5“New Weapons”: Race, Indigeneity, and Intelligence Testing at the Mohawk Institute, 1920–1949

Alexandra Giancarlo

The history of the Mohawk Institute and its curriculum, and any evaluation of its legacy, rests on two seemingly contradictory facts: Its graduates and their successes were a point of major pride for Six Nations, yet the school also exemplified many of the worst assumptions about the presumed inferiority of Indigenous peoples. It is, therefore, important to separate the educational achievements of notable graduates from the experiences of the masses of children who passed through its doors without graduating or having received a meaningful education. The latter seemed to especially characterize the school in its later years, with one inspector in 1948 noting, “No-one knowing well the conditions of the Mohawk Institute can be happy or satisfied.”¹

In this chapter, I investigate how intelligence testing influenced the structure and curriculum of the Mohawk Institute in the period 1920–49. Records indicate that at least three rounds of IQ testing occurred in these decades at the school. Aside from the formally documented testing, Mohawk Institute officials also used vocabulary throughout this period that indicated a general familiarity with the sorting of pupils into intelligence categories, such as remarks that one boy in the hospital was “sub-normal.”² The most notable tests were likely those conducted by Elmer Jamieson, himself a Mohawk from Six Nations, for his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Peter Sandiford, who was a “self-proclaimed social Darwinist.”³ This research illuminates how discourses of race-based mental inferiority impacted the type and quality of education provided to Indigenous children at the Mohawk Institute and within Canada’s residential schools more broadly. It adds to a growing body of scholarship that examines not only the prevalence of intelligence testing for racialized and immigrant students across North America in the early to mid-1900s, but also how the dubious “science” of intelligence was used to, at first justify, and later legitimize school segregation and “special” curricula.⁴ As the history of intelligence testing in moulding education for Ontario’s children within the non-Indigenous school system is only now being fully written,⁵ it is hoped that the history and analysis offered here contributes to a more fulsome understanding of the society-wide effects of the intelligence testing movement from 1920 to 1949.

Intelligence Testing in Canada

Hereditary theories of intelligence, and their handmaid, eugenics, impacted Canadian society in the realms of educational policy, immigration, and public health.⁶ Ideas linking race and intelligence were not fringe thinking during this period. Beliefs about the inherited nature of intelligence and the general desirability of maintaining an Anglo-Saxon society were common in the early 1900s. During the 1920s, books such as The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (L. Stoddard, 1921) and The Passing of the Great Race (M. Grant, 1921) made for popular reading across North America.⁷ The conventional wisdom of the period aligned with Sandiford’s main argument—that race had a direct relationship with intelligence.⁸

In fact, a general belief that Indigenous North Americans were less intelligent than Europeans had existed for several hundred years.⁹ Scores of studies in the early twentieth century seemed to confirm the “mental deficiency” of non-white groups, especially Black Americans and Indigenous peoples. In the eyes of intelligence testers, inter-group differences in intelligence were real and highly consequential, and widely publicized studies popularized the idea for the North American public that “everyone’s intelligence was innate and inherited.”¹⁰ Pearce Bailey, a physician, concluded in 1922 that “because mental deficiency is so profusely distributed among Africans and American Indians . . . their average intelligence must be inferior to that of average European intelligence.”¹¹ In their published reports on testing results, Terman (1916) and Garth (1922, 1923, 1925, 1927) focused on the relationship between intelligence and degree of “Indian blood.”¹² These scholars’ hypotheses—which their data, unsurprisingly, confirmed—posited that test scores would improve as the amount of white blood increased. It was on these same grounds that the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) conducted intelligence testing in Manitoba and Saskatchewan residential schools and on-reserve day schools in the late 1920s.¹³

