Honouring the Truth Reconciling for the Future

The history • 55object is identical with that of every good common school.” Pupils should be “taughtagriculture, kitchen gardening, and mechanics, so far as mechanics is connected withmaking and repairing the most useful agricultural implements.” 83After the release of Ryerson’s report, Methodist missionaries operated a numberof boarding schools in southern Ontario in the 1850s. 84 One of them, the MountElgin school at Munceytown (later, Muncey), did not close until 1946. 85 The first ofwhat would be a string of Roman Catholic residential schools in what is now BritishColumbia opened in the early 1860s. 86 A school in Fort Providence in what is now theNorthwest Territories began taking in students in 1867. 87The colonization of the NorthwestAfter the Canadian state was established in 1867, the federal government beganmaking small per-student grants to many of the church-run boarding schools. Federalgovernment involvement in residential schooling did not begin in earnest until the1880s. The catalyst for this expansion was the 1870 transfer of much of contemporaryAlberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, northern Québec, northern Ontario, the NorthwestTerritories, and Nunavut from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Canadian government.The following year, British Columbia was brought into Confederation by thepromise of a continental rail link.Canadian politicians intended to populate the newly acquired lands with settlersfrom Europe and Ontario. These settlers were expected to buy goods produced in centralCanada and ship their harvests by rail to western and eastern ports and then on tointernational markets. Settling the “Northwest”—as this territory came to be known—in this manner meant colonizing the over 40,000 Indigenous people who lived there. 88The Rupert’s Land Order of 1870, which transferred much of the Northwest toCanadian control, required that “the claims of the Indian tribes to compensation forlands required for purposes of settlement will be considered and settled in conformitywith the equitable principles which have uniformly governed the British Crownin its dealings with the aborigines.” 89 These principles had been set down in the RoyalProclamation of 1763, which placed limits on the conditions under which Aboriginalland could be transferred. “If at any Time any of the Said Indians should be inclined todispose of the said Lands,” they could do so, but land could be sold only to the Crown,and the sale had to be at a meeting of Indians that had been held specifically for thatpurpose. 90 The Royal Proclamation, in effect, ruled that any future transfer of ‘Indian’land would take the form of a Treaty between sovereigns. 91 In this, it stands as one ofthe clearest and earliest expressions of what has been identified as a long-standingelement of Canadian Aboriginal policy. 92