Honouring the Truth Reconciling for the Future

The history • 85Inuit students at the Joseph Bernier School, Chesterfield Inlet, 1956. Diocese of Churchill-Hudson Bay.them to do so.” 265 In 1898, the Kamloops principal reported that “English is the only languageused at all times by the pupils.” 266 That same year, the Mission, British Columbia,principal wrote, “English is the common language of the school, the Indian languageis indeed seldom heard in the institution, except with the newly arrived pupils.” 267 The1898 report from the principal of the Anglican school at Onion Lake indicated that theschool was one of the few exceptions. There, the children were taught to “read andwrite both Cree and English.” 268 Inspectors viewed the continued use of Aboriginallanguages by the students as a sign of failure. The principal of the Red Deer school wastaken to task in 1903 by an inspector who felt that a “serious drawback to school work,as well as an evidence of bad discipline, was the use of the Cree language, which wasquite prevalent.” 269This policy of language suppression continued well into the twentieth century. Aftera 1935 tour of Canada, Oblate Superior General Théodore Labouré expressed concernover the strict enforcement of prohibitions against speaking Aboriginal languages. Inhis opinion, “The forbidding of children to speak Indian, even during recreation, wasso strict in some of our schools that any lapse would be severely punished—to thepoint that children were led to consider it a serious offense.” 270Students had strong memories of being punished for ‘speaking Indian.’ Mary Angus,who attended the Battleford school in the late nineteenth century, said that studentscaught speaking their own language were given a close haircut: “All the hair cut tobe as a man, that what they do, for us not to talk. We were afraid of that, to have ourhair cut.” 271 At the Fraser Lake school in British Columbia, Mary John said she could