Copyright © 2014, Chris Benjamin
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Nimbus Publishing Limited
3731 Mackintosh St, Halifax, NS B3K 5A5
(902) 455-4286 nimbus.ca
Printed and bound in Canada
NB1077
Interior design: John van der Woude Designs
Cover design: Heather Bryan
Cover photograph: Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives
“I Lost My Talk” by Rita Joe, from Songs of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi’kmaw Poet reprinted courtesy of Breton Books.
Images on pages 37 and 41 Copyright Government of Canada. Reprinted with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2013).
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Benjamin, Chris, 1975-, author
Indian school road : legacies of the Shubenacadie Residential
School / Chris Benjamin.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77108-213-6 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-77108-214-3 (mobi).—ISBN 978-1-77108-215-0 (html)
1. Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. 2. Micmac Indians—
Nova Scotia—Residential schools. 3. Abused Indian children—Nova
Scotia—Shubenacadie. 4. Indians of North America—Nova Scotia—
Shubenacadie—Residential schools. I. Title.
E96.6.S58B45 2014 371.829’97343071635 C2014-903184-X
C2014-903185-8
Nimbus Publishing acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of Nova Scotia through Film & Creative Industries Nova Scotia. We are pleased to work in partnership with Film & Creative Industries Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians.
This is for my children. Because even at its ugliest,
the truth is less repulsive than lies.
I Lost My Talk
I lost my talk
The talk you took away
When I was a little girl
At Shubenacadie school.
You snatched it away;
I speak like you
I think like you
I create like you
The scrambled ballad, about my word.
Two ways I talk
Both ways I say,
Your way is more powerful.
So gently I offer my hand and ask,
Let me find my talk
So I can teach you about me.
– Rita Joe
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
I. Before Shubenacadie
A Superiority Complex
The Canadian Residential School System
II. The Shubenacadie Indian Residential School
A School For Maritime Indians
The Men in Charge
The Teachers
The Children
III. One Year From Another
Push for Change
The Last Decade
IV. After Shubenacadie
Children in Care
Lasting Hurt
Reconciliation
Moving Education
Circling Back
Sources and Acknowledgements
Further Reading
Foreword
BY DANIEL PAUL, AUTHOR OF
WE WERE NOT THE SAVAGES
When despotic Caucasian aristocrats ruled over most European nations to maintain their positions, they used terrorism to keep their citizens controlled, which was paramount for their very existence. Thus, when their representatives “discovered” non-white civilizations where the people ruled it was in their best interests to destroy such civilizations before their democratic ideals spread to their own populations. To make the eradication seem really desirable among their subjects, they undertook steps to dehumanize the populations of such democracies by demonization—implanting in the minds of their subjects a picture of bloodthirsty, mindless savages. Such practices were used brilliantly in the Americas; so thoroughly implanted was the white supremacist propaganda that the grotesque negative effects are still being felt by Canada’s First Peoples today.
To refute the aforementioned propaganda, I’ll simply relate some of what the Mi’kmaq Nation didn’t have and what it did have. Five hundred years ago the Mi’kmaq did not burn people at the stake, did not use humans as work-animals, did not have bedlams and poor houses for their sick and disadvantaged, did not castrate young boys so that their sweet voices could be heard by the elite for a longer period, did not have debtors’ prisons, did not practice any kind of intolerance, and so on. They did have democracy. There was no poverty among them, divorces were available and a female was not beheaded to dissolve a marriage, there were no dictators and no elite: the people ruled, freedom and justice for all, and so on. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which was the most desirable civilization.
In the early stages of the European invasion of the Americas, out-and-out genocidal practices were liberally used to exterminate indigenous populations, for instance the Beothuk were wiped out and proclamations for the scalps of Mi’kmaw men, women, and children were issued by Massachusetts governor William Shirley (1744) and Nova Scotia governor Edward Cornwallis (1749).
By the time Canada was created in 1867, such barbarous practices had been replaced with a gentler methodology: severe malnutrition was permitted to be quite common among the tribes and medical assistance was minuscule. Thus, even minor illnesses more often than not proved fatal. This neglect worked toward the goal of eliminating what Caucasian politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens deemed “the Indian Problem.” Indian Commissioner Dr. Duncan Campbell Scott in 1920 stated, “I want to get rid of the Indian problem...Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic....” But progress was slow.
