Schooling in Western Canada, 1870–1923: An Anti-racist Interpretation
Abstract
Abstract
This essay is about the history of schooling in Western Canada for Indigenous peoples, non- British and non-English-speaking White settlers, and Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians. It brings their different schooling experiences into conversation with one another using an anti-racist approach to history. Different racisms, the essay argues, determined the different policies governments used to school these groups in Western Canada, which contributed to different racializations of the groups. Yet Indigenous peoples, non-British and non-English-speaking White settlers, and Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians believed schooling was the best chance the next generation had to access skills and knowledge that would help them thrive in Canada, a society they recognized treated their children as inferior. Racist school policies at many times obstructed their children’s access to schooling and the opportunities it provided. Policies also circumscribed to different degrees their chances to protect their languages and cultures in schools. An anti-racist history of this topic exposes racial inequalities at the heart of settler societies, and schooling, at a critical juncture in their development. Anti-racist histories also help teachers, teacher education students, and the public to understand that racisms are plural; how racialization occurs and confers privileges and disadvantages in the past and present; and Canadians are treaty people with obligations, particularly in education. This history helps to unpack racist and colonial baggage and to see better the journey ahead to a different and just educational future.
Résumé
L’article porte sur l’histoire de la scolarisation des Autochtones, des colons blancs non britanniques et non anglophones ainsi que des Canadiens d’origine chinoise ou japonaise dans l’Ouest canadien. Il met en relation leurs diverses expériences dans une perspective antiraciste de l’histoire. Selon l’auteur, différentes formes de racisme ont déterminé les diverses politiques utilisées par les gouvernements pour scolariser ces groupes dans l’Ouest canadien, ce qui a contribué à une racialisation différenciée de ceux-ci. Les Autochtones, les colons blancs non britanniques et non anglophones ainsi que les Canadiens d’origine chinoise ou japonaise croyaient pourtant que l’école constituait, pour la génération suivante, le meilleur moyen d’accéder aux compétences et aux connaissances qui allaient l’aider à s’épanouir au Canada, société qui, à leurs yeux, traitait leurs enfants comme des êtres inférieurs. Les politiques scolaires racistes ont souvent entravé leur accès à l’école et aux possibilités qu’elle offrait. Ces politiques ont également limité à divers degrés leurs chances de protéger leur langue et leur culture à l’école. Une histoire antiraciste de ce sujet expose les inégalités raciales au cœur des sociétés colonisatrices et de la scolarisation, à un moment charnière de leur développement. Le discours antiraciste aide également les enseignants, les apprentis enseignants et le public à comprendre que le racisme est multiforme; à découvrir comment la racialisation se produit et comment elle comportait et comporte encore des privilèges ou des désavantages; à se rappeler que les Canadiens sont assujettis à des traités comprenant des obligations, particulièrement en éducation. La perspective antiraciste aide à se dépouiller d’un bagage raciste et colonialiste et à mieux voir le chemin à parcourir pour parvenir à un avenir en éducation qui soit différent et juste.
After 1870, the country of Canada asserted itself over the Prairies and the Pacific Coast—and over the Indigenous societies already present there. Governments soon set about providing schooling to the people. Responsibility for settler schooling fell to provincial governments; the federal government took charge of schooling “Indians.”1 Western Canada was racially diverse. Manitoba, the first Western province to join Confederation, in 1870, had a population that was over 80 percent Métis, half of whom spoke French (Friesen 1987). British Columbia, entering Confederation a year after Manitoba did, comprised 25,000 Indigenous peoples, 8,500 White people, 1,500 Chinese, and 500 Black people (Barman 2003a). Governments evolved different ways of schooling the diverse Western Canadian population—ways that were racially divided. Historians have examined separately these efforts to school Canadians and First Nations. There are histories of settler provincial public education systems (Alcorn 2013; Johnson 1964; von Heyking 2006). There is also a rich subset of literature that looks at the schooling of White settler New Canadians—Ukrainians, Germans, Icelanders, and the like (Jones, Sheehan, and Stamp 1979; Sheehan, Wilson, and Jones 1986). Other work examines Indigenous youngsters’ experiences in federal Indian residential, and occasionally day schools2 (Miller 1996; Sellars 2013; Merasty 2015). Studies of British Columbia take up the exclusion of Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian schoolchildren from that province’s public schools (Stanley 2011).
The existing literature typically does not bring these different experiences of schooling into conversation with one another.3 This essay does. Public schooling on the Prairies afforded non-British White settlers—such as Ukrainians or Germans or Poles—protections for their minority languages. This even included legally permitting their languages in schools, not just as school subjects, but as the main and sanctioned instructional language used wholly or partly by teachers and pupils instead of English, throughout the school day, and across every subject on the curriculum. Sanctioned minority instructional languages in public schools did not mean the children attending them were never instructed in English or that public schools were not meant to Canadianize them. Some educators at the time viewed minority instructional languages positively only for their transitional benefits in helping immigrant children to become accustomed to school before having to learn a new language, namely English (Gidney and Millar 2014). Nevertheless, the use of minority instructional languages in public schools meant that, for these children, the price of going to school was not the complete suppression of their home languages and, by extension, perhaps their cultures as well. Tolerance of minority instructional languages continued until about the First World War (1914–18), when factors joined to terminate it. At the same time that it often protected their languages, public school education also gave non-British White settlers opportunities to acquire the invaluable skills and knowledge, including English-language ability, needed to integrate into Canadian society and the economy.
British Columbia’s Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian children were not extended the same minority language public educational privileges that Germans or Ukrainians or other White Prairie settlers enjoyed. Instead, Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian parents usually had to seek out private means to teach their children their home languages. What is more, people in the Pacific province at times tried to deny Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadians the basic opportunity to access the same public education as others by segregating them in separate classes and schools or by excluding them from public schooling altogether. Segregation and exclusion threatened to cut these youngsters off from learning English and the other knowledge and skills acquired at school that they needed for full participation in British Columbia. Educational exclusion prefigured the 1923 Chinese Immigration (exclusion) Act that blocked Chinese from coming to Canada.4
No group was more discriminated against educationally than Indigenous children were. The federal government forced them over time into its system of Indian residential and day schools. Questionably established to “tame” and “civilize” them, federal Indian schools frequently prohibited pupils from speaking Indigenous languages (Miller 1996) and provided an inferior schooling that, as historian Jean Barman (2003b, 55) writes, educated Indigenous students “not for assimilation but for inequality.” By 1920, when compulsory federal Indian education became enforceable, the Indian residential school had all but starved away other alternatives (except federal day schools) that had existed to that point (Miller 1996)—alternatives such as the occasional integration of First Nations youngsters into provincial public schools.
