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TWO ROW TIMES
December 1, 2021
Ungodly Alliance - PART IV - Canada’s dirty little secret In this, the final installment of “Ungodly Alliance”, we talk with Rev. Dr. Wendy Fletcher, who served as the Anglican Church’s, Huron Diocese historian and researcher before taking the job as Dean and Principal of the Vancouver School of Theology. Several pleas by government-appointed doctors who were given the task of assessing the health of residential school students called for much closer attention to be paid to the health and welfare of children within the system, but they all fell on deaf ears. One communication which is found within the Anglican Archives and dated Sunday, January 27, 1907, between lawyer S.H. Blake and Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior, warns Oliver of possible liability for the frightening situation regarding the number and frequency of deaths of Native children in Canada’s Indian schools. The letter states, “doing nothing to obviate the preventable causes of death
... it was in the unpleasant nearness to the charge of manslaughter.” The total of money being spent for healthcare on the entire Native student population within Canada was only one-third of that being spent on the citizens of Ottawa alone. This was despite clear knowledge of the health concerns and death rates within the residential schools system. Secretary of the Indian Department, J.D. McLean, received a letter from J. Woodsworth, Principal of the Red Deer Industrial School, in which he calls the conditions at his school, “nothing less than criminal ... We have no isolation ward and no hospital equipment of any kind.” He reports that “the dead, the dying, the sick and the convalescent, were all together” in the same unventilated dorms. The same practice seemed to be entrenched as policy in all residential schools across Canada, including the Mohawk Institute. He pleaded with the department to do something as soon as possible since,
“at present, it is a disgrace.” Even in death, there was no dignity offered the victims of the system. Woodsworth told McLean that, to conserve costs, the dead children were being buried two to a grave. There is a chilling letter in the Canadian archives from a young Indian boy, which was intercepted and forwarded to Minister of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott. The child, only known as Edward B, wrote his parents saying, “We are going to tell you how we are treated. I am always hungry. We only get two slices of bread and one plate of porridge. Seven children ran away because they’re hungry. I am not sick. I hope you are the same too. I am going to hit the teacher if she is cruel to me again. We are treated like pigs, some of the boys eat cats and wheat. I never ask anyone to give me anything to eat. Some of the boys cried because they are hungry. Once I cry too because I was very hungry.” The cold-hearted Scott dismissed the letter order-
ing it not to be published because he considered it to be libelous. Sexual abuse was always close by at all residential schools right up to the closure of the last school in the late 1980s. Children were used for pleasure not only by some of the Principals and teachers but also by the support staffers and even financial donors. Forced sex was an all too normal form of punishment as well. Two British Columbia girls wrote of experiences they had with their Principal in a letter they gathered the courage to send directly to the B.C office of the Department of Indian Affairs. “He called me to his room. He says he’d strap me. He went into another room to get the strap. He told me to take off my jeans and my panty. Instead, I pulled it down to the knees. He tells me to kneel down. So I do. He gave me thirteen straps. He also waits a little moment every time I had the strap.... He puts his feet or I should say I had my body between his legs. That was kneeling down. Then
he lets me go. He waits a little after giving me the strap.” The second girl added her complaint to the page. “The first thing Father wanted me to go to his office so I did. He asks me a few questions. And then he brought me to the other office. He told me to kneel and then he pulled my skirt up and then pulled my pants down. He put my head between his legs and he started to give me the strap. I had the strap at 9:00 pm I had around 10 straps.” The letters seemed to disappear into a sea of denial and nothing was ever done. There were many other similar letters written over the years from schools across the country as well, but as late as 1990, the official response from the Department was, “We didn’t know.” In the case of Brantford’s Judge Hardy, who went on to become Ontario’s first Premier, the use of older, high school-aged Native girls by Brantford’s society families as part-
time housekeepers, many times resulted in unwanted pregnancies. There is also testimonial evidence that indicates Mohawk Institute Principal Zimmerman often took a few of the older, prettier, girls with him when he attended some of his “gentleman’s club” meetings. Some believe that is how Judge Hardy made initial contact with the Mohawk girl he admitted to impregnating. The resulting offspring were born at the Mush Hole, named Sarah Hardy, and lived almost her entire life there, first as a student, later as a teacher, all paid for by the good Judge Hardy. There are many reported cases of sexual abuse at the Mush Hole, and many of those victims are still alive today. But it doesn’t stop there. The fact is, the accumulated result of abuse in all of its forms, has seriously damaged a second, and in some cases, even a third generation of Six Nations families. “The legacy of the res-
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