“I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone… 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, that is the whole object of this Bill.” Dr. Duncan Campbell Scott - 1920

Scott made his mark in Canadian history as the head of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932, a department he had served since joining the federal civil service in 1879.

Even before Confederation, the Canadian government adopted a policy of assimilation (actually, it was the continuation of a policy that British colonial officials had pursued since 1713). The long term goal was to bring the Native peoples from their ‘savage and unproductive state’ and force (English style) civilization upon them, thus making Canada a homogeneous society in the Anglo-Saxon and Christian tradition.

In 1920, under Scott's direction, it became mandatory for all native children between the ages of seven and fifteen to attend one of Canada's Residential Schools.

Quoted from We Were Not the Savages:

"In 1936 a fifteen-year-old girl from the nearby Shubenacadie Reserve refused to return to the school and gave the following statement to the agent and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police:

"I have been going to Indian school for the past five years.... Before my holidays this year I was employed in kitchen for eleven weeks.... In the eleven weeks ... I spent a total of two weeks in school. The Sister has beaten me many times over the head and pulled my hair and struck me on the back of neck with a ruler and at times grabbed ahold of me and beat me on the back with her fists.

I have also been ordered to stand on the outside of the windows with a rope around my waist to clean windows on the fourth floor with a little girl holding the rope. When I told the Sister I was afraid to go out the window she scolded me and made me clean the window and threatened to beat me if I did not do it. This is being done to other children.

After we get a beating we are asked what we got the beating for and if we tell them we do not know we get another beating. The Sisters always tell us not to tell our parents about getting a beating."

Although available on paper, education, a vital tool to provide First Nations citizens with the ability to appreciate and modernize their ancient cultures, was all but denied until recent times. This unwritten requirement of White society: "You may have an education, but only if you agree to assimilate and accept the eventual extinction of your culture." Plus, the racism encountered by students attending White schools made an education practically unattainable.

In spite of these impediments, through the efforts of private organizations and churches, by 1867 some First Nations Peoples were able to read and write. However, after Confederation, even in the knowledge that the vast majority of Natives were illiterate, the government made no real effort to provide education until the passage of the Indian Act in 1876. Then, it was made unattractive by the provision that automatically enfranchised a Band member who graduated from university. Assimilation was the motivating factor behind these laws.

To hurry assimilation along, during the first six decades of twentieth century, First Nations tongues came under attack across the country. In Nova Scotia, Mi'kmaq children were forbidden to speak their language at schools and discouraged to do so in many other public places. Administrators at the Shubenacadie residential school informed Mi'kmaq and Maliseet children upon enrolment that it was a cardinal offense to speak their own languages. If caught, retribution was swift.

The same rule was followed and strictly enforced by bureaucrats administering schools and other public institutions in First Nations communities across Canada. But nowhere was it pursued with the same dogged determination as on mainland Nova Scotia. This was not unusual, because from the time the British took over in 1713, the Mi'kmaq of peninsular Nova Scotia had always been singled out for special hatred.

Despite the determined effort made by White society to eradicate the Mi'kmaq language, it is still alive and healthy today throughout most of Cape Breton, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island; and surprisingly, almost half of the Mi'kmaq on mainland Nova Scotia can still converse in their mother tongue-another example of the Mi'kmaq's dauntless spirit.

In 1892, trying to come up with a way to educate Maliseet and Mi'kmaq children, the Department toyed with the idea of building a residential school farm in Nova Scotia. However, probably because education was not much of a priority in the Department's estimation, the decision to actually build such a school in Canada's Maritime Provinces was not made until 1927. It was opened off-Reserve in the village of Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, in 1930.

The teaching staff were recruited according to the section of the Indian Act that mandated that teachers be of the same faith as the children they were teaching. As most of the Mi'kmaq and Maliseet were Catholic, the teachers were Roman Catholic nuns and the principal a priest. The curriculum was the same as that prescribed by the Nova Scotia Department of Education for the provincial school system except for the courses in religion and in how to be ashamed of being an Indian. Children were taught about all the advantages of White life and all the evils of First Nations' isolation, language and culture.

Besides delivering second-rate education, these institutions were also used by Indian Affairs for many other purposes, enforcement, punishment and terrorism, to name a few. Because of their "wards of the Crown" status, no possibility for legal redress was available to Registered Indians victimized at these facilities. So, when reading the following material, please bear in mind that the fights waged by parents and other relatives in trying to access and protect their children incarcerated in the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School were taken on without access to the laws that protected White Canadians from being victimized by the heavy hand of the state. Thus, many suffered greatly.

I'll start this short overview of the Shubenacadie residential school by relating the less than fond experiences of distinguished former resident Elsie Basque, née Charles. Elsie was born in 1916, to Margaret Labrador and Joe Charles, at Hectanooga, Digby County, Nova Scotia. She has many fond memories of her early years, but they were not without tears and tragedy. By the end of her third year, Joe was hospitalized with tuberculosis and her mother had left the family permanently. But things got better. In 1922 Joe's TB stabilized and life at home in Hectanooga returned to a peaceful existence.