Sandiford, Jamieson’s doctoral supervisor, was one of the founders of educational psychology and a proponent of the “mental hygiene” movement. He was a professor of education at the University of Toronto and desired widespread adoption of intelligence testing across Canada.¹⁴ Sandiford had firm beliefs regarding the racial and cultural superiority of Anglo-Saxons. He openly espoused eugenicist beliefs, including sterilization of people deemed to fall outside the bounds of “normal,” which was disproportionately extended to include immigrants, racialized peoples, and those of low socio-economic status. In his estimation, it was the duty of the school system to detect inferior children and to “segregate(e) the subnormal.”¹⁵ Sandiford’s influence on educational policy should not be underestimated as he founded the first university department dedicated to educational research in Canada.¹⁶ Sandiford oversaw Jamieson’s study of intelligence among the children of the Six Nations reserve who attended local residential and day schools. This study, detailed below, was published in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 1928 and remains accessible in the records of the DIA School Files Series.

“A Complete Mental Survey”: The Department of Indian Affairs and “Indian” Intelligence

Common throughout the history of the Canadian residential school system was discourse among administrators regarding the chronic underachievement of Indigenous students attending their schools. From 1890 to 1950, the children showed alarmingly poor grade progression. Across the whole period, more than 60 per cent—and, in some decades, greater than 80 per cent—of children in residential and day schools had not advanced beyond grade 3.¹⁷ Out of more than nine thousand residential school students in 1945, slightly more than one hundred attended grades beyond grade 8 and none were enrolled beyond grade 9.¹⁸ At the Mohawk Institute, Elizabeth Graham states that in 1953, about fourteen pupils attended high school.¹⁹ What could account for this so-called “age-grade retardation”? Instead of pointing the finger at the real issues of higher-age enrolments of students who did not speak English fluently, the perennially poorly trained teachers,²⁰ or underfunding so severe that children regularly missed school to work on school farms, observers identified the children themselves as the main cause of the problem.

Administrators deemed Indigenous pupils “sullen” and “irresponsible” and averred that “you can’t treat them like white children.”²¹ The authors of “Indian Education in Manitoba,” an unsigned report found in the United Church of Canada’s archives, proclaimed Indigenous people “a distinct sub-species of the human race.”²² According to one inspector, the blame lay in the students’ home environments and supposedly hereditary racial traits. Another suspected that the schools were plagued by a large percentage of “sub-normals.” He was not alone in this concern. At their 1923 convention, the Workers Among the Methodist Indians of Manitoba passed a resolution expressing approval of the DIA’s proposed plan to investigate “sub-normal conditions, mental, moral, and physical, among our Indians.”²³ The writer specifically requested that this study focus on, initially, the Brandon Industrial Institute—at the time under Methodist operation—and the boarding school at Norway House that they also ran. The superintendent of Indian education agreed, recommending that an even wider scope be adopted: “A complete mental survey of all Indian children of school age in Canada would be of real value in that the relative capacity of Indian children would be ascertained.”²⁴

Scholarly works on the Canadian residential schooling system are relatively silent on the role and impact of intelligence testing and scientific racism on both the curricula and outcomes of residential schools. J. R. Miller contends that no “scientific means” were used to confirm the apparently widespread view that Indigenous children were intellectually inferior, while John Milloy points to a dearth of social scientific knowledge as a possible reason for a “lack of agreement about the potential of the Aboriginal race.”²⁵ This ambivalence about Indigenous people’s “potential” is clear from the historical record of discussions and conferences that occurred in the early to mid-1900s. For instance, R. A. Hoey, the director of the DIA, wrote to his deputy minister in 1947 to ask for research assistance to better understand “Indian” traits such as a “lack of frugality” and “innate inertia.”²⁶ Meanwhile, DIA Secretary T. R. L. MacInnes publicly claimed that the department did not believe that Indigenous people were mentally less endowed than other races,²⁷ yet in interdepartmental correspondence classified Indigenous people on a racialized hierarchy from “primitive” to “advanced” (the latter identified by one’s length and degree of contact with white civilization).²⁸