Different people and different school experiences from 1870 to approximately 1923, but with a crucial coherence around one thing: racism (Barman 2003b). My argument is not that these groups experienced the same racism. To the contrary, I argue that different racisms (see Stanley 2016; Wolfe 2016) determined the different policies that the provincial and federal governments used to school these groups in Western Canada. Racisms are plural, Stanley (2000) claims. They vary in their causes, their effects, and across (94) “time and place.” The racisms this essay looks at contributed to the different racializations and experiences of racialization of these groups. Racialization is the birthing of a racial category through the law or discourse or policy (Anderson 1991; Backhouse 1999; Eyford 2016; Stanley 1990, 2016; Meister 2021; Wolfe 2016). The events this essay examines are not isolated occurrences, as previous and separate scholarly treatments of them suggest. The stories this essay tells of non-British White settlers, Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians, and Indigenous peoples are branches of the same tree. That tree is publicly supported schooling itself. In the Prairies and in the Pacific province, at a crucial juncture in their development as settler societies, this schooling was racially unequal.
Racially unequal schooling is even more significant in light of what different racialized groups wanted from schooling. There was a coherence there as well. Many families that were non-British and non-English-speaking but White; or were Chinese Canadian or Japanese Canadian; or First Nations, aspired to the same thing: schooling for their young. They all wanted it—at times, they all demanded it—because they believed that it was the best chance the next generation had to thrive in Canada, a society these families intimately recognized treated their children as inferior because they were not racially of British origin. What they did not want was schooling that would alienate them completely from their languages and cultures, yet this is what they received ultimately to varying degrees.
When race is the common element in historical events, a particular approach can help us to interpret the past. Anti-racist history, educational historian Timothy Stanley (2000, 80) writes, has four main features:
First, it should contribute to contemporary struggles against racism. Secondly, it should take seriously the human consequences of racisms, including their effects on members of dominant groups. Thirdly, it must engage the meanings created by those who have been subject to racist exclusion. Fourthly, it needs to adopt a post-colonial perspective.
As an anti-racist interpretation of educational history, this essay is meant to inform Canadians, especially educators and future educators (such as students in pre-service teacher education programs), about the historic racist inequalities that sit at the heart of publicly supported schooling. The hope is that when people are more aware of this history, they will better understand the need to confront racisms in the past, and in the present, with anti-racist teaching. “Antiracisms begin with the resistance of the excluded,” Stanley (2016, 10) writes, “but antiracist knowledge begins with engaging [racisms’] meanings.” This essay is concerned with precisely that engagement—namely, with examining how the different racisms it describes affected Indigenous peoples, Asians, and White settlers, at times conferring advantages or disadvantages on the last group but always disadvantages on the first two. It offers a counterpoint to other histories of the topic, including histories that deny racism with silence and that do not acknowledge White privilege. It brings many racialized voices to bear on the topic, quoting them at length, especially their frequent pleas for fair and equitable treatment of racialized children in schools. It acknowledges other historians’ work—often racialized historians—that has documented the different racisms Canadians and First Nations experienced over time. Without these historians’ efforts, I would be unable to write this essay interpretation of educational history, which is based on secondary work. Finally, the essay adopts a post-colonial perspective by recognizing the many First Nations within Canada as actors in the past and the present who made educational agreements with Canada and continue to do so. Racism is about everyone. Nevertheless, my essay focuses necessarily on the racializations that are starkest in Western Canada’s history. Other instances and experiences—White English-speaking settlers of British origin, French Canadian settlers, Métis, Black settlers (some formerly enslaved or descended from enslaved people), South Asians, Jews—are not taken up here in detail, and sometimes are not taken up at all, but this does not mean they are unimportant.5
Indigenous Schooling in Western Canada
In 1870, Canada acquired millions of square kilometres from the Hudson’s Bay Company and British Crown. This land included practically all of the area of the modern-day Prairie provinces and the three territories. In 1870, however, “Indigenous peoples remained the principal or only occupants” of practically all this territory, Cole Harris (2020, 273) reminds us, which was “by far the largest part of British North America.” What is more, “although the fur trade was more than two hundred years old” in parts of the territory, Harris writes, as late as 1871, “Indigenous peoples still spoke their languages, still practised many pre-fur trade ways, still had no doubt about who they were” (273). Canada would soon settle key lands here, at times violently, by displacing First Nations with what amounted over decades to several million settlers who spoke European languages, followed European ways, and lived on farms and in towns. Their settlements would cling to a railway laid like a thread across the map of the new nation.
But no settlement could begin lawfully in 1870 until Canada did something about the legal status of the lands newly acquired from the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Crown. That was on account of the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Issued a century earlier by the king, the proclamation was understood by the late nineteenth century to mean three things: Indigenous peoples had Aboriginal, occupant rights but not “fee simple” title to their lands (their right to be on the land and to use it was acknowledged, but they could not own it in the common law sense of private property ownership); neither individual settlers nor colonies could acquire any lands from Indigenous peoples—only the British Crown could do that; and, finally, for settlers to purchase title or to lease these lands, the Crown had to fully obtain the lands first from Indigenous peoples. Obtaining the land for settlement under the proclamation was called “extinguishing (Aboriginal) title.” This meant Indigenous peoples gave up, or ceded, their claims to the land in return for something from the Crown (Treaty 7 Tribal Council et al. 1996). Title was extinguished by a treaty signed between the Crown, representing Canada, and the First Nations concerned (Treaty 7 Tribal Council et al. 1996). In exchange for extinguishment, the Crown gave to First Nations things like a small reserve, agricultural tools, and small annual payments of four to five dollars per person; hunting, trapping and fishing rights; money for modest medical care; and, as we will see, promises of schools. The numbered treaties, so called for their titles—Treaty 1, Treaty 2, and so on (11 in total)—extinguished title across colossal chunks of Western Canada. (See Figure 1, which shows Treaties 1 through 11, the dates they were enacted, and the First Nations concerned.) Not every First Nation that signed one of the numbered treaties received all of the things promised that I have listed nor did they all receive the same promises (Harris 2020; Treaty 7 Tribal Council et al. 1996). However, schooling was a very common promise in numbered treaties (Miller 1996).
Between 1871 and 1877, Canada signed the first seven numbered treaties with First Nations in part of the country’s newly acquired territory. Legislation that the Canadian government passed first in 1872, the Dominion Lands Act, completed the process that the numbered treaties had begun of making land privately available to settlers. The act, Ryan Eyford (2016, 51) writes, was the “central piece of legislation relating to the alienation of Crown land in the Canadian Northwest.” Under the act, settlers could acquire a 160-acre quarter section of land by paying a ten-dollar fee to the government. If the settler occupied the quarter section for three years, and made improvements to it, they could apply to receive title to and privately own their section. Anyone could do this—except Indigenous peoples, unless they were enfranchised, which meant they had given up their Indigenous status, something that they very seldom wanted and that happened rarely.6 Sixty-two million acres were handed out to settlers under the Dominion Lands Act between 1872 and 1930 approximately (Eyford 2016).
