Good Times
Despite having received warnings about getting involved in the children’s recreational time, the Sisters wrote often in their Annals about bobsledding with the children and other playful activities, like picnics, berry picking, and late summer camp-outs in the pasture near the river, singing hymns around a blazing fire. “Seventy-five dark faces smiling around it, and the old familiar songs rang out into the tranquil young night,” wrote one Sister, “thus passed one of several such evenings in a summer.” Throughout the year, the boys played sports, sometimes taking on boys from Shubenacadie Village.
Christmas was a favourite for the nuns, especially when the snow fell and they climbed onto the back of double-runner bobsleds the school carpenter-engineer had made by boarding two sleds together so six to nine children could go at a time: red ones for the boys and green for the girls. In January 1948, children were excused from classes one night so they could go sledding. “The youthful nuns had some thrilling rides on the ‘double runners’ too,” a Sister wrote. Some years it got cold enough to go for a skate by November.
Sisters wrote fondly of tobogganing with the children. Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives
They held midnight Mass in the chapel every year. The children got things started, waking the Sisters with Christmas Eve singing, starting on the girls’ side and going through the halls down the boys’ side. “The Angels sang the carols throughout the house,” as one Sister described. “What is God’s is ours!” another wrote, describing the abundance of Christmas trees ripe for the chopping near the school. The Sisters had the children decorate the tree while listening to the Santa Program on the radio at 5:00 each evening. “All the unfortunates not favoured by a package from home were given a substantial one from Santa’s donations left under the tree,” a Sister wrote one Christmas. They figured only about half the kids got gifts from home in a good year, and wrote of Santa bringing the children popcorn and candy in the refectory after breakfast.
Each month the Sisters would show the children Gene Autry Westerns or Tarzan movies. They thought Tarzan the perfect choice for the children, “letting them see in the picture their loved forests and waterways, while the characters lived again their simple woodland ways.” They wrote of the boys pretending to be Tarzan for days afterward. The Sisters also showed, at least once, a home movie shot in Whycocomagh in which the children recognized relatives and friends from home.
In the spring of 1948 the Sisters held an “Indian banquet” for the graduates. “The ten old enough to leave school were all dressed up in their freedom clothes and lined up in the Reading Room,” they wrote. “All the Sisters were amazed at the poise and good manners displayed.” After a special dinner, the Sisters and principal let the children go to a show. By 1951 the children performed and had a valedictorian. That year, the Historical Society of Nova Scotia invited the children to sing at a ceremony at the Shubenacadie Fire Hall when it unveiled its plaque celebrating the first Mi’kmaw encampment “over three hundred years ago.” The Sisters raved about the children’s singing.
Sister-Teacher
The Sisters were better qualified as teachers than most of their counterparts in other residential schools, and were respected throughout Nova Scotia and elsewhere. As Sisters of Charity, teaching was their calling, and they’d received a year or more of training at Mount Saint Vincent University—at least as much as most Nova Scotia teachers at the time—which qualified them to teach primary to high school. The university had been founded in part to prepare young nuns to teach, and as of 1895 its training was legally recognized. It became a junior college in 1914. If they’d attended in the mid-1950s, the Sisters would have had a bachelor’s degree as well. In 1934 the Sisters at Shubenacadie were invited to the nearby day school with another ninety teachers. “Great was their surprise when they were asked to give their views on the subjects discussed, as well as an account of the work they were doing at the Indian School,” a Sister wrote.
However well trained they were at Mount Saint Vincent, the Catholic Church, Indian Affairs, the mother house, the school principal, and the Nova Scotia Department of Education—which provided the curriculum—also influenced how the Sisters behaved at the residential school. In the decades leading up to the establishment of the Shubenacadie school, the Catholic Church officially declared on several occasions the value of children but instructed that they be taught to obey and respect authority. Children were to listen to older children, their parents, teachers, and especially the church. They were allowed to disobey only if they had good moral reason, for the sake of their families or the Catholic faith. Love was the most important teaching tool, because children learned better from someone who cared about them, and there was no teacher as good as a parent. Pope Pius XI (1857–1939) forbid Catholic teachers from removing students from their homes without parental consent—exactly what Indian Agents and the RCMP did on behalf of Shubenacadie’s Catholic teachers.
The Nova Scotia Department of Education echoed the church’s sentiment on caring for students. Rather than shaming the children, it said, teachers should give constructive feedback. By the 1950s the Department of Education was instructing teachers to engage students, to get them talking rather than merely absorbing information. Teachers were to make material relevant to the life experiences of their students. But at Shubenacadie the Sisters made little effort to understand their students. If anything, they distanced themselves for the sake of rigorous discipline. An inspector described some of the teaching he witnessed at the school as “orthodox and stereotyped.” In many cases the Sisters stayed at the school for fewer years than the typical child. With such a short stay it was hard to form relationships, even for Sisters who were willing. The students’ lives, it turned out, were so far removed from the curriculum that it’s hard to imagine how the Sisters could have made the material relevant. The message of the texts was the opposite of everything the children knew. What the Sisters ended up teaching them was that they were flawed creatures in the eyes of Canada and of God.
