to farmers in a relatively short period of time. It is almost incompressible to image the government’s expectation that a quick transition should take, but parents were doing the best for their children.

Indian agent reports included detailed inventories of farm equipment, livestock, the crops produced, and house conditions, inside and out. Each report is attributed to the male head of the family but women, who kept order in the houses, are never credited. This is a common issue in photographs as well, where the male is named while the woman is referred to as wife or squaw of….This was reflective of how white society viewed women, not how indigenous culture viewed women. In the Williams Lake Reserve photograph, the condition and atmosphere of the house is often determined by the woman’s industry.

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These federally funded, church-run institutions were born out of a government policy of assimilation. Children were removed from their families and sent to these schools so that they would lose their culture and language in order to facilitate assimilation into mainstream Canadian society. These may include industrial schools, boarding schools, homes for students, hostels, billets, residential schools, residential schools with a majority of day students, or a combination of any of the above. At the request of Survivors, this definition has evolved to include convents, day schools, mission schools, sanatoriums, and settlement camps. They were attended by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis students.

A mother brings her children to the St John Boarding School, Wapuskaw, Alberta. Question: are all these children going to school? Although the very young child may appear to be too young, the government and churches reasoned that the first stage in gaining control and asserting a presence in the communities was to adopt orphaned or abandoned children. It was not unheard of to see children as young as five and six years old being taken away to a school and spending their young lives there.

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The map is an important first step into the exhibition space because it graphically shows the number of schools across Canada, the various names a school operated under, the dates it opened and closed, and the church denominations that ran each school. Children may have attended more than one school, beginning with an on-reserve school or being sent hundreds of miles away to an industrial school. A survivor told me that in his Ontario school, one boy continually ran away and the only way to deal with him was transfer him to a school on the other side of the country. The map will have meaning for different people, many people comment that they never imagined there were so many schools in Canada and the survivor and their families have a departure point to begin a conversation.

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Dominion of Canada. Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the year ended 31st December, 1885. p. 138. J. Hugonnard, Principal Qu’Appelle Industrial School.

“I feel certain that this school will be a great success, and that it will be a chief means of civilizing the Indian; but to obtain this result, accommodation must be made to take in more pupils, as now we can only take in but one out of each reserve. A school for Indian girls would be of great importance, and I may say, would be absolutely necessary to effect the civilization of the next generation of Indians[;] if the women were educated it would almost be a guarantee that their children would be educated also and brought up Christians, with no danger of their following the awful existence that many of them ignorantly live now. It will be nearly futile to educate the boys and leave the girls uneducated.”

In the wake of the Davin report of 1879 the government began a concerted effort to isolate children from their communities and families through the United States industrial school model. Schools were built away from reserves and parental interference school officials felt was hindering the assimilation process.

In the book entitled, The Building of The Canadian Pacific Railway: Van Horne’s Road, by Omer Lavallee, this image is captioned as,“Children from a mission school near Morley contemplate the Bow River, watched over by a priest or teaching brother (left) who may also have been a Native person.”

The interesting points for this photograph are the alignment of elements within the photograph and to consider what was the purpose behind the staging of the picture. It is one year before the Northwest Rebellion and the indigenous people in Saskatchewan are suffering from the recent loss of the buffalo and are now being herded onto reserve lands. The people are starving and totally dependent on the substandard food rations the Indian agents are handing out. Food rations are being used to break down the tribal based communities, this is one backdrop not seen in the photograph.
The photographer, Otto B. Buell, also worked for the CPR and recorded the Northwest Rebellion battlefields and the indigenous prisoners held in Regina, where they were put on trial and eventually incarcerated and executed. The first element to examine in the photograph is that the boys are lined up and wearing the school uniform and looking off into an unknown and unseen part of the landscape. Sitting behind the boys is a priest, who has been identified as Indigenous. In the foreground are a young boy and a woman who is probably his mother. They are dressed in the typical clothing worn at the time and they are the only ones facing the photographer’s camera.
Looking down the hill is a pathway leading to the school gate, where the children are probably dropped off and parents discouraged from going any farther. The title for this exhibition was inspired by this photograph. I wondered if the mother ever saw the interior of the school. Was she dropping off her son? And could we return a year later and see him sitting with the group of uniformed boys? This suggestion can be linked to the duel portrait of Thomas Moore, an image that resonates with the looming clouds over the school.

