Evan J. Habkirk and Alanaise Ferguson
This essay is a part of a sequence. See the opposite entries right here.
When the Fact and Reconciliation Fee of Canada (TRC) submitted their ultimate report in 2015, Canadians noticed how the federal authorities and nationwide Catholic and Protestant church buildings created one of the crucial harmful methods of cultural genocide. Lacking from this evaluation was an evidence of how these establishments and the nationwide Residential College program implicated and wanted the assist of on a regular basis Canadians.
In 2023, Drs. Habkirk and Ferguson entered right into a partnership with the archives of the Anglican Diocese of Kootenay. For the undertaking, Kathryn Lockhart, archivist for the Diocese, gave us entry to 2,000 scans of handwritten paperwork generated between 1910-1988 by the Girls’s Auxiliary (WA) in 13 parishes. Habkirk and Ferguson educated 40 undergraduate Indigenous Research college students in historic transcription strategies guaranteeing that this proof could possibly be transformed to searchable and indexable typed textual content. These information contained the assembly minutes of WAs from particular person church buildings who offered fundraising and materials items for 17 Anglican Residential Faculties in Canada.
All through Fall 2023, Lockhart and the Dean of the Diocese Cathedral, David Tiessen, facilitated the doc transcription and hosted a well-attended data sharing occasion the place 25 student-created posters had been offered, alongside their evaluation of those archival paperwork, to indicate present parishioners {that a} extra full accounting of Residential Faculties consists of their native church and probably members of their households. Throughout an occasion debrief, our undertaking management (Tiessen, Lockhart, Habkirk, Ferguson) generated the next questions:
- Who was affected by this assist of Residential Faculties?
- Who had been these native peoples who supported them and why?
- Who benefited from this assist of Residential Faculties?
We tried to solutions these questions by organizing extra knowledge-sharing occasions to current our findings and accumulate responses and impressions from college students and parishioners, in addition to nationwide historical past students. We offered the monetary and materials contributions that the Diocese’s WAs (1920-1974) made to 17 Anglican Residential Faculties, and confirmed the connection these faculties needed to Canada’s nation constructing, colonization, assimilation, and cultural genocide inside a neighborhood and nationwide context.[1] One other occasion was held on-line in June 2025. There we addressed a number of questions, together with:
- Who had been the members of the nationwide and native WAs?
- What was their total mission? How did this cause them to supporting Residential Faculties?
- How and why did the Anglican Church of Canada assist Residential Faculties and what had been they telling their parishioners to enlist their involvement?
For these discussions, we had the assistance of Drs. Alan Hayes[2] and Wendy Fletcher[3] to inform the nationwide story, whereas members of our staff offered the native story of settler involvement in Anglican Residential Faculties. Our audience had been local people members desirous about native historical past and reconciliation. Fifty members registered and attended this on-line convention together with present parishioners of Anglican church buildings throughout the Diocese. This work was offered in entrance of a Syilx Elder and group members who offered remark, context, and oversight to our analysis findings, guaranteeing that survivors’ views had been included, valued, and centered in our data sharing.
The engagement after these occasions has been enlightening. Attracting 30 to 50 loyal parishioners, deeper questions on native assist of Residential Faculties have emerged to tell our future work. Though we have to educate settlers concerning the nationwide story of Residential Faculties and the nationwide colonial undertaking they had been part of, we additionally have to interrogate settler locations and roles in Canada’s historical past as this shapes our present-day experiences and understandings of Residential Faculties. This may permit us to discover a roadmap of what our church communities have to do to reconcile their relationship Indigenous peoples.
Anglican Girls’s Work, Residential Faculties, an the “Energy Paradox”
Residential Faculties had been an integral part of the home mission subject, particularly for girls, however this has been largely neglected within the examination of Residential College histories in Canada. In her presentation, Dr. Fletcher drew on the “Energy Paradox” in her work on WAs and the function of ladies within the structure of the Anglican Church. She outlined that their WA work elevated their entry to social capital whereas they had been concurrently exploited for his or her labour. Girls contributed to cultural genocide through evangelism and by helping the Nationwide Church to satisfy its monetary and materials obligations to their Residential Faculties.
The paperwork proof that the members of the WAs offered the middle of fellowship for these church communities and did quite a lot of charitable and non secular work throughout the diocese and native church buildings together with:
- fundraising for the poor of their communities
- paying for church mortgages and renovations
- elevating funds for worldwide and home missions
These ladies had been additionally underneath stress to broaden their work past the native church to assist bigger tasks, with some being publicly shamed if they didn’t assist the nationwide church’s missionary endeavours. This criticism led many ladies to observe Residential College directives whereas being excluded from male church management till the Sixties.[4]
WA’s assist of Residential Faculties has led to many onerous conversations inside our staff. One early concern posed to us by our college students was the usage of items offered by the WA. Indigenous college students in Residential Faculties had been portrayed to WAs as kids in want. Many WA members sought details about these kids, typically requesting pupil names so they might ship extra items, particularly round Christmas time. The fabric items they offered included sleeping clothes, quilts, and toiletries like tooth brushes. Apart from letters from college directors acknowledging the receipt of those items, it’s unknown if these items really reached the meant pupil. Our college students turned involved after studying descriptions from survivors of kids being ordered to clean flooring and different components of the varsity with toothbrushes. Was this the tip results of the items WAs generated for the scholars?