In Ontario, during the 1920s, intelligence testing was “an important bureaucratic response and strategy for creating an efficient, differentiated system of schooling based on ‘scientific’ methods.”²⁹ While it is clear that the goings-on of the academic world were not always definitively linked to policy shifts at the DIA, social sciences research can be thought of as forming a general frame of reference for the DIA.³⁰ The DIA itself existed within a broader socio-political context in which Indigenous peoples and their cultures were seen as a hindrance to nation building. As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) bluntly states in its final report, “successive governments considered Aboriginal people inferior.”³¹ Missionary teachers, Miller observes, largely “subscribed to the pervasive racism of Euro-Canadian society.”³²

Despite the schools’ abhorrent educational record and limited genuine commitment to curricular improvements, policy-makers at the DIA could not claim ignorance of the pedagogical trends gripping the educational landscape of the time. A deeper look into the school system’s archives suggest that “scientific” evidence linking race and intelligence circulated through the communication networks of the DIA and that officials sought out information from other educational contexts to inform their decisions. In devising his testing program for the industrial schools in Canada’s West, one zealous school inspector referenced a study conducted at an “Indian” boarding school in Kansas in which test results showed a negative correlation between intelligence and percentage of “Indian blood.”³³ Philip Phelan, chief of the Training Division, wrote to the Mohawk Institute’s principal that he was travelling to Toronto to attend an Ontario Educational Association’s meeting in 1944,³⁴ indicating that, at minimum, the DIA valued the association’s professional insights. Furthermore, the DIA’s files contain evidence that they had received publications on the topic of race and intelligence and were clearly conversant in these matters, or at least thought they ought to be. A copy of the article “How People Differ Mentally,” originally printed in Scientific American, was found in DIA correspondence from 1929. There is also evidence that the article’s conclusions about race and mental ability were not without challenge; the author’s statement that “the newer generation of Negroes are more intelligent, due to an admixture of appreciable amounts of white blood” is accompanied by a marginal rebuttal of unknown penmanship: “No! Cultural.”³⁵

“New Weapons”: Testing at the Mohawk Institute

As a large farm- and livestock-based institution that remained close to major urban centres, the Mohawk Institute during the second quarter of the twentieth century was emblematic of the contradictions and tensions at the heart of the residential school project. Its curriculum—such as it was—exemplified the system’s multiple, and at times competing, purposes of education, manual training, and evangelization, in its later years increasingly serving as a child welfare institution. Across these decades, concerned parents, the public, clergy, and DIA officials themselves levelled complaints about the poor conditions at the institution. Many of these focused on educational provisions or lack thereof. The male students were regularly spoken about as a labour pool for the Institute, and while this work would have had some instructional worth, DIA officials themselves questioned the value of what was euphemistically called “manual training.”³⁶ For example, officials engaged in discussion about the closure of the school’s greenhouse, deemed of little value to the students who ran it, even as the principal argued for its necessity as a revenue source.³⁷ The Institute was able to reduce costs and, in all likelihood, keep its doors open, by pressing pupils into roles that should have been filled by paid labourers.

Under such conditions, the TRC’s conclusions speak volumes: “the vocational training program too often degenerated into a student labour program.”³⁸ At the Mohawk Institute, a 1944 inspection revealed that the Institute’s inability to hire a qualified teacher meant that “the boys evidently receive little vocational training.”³⁹ One student, Peter Smith, who attended in the 1930s explained that he “had to work all the time. We got up at 6 in the morning and we worked until 6 at night.”⁴⁰ In 1946, outrage from the local Women’s Council prompted an investigation into the “alleged lack of sufficient clothing and educational opportunities” at the school.⁴¹ Two years later, an inspector still had cause to comment that a proper primary classroom needed to be added as he had seen a small child sleeping under one of the desks in the junior room (see image of the report in figure 5.2).⁴² The problems of overworking students and a corresponding lack of educational opportunity clearly persisted for decades.