For First Nations, treaties had a much different purpose than extinguishing title to make way for settlers. This purpose was peace and survival in the grim circumstances of economic collapse; settler, government, and private appropriation of lands; and the violence, disease, and famine that plagued Prairie First Nations. By the time of the very first numbered treaties in the early 1870s, encroaching settlers and settlement already imperilled the bison that sustained First Nations such as the Plains Cree. (Bison herds and the economy dependent on them would collapse completely within a few years.) Settlers had also clashed with (Daschuk 2019, 80) “the fur trade society” at Red River, which would shortly become the new province of Manitoba. US fur and whiskey traders had also run amok across the territory, killing or causing the death of many Indigenous peoples with a smallpox epidemic that claimed 3,500 lives, mostly Indigenous and Métis. Famine and political disintegration came next (Daschuk 2019). In the years that followed, when treaties were signed, Canada did practically nothing to alleviate the suffering. In fact, it allowed suffering to continue to “further [its] own agenda” of settling the West by “subjugating the malnourished and increasingly sick Indigenous population,” historian James Daschuk (2019, 100) writes.
During these years, the 1870s, First Nations signed numbered treaties because they feared for the future. Oral tradition is clear on that. As Tsuu T’ina Lucy Big Crow relates, “[Tsuu T’ina] people signed because they were starving and buffalo were disappearing” (Treaty 7 Tribal Council et al. 1996, 123). Káínawa and Nakodas signed because they were worried about what would come next for their children (Treaty 7 Tribal Council et al. 1996; see also Daschuk 2019). However, oral tradition also demonstrates clearly that Indigenous peoples did not sign the numbered treaties because they wanted to extinguish title to their lands so that these could be handed over to settlers, which was Canada’s agenda. For that matter, Indigenous peoples who signed the treaties did not regard land as property that could be taken or given anyway. Siksika oral tradition holds that, sometime after the signing of Treaty 7 in what is today southern Alberta, Siksika leader Crowfoot explained this view of land to visiting Canadian officials. He grasped some earth and flung it into a fire to show them that it would not burn. Then he told them that if he threw money into the fire, it would burn. He said he would keep the earth because it was different from the money. He meant that earth—land—could not be sold or change hands like money did (Treaty 7 Tribal Council et al. 1996). The nations that signed Treaty 7 in 1877, the Nakoda, Káínaa, Piikani, Siksika, and Tsuu T’ina, regarded it as a peace treaty, not a land surrender (Treaty 7 Tribal Council et al. 1996).
Because of Indigenous peoples’ fears for their children’s futures, several numbered treaties included schooling as a treaty promise. It is important to note that this promise was included because First Nations asked for it, not because Canadian officials offered it (Miller 1996; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015b). Indigenous peoples sought schooling this way because they saw that schooling could help their children cope with Canadian ways in a time of cataclysmic change. Fred Gladstone, a Káínaa, related oral tradition that the Káínawa signed Treaty 7 in 1877 because “they were promised many things to improve their way of life, since their original livelihood was taken away from them” (Treaty 7 Tribal Council et al. 1996, 121). Tsuu T’ina Tom Heavenfire, also speaking from oral tradition, said his people signed Treaty 7 to get education and medical care. He also said that “the treaty meant to our people that we were just going to live our lives and by the laws that the White people brought us and that it was going to give us a better education. More of a better life was promised” (Treaty 7 Tribal Council et al. 1996, 123). Cree leaders—headmen called Mistawasis and Ahtahkakoop—who were involved in Treaty 6 talks in 1876 supported education for adaptation. “Surely we Indians,” Ahtahkakoop (quoted in Miller 1996, 98) said, “can learn the ways of living that made the White man strong.” (See also Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a.) As historian J.R. Miller (1996, 98–99) argues about numbered treaties, Indigenous peoples “were instrumental in ensuring that some of the seven treaties that emerged from that process included measures that would assist them in making a transition from a declining hunting economy to one more compatible with the farming economy that was invading their territories.” Crucially, “among these provisions were schools.” Treaty 1 in 1871 contained nothing about schools until Canadian officials presented it to Plains Ojibwa and Mushkegowuk at Lower Fort Garry. After that first pass, the treaty gained new language about “a promise ‘to maintain a school on each reserve hereby made, whenever the Indians of the reserve should desire it’” (Miller 1996, 99). Similar events unfolded at the Treaty 4 making in 1874. “The government agreed to schooling, but it was the Native negotiators who suggested it and insisted on its inclusion in the earliest treaties,” Miller (1996, 98) writes. However, he carefully—and crucially—adds that Indigenous signatories “likely had day schools in mind.” Indeed, Miller provides much evidence to support his contention that “a long line of Indian leaders … perceived in the European’s learning an alternative for a desperate people,” pushed to the brink by settlement and White settlers (98–99). Eventually all seven numbered treaties signed in the 1870s (see Figure 1) would include a promise for schools on reserves whenever Indigenous peoples wanted and asked for them (Miller 1996).
First Nations, including those who asked for and received schooling in the numbered treaties and other First Nations who pursued schools as well, did not want schooling at the price of the loss of their languages and cultures. In British Columbia, Kwakwaka’wakw at Cape Mudge on Quadra Island are one example of this. Harry Assu (quoted in Miller 1996, 94), a Kwakwaka’wakw, explains that when Methodists visited around 1890, his father, Billy Assu, told these missionaries the Kwakwaka’wakws “wanted a teacher and a school” in Cape Mudge. Billy Assu even hinted to the Methodists that if they were unwilling to oblige, he would ask the competition, the Anglicans or Catholics, for a school instead. In the school the Methodists set up, Kwakwaka’wakw learned English. However, Harry Assu (quoted in Miller 1996, 94) continues, “We could speak our own language [Kwak’wala] in the playground or anywhere else. There was no problem about it like there was up at Alert Bay [Indian Residential School], where they thought Indians could only learn English if they forgot their own language.” A school in the Kwakwaka’wakw community meant children did not have to go to the boarding (residential) school at Alert Bay, where the teachers suppressed Kwak’wala. Other First Nations, especially in British Columbia, similarly set some of their own terms for the schooling they would receive from missionaries (Miller 1996).
Another way that Indigenous peoples sought out schooling on their own terms was by choosing to enrol their children in provincial public schools with White and other settlers. This seems to have been most common in British Columbia. Answering letters about the rules on admitting Indigenous youngsters to settler schools in the province, the superintendent of education, S.D. Pope—British Columbia’s most powerful public educator—wrote this to one of his subordinates in 1886 (quoted in Barman 2003b, 58): “You are doing perfectly right admitting Indian children” whose parents wanted them there and who did not disturb the school. “Personally,” Pope continued, “I am glad to hear of their attendance wherever circumstance will admit of it.” Integration of Indigenous and settler children in British Columbia public schools was occurring in the 1880s in Hope, in Port Kells, at Granville, and in Sooke, among other places (Barman 2003b; Carleton 2021; see also Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a). Settlers benefited from Indigenous children in the public schools. Without them, Barman (2003b) argues, settler schools would have fallen below the minimum enrolment necessary to operate.
