Students by Day: Colonialism and Resistance at the Curve Lake Indian Day School, written by settler-Anishinaabe historian Dr. Jackson Pind, is a powerful offering of Two-Eyed Seeing, a methodology that mixes Indigenous knowledge with Western practices.
Pind uses oral Indigenous history and western archival analysis to chronicle the lesser-known story of Indian day schools, centering life at the Curve Lake Indian Day School, which operated from 1899 to 1978.
Almost 1,400 Indian day schools were located on First Nations reserves throughout Canada from the mid-1800s until 2000 with approximately 200,000 Indigenous children forced to attend.
“Adding in the oral history after you’ve looked at the archive, I think, is a good route to go,” said Pind, currently an assistant professor, Indigenous methodologies at the Chanie Wenjack School of Indigenous Studies at Trent University.
Pind was forced by the COVID 19 pandemic to complete his archival research before conducting interviews with day school survivors on Curve Lake First Nation. As part of the strategy to fight the pandemic, access to the reserve was restricted.
“In some ways, (researchers) have done the opposite where they interview people then go back to the archive. But I think this other way is actually a little bit more powerful for survivors because you can answer some questions (and) you know a little bit more about what was going on. And then when you talk to survivors, you’re putting in those pieces in your mind too of what you’ve read before,” said Pind.
Students by Day, the basis of which is Pind’s dissertation, “spiraled” into something more. As he was researching, the McLean nationwide class settlement for those who attended a federal Indian day school was approved by the Federal Court. That 2019 settlement allowed survivors to apply for compensation for abuses and harms they suffered from teaching staff, officials, students and other third parties.
Survivors, who had completed their applications, were “hungry” for information, said Pind, that either filled in the gaps in their own experiences or explained why their experiences were different than other family members or other kids in their community.
“I think it was really important just to give them some, hopefully, form of closure. I can’t speak to all of them that it was closure, but a way of just showing them that what had happened wasn’t their fault. It was this long history that the government was involved in and, especially, the churches were involved in,” he said.
Navigating Library and Archives Canada’s website for information on the Curve Lake school was onerous as files were not linked. Adding to the challenge, Curve Lake school operated under two other names, Mud Lake and Chemong. Pind said going through 100 documents easily took two days. With access to a small research grant and permission from Library and Archives Canada, Pind and his Queens University colleagues downloaded files for the Indian day schools covered under the McLean settlement and re-digitized them to make them searchable.
The most unexpected information Pind gleaned from the archives was the role that Curve Lake chief and council and community members played in lobbying federal government officials for better conditions in the school and better teachers.
“I think what surprised me is that chief and council was using everything in their toolbox, which was very limited in those days…but was using everything in their power to ask for a better-quality education,” said Pind. “I don’t think that’s surprising for any chief and council to want to do that, but in the way that they were able to, they understood the system and at that time it was a pretty new system.”
Pind points out that some of the archived letters from the band referred to their treaty rights and that they wanted to use their funds to hire better teachers or improve classroom conditions.
“And the government still refused even after all of the promises that were made in multiple treaties that had happened. And I think that was just surprising to see that first-hand and that not only that, but the government also kept some of those records. I had maybe assumed that they had deleted it or didn’t keep some of that, but a lot of that was kept and recorded,” said Pind.
From stories Pind has heard from other researchers and survivors, he contends that other bands also lobbied for better school conditions.
As for what he was told by survivors, Pind says it wasn’t a single story.
“Each one had a different experience…based on their own family backgrounds and what schooling meant to their families and this history that all of their families had lived through. When I talked to most of them, and they went in the ‘50s and ‘60s, their families had been going for two generations. So that obviously skewed in some way what they experienced and what they learned from their families too,” he said.
“I think this is really the first-hand experience of what it was actually like to go to a school that was underfunded, understaffed, really just seen as a way to assimilate children into what Canada was going to become. I think that first-hand experience you can’t find in the archive.”
Two successive Curve Lake councils allowed Pind access to Indian day school survivors because of both personal and professional relationships he had already established with the First Nation. In a letter of support for his work, the community stated they wanted to be part of the research advisory team. “Specifically,” said the letter, “we will be serving as research liaisons between the researcher and the community making sure the research is shared with Curve Lake First Nation members and forwarding interested oral history participants.”
Conditions were put in place to protect the survivors, said Pind, as interviews were conducted over Zoom because of COVID and there was concern about people being alone and talking about trauma.
As a result of Pind’s research, he created the website www.indiandayschools.org to help other First Nations and researchers access records and information on the 699 schools included in the McLean settlement. Almost as many Indian day schools were not covered under the McLean settlement because they were operated by other entities and not the federal government.
Pind is hopeful Students by Day “will inspire other communities to do similar types of research in their home territories…There’s so much more books that need to be written or even just reports for the community on exactly what occurred so they can better understand the survivors that are still living with them in the community and how they can change education, hopefully, for the better.”
As for non-Indigenous readers, Pind wants them to understand that Indian day schools had the same impact on students as Indian residential schools: loss of culture, language and identity as well as physical and sexual abuse. He also wants them to understand that on-reserve schools still remain underfunded. In Ontario, on-reserve education is funded at $5,000 per child while off reserve sees a $12,000 per child commitment.
That funding gap, said Pind, is a “massive reason” why educational attainment and job incomes between First Nations and non-Indigenous people varies so greatly.
“This is a current issue too, not just this historical one,” he said.
Students by Day, released in October, is published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. It can be purchased at https://www.mqup.ca/Books/S/Students-by-Day2
