The Globe supported residential schools for decades. Here’s how it stopped

I came face-to-face with George Brown, or at least a bust of him, as I entered the executive offices of The Globe and Mail’s former Front Street headquarters in Toronto in 2015. I wasn’t impressed. This was, after all, the man who founded the country’s paper of record, a paper that had misrepresented my people throughout most of its history. I may have even scoffed at the sight of yet another white settler bronzed into a Canadian legacy.

I was a student in a journalism training program and had just learned about The Globe’s investigation into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. This was at a time when Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper was refusing to hold a national inquiry into those missing women and girls. The next day, when The Globe endorsed the Conservatives for re-election, the irony hit me hard.

If the role of the paper’s editorial board is to be the voice of the paper and its proprietors, what responsibility does it bear for the mixed messages it sends when it comes to coverage of historical and continuing policies of assimilation against Indigenous people?

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“To kill the Indian in the child.” Harper used this phrase in 2008 when he apologized in the House of Commons on behalf of all Canadians for the abuse that generations of Indigenous children suffered at residential schools.

The phrase, or one close to it, originated in the United States, to describe the philosophy of abuse of native children at schools in that country.

The evil of those words spread across the continent as freely as the nations of Indigenous peoples once travelled the lands. The words first appeared in The Globe and Mail in 1997, at a time when Canada’s residential-school system was finally being outed as a horrific national disgrace.

From before Confederation until the 1990s, governments operated a system of schools across Canada that explicitly aimed, as Harper said in his apology, to “remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture.

“Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country,” he acknowledged. But a deep dive into The Globe’s archives reveals that, for well over a century, it had a place in this newspaper’s pages.

Decade after decade, The Globe supported a policy of assimilation, a policy that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission later called cultural genocide. Pope Francis, who came to Canada in 2022 on a trip addressing the traumatic legacy of residential schools and colonization, told reporters that forced assimilation was genocide.

Management and senior editors of the paper were mostly indifferent to the suffering and abuse of Indigenous children at residential schools, even as journalists and critics, some of them writing for The Globe, chronicled that abuse.

From its earliest days, The Globe debated the “Indian question.” While Brown was against “the policy of extermination,” as an editorial referencing the Sioux raids in Minnesota made clear, the paper’s call for “a rational treatment of ignorant and misguided savages who are scarcely more responsible for their actions than children” was far more telling.

The country’s answer to that call came in the spring of 1879, when Ottawa’s Privy Council was presented with a report from commissioner Nicholas Davin “on the advisableness of establishing Industrial Schools for the children of Indians and half-breeds.” Davin, a settler born in Ireland, had been a Globe writer before founding The Regina Leader and becoming a lawyer. Basing his report on a study of industrial schools south of the border, Davin noted that they were the “principal feature of the policy known as that of ‘aggressive civilization.’

“The experience of the United States is the same as our own as far as the adult Indian is concerned. Little can be done with him,” Davin declared. “The child … who goes to day school learns little, and what little he learns is soon forgotten, while his tastes are fashioned at home, and his inherited aversion to toil is in no way combated.”

Davin recommended the government contract with churches to run industrial boarding schools that would take native children away from their families and communities and indoctrinate them in the Christian faith and settler values. In 1883, Sir John A. Macdonald’s government passed legislation authorizing the first three residential schools, based on Davin’s recommendations.

Describing a residential school in Pennsylvania, U.S. Army officer Richard Pratt said, “All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” An adaptation of that phrase, with “child” replacing “man,” first appeared in a report to Canada’s Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in the 1990s.

Killing something has always meant killing something. How was it ever okay to think it wasn’t?

In the following years and decades, industrial and residential boarding schools proliferated across the new Dominion, mostly in Northern Ontario and what are now the Prairie provinces. Catholic and Protestant churches administered the schools, which aimed to provide a basic English education, teach agricultural and farming skills, and instill the Christian faith, with the intent and hope of eradicating the Indian savage within.

When it became clear that few Indigenous parents were willing to send their children to the schools, the government introduced legislation in 1920 to make attendance mandatory.