Like Kwakwaka’wakws at Cape Mudge, Indigenous children in settler public schools acquired—at their families’ will—the necessities, such as reading and writing English, for integration into settler Canada (Carleton 2021; Chapple and Raptis 2013). They were also able to remain in their communities where they were exposed to their peoples’ languages and cultures, unlike Indigenous children ripped away from families to attend residential schools for most of the year. Historians’ accounts for now are silent on whether this exposure fostered language retention. It certainly did for White settlers; many Scandinavians, Ukrainians, Germans, and others kept their languages because public schools accommodated them (Friesen 1987). Still other Indigenous parents sent their offspring to settler public schools because they were aware of residential school harms and wanted their children to avoid them (Carleton 2021). None of this is to say that settler schools were perfectly free from White prejudice and systemic discrimination. Far from it. In British Columbia public schools, Barman (2003a, 40) writes, Indigenous and mixed Indigenous-settler children “were made to be ashamed of the bi/cultural identity/ies that they inherited from their parents.” Indigenous parents who had the option made the best choice they could between two racist school systems: the federal Indian system and the provincial settler one (see also Raptis and Members of the Tsimshian Nation 2016; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a).
Over time, policy and prejudice circumscribed Indigenous peoples’ ability to access schooling on some of their own terms. Enrolling Indigenous children in settler schools in British Columbia continued until the late 1880s or early 1890s. However, by then provincial schools no longer needed Indigenous enrolments to have enough pupils to operate (Carleton 2021). At this point, White parents wrote school authorities to demand they exclude Indigenous children from settler schools, which authorities ultimately did with a few exceptions (Barman 2003b; Carleton 2021).7
Also over time, the federal government broke its treaty promises of on-reserve schools and imposed Indian education on its terms. This was schooling in church- and missionary-run Indian boarding and industrial schools. (Later the two merged as “residential” schools.) Ottawa went back on its word first on the Prairies. From there, failed promises of schooling on Indigenous terms spread across the country. In 1879, seeking a means to educate destitute Prairie Indigenous peoples that was affordable and would assimilate them, the federal government sent Nicholas Flood Davin, a Regina member of Parliament, to collect information in the United States about US Indian boarding schools. Davin returned to recommend off-reserve boarding and industrial schools (Miller 1996; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a). Davin also gave his opinion that the government should never have agreed to First Nations’ requests for schools in the numbered treaties. All this had done, he said, was give Indigenous peoples a mistaken impression that they “had some right to a voice regarding the character and management of the schools as well as regarding the initiatory step of their establishment” (quoted in Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a, 156–57). Davin’s recommendations for boarding and industrial schools only, overriding what treaties had said about on-reserve schools and what First Nations rightly believed they had been promised, Miller (1996, 101) argues, were in line with “a racist disposition, one that was widely shared in Canadian society, that Aboriginal peoples had to be controlled and have decisions made for them.” Christian Missionaries endorsed this view of Indigenous peoples’ limited agency and the residential school policy it underwrote. Missionaries were already operating a dozen Indian boarding schools in Canada by this time. After Davin reported, the federal government’s embryonic Indian education policy turned quickly to building on this capacity by, in effect, subcontracting delivery of Indian education to churches and missionaries. This cut costs. The prime minister, John A. Macdonald, also believed the policy would give Indigenous peoples Christian religion, taming them: “Among Indians the first thing to do is to make them better men, and, if possible good Christian men by applying proper moral restraints and appealing to the instinct for worship that is found in all nations, whether civilized or uncivilized” (quoted in Miller 1996, 103). The government knew that live-away boarding and industrial schools would take Indigenous children far from their reserves and kin, which government officials believed were bad influences (Miller 1996).
Canada used residential schools to undermine Indigenous cultures, not to offer education for adaptation or integration. Residential schools were the opposite of what Indigenous peoples had hoped for and had agreed to in the numbered treaties (Treaty 7 Tribal Council et al. 1996). There were problems and grievances practically from the outset. As early as 1881, Mistawasis (quoted in Miller 1996, 100), who had participated in making Treaty 6 in 1876 and heard the promises of schooling Canada made there, stated plaintively to the Governor General, who was visiting the Plains Cree: “We want teachers for [reserve] schools.” Chief Peyasiw-awasis, also a participant in making Treaty 6, wrote in 1910 to Duncan Campbell Scott, the federal government official responsible for Indigenous education, with the same complaint as Mistawasis, though Peyasiw-awasis elaborated even further (quoted in Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a, 179). “A spruce tree taken while young from a low lying moist soil when transplanted into light soil dies in most cases,” he wrote. “If it lives, it will be but short and stunted, where it would have been tall and straight had it been left in its natural soil.… I see that the Boarding Schools and their effect on our young can be explained by this parable. The [boarding school] system is not natural.” A day school instead would put “the children in our care which is natural” (quoted in Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a, 179). Peyasiw-awasis, who was, as noted, a signatory to Treaty 6, added, “To me there personally was promised a school in my reserve if I and my people desired it” (quoted in Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a, 180). Complaints against industrial and boarding schools that Canada offered instead of the on-reserve schools First Nations had requested and Canada’s treaty officials had promised piled up. Students were not learning English in industrial and boarding schools. Untrained missionary teachers proselytized more than they taught. Supposed agricultural “instruction” looked much more like forcing students to work the school farm. Because of pupils’ work obligations, there was a shorter school day in federal Indian schools than in provincial settler schools. Underfunding and neglect left pupil food and medical care substandard (Barman 2003b; Miller 1996; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a).
The spreading residential school system helped to racialize diverse Indigenous peoples into a singular Indians, a settler concept. Barman (2003b; see also Marker 2009) argues that federal Indian residential school policy forced different British Columbia First Nations, who had been accessing schooling through the provincial settler schools, to become “Indians” and “conform into dependency” (Barman 2003b, 60) in a federal Indian residential school system that treated British Columbia First Nations, Prairie Indigenous peoples, and ultimately all First Nations from coast to coast to coast as the same, single “race.” Different racializations would also take place through schooling for Chinese Canadians, and also White settlers, as we will see in the rest of this essay. In 1920, Ottawa introduced enforceable compulsory school attendance for Indigenous children that, in effect, further sealed them into the separate federal Indian school system (Miller 1996).
Schooling for Non-British White Settlers in Western Canada
In practice, and frequently in policy and legislation as well, public schooling in Western Canada was racially inequitable. The western provinces and territories had public school systems for settlers in place by the time the provinces and territories joined Canada, or they established them not long after. Public schools were free to attend, usually compulsory, tax supported, and, to varying degrees, non-denominational. Common schools, which is what most public schools were (excepting publicly supported Catholic and other separate schools), were supposed to be for everyone in a community, “providing them with a roughly equitable basic education regardless of class, gender, ethnicity or race” (Barman 2003a, 39). Yet Western Canada’s common schools were Anglo-Canadian schools. In their aims and curriculum, they favoured unapologetically and taught unswervingly the beliefs and values of British or other English-speaking White settlers who were Protestant (Axelrod 1997; von Heyking, 2006). Nevertheless, White settlers who were not British or of other English-speaking origin, settlers such as Ukrainians, Germans, Mennonites, and many others, still found accommodations and opportunities in these public schools. At times less than what public schools offered to White settlers who were of British origin, these accommodations and opportunities nevertheless exceeded what Indigenous peoples and Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians encountered. Between approximately the 1870s and the First World War, non-British White settlers in large parts of Western Canada had some latitude to protect their languages in public school. Yet these same non-British White settlers also benefited from the school’s Canadianizing functions, which served their interests as well—namely, acquiring English and the other educational rudiments necessary to function in Canadian society and in the economy.
