From the archives: Children's spirits finally set free; Neglected graveyard holds aboriginal students from former Red Deer Industrial School

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On the banks of the Red Deer River, the children’s names were called out, one by one.

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This article was originally published on July 1, 2010 in the Edmonton Journal. It’s being republished today in light of the news remains of 215 children were found with ground-penetrating radar outside a residential school in Kamloops, B.C. 


On the banks of the Red Deer River, the children’s names were called out, one by one.

Benjamin Boyd, Samson Cree Nation. John Moonias, Louis Bull First Nation.

The list continued, naming nearly 350 children who attended the Red Deer Industrial School between 1893 and 1919. All are dead now — some died at the school itself and are buried in a long-neglected graveyard that was only recently rediscovered on private land.

Wilton Littlechild, a member of the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said Wednesday’s ceremony at Fort Normandeau, just outside Red Deer, will finally free the spirits of the children, including those who were sent to residential schools and never made it home.

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“They finish their journey because of what you’re doing,” he said, thanking the several hundred people who attended, many weeping as the long list of names was read.

“When they called my grandmother, that was heavy,” said Charles Bird, from Paul Band west of Edmonton, who helped collect small rocks given in memory of 52 students who attended the school from his area. His grandmother was Sarah House.

He’ll bring tokens back to the reserve. Then the elders will meet for prayer and will bury the rocks in a graveyard there.

Taz Johnson-McGillis came to remember her father, who attended residential school in Joussard, north of Edmonton. She, too, cried listening the long list of names.

Joseph Napoleon McGillis was eight when he was sent to school, 16 when he beat up a priest and got kicked out.

For years afterward he was an angry man. Johnson-McGillis remembers regularly waking up at 4 a.m. to the sound of her father kicking the wall and yelling to be left alone. He had continuing nightmares.

“He did that until he was 93, when he left us,” she said.

Now, several years after his death, she sometimes wakes up at 4 a.m. in the quiet of her own home. It must be his spirit, she said. “I say a little prayer and go back to sleep.”

Johnson-McGillis was there Wednesday in his memory.

“This helps. It acknowledges it. It names it and it pays to recognize the true history of my people. The truth is coming out and it’s being heard,” she said. “But the sadness, the historical trauma and the grief that comes with that, it’s going to take three generations for all that to heal.”

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File photo: JUNE 30, 2010 — Names of former students are read out during a ceremony to remember the children from First Nations and Métis communities who were students at the Red Deer Industrial School (1893-1919) in Red Deer, Alta. on June 30, 2010. (Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal).
File photo: JUNE 30, 2010 — Names of former students are read out during a ceremony to remember the children from First Nations and Métis communities who were students at the Red Deer Industrial School (1893-1919) in Red Deer, Alta. on June 30, 2010. (Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal). Photo by Ryan Jackson /Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

Florence Large, whose father went to Red Deer Industrial from age 13 to 18, said the naming ceremony helped. The elders called the children’s spirits, then fed them with pemmican and candy. They set out the food and prayed over it before anyone else could fill their plates for the feast.

Daniel Large died in 1956 without mentioning the school to his daughter, who only found out he attended when organizers discovered his name in the school records. But his daughter felt his presence Wednesday.

“I’m sure he’s here with us. That’s what this is all about,” she said. “We are eating with them.”

Don Hepburn, one of the organizers of Wednesday’s event, could only think of the parents while he listened to the list of names.

A member of Sunnybrook United Church, he was on the local committee that started researching the Red Deer graveyard five years ago and eventually contacted nearby bands to ask what they thought should be done.

Hepburn was vice-principal at a residential school in Inuvik from 1959 to 1961, and would travel by float plane to collect children, as young as six and seven, to go to school. Parents would hold their hands, waiting for the plane.

His own kids were that age then. “It’s hard to imagine sending them away (that young) for any length of time,” he says.

He knows for sure that one child he picked up didn’t make it back. A seven-year-old boy was killed in a playground accident when a pipe, only partially installed, collapsed on top of him.

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“I just can’t imagine what these parents felt,” he said. “Imagine that, dying all alone. I left teaching in Inuvik because I didn’t want to be part of that system anymore, a system that breaks up families.”