Moral issues going ahead
An moral consideration our staff has needed to unpack was the truth that the ladies of the WA had been additionally in command of working their church’s Sunday Faculties. These Sunday College kids had been used to lift cash for the Anglican Missionary Fund, which supported Residential Faculties. Discovering this connection to Residential Faculties was jarring for the staff as we now need to reconcile the concept non-Indigenous kids had been used to lift cash to assist the Residential College system. These info will problem us as we place ourselves to have conversations about Canadian residents’ assist of the Residential Faculties system.
One other moral query our staff has been pressured to confront is the Anglican Church of Canada’s use of the ladies’s and kids’s teams to fill budgetary shortfalls at Residential Faculties operated by the Anglican church. Though the literature concerning the nationwide Residential College undertaking speaks to those shortfalls,[5] the usage of on a regular basis Canadians to make them up is never mentioned. What can be regarding is that, throughout occasions of native and nationwide financial hardships, native WAs reduce their assist of Residential Faculties, preferring to assist different native causes. The result was that the already overstretched budgets of the 17 Residential Faculties supported by the Diocese of Kootenay, who had been already unable to adequately look after these kids, went with out the assist and funds offered by the WAs throughout these intervals. As we proceed to work with the Diocese of Kootenay, its church buildings, and their parishioners, we are going to proceed to have tough conversations about their function in supporting the nationwide Residential College system.
Whereas this undertaking limits our investigation of Canadian residents’ materials and monetary contributions to Anglican-run faculties from native church buildings to a single diocese, all Catholic and Protestant church buildings in Canada have to undertake this painful work of disentangling the religious name to service from the presence of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and white supremacy and maintain themselves accountable for supporting the genocidal Residential College program. Though our staff members are mapping a means ahead to carry the members of this diocese accountable by offering solutions to their questions on their journey in direction of reconciliation, this reflection work must be accomplished by particular person dioceses, church buildings, and settlers, so long as they continue to be open, prepared to be taught, and courageous all through our analysis investigations.
Evan J. Habkirk, PhD is a settler Historian and Lecturer on the College of British Columbia, Okanagan campus, within the Indigenous Research Program. His analysis focuses on historic and modern treaty points and treaty making, residential faculties and reconciliation, Indigenous navy and militarism, and implementing revolutionary practices into Indigenous Course Necessities on the post-secondary stage (evan.habkirk@ubc.ca)
Alanaise Ferguson, PhD is a Canada Analysis Chair in Indigenous Well being, Therapeutic, and Group Revitalization on the College of British Columbia, Okanagan campus. She is a member of the Sandy Bay Ojibway First Nation and a Registered Psychologist in BC (alanaise.ferguson@ubc.ca)
[1] Hyperlinks to some recordings from these occasions might be discovered at circleforsharingindigenousvoices.ca
[2] Chosen works of Alan Hayes about Indigenous Peoples and the Anglican church embody, “Settler Church buildings, the Doctrine of Discovery, and the Shifting Blame,” Historic Papers 2023 of the Canadian Society of Church Historical past, 5-23; “The Church buildings, the Indian Residential Faculties, and the Royal Fee on Aboriginal Peoples,” Historic Papers 2022 of the Canadian Society of Church Historical past, 43-58; “T.B.R. Westgate: Organizing and Financing Indigenous Erasure for the Anglican Church, 1920-1943,” Toronto Journal of Theology, 36, 1 (2020): 54-74; and “The Elusive Aim: The Dedication to Indigenous Self-Willpower within the Anglican Church of Canada, 1967-2019,” Anglican and Episcopal Historical past 89, 3 (2020): 255-280.
[3] For extra concerning the work of Wendy Fletcher, see https://scholar.google.ca/citations?person=0ov7OmQAAAAJ&hl=en
[4] All the paperwork referenced on this put up are present in varied parish recordsdata all through the Diocese of Kootenay Archives and, due to this fact, can’t be cited as particular person paperwork or assortment.
[5] For instance, see John Milloy’s A Nationwide Crime (Winnipeg: College of Manitoba Press, 1999) and J.R. Miller’s Shingwauk’s Imaginative and prescient (Toronto: College of Toronto Press, 1996).
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