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Shubenacadie Residential School

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Photo by Lorna Lillo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mi’kmaw Elder Doug Knockwood and his wife Michelle reside on Indian Brook Indian Reserve, Hants County, Nova Scotia, part of the Sipekne’katik Band. I visited Doug on February 19 and we talked about his upcoming book, Doug Knockwood: Mi’kmaw Elder, Stories, Memories, Reflections.

We also reminisced about the past and had a laugh about the time in the 1950s when I was attending New York City’s New Year’s Eve celebrations and in the midst of about one million people we ran into each other. Like finding a needle in a haystack.

Doug grew up with his parents, Ann Mary and Freeman Bernard Knockwood, and their extended family, including his grandfather Sam, in Halfway River, Cumberland County. Sam was blind, but for Doug a great teacher.

Doug Knockwood spent two years at the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School

When Doug was five or six years old he was separated from his family. Against their wishes, the Indian Agent had him enrolled in the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. This was possible because, at the time, the provisions of the Indian Act enabled the Canadian government to do just about anything it wanted with Registered Indians, who were classified as Wards of the Crown.

Doug spent about two years in the institution before he was returned to his family. Doug didn’t recognize it at the time, but realized later in life that this was his first experience with overt racism. Such treatment, he learned, was the norm for his people. It created in many of us large inferiority complexes.

In Doug’s case, it probably sowed the seeds that grew into two addictions. They controlled his life for 34 years, traumatizing his family and nearly costing him his life.

Doug’s addiction to nicotine began when he was about five years old. He started smoking butts left behind by others. Slowly but surely the habit grew into a strong craving.

Alcohol came into his life when he was around 11.

Doug: “At first I thought I had control of the nicotine and alcohol addictions; however, with the passing of several years, it dawned on me that they had me well hooked!”

During the next 34 years, Doug would join the Canadian armed forces, which would increase his dependence on alcohol and cause his family to break up. After being discharged he hit the skids; sometimes he’d have a period of stability, then he’d be back at it.

Along the way to his near destruction he contracted tuberculosis.

Doug: “It was 1953. In Gagetown we were sleeping in tents on rolled up mattresses, and it rained for about 11 days steady and we were all wet, cold, and I lost my voice. One morning I couldn’t answer my name on parade. They put me in the military hospital. I was there for seven weeks. Finally they decided to send me to Saint John, Lancaster Military Hospital, and I was in there for 40 weeks. They took x-rays and the doctor came to my room to report.

“Now there were probably half a dozen of us who used to play penny ante. We were playing cards when the doctor came down. We were playing penny ante on my bed.

“The doctor said, ‘I have good news and bad news. You have an infection in your lung. I guess we’re going to be transferring you to Halifax, Camp Hill. You have a case of tuberculosis.’

“The guys playing cards asked, ‘What is tuberculosis?’ The doctor said, ‘Guys, if I were you, I wouldn’t be playing cards with him anymore.’

“One of the guys dropped his cards and money and left.”

Even with this diagnosis, Doug continued to feed his addictions. He was locked up in a secure sanatorium because he would take off from voluntary ones to try to satisfy his cravings. Lung and other operations followed but it did not sway him.

I asked Doug, what caused you to finally quit?

Doug: “By 1964, my health had declined to the extent that [cigarettes and alcohol] were making me very sick, and when you consume alcohol you smoke like a stovepipe. I had spent several years in the sanatorium with contagious TB and had had several operations. I was in Halifax at the time I finally had enough and was staying at the city’s jail when AA offered me a chance to change my life and I took it. AA became my life raft.”

As a reformed nicotine addict myself—90 cigarettes a day—and having found my three-year withdrawal from it a traumatic experience, I posed this question to my friend: which of the addictions was hardest to quit?

Doug: “Nicotine.” Said without a moment’s hesitation.

Knockwood receives an honorary doctorate from Acadia University (photo: Dan Callis)

At the age of 88, he no longer has any inclination to indulge in either of the addictions that took him down such a rocky road.

