Background
For over 300 years, Europeans and Aboriginal peoples regarded one another as distinct nations. In war, colonists and Indians formed alliances, and in trade each enjoyed the economic benefits of co-operation. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, European hunger for land had expanded dramatically, and the economic base of the colonies shifted from fur to agriculture. Alliances of the early colonial era gave way, during the period of settlement expansion and nation-building, to direct competition for land and resources. Settlers began to view Aboriginal people as a ‘problem.’
The so-called ‘Indian problem’ was the mere fact that Indians
existed. They were seen as an obstacle to the spread of ‘civilization’ – that
is to say, the spread of European, and later Canadian, economic, social, and
political interests. Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent of Indian
Affairs from 1913 to 1932, summed up the Government’s position when he said, in
1920, "I want to get rid of the Indian problem. [...] Our object 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.”
In 1844, the Bagot Commission produced one of the earliest official documents to recommend education as a means of ridding the Dominion of Indians. In this instance, the proposal concerned farm-based boarding schools placed far from parental influence. The document was followed, in immediate successive decades, by others of similar substance: the Gradual Civilization Act (1857), an Act for the Gradual Enfranchisement of Indians (1869), and the Nicholas Flood Davin Report of 1879, which noted that "the industrial school is the principal feature of the policy known as that of ‘aggressive civilization’.” This policy dictated that: the Indians should, as far as practicable, "be consolidated on few reservations, and provided with ‘permanent individual homes’; that the tribal relation should be abolished; that lands should be allotted in severalty and not in common; that the Indian should speedily become a citizen […] enjoy the protection of the law, and be made amenable thereto; that, finally, it was the duty of the Government to afford the Indians all reasonable aid in their preparation for citizenship by educating them in industry and in the arts of civilization.”
A product of the
times, Davin disclosed in this report the assumptions of his era – that ‘Indian
culture’ was a contradiction in terms, Indians were uncivilized, and the aim of
education must be to destroy the Indian. In 1879 he returned from his tour of
the United States’ Industrial Boarding Schools, or the handling of the ‘Indian
problem,’ with a recommendation to Canada’s Minister of the Interior – John A.
Macdonald – of industrial boarding schools.
