Depicting Canada’s Children

Haunted: First Nations Children in Residential School Photography

My girl, there is no spirit of the children here in the community, no laughter of children, all that remains on the reserve is us old people and small babies.1 I n the larger body of photographic images of First Nations people in archival collections, there are comparatively few images of children. Their relative absence begs the obvious question: Where are the children?2 Why do so few children appear in the photographs Edward Curtis took during his Canadian expeditions in the early twentieth century?3 The photographs Edmund Morris took during the 1907–1910 fieldwork for his“Indian”portrait series show a similar absence.4 The stark answer is that pictorial absence reflected physical absence.Very few children were left in the communities they visited. Most had been taken to residential and industrial schools, and it is in this photographic legacy that we must seek their images. At first glance, many photographs of children in residential schools are indistinguishable from the broader genre of school photography. Children wearing uniforms, arranged in rows, bracketed by stern, authoritative figures are standard compositions. Small group photographs also emulated photographs of students clustered around their teachers at boarding schools such as St. Mary’s Academy in Ottawa.5 However, while some photographs may have borrowed formal poses from the conventions of school photography, the residential and industrial school system implemented in late nineteenth-century Canada was not a branch of the European boarding school tradition. Rather, its roots can be found in the educational institutions established to implement Ulysses S. Grant’s American policy of “aggressive civilization.”6 One institution in particular, the Carlisle Industrial School, which used photography as a promotional strategy, was upheld as a model of effectiveness.7 Carlisle’s origins can be traced to educational experiments conducted by Captain Richard Pratt, the superintendent at Fort Marion, a military prison camp established in HAUNTED First Nations Children in Residential School Photography SHERRY FARRELL RACETTE 49 1875 in Florida.8 Men and women involved in wars of resistance on the American plains were transported from their homelands to Fort Marion, where they were confined as prisoners of the U.S. government.When Fort Marion closed in 1878, Pratt visited the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, a school established for recently freed African Americans after the civil war. Hampton had just begun to accept First Nations students, in what was termed the “Indian Experiment,” and a group of Fort Marion inmates appeared on the Hampton school roster.9 The following year, Pratt established the Carlisle Industrial School with a student body that also included individuals transferred from the camp to the school. In 1892 he spoke to the Annual Conference of Charities and Correction in Denver, Colorado, espousing the Carlisle philosophy: A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.10 “Kill the Indian, save the man”was Carlisle’s unofficial slogan, and variations of it were echoed in the policy documents and discourse of Canadian government officials. In 1879 Nicholas Flood Davin submitted his Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Halfbreeds to the Minister of the Interior. Davin had toured the Hampton Institute, the Manual Labour School in Indian Territory (later the state of Oklahoma), and the boarding school at the White Earth Agency in Minnesota, which opened in 1871.11 His report enthusiastically endorsed the American strategy. He identified the industrial school as the“principal feature of the policy known as … aggressive civilization.”12 The model of American industrial schools, emerging as they did from the forcible confinement and imprisonment of resistant nations, became the model for industrial and residential schools in Canada. Removal and separation of children and their reconstruction into useful “citizens” were closely woven into an overall policy that envisioned the destruction of collective identities, the assimilation and integration of individuals, and the subsequent acquisition of remaining First Nations lands.13 The system developed in Canada built upon an educational foundation begun by missionaries prior to Confederation. The Canadian government decided, on Davin’s recommendation , to graft the proposed new system onto the older missionary project. As a result, the residential and industrial school system inherited its Christian zeal...