When he finally conquered his addictions, Doug became successful in helping others who had fallen into the same downward spiral he had. He was instrumental in establishing detox centres and became a sought-after addictions counsellor.

The following are quotes from his son, Bernie Knockwood, and Vera Marr, a grateful benefactor of his wisdom and services.

Bernie Knockwood: “When Dad talks to people, there’s that innate understanding…he knows where he’s coming from and he’s coming from the same place they are…a combination of knowing who he is as a person [and] his life experiences.

“I’m really proud of my dad. I’m totally amazed that after all these years and all the things he’s gone through, and all the things I’ve gone through, and my sister, all of us—that we can still come together and be a loving family.

“We’re not tearing at each other and saying, ‘You did this, you did that, why did you do this? Why did you do that?’ …because we know the pain of not being there for somebody. And I’m really glad…he’s my Dad. That’s all I can say.”

Vera Marr: “If Doug wasn’t there, there would be a big chapter in our lives that would be gone. Lord knows how we would have ended up. Our dad was a strong man, but even strong men need help. I think the most important part was that we knew Doug was coming to visit Dad. There was someone who would come by to take care of Dad, because he had to be taken care of. He took care of us eight kids and his wife. Doug was always his constant. Everybody should have one constant in their life…Ours would be Doug.”

Doug Knockwood’s life story is an inspiring one, about the courage and resilience needed to overcome powerful addictions.

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Munsch books

Children across Nova Scotia can now read seven iconic children’s books in their mother tongue

A grandmother tucks a child into bed and sings a song from a book with a tune she creates herself. The words are by Robert Munsch. “Ksalultes iapjiw, ta’n teli-pkitawsi. Ksalultes iapjiw, nijanites ki’l” she sings, her voice warbling sweetly. The child feels loved.

The book is Ksalultes Lapjiw. You may know it as Love You Forever, one of the most popular among Munsch’s dozens of children’s books. It’s one of seven that were recently translated into Mi’kmaw by MK, or Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey, the organization that has coordinated the Mi’kmaw education system in Nova Scotia since 1997.

MK was founded three decades after the closure of the disastrous Shubenacadie Indian Residential School as the provincial education system continued to fail Mi’kmaw students. It put the power for Mi’kmaw education in the hands of the Mi’kmaq and encourages the education and employment of Mi’kmaw teachers. This way, students can grow up understanding their own culture and speaking their own language, opportunities that were often denied to their parents and grandparents.

An essential component in this effort is language immersion. But MK struggles to find enough teaching resources in Mi’kmaw. “In 2010, the school principals asked us to look for everyday books in Mi’kmaw,” Janice Ciavaglia, MK’s literacy specialist, recalls.

Zophia Nicholas and Stephanie Isaac read Ksalultes Lapjiw, which you may know as Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever. Photo courtesy of Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey.
Zophia Nicholas and Stephanie Isaac read Ksalultes Lapjiw, which you may know as Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever. Photo courtesy of Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey

There were several Mi’kmaw books but they weren’t the ones most Canadian children would know. While it’s important to encourage original and traditional Mi’kmaw stories, the teachers also wanted fun, familiar material to get kids excited about reading their language.

Ciavaglia and her colleague, Blair Gould, cast their memories back to their childhoods and thought of Munsch. His frenetic, kid-centric stories have helped raise millions of Canadians since 1979.

He’d visited one of their Cape Breton schools. At the time he was making 50 appearances a year, meeting kids and sharing stories with them, creating them orally and refining them with repeated telling. Even the Elders were fans of Munsch. “We went on his website and asked if he’d be willing to let us translate his books,” Ciavaglia says.

Munsch said go right ahead. MK hired translators Elizabeth Paul and Barbara Sylliboy to navigate dialects from 13 different Mi’kmaw First Nations. “They met regularly with Elders for a year,” Ciavaglia says.

The translators hit some snags in the process. Munsch’s Angela’s Airplane was to be one of the translated books but there is no Mi’kmaw word for airplane. Another Munsch classic, I Have to Go, was translated into the more literal I Have to Go Pee in order to make sense in Mi’kmaw.