“I want to get rid of the Indian problem,” Duncan Campbell Scott, the notorious deputy minister who oversaw the residential-school policy at its peak between 1913 and 1932, told a parliamentary committee. “… Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”

From the beginning, The Globe viewed the schools in a mostly positive light. In June, 1880, the paper interviewed Rev. E.F. Wilson, who founded the Shingwauk Indian Residential School in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. He proudly explained the details of the five-year contracts they had for boys as young as 11.

“The first two years is devoted wholly to the school, in which are taught the elementary branches and some Latin,” Wilson explained. “For the third year we hire the boy out to some mechanic, to whom we pay a small sum for teaching him his trade. In the fourth year the mechanic pays us $1 per week for the boy’s services.”

He boasted of how the schools had been able to gain the full support of the parents and families of the children in the district that spanned about 500 kilometres from Sault Ste. Marie: “They sometimes would not hear of allowing their boys and girls to attend the school, while other parents would send a child for one or two years and take him away. This feeling is now all a thing of the past, and we have the hearty cooperation of all the Indians in our section.”

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Shingwauk sounded like a typical example of well-run institutions that offered enlightened and practical education for First Nations children. The opposite was true.

The schools were shoddily built, the teachers unqualified, the food substandard at best. Children became weakened and at risk of tuberculosis and other diseases. Over the decades, more than 150 schools took in more than 150,000 First Nation, Métis and Inuit children. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission said 4,100 children died while attending the schools, but the commission’s chairman, Murray Sinclair, has since said the actual number could be more than 10,000.

The Globe was oblivious to the abuse, writing in 1887, “… after every Indian has thus had a farm assigned him, the residue sold and the proceeds held in trust by government will afford an ample fund for the instructors’ schools and all other needful appliances, at the same time that the lands are thrown open to settlers. Can anyone doubt that this is the common sense solution of the Indian problem?”

By the 1890s, journalists were starting to report on the true conditions of the schools. In 1896, 17 years after the Davin Report, a Winnipeg Tribune reporter toured St. Paul’s industrial school in Middlechurch, Man., calling it “one of the most villainously constructed buildings it would be possible to imagine, and it is a disgrace to the department.”

In 1907, The Globe wrote about tuberculosis-related illnesses and deaths in residential schools, as outlined in a report from Peter Bryce, chief medical inspector to the Department of Indian Affairs. “Of a total of 1,537 pupils reported from 15 schools [...] seven per cent are sick or in poor health and 24 per cent are reported dead,” the report found. “In almost every instance the cause of death is given as tuberculosis.” In one school, 69 per cent of former students had died, the report said.

Bryce went on to say that “under present circumstances about one-half of the children who are sent to the Duck Lake boarding school die before the age of 18, or very shortly afterward.” He published a second report in 1909 recommending the government take over control of the schools from the churches.

But Scott suppressed Bryce’s reports. Nothing was done.

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If children weren’t dying of disease, they were being abused by school officials. One 1934 article reveals how both First Nations parents and local townsfolk in Truro and Shubenacadie, N.S., were enraged when they learned a number of boys at a nearby residential school had been flogged after money had gone missing. The school’s principal, Father J.P. Mackey, “did not consider the treatment unusually severe. The beatings had not been administered as punishment, he said, but to elicit information about the missing money.”

Three years later, The Globe reported on the deaths of students at another school with the headline, “Four Boys Die; Find Discipline Is Too Severe.”

There were other stories, here and there, over the years. In 1946, reporter Ralph Hyman wrote about an Anglican investigation of conditions in the schools. The buildings were firetraps and health hazards, the report concluded, and “reflect no credit on the Government of Canada which is responsible for them, or the Church which has put up with them.” The report urged that the schools be rebuilt as quickly as possible.

What if a Globe editor had seized on that report and put a team of reporters on the story? What kind of influence could The Globe have had on the residential-school policy had it not been so prejudiced and neglectful in its editorials and news reports toward the Indigenous children and families that it wrote about – or, more accurately, failed to write about?

But a search of The Globe’s archives reveals the paper’s discourse post-Confederation reflected colonial, white-supremacist values. Coverage mostly centred on solving the country’s self-induced “Indian problem” and frustrations with any resistance encountered in the process.

And throughout it all, no Indigenous voices or perspectives. And certainly no Indigenous reporters or editors.

