June 1900, Phoenix. (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)
Red Cloud Indian School is taking the lead among Christian-run schools in coming to terms with its assimilationist past.
The Jesuits have given Red Cloud a $20,000 grant to help in the work,
including conducting searches with ground-penetrating radar for
unmarked graves, and have allocated $50,000 to hire an archivist for one
year to examine the order’s boarding school history at its archives in
St. Louis.
School leaders are also working with tribal representatives about
searching the school grounds on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South
Dakota for remains of students who died there.
“The Catholic Church needs to recognize that honesty, being
forthright and vulnerable are far more powerful and more healing than
being reticent, restrictive and closed,” said Maka Black Elk, Oglala
Lakota, executive director for Truth and Healing at Red Cloud Indian
School.
Churches are joining the U.S. federal government in facing the
often-brutal history of Native boarding schools, which forced children
from their families into schools where they were often abused, underfed
and used as virtual slave labor. Some died there without ever going
home.
U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna) launched the Federal Boarding School Initiative in June directing the agency to prepare a report detailing historical records of schools operated by the U.S. government.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna). (Photo by Leigh Vogel / Getty Images)
The Initiative, however, has no authority over Christian
denominations, which operated about one-third of the approximately 400
Indian boarding schools in the U.S.
With more than 100 schools, various Catholic orders operated most of
the Christian Indian boarding schools, some long before President
Ulyssis Grant’s 1869 Peace Policy formally created the federal school
system.
Christians began operating boarding schools as early as the 1600s
when Jesuits and Puritans separated Native children from their families
in order to receive “civilizing” Christian instruction.
Christian missionaries were paid by the federal government to operate
Indian schools beginning in 1819 with the Indian Civilization Fund Act.
But the heyday of federal Indian boarding schools came under Grant’s
policy.
Indian Country Today reached out to leadership in the
Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal and Quaker churches,
denominations that operated most of the schools, asking what they are
doing now to address the history.
(Examining who was in charge of some of the residential schools is disturbing... TLH) A group of young girls practicing basket weaving on the front lawn of Coqualeetza
KNOTT, CAROLINE SARAH (Tate),
Methodist lay missionary and teacher; b. 1842 in London, England,
eldest daughter of John Knott, a piano maker, and Caroline Sarah---; m.24Oct.1879 the ReverendCharles Montgomery Tate in Fort Simpson (Lax Kw’alaams), B.C.; d.7May1930 inVictoria, British Columbia.
Caroline Knott came to
Upper Canada with her family from England in 1856 or early in 1857.
Shortly after their arrival in Hamilton, Caroline’s mother died, leaving
her in charge of seven brothers and sisters. When they grew up, she
applied to the general committee of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary
Society for mission work. She was posted as a schoolteacher to
aboriginal children, first at Rice Lake and then at Sault SteMarie.
When the call came for teachers to go to the Methodist mission at Fort
Simpson in 1875, Caroline responded and was chosen, despite the fact
that she was already 33 and was somewhat older than most applicants. At
Fort Simpson she established herself as a good worker, winning the
esteem of prominent Methodist missionary Thomas Crosby*.
Four years after her arrival, she met and married Charles Tate.
Together they embarked on over 31 years of missionary service, the
longest of any couple in British Columbia, including postings at Bella
Bella, Rivers Inlet, Burrard Inlet, Clayoquot, and Chilliwack.
Caroline Tate was both
remarkable and typical of her time. The mere fact that her missionary
career lasted so long indicates incredible fortitude and faith.
Historian Rosemary Gagan has argued that home mission work, particularly
among the First Nations, was often more physically and psychologically
demanding than similar work in Asia. The majority of home missionaries
left their jobs within five years and few continued until their
retirement. Even at the time of her marriage, Caroline had outlasted
many of her contemporaries in Fort Simpson. In total, she worked as a
missionary among the First Nations for over 35 years and spent an
additional 15 years in church organizations in Victoria. In many of her
attitudes towards her work and towards the indigenous peoples with whom
she associated, however, she was typical of her time.
As a missionary,
Caroline lived an adventurous life for which little in her previous
experience would have prepared her. She worked at a time of high
mortality among the First Nations and so witnessed countless epidemics
and deaths. Always reliant on the goodwill of aboriginal leaders for
their survival, the Tates boarded in traditional longhouses, travelled
in canoes over the ocean, and, when they reached a new posting, often
had to build the mission from the ground up. On their arrival at Bella
Bella in 1881, for instance, the crew of the steamer Princess Louise
made a raft out of the lumber the Tates had brought to construct a
house and a church and set them adrift on it as they approached the
village. The Heiltsuk chief Humcheet organized a party to rescue the
missionaries and welcomed them into his home. While other missionaries
soon tired of the damp isolation of the northwest coast, the Tates
endured.