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View of Fort Qu’Appelle Indian Industrial School, showing Aboriginal tipis outside the school fence, Lebret, Saskatchewan, 1895 Library and Archives Canada, PA-182246 This is a companion photograph to the image in Stop 7. It shows the gate and fence once again but now we see teepees and tents pitched outside the school gate, reinforcing the growing concern over Indian families showing up at the schools and wanting to take their children home. When officials write about this problem in their reports, they fail to account for why the parents wanted to take their children out of school, the number of children who are dying while at school. Not far away , Thomas Moore is being photographed at the Regina Indian Industrial School for the school’s annual report to Indian Affairs

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Dominion of Canada. Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the year ended 31st December, 1897. p. xxvi. JAS. A. Smart, Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs.

“The chief advantage of such schools is the removal of the children from home influences, and consequently the more speedy and thorough inculcation of the habits, customs and modes of thought of the white man, but to have all that exists in common between them destroyed, and to have them return to the reserve out of sympathy with their environment, seems to the Indian parent a distinct disadvantage. It is, therefore, only as they can be brought to recognize the greater material advantage to their children in other directions and the necessity of education to enable them to hold their own in the struggle for existence, that their prejudices against education can be overcome and a desire for its benefits aroused.”

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by David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson, 4 August 1845
Rev Peter Jones Kahkewaquonaby

Aboriginal education had long been a priority for both Aboriginal and British (and later Canadian) leaders and governments. However, the political and economic changes brought about by events in the nineteenth century soon made it a critical one. Astutely realizing the long-term impact of these changes on their traditional lives and cultures, a number of Aboriginal leaders engaged in negotiations with religious orders and government officials to create an equitable education system for all.

Rev Peter Jones Kahkewaquonaby

Aboriginal education had long been a priority for both Aboriginal and British (and later Canadian) leaders and governments. However, the political and economic changes brought about by events in the nineteenth century soon made it a critical one. Astutely realizing the long-term impact of these changes on their traditional lives and cultures, a number of Aboriginal leaders engaged in negotiations with religious orders and government officials to create an equitable education system for all.

I received the traditional education at home before going to the residential school. My parents taught me what was needed and what and how it was done in the traditional ways of life. We learned about medicines and when to pick them and what they were used for. In this way I was learning about science or the biology of plants and trees – that was the environmental studies about trees. By picking and cutting birch bark we learned how to only take the bark off the tree without harming the tree and how to dry and look after the bark when it was stored. I learned about the science of the weather. I learned about seasons and how these seasons helped human beings to survive according to the season.

Shirley Williams is Ojibwe and had a traditional Ojibwe education in early life before

attending the St. Joseph’s Residential School at Spanish, Ontario. She is currently a

professor in the Department of Native Studies, Language and Culture, Residential Schools, at

Trent University. Also, she has published teaching materials for the Ojibwe language and is

working on an Ojibwe language CD-ROM.

The idea behind using this image is to first establish the historical role of the exhibition, to trace back in time, the agenda the government and churches had for Indigenous children in the 19th century and imagine replacing this class of non-indigenous girls with Indigenous girls and how incongruous it would look. This photograph reminded me of the cut-outs figures seen at tourist attractions where you stand behind a picture and put your face in the hole. I took this photograph at a tourist site in Deep River, Ontario. A phrase often echoed by the people in charge of assimilating indigenous children is ‘Kill the Indian to save the child’ now re-imagine the symbolism in this cutout in relation to the duel portrait of Thomas Moore.

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Now that the children have been dropped off at the school, family and community vanish and a very different world begins to take over the children’s lives. The way survivors have described their arrival sounds like a prisoner’s story.
Read what Survivor Shirley Williams has to say.

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Shirley I. Williams, Ojibway, attended St. Joseph’s Residential School in Spanish, Ontario, at the age of 10. She is now Professor Emerita and Ojibway Elder in the Department of Native Studies at Trent University, Peterborough.