Nineteenth-century Canadian settler public schools allowed many different languages, with the choice of instructional language often up to the community, political scientist Ronald Manzer (1994) has argued (see also McLeod 1979). Multiple instructional languages in the period before the First World War in Western Canadian schools is partly attributable to the French Canadian presence in the region. When Manitoba joined Confederation in 1870, for example, French and English enjoyed equal status there. Confessionally dual (i.e., Catholic and Protestant) public schools did as well. There were two taxpayer-funded school systems: one Catholic and French, the other Protestant and English (Jaenen 1979; Morton 1979).
Multilingual schooling also arose because of something called “group colonization.” (See Figure 2.) Different federal government policies and private schemes for settling Western Canada, under the 1872 Dominion Lands Act’s umbrella, allowed and often encouraged emigrants to settle in racially or ethnically homogeneous “colonization reserves.” In these areas, Germans settled with other Germans, Icelanders with other Icelanders, Belgians with other Belgians, and so on. (Eyford 2016). Some Prairie settlers possessed a settlement agreement with the federal government that accorded them special privileges when they settled with their compatriots or co-religionists. Mennonites immigrating to Manitoba in the 1870s had an agreement with Ottawa that technically guaranteed freedom to worship for these religious dissenters from Russia. The Mennonites, however, interpreted this to mean they could import their schools as well, instructed in their language, Low German. Eventually, in 1885, they were even able to place these schools, still instructed in Low German, under the provincial public school system in order for the schools to receive government grants (Titely 1990). Immigrants of other origins lacked formal agreements like the Mennonites had. However, after they landed in Canada and eventually made their way to the Prairie gateway, Winnipeg, the “colonization agents and land guides” in that city directed them to settle in areas effectively set aside for Ukrainians, or Slovaks, or such other ethnic, racial, or religious groups as there may have been (Eyford 2016, 61). Group colonization was supported by some Canadian officials (but by no means all of them) because it softened the settlers’ landing in a foreign place. Writing in 1879, Thomas Spence, a Manitoba settlement booster, remarked about colonization reserves, “Neighbors in the old land may be neighbours in the new; friends may settle near each other, form communities and the nucleus of new settlements and towns, establish schools and, in short, avoid many of the traditional hardships which have usually attended pioneer life” (quoted in Eyford 2016, 63; see also, Meister 2021).
However, the schools instructed in immigrant languages that arose with group colonization were unpopular with many established Canadians for the same reason that group colonization was also frequently disliked (Eyford 2016). They appeared to get in the way of assimilation and national cohesion. Multilingual school systems—which were often confessionally (Catholic and Protestant) dual as well—were not popular with Protestant chauvinists from Ontario who entered the West as settlers after approximately 1870. Anti-immigrant nativists back East also deplored using languages other than English in schools. There were politicians who clamoured to replace dual systems and multilingualism with English-only non-denominational institutions. In 1890, a government espousing educational policies like this one came to power in Manitoba. The Greenway government amended the province’s school law to terminate its dual Protestant-Catholic system. The amendment created a single public school system, non-denominational, with English as the only sanctioned instructional language. The move to end the Catholic school system was broadly construed as an attack on French, because practically all Manitoba Catholic schools used it as the instructional language (Manzer 1994). During the Greenway government’s assault, the federal government did not defend Manitoba’s French minority’s right to separate Catholic schools. This right existed under Section 93 of the Constitution Act, 1867, and the federal government was legally obligated to protect it. The government’s inaction instead touched off the Manitoba Schools Question, a national political crisis. The crisis was not resolved until 1897 when Manitoba amended the school act again (Friesen 1987).
To assuage French Canadians in the province and in the rest of the country, this time Manitoba’s 1897 amended school act protected French as an instructional language. In places in Manitoba where there were ten or more French-speaking pupils, their families could request instruction in that language in school “upon the bilingual system” (Morton 1979, 5). “Bilingual system” meant different things historically but usually referred to a school that did not have an English-only instructional language policy. Bilingual schools employed teachers who spoke the children’s home language in addition to English and permitted teachers and pupils to use that home language during the school day (Manzer 1994; Sissons 1917). However, to appease Ontario English chauvinists, who would not accept equality of English and French in any way, the amended Manitoba school act also conferred instructional language rights on groups speaking “any language other than English” (quoted in Morton 1979, 5).
Multilingual public schooling also existed in the Northwest Territories, and then in Alberta and Saskatchewan, when those two provinces were formed out of part of the territories. As far back as the 1870s, the instructional language in schools in the northwest was the language that was used locally, whether it was English, French, or something else. By 1901, the territorial government had circumscribed this permissiveness somewhat. Instructional languages other than English were still allowed but on a similar system to Manitoba’s system after 1897 (McLeod 1979). When Saskatchewan and Alberta were formed as provinces in 1905, they adopted policies similar to previous territorial policies. Saskatchewan allowed one hour of instruction in a language other than English during the school day, but in practice tolerated minority languages as instructional languages for a much greater part of the day than that. Alberta’s liberal 1911 regulations also permitted instructional languages other than English (Jaenen 1979).
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Canada changed its immigrant recruitment policy in a manner that opened the doors wider to Europeans who spoke a multitude of languages. Thanks to the policies tolerating minority languages just described, these immigrant languages would become instructional languages in Prairie public schools. Before this time, Canada had tried, with mixed results, to recruit racially, ethnically, and linguistically preferred immigrants mainly from the British Isles and western and northern Europe. Unable to recruit enough of this preferred “stock” to grow the settler population as much as officials desired, the government began to also actively seek immigrants from Eastern and southern Europe. One government official famously declared that the Eastern or southern European newcomer, a “stalwart peasant in [a] sheepskin coat … with a stout wife and half-dozen children,” was “good quality” and suitable enough for Canada (quoted in Harney 1988, 53). This change in immigration policy that broadened recruitment to practically all of Europe helped to grow the Prairie population from 400,000 people in 1901 to 2.1 million by 1921 (Friesen 1987).
The settler newcomers, including many from Austria-Hungary and other parts of Eastern and southern Europe, took advantage of existing permissive instructional language rules. By 1911, Manitoba had 107 Ruthenian (Ukrainian) or Polish bilingual schools. In fact, one out of every five Manitoba public school students attended a bilingual school (Jaenen 1979). As late as 1918, around six dozen Saskatchewan schools were teaching in French, about the same number were teaching in German, and around three dozen were teaching in Ukrainian, though this was out of a much larger total number of schools in Saskatchewan, which had approximately 3,000 school districts at this time (McLeod 1979). Similar conditions prevailed in Alberta. Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta (to a lesser degree) even let people study to become public school teachers at teacher training institutes that used Ukrainian as the instructional language (Jaenen 1979).
