Honouring the Truth Reconciling for the Future

126 • Truth & Reconciliation CommissionStaff outside the entrance of the Brandon, Manitoba, school in 1946. National Film Board of Canada. Photothèque, Libraryand Archives Canada, PA-048575.their services, the Roman Catholic schools could “afford to have a much larger staffthan where ordinary salaries are paid, and there is consequently less work for eachto do, without interfering with the quality of the work done.” 580 The Protestant schoolsrecruited many of their staff members through missionary organizations.Many of the early school staff members believed they were participating in a moralcrusade. In her history of the McDougall Orphanage, the predecessor of the Morleyschool in Alberta, Mrs. J. McDougall described the work of the mission and orphanageas “going out after the wild and ignorant and bringing them into a Christian home andblessing the body, culturing the mind and trying to raise spiritual vision.” 581Staff members were often motivated by a spirit of adventure as well as a religiouscommitment. As a young seminary student in Corsica, a French island in theMediterranean, Nicolas Coccola wanted more than a life as a priest. In his memoir,he wrote, “The desire of foreign missions with the hope of martyrdom appeared tome as a higher calling.” He ended up living out his life as a residential school principalin British Columbia. 582 As a small boy in England in the middle of the nineteenthcentury, Gibbon Stocken read with enthusiasm the missionary literature sent to himby an aunt. When he turned seventeen, he volunteered his services to the AnglicanChurch Missionary Society. He hoped to be sent to India. Instead, he was offered aposition on the Blackfoot Reserve in what is now southern Alberta. 583 British-born