History

Students were punished when they broke the rules. The punishment of students at the school varied with the type of behavior complained of, the seriousness of the behavior and the attitude of the students. In some instances a reprimand of the students was sufficient, but at other times the student would suffer physically through the […]

There were several reasons that a student could be discharged from school. A student was normally discharged at the end of the school year following his or her sixteenth birthday. In some instances a students would be discharged and sent home if he or she proved to be too difficult to manage or disrupted the […]

The food eaten by the students varied from school to school. The variations arose partly as a result of the gardening, farming and other activities, which occurred at each school. For example, at Mount Elgin it was noted in one of the annual reports that “the management of the milk cows is worthy of mention. […]

Many of the schools were overcrowded. The overcrowding led to the easier spread of communicable diseases among the students. The overcrowding occurred because the schools did not have enough space to house the number of students that were at the school. There were often too many students at the school because the schools were chronically […]

As in many other residential institutions, there were often breakouts of communicable disease at the schools. These included whooping cough, colds, influenza, grippe, eye infections and infections of the upper respiratory tract including ear, nose, tonsils, and throat.  Diseases such as measles, German measles, mumps, chicken pox and small pox were common and often prevalent […]

All of the schools instituted a half-day system of instruction whereby senior students spent half-day in the classroom and completed chores at the school the other half of the day. Classes consisted of reading, writing, arithmetic and religion and were conducted in English. The boys did chores and manual labour around the schools and its […]

There seem to have been very few qualified teachers at most of the schools from the dates that schools were established until 1950. While some of the people who were used as teachers were educate, most of them did not hold qualifications as teachers. This is particularly true of priests and brothers who taught at […]

There was no regular maintenance program for repairs and upkeep to the buildings and physical services at the schools because insufficient funds were made available for that purpose by the department. Therefore, most of the schools were in a constant state of disrepair. An example of the general state of disrepair is provided by the […]

The schools were inspected regularly each year by officials from the Department of Indian Affairs, the local Indian Agent of each Agency was required to submit a quarterly report on events and issues within his Agency and a portion of the reports deal specifically with visits to schools in the Agency. The Indian Agent was […]