Western Canada’s multilingual public schools fulfilled two important objectives for settler families who sent their children to them. They helped to preserve immigrant languages and, by extension, cultures. This stands in contrast to federal Indian residential schools that tried to stamp out Indigenous languages and cultures. Yet multilingual settler Prairie public schools also Canadianized immigrant children, offering them some English and other academic and citizenship instruction necessary to participate in Canada socially and economically. This diverged from federal Indian residential schools as well. With their abbreviated school day and lack of useful instruction, they prepared Indigenous children for subordination, not participation, as Barman (2003b) has argued.
Different White settler groups, and within those groups, different families, prioritized linguistic and cultural survival and Canadianization differently (Eyford 2016; Jaenen 1979) Nevertheless, most, probably even all, wanted some degree of both. Icelandic immigrants, for instance, preferred their children to receive their public schooling in English. They used the home and local press to protect Icelandic language and culture. Poles, Ukrainians, and Germans, on the other hand, wanted public schools to preserve their languages, though they still wanted their children to learn English also (Morton 1979). The Ukrainian newspaper Kanadyiskyi Farmer in 1909 stated simply, “We need to know the English language but we have the right to learn the Ruthenian [Ukrainian] language in schools” (quoted in Hryniuk and McDonald 1986, 158).
Over time, European settlers of diverse origins were racialized into a White racial group with Anglo-Canadian settlers. The process took years, and different Europeans were racialized as White unevenly. Claims to Whiteness, not phenotypes, mattered most. Icelanders, Ryan Eyford (2016) argues, became White within one generation of arriving in Canada. This occurred, he says, because the Icelanders professed a shared White racial identity with Anglo-Canadians and because Anglo-Canadians accepted that claim’s genuineness. The claim itself derived from nineteenth-century racial mythologies that Icelanders were racial cousins to Anglo-Canadians. As one commentator stretched the claim in 1874, Icelandic settlers were “the vigorous descendants of the ‘Vikings’ and ‘Danes,’ who conquered England and Scotland in ancient times” (quoted in Eyford 2016, 34).
Schools were crucial to these claims to Whiteness, to the Europeans who insistently made them, and to White racialization more generally. Aligning a group with the project of creating a single nation through its schools could be a powerful claim to a shared White racial identity. The colonization agent for Icelanders in Manitoba in the 1870s, John Taylor, requested a “national school” as one of the first things he did when establishing the Icelandic colony on Lake Winnipeg (quoted in Eyford 2016, 131). This phrase, “national school,” referred at that time to the sort of school that would give immigrants a Canadian nationality, removing their old and varied allegiances, as opposed to a bilingual or other school that used a minority instructional language or tolerated a minority religious identity. David Goggin, chairman of the Council of Public Instruction in the North-West Territories (1891–1902), and a giant of the national schools idea, once described their objectives like this: “to gather the children of different races, creeds, and customs into the common school, and ‘Canadianize’ them.… Though they may enter as Galicians, Doukhobors, or Icelanders, they will come out as Canadians” (quoted in McDonald 1979, 23; see also Jaenen 1977; Morton 1979). This is likely the sort of school Taylor had in mind. Taylor’s teenage niece, Carrie, who like Taylor did not speak Icelandic as a first language (if at all) but rather English, was appointed the first schoolteacher (Eyford 2016). Icelandic and Scandinavian settlers, historian W.L. Morton (1979, 10) writes, were the biggest proponents of “assimilation to the English group in public life and … the retention of their mother tongue and culture in private life.” By 1916, the two Icelandic-Canadian members of the Manitoba legislature voted with other members to end bilingual teaching in their province’s schools. One of the two men said, in the legislative assembly, “We admit, and we all must admit, that there is only one nationality possible in the future, a Canadian nationality, and we claim the privilege of becoming merged in that, and the privilege of contributing towards that, whatever national characteristics we may possess” (quoted in Morton 1979, 10).
As the Icelanders example shows, Whiteness and inclusion were neither inevitable nor evenly distributed, even among European settlers (Meister 2021). Prejudice had a hand in that. Despite the accommodations for their languages and cultures, non-British or non-English-speaking White settlers faced open, nasty bigotry in Canada. This was especially true for Eastern and southern Europeans, whose grasp on Whiteness, against say Icelanders’ hold on it, stayed shaky throughout the period this essay examines (Meister 2021). Even as Canada finally turned to recruiting Eastern and southern Europeans as immigrants, they remained non-preferred immigrant “stock” (Harney 1988; Meister 2021). Referring in 1901 to Eastern Europeans, an editorial in the Winnipeg Telegram, for instance, said their “civilization is primitive,” called them “the scum of Europe,” and agitated for immigration restriction to “keep our land for children, and for the children’s children of Canadians” (quoted in Hryniuk and McDonald 1986, 158–59). The superintendent of the Winnipeg school division, Daniel McIntyre, translated bigotry into racist policy. McIntyre “was an adamant advocate of a unitary school system and of unilingual English instruction” (Hryniuk and McDonald 1986, 160) and dug in against introducing Ukrainian as an instructional language in the city’s schools. Winnipeg’s Ukrainians—as we will see, like British Columbia’s Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians—turned to private evening, Sunday, and even a parochial day school to teach their language instead (Hryniuk and McDonald 1986).
By the First World War (1914–18), ever-present anti-French Canadian and anti-Catholic attitudes and general nativism merged with fallout from Ontario’s own French-language instructional crisis over school Regulation 17, and the wartime conscription crisis that divided Canadians linguistically, as well as with wartime anti-foreigner sentiment. This cut deeply into the foundation for multilingual education in Western Canada and it collapsed. Between 1914 and 1919, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta altered their earlier legislation and policy and made English the only instructional language (Jaenen 1979; McLeod 1979; Morton 1979; Titely 1990). Yet it is nevertheless also true that many White settler languages other than English in the period from approximately 1870 to 1914 still enjoyed greater status in Prairie public schools than Indigenous languages did or Chinese and Japanese did in British Columbia. Public schooling was a racially ranked linguistic status hierarchy. That hierarchy favoured White settlers over others, even if it still did not treat non-British White settlers as the equals of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. What is more, in the same period many European settlers successfully melted into Canadian Whiteness, both because they wanted to and because Anglo-Canadians permitted them to. Some of them used schooling to do this, just as some others used schooling to preserve aspects of their languages and cultures during the slow and uneven racialization process. The final groups, whose school experiences this essay turns to now, enjoyed no such privileges.
Schooling of Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians in British Columbia
Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian children’s home languages and cultures sheltered them in British Columbia, a hostile “White Man’s Province,” where many White settlers behaved as if the place was theirs rightfully and no one else’s (Roy 1989, vii). Private Chinese- and Japanese-language schools created that cover. Yet, Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian children also needed English-language ability and other skills to integrate into the provincial economy. Public schools provided those but not all of the time, and families and communities struggled against racism to access them.