The Globe’s centennial editorial in 1967 offered one of the first, albeit slight, indications the paper was starting to pay better attention to the many issues of assimilation and colonization facing Indigenous peoples, in spite of the slanted and sporadic coverage it had afforded since before Confederation.

After quoting prime minister Lester B. Pearson’s declaration that “Nobody need starve in Canada,” the July 1 editorial rebutted: “Nobody need starve to death. But people do. Opportunities fumbled. The Indian and the Eskimo know how we have fumbled.”

Yet biased and dismissive coverage was still taking place. Witness this headline from 1965: “Priest tells why he thinks Indians are not disadvantaged and backward.”

In these years the effort to “kill the Indian in the child” migrated to child-welfare agencies, which removed an estimated 20,000 Indigenous children from their parents in what became known as the Sixties Scoop. The children were put up for adoption, mostly to white, Christian families across North America.

The Globe ran adoption advertisements that were blatantly racist, if unintentionally honest, in their attitude: “Sturdy little North American Indian … without any knowledge of his background,” “a big boned, husky 3 year old Indian Protestant boy,” “chubby Indian girl” and “Rose needs Roman Catholic parents.”

But change was coming. A 1969 white paper from Indian Affairs minister Jean Chrétien recommended everything Scott had fought for: eliminating the Indian Act, selling off reserve lands to occupants, abandoning treaties. The backlash from the National Indian Brotherhood (which later became the Assembly of First Nations) and other First Nations forced the government into a full retreat.

Resource development in the 1960s and 1970s, including hydroelectricity projects and the proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline, opened the floodgates of Indigenous activism, as First Nations leaders mobilized with increasing success to have their inherent and treaty rights – indeed their basic human and civil rights – acknowledged, respected and honoured. Because of their efforts, federal and provincial leaders were compelled, reluctantly, to recognize Indigenous rights in the 1982 Canada Act. Supreme Court rulings have increasingly affirmed those rights.

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By the 1980s, The Globe had begun to grapple with what had gone on in the schools, and why the paper had failed to properly report on it. This is around the time that the words “aboriginal” and “native” started being used instead of “Indian,” and the paper began to include Indigenous sources in its coverage of historical events.

The 1990s would see the paper start to publish the hidden secrets residential-school survivors had been long suppressing. In an October, 1990, Globe article, Phil Fontaine – at the time grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, later national chief of the Assembly of First Nations – for the first time publicly disclosed the physical and sexual abuse he had endured as a young boy at the Catholic-run Fort Alexander Residential School.

“I think what happened to me is what happened to a lot of people,” Fontaine said. “It wasn’t just sexual abuse, it was physical and psychological abuse. It was a violation.”

By now, the paper was writing in horror of what had gone on. Take this editorial from Jan. 8, 1998:

“Presumably because they viewed the children in their care as somehow less than human, authorities at all levels within the system failed to give them the care and protection to which they were entitled. Sexual and other forms of abuse took root and flourished. Unlike the cultural paternalism, this cannot be seen as an understandable but regrettable excess of the day. At no time has it been part of this country’s values to allow the brutal exploitation of defenceless children in institutions charged with their care.”

Except that this had been part of the country’s values, had been part of the paper’s values, for decades – to ignore the sufferings of Indigenous children and to ignore those who sounded the alarm.

Two decades after the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and several years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission told us there were likely thousands of children buried at former residential school sites across the country, the Canadian public was finally opening its eyes as the first reports surfaced of unmarked graves at Kamloops in 2021, and numerous other former residential schools since. The schools not only tried to kill the Indian in the child. All too often, they killed the child.

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When Globe staffers moved to new offices in 2016, Brown’s bust moved with them. I haven’t seen it, though; I report from Northern Ontario.

I’m not sure what I would say to him if we ever did meet again. A lot of people are proud of Brown’s contribution to this country. I’m not one of them.

Willow Fiddler is a reporter at The Globe and Mail, covering stories related to Indigenous peoples and communities.

Editor’s note: The main photo caption in a previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation had announced the discovery of dozens of remains buried in unmarked graves. The nation announced that it had used ground-penetrating radar to find what First Nations leaders described as potential unmarked graves. This version has been updated.

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