File photo: JUNE 30, 2010 — Supplied photos at a ceremony to remember the children from First Nations and Métis communities who were students at the Red Deer Industrial School (1893-1919) in Red Deer, Alta.
File photo: JUNE 30, 2010 — Supplied photos at a ceremony to remember the children from First Nations and Métis communities who were students at the Red Deer Industrial School (1893-1919) in Red Deer, Alta. Photo by Ryan Jackson /Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

Hard labour, disease relentless at Red Deer Industrial School

Disease and starvation were common on many aboriginal reserves. About 18,000 status Indians lived in Alberta in the 1870s, but by the 1920s only 6,000 remained.

– 1893 — The federal government agreed to spend $25,000 to erect two buildings for 80 students, then gave a contract for just one building at $18,000. For several years the building held 50 boys and girls, plus several staff members and the principal’s family. The students got three hours of academic instruction a day. The boys spent the rest of the time building fences, clearing land, repairing the buildings and sheds. The girls worked in the dairy, bakery, laundry and sewing room. The students attended school year round, and Methodist aboriginal parents sent their children from as far away as Saddle Lake and Whitefish Lake.

– 1894 — Following a decade of en-thusiasm for industrial schools, the federal government moved to a per-student grant and severely limited funding. Clifford Sifton, minister of the interior, told the Methodist administrators that funding for aboriginal education had reached “a high-water mark.” Staff wages were half the average teacher salary in the territory. Although the school was intended as a high school for children 14 to 16, records show children as young as five were enrolled.

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– 1894 –The first principal claimed the boys’ washroom was contaminating the water well. School records indicate 17 of the 62 students who enrolled between 1983 and 1985 died prematurely, either at the school or within a decade of leaving it.

– 1895 — Indian agent Daniel Clink, after returning runaways to the school, complained to the Indian Commissioner that one of the teachers had hit a boy on the head with a stick, shoved another girl to the floor and exchanged blows with another. He said parents often complained about corporal punishment at the school. Shortly afterward, the department changed the rules to only allow Indian agents to report on the results of official inspections.

– 1897 — A second school building was built, but enrolment still declined. Some parents boycotted the school because of the corporal punishment, high rates of illness, the amount of physical labour required of the children and the distance of the school from the communities. By 1900, the school had space for 90 students, but only 60 attended. Principal C.E. Somerset blamed the parents’ “lack of interest in educational matters.”

File photo: JUNE 30, 2010 — Supplied photos at ceremony to remember the children from First Nations and Métis communities who were students at the Red Deer Industrial School (1893-1919) in Red Deer.
File photo: JUNE 30, 2010 — Supplied photos at ceremony to remember the children from First Nations and Métis communities who were students at the Red Deer Industrial School (1893-1919) in Red Deer. Photo by Ryan Jackson /Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

– 1900 — A shifting focus in the Methodist Church saw it spending more on its Chinese and Japanese missions than in North American aboriginal communities.

– 1901 — A Red Deer doctor visited the school once a week and recommended a small hospital to separate contagious students. The federal department refused.

– 1903 — In an effort to make up for low federal funding, the school increased the amount of land students farmed from 75 acres to 340 acres by 1907; the children cleared the land mostly by hand. The hard work alienated parents, who increasingly chose not to send their children to the school, resulting in lower school allotments from the federal government. Parents could choose boarding schools or day schools closer to their communities run by other religious denominations.

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– 1907 — A federal investigation into high rates of tuberculosis at residential schools found six children had died from it in Red Deer that year, by far the highest death rate among industrial schools.

– 1907 — New principal Arthur Barner ended corporal punishment and brought in summer holidays in an effort to win back parents. He started a mission band and a library. Desertions stopped and enrolment slowly increased. Five students went on to attend Alberta College in Edmonton after graduation.

– 1909 — The federal government decided Metis and non-status Indians were ineligible to attend. Enrolment fell again. The Samson Cree continued to boycott the school, saying it was too far from their Hobbema community. The Methodist Church considered closing the school, but worried families would convert to Catholicism if a Methodist school wasn’t available. The school ran a $5,000 deficit. A federal moratorium on repairs to the school remained.

– 1918 — The Spanish flu struck. With no isolation ward, five students died within two days. The children were buried like “paupers,” reported the principal, two to a grave.

– 1919 — The school closed. Any orphans were sent to Brandon until the Edmonton Industrial School opened in 1923.

Source: A 1993 thesis by Uta Fox, The Failure of the Red Deer Industrial School, written at the University of Calgary

Compiled by Elise Stolte

estolte@postmedia.com

© 2010 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.

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