Few Indian residential schools have seen the light of day in Quebec or the Maritimes. But French-Canadian nuns represented a large proportion of the staff at these boarding schools aimed at acculturation of native children, which were often led by Oblates, a French order invited to Canada in particular to promote the spread of French beyond the valley. of the St. Lawrence …
Two or three Oblates, ten nuns, often hundreds of children: this is the typical case of native boarding schools managed by the Catholic Church. “About 60% of residential schools were run by the Catholic Church,” says Jim Miller of the University of Saskatchewan, one of the most extensively researched historians in Canada. “The Oblates were in the foreground, but generally they worked with a female order established in Quebec. ”
Mgr Claude Champagne, himself an Oblate and bishop of Edmundston, specifies that the nuns taught “young children” and took care of care and stewardship.
The advantage for the Canadian government was that the nuns were paid very little, according to Brian Gettler, a specialist in the social history of colonialism at the University of Toronto. “In Protestant boarding schools, we had to hire lay people with a troubled past,” says Gettler. Were the children better treated where there were nuns than in Protestant boarding schools? “No, the sisters weren’t angels either,” says Gettler.
In an essay published in early June in the online journal Histoire Engaged, Catherine Larochelle, historian at the University of Montreal, writes that this involvement of religious orders means that the history of residential schools is “Quebecois”, even if it is not there haven’t been many boarding schools here. Ms. Larochelle also affirms that the influence of Albert Lacombe, one of the first Oblates born in Quebec and a major figure in the evangelization of the natives of the West, must be examined. “This is indeed one of the important questions to be resolved for the history of residential schools,” said Frédéric Barriault, director of research at the Center justice et faith, which has published critical essays on the Church. in this file. Mr. Barriault adds, moreover, that there was sometimes a “formal prohibition of the agent of the Department of Indian Affairs to communicate with the families”, which could hinder the notification of a death by the religious.
Ubiquitous in the West
To find out which religious communities were involved in the Native residential schools, Press scoured “Ecclesiastical Canada” for 1951. It is an exhaustive directory of the Church published each year, from 1887 to 1974. Over the 1508 pages of the 1951 edition, we see that the Oblates managed 22 “Indian schools”, and female orders, 42 schools, sometimes with the Oblates, sometimes alone. The Gray Nuns, with 11 schools, including one in North Dakota, and the Sisters of Providence, with 8 schools, top the list.
The “Indian industrial school” of Kamloops was co-directed by 4 English-speaking oblates and 11 sisters of Saint Anne (with 500 children), the boarding school of Marieval, then named “Indian school of Lac-Croche”, by 12 sisters of Saint -Joseph (for a little more than 100 children), and that of Cranbrook, then called “Saint-Eugène Indian school”, by two oblates. It should be noted that the Oblates were present in dozens of reserves as pastors, generally alone.
According to Anne-Hélène Kerbiriou, French historian who published in 1996 the book The Indians of Western Canada as seen by the Oblates, these religious were generally from Brittany and Belgium. However, even if one of their objectives was to increase the influence of Francophones in the West, the federal government imposed education in English in Native residential schools.
The difficult identification of the remains
On Wednesday, the aq’am community made it clear that it was for the moment impossible to say with certainty that the 182 remains found near the old Cranbrook boarding school were all those of children who attended it. The remains of these children were sometimes buried among others, making it difficult to identify them.
As in Cranbrook, the bodies of children discovered in Marieval and Kamloops had been buried in cemeteries according to Catholic rites, under wooden crosses which quickly disintegrated, explains Jim Miller. “The wooden cross was a Catholic burial place for the poor,” confirms Mr. Gettler. It would therefore not be mass graves, although the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has evoked testimonies that there were some in some residential schools, according to Jean-François Roussel, specialist in Indigenous residential schools at the Institute. of Religious Studies at the University of Montreal.
In parish cemeteries, one can find the name of a buried person (but not always the location of his grave) in a register. The identity of the buried children could therefore be found in the archives of religious communities. “It’s easier when residential schools used parish cemeteries, which have their own records,” Miller says.
PHOTO FROM THE SITE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN
Jim Miller is one of the Canadian historians who have worked the most on the subject of residential schools.
According to Mme Kerbiriou, the Oblates at the very least should have these records. “I saw a lot of group photos with dozens of people surrounding the Oblate pastor, where everyone was identified. Normally, Oblate missionaries kept a register for funerals and another for burials, according to Rémi Cadieux, an Oblate who was the last director of the native boarding school at Pointe-Bleue, near Roberval. “I don’t know if it was the same in the boarding schools, but I imagine,” says Father Cadieux, who is at the Oblate retirement home in Richelieu.
“Personally, I didn’t have any deaths at school. When the federal government took control of the schools in 1972, I left all the student records. I have had students who subsequently had difficulty accessing their school records. ”
The Jesuits, for their part, ran one Indian residential school in Spanish, west of Sudbury, Ontario. “Twenty years ago, we commissioned a historian to write the history of the boarding school, and he found the names of the children who died there,” explains Canadian Jesuit Provincial Erik Oland. “We installed a tombstone with their names in the cemetery where they were buried. The same local historian, David Shanahan, has just been rehired to go through the Jesuit archives again on the boarding school.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY ERIK OLAND
Memorial erected for deceased children at the Spanish Indian Residential School in the Municipal Cemetery
Brandon: campsite on the cemetery
The grounds of forgotten cemeteries have sometimes been converted. A controversy has been hitting a campsite in Brandon, Manitoba for the past month. It is because it is located on a cemetery of an Aboriginal residential school which was partly administered by the Catholic Church. Up to 104 remains are believed to be there, but an investigation is still underway to determine this.
The campsite was created by the municipality in the 1960s and then sold to its current owner in 2001. “Local indigenous communities used to go there to honor their deceased, but the new owner wanted to prevent them,” explains Brian Gettler. So there is a movement for the municipality to buy back the land. ”
Residential schools by the numbers
150,000: number of children who attended residential schools
3,200: number of children officially dead in residential school, a figure that could be 5 to 10 times higher in reality, according to historians
80: number of residential schools at the height of the system, in 1930
Sources: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canadian Encyclopedia
Sources: Jean-François Roussel, Government of Canada