In a 1925 letter to the superintendent of Indian education, Elmer Jamieson set out his plan for intelligence and achievement tests to be administered to the students of the Six Nations School Board, from which permission had also been granted. Jamieson hailed from one of Six Nations’ most well-known families with a deep interest in, and commitment to, education for Indigenous children. Two of his sisters were teachers on the reserve for many decades and were honoured by the DIA upon their retirements.⁴³ Their brother, Andrew, was the first Six Nations graduate of the Ontario Agricultural College (1931) and went on to become a school principal on the reserve.⁴⁴ Explaining that he was working under the supervision of Dr. Sandiford, Jamieson expressed the hope that his results comparing Indigenous, white, Asian, and Black students could be put to “practical uses.”⁴⁵ Russell T. Ferrier, superintendent of Indian education, responded to confirm the department’s approval of the research.⁴⁶ Separately, Ferrier wrote to the Mohawk Institute’s principal to request the school’s assistance,⁴⁷ and Ferrier’s deputy wrote to the Brantford Indian superintendent requesting the same.⁴⁸ We know that the testing was undertaken later that month as reported by the principal.⁴⁹ According to the report on student activities up to the end of March 1926 compiled by Principal Sydney Rogers, Jamieson’s research was rather extensive, as he had been spending many weekends “conducting his intelligence tests.”⁵⁰ He returned in June to continue this work.⁵¹

It seemed that his efforts were already paying dividends as, according to Rogers, he was able to identify a “troublesome” girl in the senior class as having “the mentality of a child of five.”⁵² Indeed, low IQ scores were blamed for various behavioural problems at the Institute, such as pupils running away.⁵³ The links between bad behaviour and limited intelligence reflected beliefs about unchecked “mental deficiency” characteristic of the time period. Educational experts blamed what was then referred to as “feeblemindedness” for a range of social problems.⁵⁴

As an indication of how the new science of intelligence testing had reached those on the periphery of the teaching profession, Principal Rogers already had familiarity with IQ categorizations by the time Jamieson arrived to conduct his research. He recounted in his quarterly report the previous year that “Mr. McFadden of the local Collegiate conducted some psychological tests upon our pupils . . . in order that he might compare children of Indian descent with others.”⁵⁵ Patrice Milewski explains that, as part of a growing cadre of institutional experts in the science of education in Ontario, the local public-school inspector usually administered such mental tests.⁵⁶ Though the frequency of interactions between the DIA, its schools, and the Ontario Department of Education is not fully known (or it is not evident through the limited lens of the DIA School Files series), this chapter demonstrates that the students of the Institute were of interest to educators and educational researchers of the period who endeavoured to harness mental testing to “identify and sort students and arrange appropriate forms of schooling based on innate abilities (or inabilities).”⁵⁷

Jamieson clearly understood the ramifications of such testing regimes on the opportunities provided to Indigenous students. In his article based on the tests conducted at the Six Nations schools, “The mental capacity of Southern Ontario Indians,” he calls intelligence and achievement tests “new weapons in the hands of those who wish to compare the intelligence and achievement of different races.”⁵⁸ While a cursory read of his results suggests they conform to the racialized conclusions about intelligence typical of the time period, his analysis subtly pointed researchers away from understanding test results as firm conclusions about race and intellect—surely no small feat under the tutelage of Sandiford. He cautioned readers to recognize that residential school pupils are likely to score less well owing to their half day of work. Their lack of proficiency in English, he reminded the reader, would also hamper pupils’ abilities. He noted that “every one” of the children tested “suffered from a language handicap” in these types of tests.⁵⁹ He pointed out that lower socio-economic status and irregular school attendance also limited the achievement of some students. Jamieson advocated for further studies that could account for these “environmental” factors and asked that “deductions from the results” should be made carefully.⁶⁰

While not offering an outright rejection of the race-based intelligence theories of the day, Jamieson is considerably more circumspect than many of his peers and certainly more so than his supervisor, Sandiford. After all, Jamieson understood that the stakes were high with these “new weapons.” From his previous 1922 work, he also knew that Indigenous students were disadvantaged by a curriculum that did not follow the provincial guidelines and appeared to be “made simple and constructed differently” than that of white schools.⁶¹ Though I have not been able to locate any first-hand accounts of Jamieson reflecting on this research, we know that he was deeply committed to education for Indigenous children and can surmise that he sought to disarm the “new weapons” of intelligence and achievement tests by emphasizing the external factors hampering pupils’ scholarly achievements.