In the late 1800s new tools to expedite the process were devised: Indian residential and day schools. The sole reason for their establishment was to take “the Indian out of the Indian.” This story by Chris Benjamin about the Shubenacadie residential school is your story, not ours. It reveals a sin that is to Canada’s everlasting shame, an attempt to exterminate its Indigenous peoples by assimilation. Not even South Africa’s apartheid rivals the effort: apartheid was invented to separate the races; Canada’s assimilation policies were implemented to exterminate.
Chris’s book reveals the pain that white supremacist racism can inflict upon a people of colour. It demonstrates vividly that the wounds and scars accumulated by the incarcerated children will not heal in their lifetimes.
Introduction: Why and How
Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them
the same understanding so lacking in themselves.
– Audre Lorde
Unsettling
Here is what I found first: a recurring nightmare. Me wandering the black and white halls of the old building, as seen only in photographs, pristine but steeped in an old rotten stench. The facts playing hide-and-seek within the walls. Finding only a sense
of lurking, dishonest evil. What fool’s mission was this? What right did I have to come here?
Dorothy Moore lived here as a girl. Sister Dorothy Moore she’s now called, a well-known Mi’kmaw Elder who once said to a luncheon at St. Mary’s University that white people owe First Nations people an explanation for residential schools. Now, a couple decades after she said it, most of the creators of the system and its schools are dead or very, very old. But I’m alive, and fairly young. I have questions about residential schools, particularly the one that ran in my home province of Nova Scotia. The big one is: what the hell were we thinking?
In her probing book, Unsettling the Settler Within, Paulette Regan wonders why, with all the talk of the Aboriginal peoples’ need for healing, aren’t more of us looking at “what it means to be a colonizer and our own need to heal and decolonize.” European-Canadians committed what John S. Milloy, a Canadian Studies professor at Trent University, calls a “national crime,” in his book of the same name. He quotes a residential school survivor who told researchers in 1966, “This is not my story but yours.” Milloy adds, “It is our history, our shaping of the new world.” For white writers to solely treat residential schools as someone else’s story is to miss the chance to learn about ourselves, to live in a society better able “to deal justly with the Aboriginal people of this land.” We tried to erase hundreds of cultures across the country. To open ourselves to that history is to feel crippling guilt and daunting responsibility. Maybe that’s why we avoid it, or why we treat the residential school system as if it’s only in the past, ignoring its living legacy and the ongoing divide between Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal cultures.
This state of denial allows Euro-Canada to continue its oppression, with settler Canadians taking from Aboriginal peoples instead of living in partnership. I am writing this book in the hopes of better understanding the crimes Euro-Canadians committed and are committing against the First Nations of the Maritime region, and to push myself to be a better ally in the struggle against oppression by white society. As educator Paulo Freire one wrote, “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” The only way I can avoid participating in oppression is by participating in the struggle against it. To do this I need to move past learning and become a witness, to tell others what I’ve learned.
Despite all the media coverage—since allegations of sexual abuses in the early 1990s and more recently as a result of testimonies at Truth and Reconciliation Commission sessions across Canada—the majority of non-Aboriginal people still don’t know about residential schools. A 2008 survey conducted by the research firm Environics found that only one-third of Canadians were “familiar with the issue of Native people and residential schools,” and only 5 percent said they were “very familiar” with these issues. More than one-third had heard about physical and sexual abuse, but just 20 percent realized that children had been separated from their families, and only 10 percent knew that these children weren’t allowed to speak their mother tongues. “We still know very little about this period of history or about the reasons why residential schools had such a lasting impact on Aboriginal people,” Marie Brunelle told an audience at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish in 2011. A human rights and equity advisor at the university, she added: “Each of us has a role to play in this reconciliation process. This cannot happen if only one party is involved.”
In my own conversations with other white people about this book, most are familiar with the concept of an Indian residential school and are sad that such a thing once existed and caused so much hurt. But only about half are aware there was such a school in the Maritimes, and few know anything about it beyond a general sense of tragedy. A few shake their heads and tell me what they think needs to happen now with Aboriginal peoples, unaware that they are doing exactly what our ancestors did. They are trying to fix “the Indian Problem.”
As Paulette Regan wrote, there is no Indian Problem. There never was. What we have here is a settler problem, a deep-seated belief that one culture is better than the other. Only from the place of cultural arrogance can we proclaim solutions for another peoples’ problems—problems defined and created by that same arrogance. Too often we hear, and tolerate, criticisms of the Mi’kmaq for failing to “get with the times” or “stop whining about the past.” In other words, assimilate into our ways; forget their history, tradition, and culture. Give up who they are and become us instead. The inherent assumption is that we are better.