Elsie remembers "papa" as being her most important childhood influence. His advise that "To be somebody, one needs a good education" is still fondly recalled. In tune with his belief, Joe enroled her in the old one-room school in Hectanooga where she completed grade 7. Then her life was drastically changed by the information contained in an article her father had read in a 1929 edition of the Halifax Chronicle which touted the new horizons being opened up for the Mi'kmaq by the opening of the residential school. Believing the school was a golden opportunity to secure his daughter's education, Joe enroled her.

This is Elsie's assessment of the two years she spent there:

"I've always regarded these years as time wasted.... I was in the 8th grade when I arrived at the school in February 1930 and in the 8th grade when I left in 1932. What had I learned in those 28 months? How to darn a sock, sew a straight seam on the sewing machine, and how to scrub clothes on a washboard. Educationally, how to parse and analyze a sentence.

Volumes have been written about the school. Its total disastrous effect upon the Mi'kmaq/Maliseet Nations will never be known. Generations later, the scars remain. It was not an education institution as we define education. Older children, boys and girls were taken out of the classroom to do chores-milk cows, clean the barn, plant and harvest, etc. The girls were ordered to launder clothes, make uniforms, scrub the floors and so on."

After this disappointment, Elsie, who is fluent in French, returned to Clare and enroled at Meteghan's Sacred Heart Academy, where she graduated with a high school diploma in 1936. She then entered classes at the Provincial Normal College in Truro and was awarded a teacher's certificate in 1937. Thus she became the first licensed Mi'kmaq teacher in Nova Scotia. Notably, she was well treated at the college by peers and administration. The students elected her class president and she describes her time there as a "fun year."

The year was capped by a rare honour. The principal of the college, Dr. Davis, permitted very exceptional students to use his name as a reference. In 1937 only three were permitted to do so, and Elsie was one of them! With teaching license in hand, she applied by mail in mid-1937 to the Inverness County School Inspector for a teaching job at Mabou Ridge. This is how she describes her first face-to-face meeting with the inspector-it was also her first experience with overt racism:

"On our short drive to his home in Port Hastings, he advised that it would be best for me to turn around and go home. He was certain that the good people of Mabou Ridge would never accept a Micmac to teach their children. After much discussion it was agreed that I could at least try. The next day, teaching duties were undertaken without opposition from the community, the year passed without incident." [In the mid-1980s Elsie returned to Mabou Ridge and was given a warm welcome.]

If Elsie had applied in person she would not have got the job. Incidents such as this prove that officialdom was at the forefront of racial discrimination in Nova Scotia.

In view of the racism afoot in this province at the time, I had often wondered where Elsie had got the courage to attend a White institution and become a teacher. Then she gave me an explanation that reflected Maritime history. Raised among the Acadian people, Elsie had not experienced the self-confidence-destroying racial discrimination in youth that was suffered by most of Nova Scotia's Mi'kmaq:

"I grew up in the area of Nova Scotia known as Clare ... an area where one is accepted for who and what one is, not on ethnic background. The bonds of friendship and understanding that began with Chief Membertou, Champlain, De Monts, Poutrincourt, have never faltered. Their legacy lives on."

In 1992, Marilyn Millward wrote an article about the residential school entitled "Clean Behind the Ears?" These are some shocking excerpts from it:

"Many of the students who attended the old Shubenacadie Indian Residential School carry with them the scars of that experience. But they were not the only ones to suffer. A look at surviving records reveals the anguish many parents endured, and shows the determination to speak and be heard that was their reaction to the way the educational and governmental bureaucracy dealt with them and their children.

The Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, operated between February 1930 and June 1967. It was intended to accommodate Micmac (and Maliseet) children who were deemed to be "underprivileged," defined by the Federal Department of Indian Affairs as orphaned, neglected, or living too distant to permit attendance at any day school. While children who were orphaned or remote from schools could be easily identified, it was more difficult to interpret the term "neglected." This was a matter to be determined by the local Indian Agent.

Here, the Department intended to "consolidate Indian educational work in the Maritimes" and planned to "mould the lives of the young Aborigines and aid them in their search towards the goal of complete Canadian Citizenship." Duncan C. Scott, then Deputy Superintendent General of the Department of Indian Affairs, told the Halifax-Chronicle that their object and desire in establishing the new school was that its graduates should become self-supporting and "not return to their old environment and habits."

Millward states that parental permission was necessary for admission. Although she later qualifies this statement, it isn't true. She may not have been aware that, because we were "wards of the Crown," the law as it then stood gave control of such things to Indian Affairs. The parental permission portions of the forms for admission to the school were simply window dressing. The Indian Agents did not legally need our permission to do anything they wanted to do with us, and they used these powers at will.