Given the heightened interest in classifying student populations according to “innate” traits during these decades, Jamieson’s was not the only major round of testing to occur at the Mohawk Institute. Though relatively little contextual information is provided in the DIA School Files Series, documents that have been preserved at the Woodland Cultural Centre show that a teacher at the school conducted intelligence and achievement tests in the mid-1930s.⁶² Kenneth E. Kidd gave the students the National Intelligence Test, the Pinter-Cunningham Primary Mental Test, and other supplementary testing instruments. He summarized his results in a manuscript, “A Study of the Mental Ability of the Indian Children in Mohawk Institute, 1934–1935.”⁶³ It appears that it was unpublished, but the date given is June 1935. Although he employed distasteful and stereotypical language common to the time to describe students, in a manner similar to Jamieson’s, he provided more analytical nuance than is typical. For instance, he identified students’ language limitations and proposed that those more familiar with white culture have a testing advantage. He also stated that he does not believe that mental inferiority of Indigenous children has been proven.

Despite this seemingly more measured view, two publications about his teaching at the Institute tell a different story. In “The Education of the Canadian Indian” (1937), he expresses his low opinion of Indigenous culture, and in “The Basis of Indian Culture” (1936) he presents white “civilization” as the unquestioned goal for Indigenous people and comments on a student’s “apparent stupidity.”⁶⁴ It seems that when it came time to speak publicly about Indigenous education, his previously sympathetic tone had changed—perhaps to fall in line with the prevailing sentiments of the era. In the final analysis, it is difficult to know what to make of Kidd; his early works cited here, based on his testing of Mohawk Institute pupils, are unflattering in their assessments (though notably less so than those of many of his contemporaries). However, Graham states that Kidd remained lifelong friends with many of his students, and he went on to found Trent University’s Indian-Eskimo Studies Program, which later became Native Studies.⁶⁵

According to correspondence pertaining to the Mohawk Institute in 1948 and 1949, the changing student body warranted major curriculum alterations. To understand these changes and their significance for the educational opportunities provided to the Institute’s students, a bit of context is warranted. A 1941 three-page report from the inspector of auxiliary classes for the Ontario Department of Education, C. E. Stothers, conveyed the results of a preliminary study of residential schools by a Miss Helen L. Delaporte, who was his assistant inspector of auxiliary classes. “Auxiliary classes,” in the language of the early to mid-1900s, were “separate classrooms for children with learning difficulties or intellectual disabilities.”⁶⁶ In her report, Delaporte explained that Indigenous students are currently given a full academic course load but, owing to intellectual deficiencies, should be given curricula for “dull-normal” and “retarded” children. Only “special cases of apparent brilliancy” warranted a full academic course load. Delaporte pointed out that Mr. Jamieson’s studies showed an IQ between 80 and 85 for students at the school. These results, which Jamieson had intended to be interpreted cautiously, in Delaporte’s view meant that “over half of the pupils have little chance of getting their entrance to high school.”⁶⁷ While Jamieson had encouraged his results to be interpreted with care, Delaporte used the results of his educational testing with Six Nations students as part of her justification in recommending curricula equivalent to today’s “special education” because of the apparent lower intellectual abilities of Indigenous children. It could be argued, in fact, that she used his results as the “new weapons” he spoke out against.