But in other ways, the excitable children and adults in Munsch’s stories were a natural fit for the Mi’kmaw language, which is dynamic, action-based, heavy on the verbs and based on interrelationships between people, animals and things. “He uses a lot of moving words and his noise words [VAROOMMM] work well,” Ciavaglia says. “His words are super dynamic and we like that he’s a Canadian author.”

In all, MK translated seven books including I’m So Embarrassed, Andrew’s Loose Tooth, Thomas’ Snowsuit, A Promise is a Promise, Mud Puddle, I Have To Go and Love You Forever. MK worked with Eastern Woodlands Publishing in Truro to produce 1,000 copies of each book, half for schools and libraries and the other half to sell. “A Munsch book is now a staple present in the Mi’kmaw community.”

MK also produced a teacher-lesson plan to accompany the texts. The books and lesson plans have been in use since the start of the school year.

Ciavaglia and Gould had hoped Munsch could come for the launch but “he had had a stroke and couldn’t join us,” Ciavaglia says. Since his stroke in 2008, Munsch has significantly cut down on public appearances. Ciavaglia thinks he’d be pleased at the reception from all over the world, including from a similar immersion program for Maori students in New Zealand. “We had to hire somebody just to ship out all the orders.”

The most important reaction comes from home. Elders are happy to read the stories and children are thrilled to listen to the cadence and humour of their own language. The jokes are even funnier in Mi’kmaw. “And the kids are super proud to hear Mi’kmaw in the public library and other places where it’s not normally spoken,” Ciavaglia says.

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Photo courtesy of the Sisters of Charity, Halifax Congregational Archives
Photo courtesy of the Sisters of Charity, Halifax Congregational Archives

Chris Benjamin’s latest book shines a light on the people behind the Shubenacadie Residential School

Isabelle Knockwood’s searing memoir of her time at the Shubenacadie Residential School burned a question into Halifax writer Chris Benjamin’s mind.

“As a European-Canadian myself, I wondered: what the hell were we thinking about with this school? Why did it seem like a good idea?” he asks. 

Knockwood’s Out of the Depths (Roseway Publishing, 1992), with its cover photo of the school engulfed in flames, shows the school from a survivor’s perspective. The cover of Benjamin’s book shows rows of students smiling for the camera while a nun stands in the background. This book is a forensic examination into the minds of the people who built and ran the school.  

Indian School Road Chris Benjamin Nimbus PublishingIndian School Road: Legacies of the Shubenacadie Residential School (Nimbus Publishing) marks a new direction for Benjamin. He’s written a novel, Drive-by Saviours (Fernwood Publishing, 2010) and the non-fiction Eco-Innovators (Nimbus Publishing, 2011), but this was his first historical book. He took the task seriously, digging deep into the archives to find the real-time voices of the people who built the school. 

Read a review of Indian School Road: Legacies of the Shubenacadie Residential School (Nimbus Publishing) 

The idea started in 1844, when the Province of Canada (today’s Ontario and Quebec) began to separate First Nations children from their families and the “half-civilized” reserves to make them “Canadian.” Prime Minister John A. Macdonald later explained the broader goal was “to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people.”

“The goal was to make Indian men farmers and women homemakers. They felt that would finally civilize them and make them like us – make them true Canadians,” Benjamin explains.

Find more Nova Scotia history:

The proposed solution to the “Indian problem” rolled out across Canada in the late 1800s, reaching the Maritimes in 1930.

Nova Scotia ignored reports that existing residential schools were killing half of their students through diseases like tuberculosis, poor conditions and child abuse. “They were horrible places of infestation, partly because they were poorly built and poorly funded. And yet they built Shubenacadie like every other school,” Benjamin says. “Indian Affairs had it in their mind that if they made [the children] into farmers, and modelled them after Europeans, then they would become like Europeans. That was the goal of the system.”

