Differing Visions: Administering Indian Residential Schooling in Prince Albert, 1867-1995

Abstract

Indian residential schooling is a hot topic in Canada these days, but most of the discussion has focussed on its role in child abuse and the suppression of Aboriginal culture and language, accompanied by a chorus of church and government mea culpas and hand-wringing for these wrongs. But there is much more to residential schooling than this. Over the past century the provision of residences for pupils was for many Aboriginal groups in northern Canada the only practical way of gaining access to formal education. Many Indian villages were too small to have their own fully equipped schools, integration into local non-Aboriginal schools, if such existed, involved barriers of prejudice, housing on reserves was seldom adequate to allow for home study and many of the parents were out on the trapline during most of the school season. I would argue that far more damage was done, for instance, to the Innu in Labrador because residential schools were not made available when they were settled in villages in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, parents who were suddenly forced to send they children to day school had no other option but to stop hunting, undermining their self-respect and to a great extent leading to the devastating social problems that followed.Noel Dyck, who has a long record of research and publication, much of it on Saskatchewan Indian politics and administration, has now published a detailed analysis of the administrative history of Indian residential schooling in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Among his findings, he shows that parents in the outlying communities understood the need for this kind of school, despite the heavy-handed paternalism and ethnocentric insensitivity of church and Indian Affairs authorities. They worked together with the urban Aboriginal community to confront the problems, first by pressing for, and later by themselves directly undertaking, reform, rather than, as occurred in some other places, abandoning the residential schooling idea.Dyck's account, which for much of the book involves a three-cornered struggle between church, government and Indians, begins in 1866 with the arrival of church missions to the Indians in what was to become northern Saskatchewan, first, briefly, Presbyterian, followed by Anglican. The settlement and growth of Price Albert, where Emmanuel College began to train Native and non-Native missionaries in 1879, was in part linked to the administration of Indians, in which the Anglican Church and the Department of Indian Affairs became the key players. …