Ms. Millward substantiates this fact when describing how a Mi'kmaq parent tried to keep a child home:

"A mother wanted to keep her children home after their vacation, and believed that only a note to her agent to that effect was necessary. When she learned "it wasn't her decision to make," she had a justice of the peace write to the Department on her behalf. His help consisted of a note saying that this mother "says she 'loves' her children"-the word "loves" was belittled and negated by quotation marks. The agent wrote that she wanted them home only to take care of the house and their younger siblings, and so her request was apparently unsuccessful."

The Department's control over the lives of children and parents was all-encompassing. Ms. Millward reports of vacations:

"Perhaps because of the difficulty in having some of the children returned to the school after summer vacations, holidays at home were not allowed for any children during Christmas. Although specific reasons for this policy are not clear from the existing records, they are implied in a 1938 letter from the Department to an agent in the Annapolis Valley: "For many reasons which will no doubt suggest themselves to you, the Department does not allow holidays at Christmas, and I might say further that no valid reason has yet been given to us why holidays should be allowed at that period of the year. There is no question that the children attending the Shubenacadie Residential School receive every possible care and attention, and in addition at Christmas time there are always special festivities which the children enjoy.

In 1939, the parents at the Cambridge Reserve in Nova Scotia were determined to have their children home for Christmas, but the agent refused their request and advised them of the Department's rules. Reporting on the matter to the Department, he wrote: "These people went so far as to have a man go to the school for their children, [but] they did not get the children. The Principal would not let them take them."

When one of these parents then sent her request to the Department herself, the agent reported: "She thought by writing she would be able to get her children home for Christmas. These people think that they can have their own way and would like to do so and when they find out they cannot they get mad."......

For the full story please go to Chapter 13, Twentieth-Century Racism and Centralization, of We Were Not the Savages.

By Daniel N. Paul, January 3, 2008

Nora was born, September 22, 1935, to the late Mary (Cope) and Michael Bernard. Her place of birth was the Mi’kmaq First Nation Community of Millbrook. She is survived by her six children, thirteen grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and four of her seven siblings, an uncle, and hundreds of other relatives, who are so numerous that at the time of her untimely passing, December 27, 2007, she had not met a great many of them.

The large extended family into which Nora was born includes me and my siblings. Her mother Mary and ours, Sarah, were double first cousins. Mary’s parents were brother and sister to my mother’s parents. Our ancestry on the Cope side can be traced back to Sipekne’katik District Chief Sachem Jean Baptiste Cope, who negotiated with the British the Treaty of 1752, and beyond.

Nora and I first became acquainted when we were very young, so young that I don’t have any recollection of the first time. But, I do recollect that she had a great smile that she greeted me with whenever we met. The last time I enjoyed it, a few pleasantries, and a hug, was at the Millbrook Elders dinner on December 12, 2007. It will be a fond memory for me for the rest of my time on Mother Earth.

During our early years, our families, as well as most other Mi’kmaq families, shared a dreaded thing in common, dire poverty. On many days meals were missed, our cloths were second-hand, and our homes were little better than decrepit shacks. Luxury items, such as choice meat cuts, were few and far between. However, even in such dire conditions, love and laughter were not absent in our lives.

Another thing our families shared in common was family members incarcerated in the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. My two older brothers, Bob and John, were incarcerated there in the late1930s, and during their stay were witness to many of the horrors that occurred within its confines during that period. Their description of them to us were so scary that we were in dread of ever being incarcerated in the place. Thankfully, I never had the personal experience of residing within its walls.

However, Nora and her siblings were not so lucky, they were incarcerated there, which experience later inspired her to take on the powers that be and demand redress. When she got her project for justice underway in the 1980s, she labored at it with tenacious dedication, nothing could derail her from realizing her dream. The formation of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School Association was soon a reality.

In 1996, John McKiggan, a lawyer that Nora finally found who would take on their case, filed a class action lawsuit on Nora’s behalf. It inspired similar suits across Canada, which eventually led to the 2006 class action settlement of approximately five billion dollars, the largest in Canadian history. McKiggan says of Nora: “"I firmly believe that if it wasn’t for Nora’s efforts, and other survivors like her across Canada, this national settlement never would have happened."

Hats off to Nora, who had the courage to take on the impossible and stay with it until justice was found. I do hope that her efforts will inspire more and more First Nations Peoples across the Americas to say “no more, we want and will fight for justice for the injustices that we and our ancestors suffered at the hands of Caucasian societies now!”

May the Great Spirit grant Nora a happy place in the Land of Souls for eternity!

Nora was named Posthumous to the Order of Nova Scotia on September 4, 2008. Her name will be invested into the Order on October 8, 2008.

1935 - 2007

Jason Bernard accepts the Order of Nova Scotia from Lt.-Gov. Mayann Francis

on behalf of his mother, late native rights activist Nora Bernard, during a ceremony