Unlike provincial public schools in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta that permitted multiple instructional languages, British Columbia’s public schools were “de facto if not de jure” English-only (Manzer 1994, 61). Consequently, Japanese Canadian and Chinese Canadians had to establish private schools to instruct in their home languages, at their own expense. Japanese Canadians in Vancouver started Alexander Street School (or Nippon Kokumin Gakko) in 1906. It was a “national school” but Japanese. The school taught in Japanese about Japanese culture using a curriculum from Japan. White employers avoided hiring Japanese Canadians, so Japanese language ability was very important to the “Nisei” (second-generation Japanese immigrants) to secure jobs with Japanese employers “in Japanese Canadian economic niches” (Okawa and The Landscapes of Injustice Research Collective 2018, 22–23; see also Roy 1989).Japanese was also necessary for Nisei if they wanted to visit or relocate to the Japanese Empire (Okawa and The Landscapes of Injustice Research Collective 2018). Alexander Street School served an important cultural function combined with its linguistic one. Many Japanese believed that Nisei could only attain true Japaneseness by learning the Japanese language. As stated in one contemporary description of Alexander Street School, “The language of a nation is suffused with the nation’s thoughts, emotions, culture, and so on. The best way to foster the [Japanese] national spirit in a person is to ensure that he or she attains a deep understanding of the language” (quoted in Okawa and The Landscapes of Injustice Research Collective 2018, 23).
Chinese Canadians opened comparable private schools for their community, for reasons similar to those of Japanese Canadians. Around 1900, Chinese Canadians in Victoria established a school that used Chinese as the instructional language, except in commercial subjects, which were instructed in English. In 1909 and 1922, Chinese Canadians in British Columbia formed private schools to educate the Chinese-Canadian children that public schools had tried to exclude or segregate (Roy 1989; Stanley 2011). Supporters of a 1922 student strike against Victoria’s recently racially segregated public schools started the Zhonghua Yixue (Chinese Free School) that taught the “Chinese nationalist curriculum in Chinese” (Stanley 2011, 37–38). It was free to attend, and community members financed it while continuing to pay public school taxes also (Stanley 2011).
British Columbia’s settler public schools on many occasions tried to deny Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians the public education that would enable them to learn English and participate more fully in Canadian society. They did this by segregating Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian children into separate public school classrooms and buildings or by trying to exclude them from public schools altogether. Repeatedly in the 1870 to 1923 period, White British Columbians called for Chinese Canadian or Japanese Canadian school segregation. The Asiatic Exclusion League and the Native Sons of British Columbia—and also such respectably mainstream organizations as the Victoria Chamber of Commerce and the Henry Hudson School Parent-Teacher Association in Vancouver—worked openly for segregation. White people made many arguments against integrated schools, all of them motivated by prejudice. Some White people even claimed integrated schools would lead to interracial marriages (Roy 2011). One particularly panic-stricken bigot, Harry Langley (quoted in Roy 2011, 34), who was prominent in the Oriental Exclusion Association, said that he would rather “murder” his daughters “than see them fall prey to Orientals for husbands.” A proposed amendment to British Columbia’s school act to permit public schools to turn away Asian students “on racial grounds” (Roy 1989, 25–26) foundered in 1909, but only because the government worried the plan would lead to separate schools for the excluded children, which would be costlier and less efficient than a single public system. The Victoria public school board, in 1908, prevented Chinese Canadian children born outside Canada from enrolling in its schools. It also segregated Chinese Canadian children born in Canada in separate classes (Roy 1989). School trustees in Victoria enacted yet another policy segregating Chinese Canadians in 1922 (Stanley 2011). Steveston, a fishing village that counted Japanese Canadians as some of its founders, had a ghettoized classroom for Japanese Canadian children at its Lord Byng Public School. Hide Hyodo, a Japanese-speaking Nisei, taught the Japanese Primary class there from the 1920s until Japanese internment in 1942. Presumably, she was hired because she could teach in Japanese (Kubota 2020). The Canadian Daughters’ League was quick to jump on the decision to employ Hyodo. Like nativists in other parts of Western Canada, the League believed non-English instructional languages in public schools were the “thin edge of the wedge of bi-lingualism … and Oriental bi-lingualism at that” (quoted in Roy 2011, 39). Hence bilingualism’s Canadian opponents did not just target White settler languages such as Ukrainian, or French, in public schools but also at times targeted Japanese. In 1923, the Canadian government brought closure of a sort to the issue. After decades of restricting Chinese immigration (as well as Japanese immigration, but more informally), Canada enacted the Chinese Immigration Act. It ended practically all immigration from China.
Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians, like Ukrainian, German, Polish, or other non-British White Prairie settlers and like many Indigenous peoples, believed that obtaining schooling was essential to their children’s success in a society that treated them as racial inferiors. When Victoria’s public school board segregated Chinese Canadian children into separate schools in 1922, Chinese Canadians supported a strike by students, many of them not even yet teenagers, who stayed away from public schools for over a year to protest the school board’s discrimination. Chinese Canadians knew that they were taxpaying British subjects who deserved “equality of educational opportunity” (Stanley 2011, 29). They let loose a torrent of letters demanding it. “Letter writers,” Stanley (2011, 29) observes, “articulated the reasons for the strike: experience had shown that segregated schooling meant inferior education, whereas integrated instruction meant successful education in English and ‘Canadian ways.’” In fact, White supremacists also knew that public schooling helped the Chinese to integrate and succeed in Canada. They proposed excluding Chinese Canadian children from public schools, or segregating them, because they did not want that to happen (Roy 1989).
Public schools that segregated Chinese Canadian pupils racialized diversity into a single “Chinese Canadian” identity, Stanley (2011) has argued. Segregation erased instantly longstanding and real ethnic, dialect, class, and political differences within the Chinese population in Canada and forced different people to think of themselves the same way Whites settlers thought of them—as one indistinguishable whole. “It seems that if school segregation meant that racialized Chinese could not be ‘Canadian,’” Stanley (2011, 37) writes, “they were prepared to be ‘Chinese.’” As we have seen, much the same thing happened to diverse Indigenous peoples under a federal Indian education policy that assumed all First Nations were the same and arbitrarily collapsed them, Barman (2003b, 60) writes, into “a single category to be dealt with as expeditiously and economically as possible” in the federal Indian education system.