Correspondence between the church, the bishop, and the local board of education during the late 1940s centres on how to manage the Mohawk Institute’s changing student body. The bishop of Huron stated that he had consulted with the Mohawk Institute’s principal, the City of London’s assistant school superintendent, a local school principal, and a member of the province’s Royal Commission on Education. This bishop, C. A. Seager, noted that as the Institute increasingly came to serve a child-welfare purpose, the quality of students plummeted, due to emotional problems, delayed mental abilities, and, perhaps, “definite mental defectiveness.” He determined that a survey of mental ability should be conducted and, if needed, “special opportunity” classes established. Seager also suggested that the handful of students found to be of high intelligence should be trained to assist school staff.⁶⁸ In response, the representative of the DIA, probably Superintendent of Indian Education Colonel Neary, concurred, writing that soon, “a great many of the pupils . . . will be backward and in the low intelligence classes.” He asked the ODE to conduct intelligence assessments of the Mohawk Institute’s students.⁶⁹ Though the results of the intelligence testing themselves are not found in the existing records, the evaluations were carried out by Brantford Public School Inspector J. O. Webster in late 1947 or early 1948.⁷⁰ A 1949 letter confirms that only 1 in 25 students were found to be of normal intelligence and 40 out of the total 155 students should be placed in “auxiliary” classes.⁷¹ Intelligence testing, with its built-in class and race biases, led to fewer opportunities for Indigenous students by restricting their education to the vocational “crafts”-based curricula prescribed for “auxiliary” classes.

Conclusion

The point here is not to discount the genuine need for auxiliary education for some students in the residential school system, but rather to identify how race and class biases inherent to intelligence testing led to Indigenous students at the Institute—and beyond—being unfairly labelled as lacking in intellectual capacities. One of the foremost authorities on the Indian Residential School system explains that the system’s teachers often held the belief that their students were incapable of completing a regular public-school course. This lack of confidence in Indigenous students’ abilities “helped limit achievement and no doubt reinforced the negative stereotyping of the children.”⁷²

By the 1920s, intelligence testing was standard curriculum at the Ontario College of Education. As historian Jennifer Anne Stephen explains, such systematic testing was seen as “smart social and economic policy” that helped to limit “social malaise caused by mental deficiency.”⁷³ Children were to be streamed early, ideally beginning at age seven, into academic or non-academic programs.⁷⁴ In the residential school system, it was not uncommon for students to enrol for the first time at age seven or older. Students, mostly older ones, attended class for only part of the day and were forced to work as the schools’ main labour force. In fact, in a 1949 letter to DIA headquarters, one teacher candidate for a position at the Mohawk Institute offered her opinion that “the rule be established and enforced that Indian children attend school a full and not a half day at present.”⁷⁵ The following year a letter from Principal Zimmerman to Colonel Neary, superintendent of Indian education, indicated that children from grade 5 onward still only had a half day of classes.⁷⁶ A great chasm separated what have since been called child labour institutions masquerading as schools from the modern school system so described, yet Indigenous students were judged by the latter standards and found lacking.

When their intelligence testing scores were considered in light of the prevailing “racial template of intelligence,”⁷⁷ inspectors, educational psychologists, school administrators, and DIA officials concluded that residential school students themselves, not the dysfunctional and degrading institutions they were forced to attend, were the cause of insufficient levels of achievement. The Mohawk Institute graduated many notable Six Nations students who went on to become educators and other professionals across Canadian society. Their successes challenged racial stereotypes. Yet they were the exceptions at an institution that was plagued by the same inadequacies that characterized the residential school system as a whole. Out of the thirty-six former students that Graham interviewed for her book published in 1997, not a single respondent credited the education received at the Mohawk Institute for their life successes.⁷⁸ From 1929 to 1969, no more than 5 per cent of students per year attended high school; during the period that the Reverend Horace Snell was principal (1929–45), some students left the Institute “barely literate.”⁷⁹ Intelligence tests were used to justify a claim that Indigenous students possessed lower “mental powers,” which was subsequently used to justify a reduced curriculum and in turn limit students’ future potential.

Notes

Small sections of this chapter were previously published in Alexandra Giancarlo, “To ‘Evaluate the Mental Powers of the Indian Children’: Race and Intelligence Testing in Canada’s Indian Residential School System,” Historical Studies in Education / Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 34, no. 2 (2022), https://doi.org/10.32316/hse-rhe.v34i2.5021.

1. 1 E. P. Randle, to Superintendent, Indian Affairs Branch, 16 September 1948, File 466-1, Pt. 5, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, Library and Archives Canada (hereafter LAC).

2. 2 S. Rogers to Medical Branch, Dept. Indian Affairs, Ottawa, 7 July 1929, File 466-13, Pt. 1, c-7935, Vol. 6202, RG 10, LAC.

