Deaf History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New Scholarship

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10 Exclusion and Integration: The Case of the Sisters of Providence of Quebec Constantina Mitchell Editor's Introduction Margret Winzer's essay discussed an open, secular, and almost certainly patriarchal community of deaf people in Canada's Englishspeaking Ontario Province. By contrast, this study examines a closed, religious, matriarchal deaf community-an order of deaf nuns-in Canada's French-speaking Quebec Province. The connection between Catholic religious orders and the education and care of deaf students can be traced back at least to the time of Pedro Ponce de Le6n in the sixteenth century. Even in Ponce's time, there were reports of deaf daughters of wealthy Spanish families becoming nuns. These reports have been neither well documented nor studied, however, and their significance to the history of deaf people is unknown. In this study, Constantina Mitchell examines the experience of Quebec's deaf nuns from the perspective of alienation and exclusion. She sees these women as examples of individuals who were far removed from the mainstream of society. They were Catholic in a Protestant country, female in the midst of patriarchy, and deaf in a hearing environment. Despite the remoteness of her immediate subjects, though, Mitchell 's observations about the deaf nuns' experience relate to the larger picture of deaf people's past. Mitchell notes, for example, that oral methods became popular in the Montreal convent school for deaf girls in the late nineteenth century, when they were imported from France. She mentions also the absurdity of oralism's influence: deaf children in the convent school were forbidden to sign and forced to speak, while hearing children were forbidden to speak and encouraged to use a system of signed communication. Perhaps the most strikingly familiar aspect of Mitchell's argument, though, is the oppression of deaf people. She relates that deaf nuns 146 The Sisters of Providence of Quebec 147 were not permitted to make perpetual vows; they had to renew them every year. Throughout the history of the order, all the superiorsthe nuns in charge of the group-were hearing. No deaf nuns were allowed to move up in the religious hierarchy. The role of deaf nuns in teaching deaf students in the convent school has been ignored, even when there is evidence, from photographs for instance, that they played an important role. In short, even in this closed society, governed by the desire to do well, paternalism, dependency, and oppression were obvious in the relations between those who could hear and those who could not. THE ORDER OF Les Soeurs de la Providence (The Sisters of Providence ) was founded in Montreal in 1843. From 1864 to 1976, its hearing nuns oversaw the instruction of deaf Catholic girls at an institution which they created, L'Institut des Sourdes-Muettes de Montreal (The Institute for Deaf-Mute Girls of Montreal). From 1887, the institute housed a religious congregation exclusively for deaf women, Les Petites Soeurs de Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs (The Little Sisters of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows), or SNDD, the order's official designation .I Although the Institute for Deaf-Mute Girls is now defunct, the deaf religious congregation, like its mother order, has survived. Early members of the SNDD, most of whom had been pupils at the institute administered by the Sisters of Providence, bore three markers of remoteness and exclusion. First was their ethnicity: they were Catholic and usually French-Canadian in a country where English Protestants held the financial and political reins. Gender defines the second aspect of alienation, for Quebec was a fundamentally patriarchal society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, in a milieu where departure from the norm was in itself sufficient justification for exclusion, deafness alienated these women on a third count. Held together by the threads of solitude, denial, and silence, these three identities of marginality simultaneously borne by the SNDD can be fully understood only within the historical context of nineteenth-century French Canada. Identity and Marginality in Nineteenth-Century Quebec In the early nineteenth century, English Canada consistently resisted demands by French Canadians for constitutional reform. The latter insisted, among other things, on the right to parliamentary represen- 148 Constantina Mitchell tation proportionate to the population in Lower Canada (today's Quebec). The consequence of English intransigence was a FrenchCanadian revolt, known as the 1837-1838 rebellions, that brought about numerous casualties as well as extensive destruction to crops and property...