When ten-year-old Shirley Pheasant (Williams) entered the St. Joseph’s Boarding School at Spanish, Ontario, in 1949, she could only speak her Native language, Ojibway. Shirley remembers what it was like when she first arrived:

“When I saw [St. Joseph’s] it was grey. A brick building when it rains is dark and grey, you know. It’s an ugly day but the feeling was … of ugliness. [T]he gate opened and the bus went in, and I think when the gate closed … something happened to me, something locked, it is like my heart locked, because it could hear that…[the clink of gates]

…the bus stopped and then the sister or the nun … she came in and she sounded very very cross, and I could just imagine what she was trying to say, because this is what my sisters told me, what she would probably say, so I had in my mind what she was trying to tell us, that we get off the bus [and] we go two by two … up the stairs … the stairs were, well it was four stories and no elevator and we had to walk up the stairs with our suitcases.

…[at the] top of the stairs . . . you were asked your name … and this [is] another thing my mother prepared me for … so I was very proud to say yes that my name was Shirley Pheasant and then they gave you a number and so you went down and they give you another bundle with your chemise … your bloomers and your stocking[s] and you went to the next person … the last one you saw [was] the nun who looked into your hair to look for bugs.”

Ethnocide refers to the deliberate attempt to eradicate the culture or way of life of a people. . . . Ethnocide depends on the use of political power to force relatively powerless people to give up their culture and is therefore characteristic of colonial or other situations where coercion can be applied. . . . The term is sometimes used to refer to any process or policy that results in the disappearance of a people’s culture.

The Dictionary of Anthropology (1997). Edited by Thomas Barfield. Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Genocide Definition

Article II of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of

Genocide states:

Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,

racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to

members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about

its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

X

Staff outside the entrance of the Brandon Indian Industrial School, Brandon, Manitoba, date unknown Library and Archives Canada, PA-048575 Looking at this photograph several elements stand out. We see a very young girl seated among the school’s teachers and administrators; she is almost invisible at first glance. She appears too young to be a student, was she adopted by one of the teachers? Off to the left side is a young boy who is literally cut in two by the frame of the photograph, what he is thinking about? One half of him is physically there and the other half may be back on the reserve. This photograph builds upon the 1884 photograph, Stop 7 which shows the photograph of Principal Father Joseph Hugonnard and students posed on the hill overlooking the Fort Qu’Appelle Indian Industrial School. We have now made our way down the hill and are facing the gateway to a new civilization, is it a better world? What is not taken into consideration is that Indigenous children arrived at the schools with an education that provided all the necessities for a good life. Children like Shirley Williams and Thomas Moore did not enter these schools uneducated. For thousands of years, Aboriginal people had flourished on this continent, but the arrival of Europeans slowly began to erode the integrity and strength of Indigenous l cultures. The program of social engineering implemented by the Canadian government and carried out by the churches can be, I argue, characterized as ethnocide.

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Aboriginal students on the steps of an Indian school near Woodstock, New Brunswick, date unknown
Photographer: William James Topley
Library and Archives Canada, PA-010634

Father Trinell with Inuit children in front of the Roman Catholic Mission, Cape Dorset, N.W.T.*, October 1951
Photographer: Douglas Wilkinson,
National Film Board of Canada
Library and Archives Canada, PA-146509
*Kinngait, Nunavut

Location and Area of Land. – This school is situated about four miles west of Regina. The total area of land is three hundred and twenty acres, all of which is enclosed by a substantial wire fence. Other fences separate the farm lands from the grounds immediately surrounding the school buildings. The waters of the Wascana run through the eastern portion of our half section, and by the construction of a dam we have given some additional beauty to the grounds.

Buildings. – The buildings are erected on high lands, and, everything considered, the school is admirably situated. The main building, constructed of brick, is one hundred and eighty feet in length. From garret to basement its rooms are utilized. In the rear of this building are the laundry, the bake-house and a small ice-house; also a small crusher-house near the wind-mill. The large building for instruction in trades gives accommodation for carpentry, painting, shoemaking and harness-making. In addition to these buildings, there are two large stables, an implement shed, a principal\\\’s residence and a cottage under construction for the carpenter.