Sisters of Charity, Halifax Congregational Archives #1708
Students at the residential school made pottery, which was later sold to help subsidize the school’s costs. The children did not receive any money for their pieces. Photo credit: the Sisters of Charity Halifax Congregational Archives

Indian agents scoured reserves and took children whose home situations they disapproved of. Benjamin says in some cases, the child appears to have been in genuine danger, but often it was cultural differences, or kids who disobeyed teachers at day schools, or orphans. “Over the years it became more and more of a penal [institution]. It was almost like juvie, where they sent kids that were acting up in class,” he says.

Some Mi’kmaq parents harnessed its fierce reputation as a boogeyman to frighten their kids into behaving better. At the school, the nuns prohibited the Mi’kmaw language, and never discussed Mi’kmaw culture, other than as a stain of shame. “It was about, ‘Act white. Be White. Stop being Mi’kmaq,” Benjamin says. 

Over the three decades it was open (it closed in 1967), about 2,000 children attended the school. It failed to produce farmers or homemakers, and largely failed to make Mi’kmaq kids into Europeans – a blessing, many would say. But it caused deep damage. “I would say the people who left the school were pretty messed up by it. Everyone was different, but there was a legacy of personal problems.”

025 A simple memorial-Chris Benjamin
A simple memorial stands on the site of the former school. Photo credit: Chris Benjamin

Many struggled with the legacy of sexual abuse and violence, and from being cut out of their families and culture at a very young age. Many adopted the motto heard often at the Truth and Reconciliation hearings: My revenge is to succeed. People like Knockwood, who became a distinguished academic and writer, and Rita Joe, whose poem “I Lost My Talk” opens Benjamin’s book.

Benjamin says the Mi’kmaq people he spoke to found healing in returning to their culture, in embracing the language and traditions. He wrote the book for the 95 per cent of Maritimers who aren’t Mi’kmaq.

“When I talk to white people about it, I find they’re generally sympathetic. They realize it was a terrible thing and it makes them sad to think about it. But if you flesh these conversations out too often, I end up hearing things like, ‘What Aboriginal People need to do is …’ I feel that’s missing the point. This whole thing came about from white people thinking they knew what aboriginal people should do with themselves.”

There never was an Indian problem, he says; it was always a European-Canadian problem. Benjamin argues that the school should be seen more a part of European-Nova Scotian history than Mi’kmaq history, and so white Maritimers should study it carefully. 

“It’s the kind of self-education we need to do to be good citizens,” he concludes. “What we do about it once we know about it? Well, that’s for each of us to figure out.” 

Top photo: But for rare occasions, the Shubenacadie Residential School was divided by gender. Photo credit: the Sisters of Charity Halifax Congregational Archives

Find more Nova Scotia history:

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Blank white book w/pathI opened Chris Benjamin’s Indian School Road expecting to learn about a dark chapter in Mi’kmaw history. Instead, I found a forensic examination of an even darker chapter in European-Nova Scotian history: the Shubenacadie Residential School.

As Benjamin makes clear in the book’s dedication to his children, “even at its ugliest, the truth is less repulsive than lies.” And this is an ugly truth indeed. Instead of focusing on the victims of horrifying sexual and physical abuse, of scientific experimentations involving starving children and of people brutally cut apart from their culture, Benjamin skillfully turns the lens onto the perpetrators.

This is not to downplay the survivors, but to reframe the debate around the people who have somehow remained invisible until now – the bureaucrats who founded the school, the nuns and priests who ran it, and the numerous public officials and journalists who looked straight at sadistic abuse and saw a noble attempt to “civilize” Mi’kmaq children.

Indian School Road is meticulously researched and reads like an agreed statement of facts for a terrible crime. And that’s what you realize: the whole thing was a terrible crime, but one for which no one was ever charged. Mi’kmaq readers may gain insight into why they and their parents or grandparents were thrown into such a nightmare. Non-Mi’kmaq readers will stare straight at an attempted cultural genocide carried out (or tacitly supported by) our parents and grandparents.

It’s a repulsive truth, but reading this book will at least get us past the comfortable lies.

Indian School Road: Legacies of the Shubenacadie Residential School
By Chris Benjamin
$24.95, paperback, 256 pp.
Nimbus Publishing, September 2014