Despite her many varied
experiences in the field, Caroline Tate shared the negative attitudes
towards aboriginal peoples then common among missionaries. Like them,
she disdained aboriginal culture, particularly the feasting rituals
associated with marriage and death. She approached indigenous healers
with fear and loathing. Her attitudes towards women were mixed. She
frequently blamed the deaths of children on what she saw as the poor
housekeeping skills of their mothers. Yet she also viewed herself as
saving indigenous women from a misogynist culture. On a speaking tour of
Ontario in 1897 she reported to audiences of the Woman’s Missionary
Society and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union that only the work of
missionaries saved the lives and honour of aboriginal women and
children. Though Indian agents and others rightly disputed her claims,
she reported that infanticide was widespread, that children were sold
into marriage, and that widows were often killed or maimed. She
supported the ban on the potlatch on the grounds that the traditional
feasting abused women by forcing them to generate wealth by
prostitution. Her diary is replete with references to her efforts to
disrupt aboriginal funerary practices with prayer and singing. She
reports few aboriginal women friends, although her husband’s diary
frequently refers to indigenous men he respected and relied on. Her fear
of aboriginal culture never abated and fuelled her work to replace it
with Christianity.
Like many other
missionaries, Tate believed that cultural change could best be
accomplished by removing children from their families. At Chilliwack she
started to take into her home aboriginal girls who were orphaned or who
were estranged from their community. Out of this endeavour emerged the
Coqualeetza Home (later the Coqualeetza Institute), a Methodist boarding
school which opened in 1889 on Stó:lo land at Sardis. Like that of many
residential schools, Coqualeetza’s legacy is mixed. It was not immune
from the cultural, emotional, and physical abuse that plagued other
institutes.
A report issued in 1905, after the Tates had moved on to
another post, stated that over 20 per cent of Coqualeetza graduates died
shortly after they left the school and pointed to poor institutional
conditions as the cause. Yet the institute also helped produce a
generation of aboriginal leaders in the province, of whom Haida chief
Peter Kelly* is the most prominent example.
The Tates retired to
Victoria in 1910. Caroline Tate remained active in church work until
1925, becoming the first member of the Woman’s Missionary Society of the
Methodist Church of British Columbia. She died in 1930. Charles Tate
died three years later.
AO, RG
22-205, no.2073. BCA, MS-0303. British Columbia Vital Statistics Agency
(Victoria), Marriage registration records, 1872-1925 (mfm. at Victoria
Geneal. Soc.). LAC, RG 10, 6422, file 869-1, pt.1; RG 31, C1, 1861,
Hamilton, [Ont.], StLawrence Ward: 368; 1871, Hamilton, StAndrew’s Ward, div.1: 65. New Outlook (Toronto), 4 June 1930. Victoria Daily Times, 7 May 1930. Directory, Hamilton, 1858, 1862-63. R. R. Gagan, A sensitive independence: Canadian Methodist women missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881-1925 (Montreal and Kingston, Ont., 1992). Jan Gould, Women of British Columbia (Saanichton, B.C., 1975). C. M. Tate, “A story of missionary adventure,” Western Recorder (Victoria), December 1929: 20-22. Western Recorder, May 1930. Margaret Whitehead, “Women were made for such things: women missionaries in British Columbia, 1850s-1940s,” Atlantis (Wolfville, N.S.), 14 (1988-89): 141-50.
While the assimilationist agenda of
the government and church were being implemented daily at Coqualeetza,
work was done by two principals to introduce Indigenous practices into
the curriculum for the students. Principal Raley insisted on displaying
approximately 800 pieces of Aboriginal artwork around the school, all
from his personal collection. Raley was the one who suggested
improvements to the new building, and it would be in this new building
that he would introduce basket weaving and wood carving. R.C. Scott, the
principal who succeeded Raley, continued this forward. He introduced
carding, spinning, dyeing, knitting, and weaving for the girls. For the
boys he introduced machinery to aid in carving, and encouraged the
production of miniature totem poles. After officials began to question
his focus, he promised to direct more attention to practical training
that would be “useful” for the students after leaving Coqualeetza.
Nevertheless, administrators traveling to the school noted that
Coqualeetza stood out in its well kept facility and highly regarded
education. Although the motivations may not have been right, it was
clear that many of the staff members deeply cared for the students.
(We will have to wait and see if they also have hidden unmarked graves...)
