Honouring the Truth Reconciling for the Future

128 • Truth & Reconciliation CommissionThe chief cook at Lapointe Hall in Fort Simpson,Northwest Territories. The schools were highlydependent on female labour. Northwest Territories Archives,N-1992-255-0144.certificate, 598 and Olive Saunders hada university degree and several yearsof teaching experience. 599 In 1966, E.O. Drouin, the principal of the RomanCatholic school in Cardston, boasted thatout of the twenty-one people on his staff,ten had university degrees. Drouin, himself,had left his position as a universityprofessor to go to work at the school. 600A number of people devoted their adultlives to working in residential schools. Atleast twelve principals died in office. 601Kuper Island principal George Donckeleresigned in January 1907; by June of thatyear, he was dead. 602 Sherman Shepherdserved at the Anglican schools in ShinglePoint on the Arctic Ocean in the Yukon,Aklavik (Northwest Territories), FortGeorge (Québec), and Moose Factory(Ontario), resigning in 1954 after twenty-fiveyears of service in northernCanada. 603 Others worked into their oldage, since, due to low pay, their savings were also low and pensions were minimal.When the seventy-three-year-old matron of the Ahousaht school in British Columbiaretired in 1929, Principal W. M. Wood recommended that she be given an honorariumof a month’s salary as appreciation for her years of service. Woods noted that she was“retiring with very limited means.” 604Such long service was not the norm. Because the pay was often low and the workingand living conditions were difficult, turnover was high throughout the system’shistory. From 1882 to 1894, there was what amounted to an annual full turnover ofteachers at the Fort Simpson (now Port Simpson), British Columbia, school. At onepoint, all the teaching was being done by the local Methodist missionary ThomasCrosby, his wife, Emma, and the school matron. 605 Between January 1958 and March1960, a period of just over two years, the Alert Bay school lost fifty-eight staff members.Of these, nineteen had been fired because they were deemed to be incompetent. Eightothers left because they were angry with the principal. 606 In 1958, the BenedictineSisters announced that their order would no longer be providing the Christie, BritishColumbia, school with staff from its monastery in Mount Angel, Oregon. According tothe prioress of the Benedictine monastery, Mother Mary Gemma, meeting residentialschool needs had left the members of the order physically and mentally exhausted.