The History and Legacy of Residential Schools

What the Schools Were Built to Do

In 1879, Nicholas Flood Davin wrote a report for the federal government recommending a national system of residential schools for First Nations children. Davin argued that day schools did not separate children from their families and communities enough. His report became the blueprint for a system that ran 140 schools across Canada, funded by the federal government and operated by the Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and United churches.

Indian Affairs Deputy Superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott stated the goal in 1920: to continue removing children until "there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic." Removing children from their families was the method. Replacing their languages and spiritual practices with an English-speaking, Christian identity was the goal. About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children passed through this system between the 1880s and 1996, when the last federally operated school closed in Saskatchewan.

Two Schools in the Qu'Appelle Valley

Two of these schools stood inside what is now File Hills Qu'Appelle Tribal Council territory.

The Qu'Appelle Indian Industrial School opened in 1884 on the White Calf (Wa-Pii Moos-Toosis) reserve of Star Blanket Cree Nation, near the village of Lebret. It was one of the first three industrial schools built after the Davin Report and the last to close in Saskatchewan, in 1998. Run first by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Grey Nuns, it grew from 86 students in 1886 to 280 by 1914. A fire destroyed the main building in 1932. Girls were moved into the Fort Qu'Appelle town hall, where a government inspector described bunks stacked five tiers deep and no bathing facilities, and said he doubted anyone could escape alive in a fire.

The File Hills Indian Residential School opened in 1889 on the boundary of Okanese First Nation, run first by the Presbyterian Church and then, after 1925, the United Church. Former student Melvina McNabb recalled being hit for speaking Cree at age seven and learning English by listening to other girls in secret. In 1893, a school inspector reported that children at File Hills spoke only English, "even at play," and that one boy "had forgotten almost entirely his native dialect." The school's own records treated language loss as evidence the program was working.

File Hills fed into the File Hills Colony, a program Indian Agent William Morris Graham built on Peepeekisis land starting in 1898. Graduates were resettled there as individual homesteaders, cut off from ceremony and from contact with anyone still practising traditional ways. Twelve square miles of Peepeekisis land went to Colony placements in 1902, and 210 more acres followed in 1906, leaving under 8,000 acres for the Nation's original members. The government toured royalty and foreign officials through the Colony as proof its assimilation policy worked.

What the Legacy Looks Like Today

The File Hills Colony split Peepeekisis into two groups with different land rights and different band membership, a divide the Nation is still working through. Members filed a specific claim in 1986, and the Indian Claims Commission found Canada had breached its obligations. Canada and Peepeekisis reached a $150 million settlement in 2020.

At Lebret, Star Blanket Cree Nation began a ground-penetrating radar search of the former school grounds in 2021, work that continues today. Across Saskatchewan, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission confirmed 566 child deaths at residential schools, a number the Commission itself called an undercount. In 2021, searches at the former Marieval school on Cowessess land found 751 unmarked graves.

These schools tried to break the transmission of language and culture from one generation to the next. Survivors describe the result in their own families: grandparents who stopped speaking Cree or Saulteaux to their children because school had punished them for it, and children separated from land and ceremony before they were old enough to choose for themselves. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission called this system "cultural genocide." The task facing First Nations communities today, including the five FHQ Tribal Council Nations these students call home, is rebuilding what that system spent a century trying to break.

References

1. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Final Report. National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

2. Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. "Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement." Government of Canada. rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca

3. University of Regina, Faculty of Education. "Lebret (Qu'Appelle) Indian Industrial Residential School." Shattering the Silence. uregina.ca

4. University of Regina, Faculty of Education. "File Hills Indian Residential School." Shattering the Silence. uregina.ca

5. Peepeekisis Cree Nation. "About Peepeekisis." peepeekisis.com