Grounds. – The grounds are beautified by trees and numerous flower-beds. On the flats beyond the river the boys have a very suitable field for their athletic exercises.

Accommodation. – The accommodation of the school is limited to one hundred and fifty pupils.

Attendance. – The attendance of boys for the year averaged seventy-five, of the girls forty-seven, making a total of one hundred and twenty-two.

The Outing System. – The adoption of the outing system has been attended by many beneficial results. It accustoms the pupils to the white man\\\’s ways. It is our aim to select only helpful homes where our pupils will have a number of home comforts. We especially desire to secure remunerative occupation for the boys, who should be the wage-earners of their future homes. Applications for their services have been so numerous that the majority of the applicants had to be disappointed, and yet our last monthly statement shows that nineteen of our boys were earning wages not in any case less than $15 a month and board.

I have, & c., A.J. MCLEOD,

Principal.

The school buildings ranged from primitive structures to large institutional industrial schools. This architectural drawing from the Department of Indian Affairs corresponds to the photograph of the girls’ sewing room in the Shubenacadie residential school that appears after this stop. The architectural drawing is like the residential school map, because it provides the survivor and visitor a way to track the interior of the school and point out places of importance for discussion, I chose this particular drawing because it corresponds to the photograph of the sewing room and in turn it provides the photograph with physical context.

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A carpentry class at the Brandon Indian Industrial School, Brandon, Manitoba, ca. 1910
United Church of Canada, Archives, 93.049P/1368N

Geo. H. Hogbin, Principal, vol. XXXIV, no. 11, 1900, Moral and Religious Training, p. 352:

“Daily service is held morning and evening, at which all inmates of the institution are expected to be present. The usual Sunday services, such as in any country church, are held. […] Our aim is to make them good Christian men, men of action, men of thought; we try to teach them habits of self-dependence, not to be always waiting to be told what to do, but to think for themselves, and we attempt to show them the beauty of a good life, well and usefully lived.”

IN CLASS
I chose this photograph because of the powerful presence of the young girl seated in the center of the first row. She appears calm and almost serene in the midst of the classroom. She is in focus while the children around her become less sharp as we go farther back into the room. In the back of the room is a sister who is standing next to a religious icon and note, in almost every photograph in this exhibition, person of authority is in the image. Is the sense of self seen in her face a result of the school or is it the result of the education she received from her own culture? Are there other examples in the exhibition? Another point to consider is the young girl’s haircut, is it seen in other parts of the exhibition?

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It is also interesting to discuss the education program that was supposed to be a half day, but for many students it was only a couple of hours at the most. Many spent most of their time working on the farm, because the government was so stingy in terms of its budget that schools had to rely on growing their own crops to provide food for the students. So the fact was that most of the time, these kids were working as opposed to actually getting any kind of classroom education.

There was also another part of the school experience called outing. And that was where children were sent out to work for local farmers, as housekeepers and working in stables and in the fields.So this outing program brought income into the school and the students more or less earned their keep. Often students had to make their own clothes in the sewing room, so yes, they were learning how to sew, but they had to make their own clothes.

Jeff Thomas, Curator

Kamloops Indian Residential School (St. Louis Mission Indian Residential School) Opened in 1890 and closed in 1978. It was run by the Roman Catholic Church, with the support of the Canadian federal government. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Sisters of St. Ann were the specific orders involved in running the school. The school emphasized agricultural training and devoted half a day to academic and religious studies and half a day to manual labour. In 1923, the school was destroyed by a fire and a new brick building was constructed in its place. It still stands today.

Aboriginal students and staff assembled outside the Kamloops Indian Residential School, Kamloops, British Columbia, 1934
Archives Deschâtelets
When we think of a class pictures, what comes to mind? It is generally a positive experience and marks the end of a school year. What does this class picture say to you? Do you think the kids brought a photograph home to give to their parents? Consider the large number of children at this school and how young many of them appear to be. Note the strong Christian overtone and the men seated in the front row. How does this factor influence the reading of the image? Especially in consideration that these children came to the school with their own tribal-based belief system? The Potlatch or give-away was an important ceremony that would have been part of the children’ s world back home and it was also outlawed by Indian Affairs. How could the children possibly understand or resolve the ideological differences at play in the school?