A stronger influence on the Sisters’ teaching style may have been Mother Mary Berchmans’s 1925 Directory for the Sisters Employed in the Charitable Institutions of the Sisters of Charity, Halifax, in which she instructed her “darling daughters” on teaching orphans. Her view was somewhat stricter than that of the church as a whole, though Mother Berchmans warned against excessive punishments, including harsh words. Punishment was to be a last resort, never to be given gladly. And corporal punishment was forbidden, as was locking children up in a room alone. “Solitude is a bad counselor for a child who is not good,” she wrote. “Discipline” was a preferable term to “punishment,” and it, along with faith, was the most important thing. “Above all, strongly urge them to assist at Holy Mass and to receive Holy Communion daily. Teach them to raise their little hearts to God often during the day by the use of ejaculatory prayers.”
Many of Mother Berchmans’s instructions were taken to heart at Shubenacadie. She advised that students’ mail should be monitored and censored, and that boys and girls be denied all communication across gender lines, both of which were common practices at Shubenacadie and other residential schools. And she said that residents should be allowed visitors only during posted hours, unless someone had travelled a great distance. For students at Shubenacadie whose homes were far away, in northern New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and occasionally Québec, visitors were rare. Indian Affairs would not help parents with travel costs. Berchmans wrote that children’s souls are most at risk when they play, claiming, “It is generally during recreation that evil projects are formed.” She forbade Sisters from playing along, or to “suffer any familiarity with them,” and furthermore, “they shall not allow the children to touch them,” and risk diminishing their authority over them. Children had to be taught to obey; the Sisters were to “keep them in their place.” But the Sisters sometimes chose the toboggan over doctrine.
Despite the directions they received, their qualifications, and their best efforts, the Sisters didn’t get good results in the classroom. When Indian Agent Harry of Annapolis County visited Shubenacadie in 1936, he was unimpressed with the academic abilities of the students. “I have met bright and sharp children of fourteen years only doing Grade 5 work,” he wrote to Indian Affairs. The acting secretary of the Department took the trouble to reply, explaining that any shortcomings in the students were their own fault. In 1936 Agent Ed Harvey of Lequille, Nova Scotia, and Agent R. H. Butts of Sydney Mines wrote to Indian Affairs, criticizing the school for focusing too much on labour and not enough on the classroom. Harvey noted that he’d seen seventeen-year-old boys who’d been at the school six years and failed to advance past Grade 3. Butts added that he’d witnessed too much cruelty at the school. Their letters went unanswered. Three years later, only 2 of the 150 residents of Shubenacadie had made it to Grade 8. Yet at least 15 of the children had been there since the school opened 10 years earlier. By 1944 only 4 of 146 residents had made it to Grade 6.
Religiosity
While it urged morality as one of the primary functions of its schools, Indian Affairs forbade more than half an hour per day be spent on religious instruction. There was a contradiction here, and a loophole. For the nuns, morality was religion. They would teach both. The principal gave the Sisters a guide from Indian Affairs when they arrived. They were to instill “obedience, respect, order, neatness and cleanliness.” They were to teach the difference between right and wrong. They were to take their ragged pupils and shape them into independent, industrious, honest, thrifty, patriotic Canadian citizens. Make them hard-working men and cleanly, nurturing women. And so, despite their qualifications, the Sisters did very little academic teaching at the school. They focused instead on religion, morality, and Canadian citizenship. They wrote “Idleness is the Mother of Misery” on the chalkboards, and often had children knit, sew, or repair clothing for themselves and staff and for the military during the war. This work was vocational training, and it built a sense of discipline.
In their Annals, the Sisters wrote much more about religious ceremony than class time. “We trust that Our Lady looked with pleasure on those baby hearts which became the dwelling place of her Divine Son for the first time,” one Sister wrote of the children’s first communion. They often spoke of prayers and visits to the chapel. “The Heart of Our Dear Lord in the Blessed Sacrament must have been delighted with the frequency and fervor of the visits made by our little children,” a Sister wrote at the end of 1930. “It was not even necessary to ask them to go, they were very anxious to do so and their behaviour was most edifying.”
The Sisters were perfect for this work. “Parents bring to the school spoiled children who cannot be trained at home,” wrote Sister Maura in a 1956 book detailing the history of the Sisters of Charity in Halifax, about their work as teachers. The teachers would then “correct, reprimand, punish—if necessary—the delinquent, and give back to the parents a notable convert.” To the Sisters, education for its own sake was a “pagan conception.” One Sister wrote of “saving the children from the calamity of Indianness.” It was frustrating work, as shown in their comments on discharge forms. Unlike their general comments about the children in the Annals, the Sisters’ teaching notes on individuals were rarely positive. “No brains,” one wrote. “No ambition whatsoever,” said another. “Under-average intelligence,” wrote another. Adjectives like “lazy” and “stubborn” were common, but the descriptions could be crueler. “Syliboy,” one sister wrote, “well named.” Another sister described a child as “mentally and morally weak.”
