Honouring the Truth Reconciling for the Future

54 • Truth & Reconciliation Commissionproject—that was extended to NorthAmerica served as the prime justificationand rationale for the imposition of a residentialschool system on the Indigenouspeoples of Canada.Kahkewaquonaby (Sacred Feathers), also known asPeter Jones, in 1832. He was an Ojibway chief whoworked with Methodist officials to establish the MountElgin residential school in Muncey, Ontario. He diedbefore the school opened. Toronto Public Library, X2-25.Residential schools in pre-Confederation CanadaIn Canada, residential schooling wasclosely linked to colonization and missionarycrusades. The first boardingschool for Aboriginal people in what isnow Canada was established in the earlyseventeenth century near the Frenchtrading post at the future site of QuébecCity. At this Roman Catholic school, missionarieshoped to both ‘civilize’ and‘Christianize’ young Aboriginal boys. 75The school was a failure: parents werereluctant to send their children, and thestudents were quick to run away andreturn home. 76 Later efforts in New France met with no greater success. 77 After theBritish conquest of New France in 1763, the idea of residential schooling lay dormantuntil the early nineteenth century. In the first decade of that century, the New EnglandCompany, a British-based missionary society, funded a boarding school operation inSussex Vale, New Brunswick. The goals were to teach young Mi’kmaq and Maliseetchildren trades and to convert them to Protestantism. 78 In the 1820s, John West, anAnglican missionary from England, opened a boarding school for Aboriginal studentsat Red River. 79 Although these efforts also failed to take root, in 1834, the MohawkInstitute, a mission school on the Grand River in what is now Ontario, began taking inboarders. 80 This school would remain in operation until 1970. 81In 1847, Egerton Ryerson, the superintendent of schools for Upper Canada, recommendedthe establishment of residential schools in which Aboriginal studentswould be given instruction in “English language, arithmetic, elementary geometry,or knowledge of forms, geography and the elements of general history, natural historyand agricultural chemistry, writing, drawing and vocal music, book-keeping (especiallyin reference to farmers’ accounts) religion and morals.” 82 This he thought of as“a plain English education adapted to the working farmer and mechanic. In this their