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Two of the first pupils to attend the Blackfoot Anglican School, Alberta, ca. 1886
Photographer: A.J. Ross
Glenbow Archives, NA-896-3

Sisters outside the Pukatawagan day school with a group of boys wearing Plains Indian-style headdresses made from paper, ca. 1960s
Attributed to Sister Liliane
Library and Archives Canada, PA-195120

An Aboriginal boy having his hair cut, 1960
Photographer: Sister Liliane
Library and Archives Canada, PA-195124

What was going on in this photograph? Is the boy getting a haircut as punishment or is it barber training? During a tour I gave to a group of indigenous people, I posed this question. A survivor was in the group and she said that he was being punished. Look at the expression on his face and how the other children are looking away.? It is hard to say what is actually taking place in the photograph but regardless, it stirred the memory of the woman. and gave the tour group more to think about.
Residential school administrators and Indian agents across Canada submitted annual reports to the Department of Indian Affairs. These reports were bound together with the annual reports of other federal departments, becoming part of a larger document called The Sessional Papers. Information about the locations and conditions of the schools, the names of the teachers and the administrators, the classes taught, the number of students attending the schools, the areas from which they came, and the ideology professed by the schools and by the Department of Indian Affairs was all included in the reports. Photographs were used to illustrate the annual reports between 1895 and 1905. The 1896 report was particularly revealing because it is where I met Thomas Moore.

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Over the years I have met Survivors during my tours of the exhibition and one comment I kept hearing over and over again was about the loneliness and especially difficult was hearing the younger children crying throughout the night. Comments like this are vital because of the information they provide the images with; imagine children trying to say the prayers, maybe not able to speak English yet and fearing punishment if they don’t say them, . When I had an opportunity to interview Shirley Williams, who is seen in the role Model section, I had this photo in mind when I asked her how she kept her Ojibwe language alive while in school. Her story raised more questions and one was about how children resisted assimilation and what were their strategies.

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The goal of this exhibition is self-empowerment; to give indigenous audiences the opportunity to begin to see the places to which indigenous children were taken and to imagine their stories. In a sense, the images offer an opportunity to come full circle and move forward.

By rethinking their role and purpose, perhaps these photographs can contribute to the healing process for those who attended residential schools as well as their children and grandchildren. I want to suggest that these photographs can play a new role – one that speaks to the loss of imagination that occurred in those classrooms. How can we begin to imagine a different story – one where Jim Abikoki stands up and opens the gate, one where the white teacher is replaced by an Elder who tells the children the history of their people, one where Waduta is not forced to give up one culture for the other, one where Mollie receives proper care and returns to her community.

I want to end by returning to Thomas Moore. In 2011, new information about Moore was forwarded to me from the Saskatchewan Archives. I now know what reserve he came from, what his parents’ names were, and when he entered the Regina Industrial school.

Thomas Moore Kusick was admitted to the Regina Industrial School on August 26, 1891. His mother’s name was Hanna Moore Kusick and his father Paul Desjarlais (listed in the Regina Industrial School register as st. Paul Desjarlais. The name Kusick, according to the archivist may be of Aboriginal or of Ukrainian origin. It is hard to tell given lack of uniformity in the spelling of the era. The father died early.
According to the Regina Industrial School register, Thomas Moore was protestant and had previously attended Lakes End School (Muscowpetung [later known as “Lakesend”] Residential School, Saskatchewan. A boarding school opened c.1888. In 1890 the school was moved to a point nine miles north of the old site. This school closed in June 1894 but was re-opened briefly in 1895 before being closed again in 1896. From
His state of education upon admission consisted of knowing the alphabet. He was eight years old, was 3 ‘11” and weighed 54.5 lbs. A note in the register says to see page 20 of the discharge register. He was from the Saulteaux Tribe. He was from the Muscowpetung Band.

With this new information, I went back to the 1896 annual report. I saw something I had never noticed before – a portrait of the brass band from the Regina Industrial School,and in the front row, seated on the ground third from the left, was a young boy that looked like Thomas Moore. His face resemble his face in the first photograph where is is wearing traditional clothing and here is appears as t a young boy in the group, not a poster child for residential schools.