Some of the Sisters’ frustrations may have stemmed from the fact that they did not understand the cultural backgrounds of their students. As Sable and Francis point out in The Language of This Land, Mi’kma’ki, storytelling is one of the most important teaching methods in Mi’kmaw culture, and the story’s logic is not linear. Stories are told in the present tense, making the logic of the English language—and anything taught in that language—particularly challenging. Non-Mi’kmaw teachers often criticize Mi’kmaw students on their grammar and logical sequencing in essay writing without understanding this important cultural distinction. The Catholic Diocese blamed the Mi’kmaq for being difficult to understand. “The psychology of the Indian nature is often obscure to those not of that race,” it said, waxing poetic on the subject. “Silence and impassiveness are qualities in them fostered by age-long cultivation. What thoughts lie hid beneath the opaque gleam of their eyes? What emotions rise beneath their stoic countenances? Who can tell?” But it urged patience as the quality essential to changing the Mi’kmaq, to showing them the light and lifting them from misery. “Only by patience can alien virtues be brought to flower in the Indian character, which has by nature the qualities of loyalty, courage and reverence,” it reads. “Though the path to Indian souls is difficult, yet the reward is superlatively worth the trouble. To place the pearl of great price within their dusky hands, to brighten their shadowed lives with the splendor of the Gospel truth; surely this is exceeding great reward!”
The Canadian Way
With instructions from the federal government and the mother house, the Sisters taught the curriculum given to them by the Nova Scotia Department of Education. It was the same curriculum used in public schools, filled with the mythology of noble Europeans conquering the peoples and lands of the “New World.” Terms like “savage,” “squaw,” and “buck” were used as nouns for First Nations people. As ethnologist and author Ruth Holmes Whitehead notes, when Europeans won a battle it was a “triumph.” If the Mi’kmaq won, it was a “massacre.” Nova Scotia curriculum had three goals: promote “our way of life,” create responsible Canadian citizens, and foster a better understanding of different cultures. The actual material, however, depicted First Nations people—“Indians”—as wild, uncivilized, and ignorant. The Sisters did not teach true Mi’kmaw history or culture, and they knew nothing of it. Under the curriculum and educational culture of the era, the first objective made the third impossible.
The Sisters relied heavily on the Faith and Freedom series of textbooks. Against the directions of Indian Affairs, they used these texts along with standard provincial readers. According to Briar Dawn Ransberry, who reviewed both sets of texts for her Master’s thesis, the contents of the two are “remarkably similar.” Both texts promoted “our way of life,” the Euro-Canadian way, as having won out over the inferior Indian culture, a singular entity. The children in the Faith and Freedom texts prayed consistently, and their prayers were always answered.
Some Sisters used Social Studies: Primary–Grade VI, A Guide for Teachers to teach the children about the “courage, enterprise, faith and determination of the early explorers and pioneer settlers.” This text depicted “Indian medicine men” as con men who pretended they knew how to cure sickness. The Sisters taught their wards that they owed a great debt to those pioneers for, among other things, bringing them Christianity and civilization. Reservations, the text said, were created “to make the Indians self-supporting, to educate them and thus to hasten the time when, through intermarriage with other Canadians, they will perhaps cease to be a separate people.” By thus civilizing the Indian, the story went, the settlers would also eliminate an outdated way of life.
The Sisters also used a Grade 4 reader that included a 1919 poem called “Indian Children” that made clear Indians were a thing of the past. “Where we walk to school each day / Indian children used to play / All about our native land / Where the shops and houses stand,” the poem read. “What a different place today,” it concludes, “Where we live and work and play!” Astoundingly, this text is still used in many curricula today. There are YouTube videos of young white children reciting it for their adoring white parents. A Grade 5 speller told the story of a boy who always obeyed the law and grew up to be a successful lawyer, suggesting that in exchange for their obe
dience, children would be protected from moral harm. Another text, Success and Health, Canadian Hygiene Series, was used to teach about the importance of cleanliness. It told the story of two horses: one dirty and neglected, and another named Flora, who the children washed and brushed and loved. Wash yourself and be loved, it told them, or be dirty and hated.
The Sisters, who were not directly involved in running the Shubenacadie farm, did their part to teach the superiority of farming over a hunter-gatherer way of life. The texts they used called farming the more efficient way to get food, a key historical step toward Western industrialism. The texts downplayed the ways in which North American Indigenous peoples had helped European colonialists survive. “If the Indians had not already invented [the canoe], it seems likely that the white man would have had to invent it himself!” one read.
The Sisters also relied on textbooks to teach about the proper, civilized, Canadian way to live. Readers emphasized a Canadian nuclear family as the right form of social organization. Each family member had a specific role. Women looked after the house and two or three children. Men worked outside the home. A Grade 1 reader called The Little White House focused on the father of the family. The mother cooked and cleaned in the background and the children received gifts. The books rarely mentioned other family members like grandparents, aunties and uncles, let alone respected community Elders.
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