To root out that arrogant seed we need to look more closely at our own history, which includes the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. I am not Mi’kmaq or Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) or Peskotomuhkatiyik (Passamaquoddy), and the experience of surviving this school is not my story. This book is my attempt to better understand what happened and convey it to you, based mostly on existing testimony from many different sources. I hope it is an honest version, based on the facts as best as I can find and interpret into story.
If European-Canadians don’t know these stories, we will continue to treat the First Nations peoples and cultures of this region as inferior, and with the assumption that they need to adapt to the now predominant Euro-Canadian culture. This would be the continuation of a tragedy. I hope this book will contribute knowledge and perspective to help light a path of respect for the first cultures of this land.
The Story of This Book
This is the first published account of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School from the varied perspectives of its founders, teachers, and survivors. I’ve drawn from many sources for information and photographs. Whenever possible I’ve noted the source of these in the text and in the Further Reading section.
Despite a lot of gaps in the official records, there is enough documentation in Library Archives Canada to give a sense of how the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School came to be and who was involved. The children’s and parents’ stories emerged later, in the media, beginning with a three-part 1978 series in the Micmac News by Conrad W. Paul, for which he interviewed more than thirty survivors. In the 1980s freelance journalist Heather Laskey researched and wrote a short documentary on CBC Radio as well as a feature for Atlantic Insight about the school. But media coverage exploded in the 1990s after Phil Fontaine, head of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, went public with the sexual abuse he experienced in residential school. The school received heavy media coverage again in 2011 when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hosted several events in the Maritimes. Shubenacadie survivors told their stories publicly, many for the first time.
I have read as much material as possible, including every piece of media coverage I could find, to get a sense of life at the school and of TRC events. I have mostly avoided first-hand interviews with survivors for several reasons. The stories, as you will see, are painful. For many, telling these stories reopened old wounds and extracted long-buried memories. Given that so many of these stories have just been told publicly at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, commonly called the TRC, I saw more harm than good in trying to convince Mi’kmaw Elders to put themselves through it again for my sake.
The exception was Wayne Nicholas, a band councillor at Tobique First Nation and Shubenacadie residential school survivor. I called Wayne to ask about key changes at the school in the 1950s and he told me his whole story. He’d told it many times before and said it was important to share so that others would know the truth. I’m glad he did because it gave me at least one direct, compassionate voice of survival. But as I will explain, while there are important themes common to all the Shubenacadie school survivor stories, no two are completely alike.
For the most part, in relaying these stories, whether I’ve found them in media coverage or in the archives, I generalize in order to give the reader a better idea of what life at the school may have been like. When talking about school survivors I often leave out names to respect the privacy of individua
ls and their descendants. The names are available on public record, but were put in the archives without the consent of the individuals affected; when they spoke with the media it wasn’t with the understanding that their names would end up in a book. There are a few exceptions, particularly concerning survivors who published their own stories and have thus made the courageous and informed choice to be a public voice about the school. In particular I found detailed expressions of life at the school in Rita Joe’s autobiography, Song of Rita Joe, and Isabelle Knockwood’s account of the school, Out of the Depths. I also use the names of some residents who died while incarcerated at the school, because I feel that these instances are severe and important enough that the public should be aware of the names of these individuals to honour their memories.
Missing Puzzle Pieces
In talking about how the school came to be I’ve looked whenever possible at the original source, mostly consisting of archival letters between government officials and school principals. But there are holes in this information. More than one-third of the files on the school are locked up in Library Archives Canada. The public is legally prevented from seeing them. The files that are available to the public mainly cover the 1930s and ’40s. The government’s and church’s views on the school’s last twenty years are murky.
One reason for these gaps in the records on Shubenacadie may be that the government intentionally destroyed its own documents on this and other schools. According to a 2006 report by the Shingwauk Project of Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, which is based on archival documents, many government documents were intentionally burned or pulped between 1936 and 1973. Indian Affairs’s Records Destruction Teams eliminated monthly reports, accounts, correspondence, diaries, and medical and attendance records to free storage space. The government denies these purges. As an internal Aboriginal Affairs document claimed in 2009, “The admission of the deliberate destruction of student records and documents might spur further legal action against the government of Canada.”
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