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Despite the fact that most residential schools have been closed for several decades now, their damaging effects continue to reverberate throughout Aboriginal communities across Canada, both on reserves and in urban centres, with the images of what took place seared in the minds of former students. The need for healing is crucial — it is not enough to say that we have survived. The question is: “How well are we surviving?” To answer that question we have to look at the intergenerational impacts of residential schools — youth suicides, incarceration rates, family violence and sexual abuse, drug use and alcoholism, poverty, and homelessness.

The photographs in this exhibition show where the children were sent, but that is only a part of the picture. We need the stories of our Elders and family members to move another step along the journey to the healing. That is what this exhibition is hoping to encourage. Healing not only entails an individual journey, but a collective process of addressing the systemic social problems Aboriginal communities across Canada continue to face. The first step in the healing process can be as simple as looking through a grandmother’s family photo album.

I have the right to freedom of speech.

I have the right to be heard.

I have the right to be respected.

I have the right to accept and own my own power.

I have the right to not disclose unless I am comfortable.

I have the right to feel my emotions.

I have the right to say no.

I have the right to challenge the status quo.

I have the right to ask questions.

I have the right to be me.

I have the right to own my own ideas.

I have the right to my values and beliefs.

I have the right to laugh.

Dr. Alicia A. Dunlop, Toronto

Before long, Aboriginal communities began to experience the full effect of the dysfunction, and indeed devastation, caused by the residential school system. Generations of Survivors have been raised, from as young as four or five years old, in a “family” made up of government and church officials, and school staff. Far short of parental role models, teachers and school administrators used harsh disciplinary methods, and neither encouraged nor showed affection. The residential school system deprived Aboriginal children of their traditions and of a safe and supportive home in which they were cherished. It produced generations of people who lacked essential interpersonal and relationship skills. Many Survivors were not equipped with the skills to become loving partners and parents, and had difficulty expressing parental love; many did not know how to handle conflict in a constructive way. When these Survivors became spouses or parents, they did not always interact with others appropriately. The abuse and neglect that Survivors suffered at the schools often resurfaced in their own relationships, where the abused became the abuser. This perpetuated a cycle of violence within families, and produced generations of “broken children,” many of whom also went on to attend residential schools.

As parents struggled with the trauma of their own residential school experiences, they remained powerless to prevent the same from being visited upon their own children when it was their time to attend residential school.

The unresolved trauma of Aboriginal people who experienced or witnessed physical or sexual abuse in the residential school system is passed on from generation to generation. The ongoing cycle of intergenerational abuse in Aboriginal communities is the legacy of physical and sexual abuse in residential schools.

The definition of intergenerational impacts and the legacy of residential schools abuse follows:

“Intergenerational Impacts” refer to “the effects of physical and sexual abuse that were passed on to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Aboriginal people who attended the residential school system.”

Please see the list below of impacts that intergenerational Survivors face on a day-to-day basis:

Alcohol and drug abuse;
Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and fetal alcohol effect (FAE);
Sexual abuse (past and ongoing);
Physical abuse (past and ongoing; especially, but not exclusively, of women and children);
Psychological/emotional abuse;
Low self-esteem;
Dysfunctional families and interpersonal relationships;
Parenting issues such as emotional coldness, rigidity, neglect, poor communications and abandonment;
Suicide (and the threat of suicide);
Teen pregnancy;
Chronic, widespread depression;
Chronic, widespread rage and anger;
Eating disorders;
Sleeping disorders;
Chronic physical illness related to spiritual and emotional states;
Layer upon layer of unresolved grief and loss;
Fear of personal growth, transformation and healing;
Unconscious internalization of residential school behaviours such as false politeness, not speaking out, passive compliance, excessive neatness, obedience without thought, etc.;
Post-residential school community environment, seen in patterns of paternalistic authority linked to passive dependency; patterns of misuse of power to control others, and community social patterns that foster whispering in the dark, but refusing to support and stand with those who speak out or challenge the status quo;
The breakdown of the social glue that holds families and communities together, such as trust, common ground, shared purpose and direction, a vibrant ceremonial and civic life, co-operative networks and associations working for the common good, etc.;
Disunity and conflict between individuals, families and factions within the community;
Flashbacks and associative trauma; i.e., certain smells, foods, sounds, sights and people trigger flashbacks memories, anxiety attacks, physical symptoms or fear; e.g. the sight of a certain type of boat or vehicle (especially containing a social worker or RCMP), the sight of an old residential school building, etc;
Educational blocks – aversions to formal learning programs that seem “too much like school,” fear of failure, self-sabotage, psychologically-based learning disabilities;
Spiritual confusion; involving alienation from one’s own spiritual life and growth process, as well as conflicts and confusion over religion;
Internalized sense of inferiority or aversion in relation to whites and especially whites in power;
Toxic communication – backbiting, gossip, criticism, put downs, personal attacks, sarcasm, secrets, etc.;
Becoming oppressors and abusers of others as a result of what was done to one in residential schools;
Dysfunctional family co-dependent behaviours replicated in the workplace;
Cultural identity issues – missionization and the loss of language and cultural foundations has led to denial (by some) of the validity of one’s own cultural identity (assimilation), a resulting cultural confusion and dislocation;
Destruction of social support networks (the cultural safety net) that individuals and families in trouble could rely upon;
Disconnection from the natural world (i.e. the sea, the forest, the earth, living things) as an impor

“[I remember] kids never having enough to eat. I think back on those days and I wonder was it during the Depression. Was that why there was so little food? Was it because food was rationed at that time? I guess in my own mind I’m trying to justify or make excuses why we didn’t have enough food. There was plenty of food on the table of the people who looked after us. There was butter on that table. We had fat on our bread. That’s what they put on our bread, one slice of bread per meal. The spread that was on there was beef fat or pork fat. When you do your duty and go to clean up the table of the caregivers and you see a beautiful setting there and they have a good choice of food —

. . . Mostly [at home] we lived on game, deer meat, and a lot of seafood prepared traditionally. That was all I knew, my grandmother\’s cooking. We had fried bread or oven bread, jam or dried fruits, dried meat, dried fish and clams. Those were all the foods I was familiar with. And to get [to school] and to have a dish of some sort of stew put in front of me that I was not familiar with at all — It must have been pork stew. I remember the rind being in the stew with the hair on it, with fur on it, and the child next to me was saying that you have to eat that food or else you’re going to be punished if you don’t. I think I blanked it out. I don’t know if I ate it.”

Elsie Paul
Sechelt Residential School

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Remembering the Children Who Never Returned Home

Controversy over the running of residential schools emerged in the early 20th century after great numbers of Aboriginal children died while attending the schools. “Throughout the industrial school era, children in the schools had been dying in unbelievable numbers. In that conjunction of the condition of the schools and the health of the children lay, as Dr. P.H. Bryce termed it in 1922, the ‘national crime.’ The main consequence of inadequate government funding, poorly constructed schools, sanitary and ventilation problems, inadequate diet, clothing and medical care was an epidemic of tuberculosis for Indian Schools.” (A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986, p. 75.)

The true numbers of children who died while at the schools, who didn’t come home and whose stories lay with them in unmarked graves, are beginning to be told by those who did survive. Why did so many children die? There was a perception that children were well taken care of while at school but this wasn’t true. The schools were underfunded, the children were underfed and overworked, and the schools were in very poor condition. So the perception that parents couldn’t take care of their children was not true and in fact, the children faced unhealthy environments while in the schools.

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Hayter Reed, Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, and his stepson, Jack Lowery, dressed in Indian costumes for a historical ball on Parliament Hill, Ottawa, February 1896 Photographer: William James Topley Library and Archives Canada, PA-139841

The following images are enlargements of photographs presented earlier in the exhibition. In their smaller format, you may not have noticed certain details. The opportunity to view original images under close inspection often leads to new discoveries of documentary information. For example, the identities of people, places and time periods become clear. Other details, such as the symbolism behind the spinning wheels, or the government official dressed in Aboriginal clothing, may prompt more discussion. As you look at these photographs, consider what stories you would write or tell about them.