Conclusion
Between approximately 1870 and 1923, racism shaped the relative educational privileges and disadvantages of non-British White settlers, Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians, and Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. All three wanted public schooling on their own terms. They needed it to flourish economically and socially in a country where their children were treated as second class, or worse than that, because of their race. Yet none of the three groups wanted schooling that would alienate them completely from their languages and cultures. Nevertheless, this was the type of schooling that was often imposed on them, to different degrees. Non-British White settlers’ home languages were tolerated as instructional languages—at public expense—in every part of the region except British Columbia, up until about the time of the First World War. Public schools also gave these White settlers opportunities to acquire the English-language and other skills and knowledge they needed to thrive as immigrants to Canada. Northern, Eastern, and southern Europeans were gradually and unevenly racialized as White. Schools had a hand in that and were flexible enough to enable non-British settlers to use them—as Ukrainians did—or to not use them—as was Icelanders’ choice—for keeping alive their languages and cultures. In British Columbia, Chinese and Japanese speakers could not use public schools to preserve their languages. They had to do this privately, paying for the privilege themselves while still paying public school taxes. On multiple occasions, school trustees and provincial politicians tried to exclude Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians from British Columbia public schools or to segregate them in separate classrooms. Chinese Canadians and Japanese Canadians fought against these efforts to deny them equal educational opportunities and access to education for integration into Canadian society. Racialized as Chinese and not as Canadians, Chinese Canadians, Stanley (2011) has argued, sublimated their own many differences in response to racist school policies. Anti-Asian immigration laws culminated for Chinese Canadians in the 1923 Chinese Immigration (Exclusion) Act that prevented practically all further immigration of Chinese people to Canada. Indigenous pupils experienced yet more forms of racism. Canada broke its treaty promises to provide schooling on First Nations’ terms, schooling that Indigenous peoples signed treaties for and that would have helped them cope with settlement’s onslaught by educating them for a changing economy. Another option for useful education, the public schools, was snatched out of Indigenous peoples’ hands as well. British Columbians after approximately 1890 increasingly closed public schools to Indigenous peoples in that province, where public schools had been somewhat open to them previously. The federal government imposed Indian residential schools instead. That system racialized all First Nations, regardless of their many differences, into a single category—Indians. By 1920, federal Indian education was enforceably compulsory. Yet it was such an inferior education, Jean Barman (2003b) has argued, that it could only prepare Indigenous children for inequality. More than that, Indian residential schools certainly did not protect Indigenous languages; to the contrary, they frequently undermined them. This denied Indigenous youngsters the privilege that non-British White people often had to learn in their own languages in public schools.
Viewed together—and through an anti-racist history lens—the school experiences of non-British White settlers, Japanese Canadians and Chinese Canadians, and Indigenous peoples in Western Canada reveal a vivid picture of racisms. The nation-building project of schooling, which was so fundamental to the making of Canadians and the taming of differences, unfolded on racially uneven grounds. An anti-racist history looks unflinchingly at the harms this caused, including suppressing languages and denying school opportunities. It examines the educational privileges that trickled down to White settlers but that did not reach Indigenous peoples, Japanese Canadians, and Chinese Canadians. It addresses the long-standing efforts of all these racialized peoples to demand schooling on their terms and to stand up for educational justice.
The struggle against racism in schools is by no means only historical. It continues today. An anti-racist history of the topic reminds people living in Canada of educational debts owed for historical educational injustices and teaches other important lessons about racisms and schooling in the twenty-first century. For one, this history is a reminder that racisms are plural. That means that a school system that is non-racist, or even anti- racist, in one or more respects may still be simultaneously racist in others. We must look carefully at every educational policy and poke into every educational practice to guard against this tendency. Another lesson is that racisms that are plural make different racializations that confer different advantages and disadvantages on people. Racialized as White, non-British non-English-speaking settlers enjoyed school privileges that Indigenous and Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian children did not. Most of all, they had the privilege of being themselves by using their home languages in the classroom, even being instructed in them, in cases where that home language—Ukrainian, German, or another—was different from the national language. A third lesson is that racialization, as a process, is still specific today as it was then. More than that though, the way people are racialized today in Canada descends from how they were racialized here in the past, even if the correspondence is not identical. That means that the people racialization privileged or disadvantaged in the past can be the same people racialization privileges or disadvantages today. “Race,” Patrick Wolfe (2016, 2) writes, “is a trace of history: colonised populations continue to be racialised in specific ways that mark out and reproduce the unequal relationships into which Europeans have co-opted these populations.” Finally, as a decolonizing undertaking, the anti-racist history this essay presents also reminds treaty people—and all people living in Canada are treaty people—of solemn agreements, including the numbered treaties, that Canada has made with First Nations promising schooling. These agreements have not ended and Canadians must still honour them, along with new treaties and new nation-to-nations relationships that promise greater Indigenous control over Indigenous educational destinies. Anti-racist histories help teachers, teacher education students, and the public to unpack racist and colonial baggage, and to see better the journey ahead to a different and just educational future.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Bathseba Opini, Dale McCartney, the anonymous peer reviewers, and the journal’s editors for their helpful input on previous versions of this essay. Thanks as well to Haruho Kubota who helped to develop teaching materials on which the essay is partly based and to Geoffrey Wallace who prepared the maps in the essay.
Footnotes
1.
The Constitution Act, 1867 (formerly the British North America Act), Canada’s founding legislation, created the division of legislative powers that made settler education provincial and “Indian” education federal. Section 91 gives the federal government exclusive responsibility for “Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians” (Constitution Act, 1982). Section 93 assigns the provinces exclusive responsibility for education. While Section 91, detailing federal powers, does not mention “Indian” education specifically, the federal Indian Act, which Canada first passed in 1876, does specify that the federal government is responsible for schools for Indigenous people. Treaties, as we will see, further commit Canada to providing education to First Nations.
2.
The term “Indian” education is used because it was the federal government’s education of Indigenous peoples, which it defined as “Indians.” Where I write “Indians” or “Indian education” in this essay, I am referring to that education. Indigenous education is the education of Indigenous peoples on their terms, something altogether different from “Indian education.”
3.
4.
From 1885, “head taxes” of $50, later $100, and eventually $500, were used to exclude people before the complete ban in 1923. Canada also discriminated against Japanese immigrants. Different “gentlemen’s agreements” informally, but strictly, constrained the numbers of Japanese allowed to enter the country. See Roy (1989, 2011).
5.
Despite the fact that English-speaking White settlers of British origin benefited clearly from public schooling tilted in their favour, this essay is not about their educational experiences. It makes space for other racialized experiences to move from the background to the foreground. Yet it does not take up the experience of Black people in Western Canadian schools. Often English-speaking yet not White—such as the descendants of Black Californian gold seekers on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia—and also represented in relatively smaller numbers in Western Canada, Black people fit differently into the racist hierarchy of the region’s school systems. See Barman (2003a). Western Canadian provinces do not appear to have legally segregated Black children in schools, as some Ontario and Nova Scotia school boards did. See Killian (2020) and Winks (1969). Yet it should not be assumed that this, or the fact that Black people spoke English as a first language, meant they had educational equality with White English-speaking settlers. On other groups in British Columbia, such as South Asians, and public school access, see Mandeville (2002).
6.
For an explanation of enfranchisement, see Dickason and Newbigging (2019).
7.
On continued enrolment of Indigenous children in British Columbia public schools past this point in time, see Raptis and Members of the Tsimshian Nation (2016) and Chapple and Raptis (2013).
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Published In
Journal of Canadian Studies
Volume 56 • Number 3 • November 2022 | novembre 2022
Pages: 410 - 436
Copyright
© University of Toronto Press 2022.
History
Received: 31 January 2022
Submitted: 8 July 2022
Revision received: 8 July 2022
Accepted: 18 July 2022
Published ahead of print: 6 October 2022
Published in print: November 2022 | novembre 2022
Published online: 30 November 2022
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Journal of Canadian Studies 2022 56:3, 410-436
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