3. 3 Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885–1945 (University of Toronto Press, 1990), 62.

4. 4 Carlos Kevin Blanton, “From Intellectual Deficiency to Cultural Deficiency: Mexican Americans, Testing, and Public School Policy in the American Southwest, 1920–1940,” Pacific Historical Review 72, no. 1 (2003): 39–62.

5. 5 Jason Ellis, A Class by Themselves? The Origins of Special Education in Toronto and Beyond (University of Toronto Press, 2019).

6. 6 Ellis.

7. 7 G. Thomson, “‘So Many Clever, Industrious and Frugal Aliens’: Peter Sandiford, Intelligence Testing, and Anti-Asian Sentiment in Vancouver Schools Between 1920 and 1939,” BC Studies 197 (2018): 67–100.

8. 8 Jennifer Anne Stephen, Pick One Intelligent Girl: Employability, Domesticity, and the Gendering of Canada’s Welfare State, 1939–1947 (University of Toronto Press, 2007), 68.

9. 9 James Waldram, Revenge of the Windigo: The Construction of the Mind and Mental Health of North American Aboriginal Peoples (University of Toronto Press, 2004), 90.

10. 10 Ellis, A Class by Themselves?, 56.

11. 11 Quoted in Waldram, Revenge of the Windigo, 90–1.

12. 12 Cited in Waldram, 91.

13. 13 See, for example, Bartlett 1927[?] and Bartlett 1929. G. W. Bartlett, Notes, handwritten and signed by Bartlett, recording the results of the Otis Intelligence Test at the Haskell Institute, 1927[?], File 1/25-17, Pt. 1, c-9721, Vol. 8807, RG 10, LAC; G. W. Bartlett, Inspector’s report on the Birtle Residential Indian School, 12 September 1929, File 511/23-5-014, c-13800, Vol. 8449, RG 10, LAC.

14. 14 G. Thomson, “‘So Many Clever.’”

15. 15 Thomson, “‘So Many Clever,’” 73.

16. 16 Patrice Milewski, “The Scientisation of Schooling in Ontario, 1910–1934,” Paedagogica Historica 46, no. 3 (2010): 348; Stephen, Pick One, 72.

17. 17 See John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System (1999; University of Manitoba Press, 2017), 171.

18. 18 Milloy, 171.

19. 19 Elizabeth Graham, The Mush Hole: Life at Two Residential Schools (Heffle Publishing, 1997), 17–18.

20. 20 A 1948 departmental study indicated that although its teachers were supposed to have provincial certificates and follow the provincial curricula, 40 per cent had no professional training. Some had not even graduated from high school. See Milloy, A National Crime, 176. Occasionally, dissenting observers raised this very point, arguing that the substandard teaching endemic to the system was surely to blame for the students’ poor progress, not any “racial” trait (school inspector H. McArthur, in Milloy, 180). At the Mohawk Institute, there were regular complaints about the quality of the teachers, which in turn reflected the insufficient operating grants common across the residential school system.

21. 21 E. Stehelin, quoted in Milloy, 179.

22. 22 No author, “Indian Education in Manitoba,” ca. 1920, filed in the United Church of Canada’s Archives, Winnipeg.

23. 23 Rev. F. G. Stevens, Fisher River Indian Mission, to Department of Indian Affairs, 26 June 1923, File 1/25-17, Pt. 1, Vol. 8807, RG 10, LAC. Little detail in the file is provided about the convening body, the Workers Among the Methodist Indians of Manitoba; however, the Methodists had a substantial role in missionary efforts in what was then called Rupert’s Land beginning in 1840. See Elizabeth Bingham Young and E. Ryerson Young, Mission Life in Cree-Ojibwe Country: Memories of a Mother and Son, ed. Jennifer S. H. Brown (Athabasca University Press, 2017).

24. 24 Russell T. Ferrier, Superintendent of Indian Education, to Reverend F. G. Stevens, Koostatak, MB, 10 July 1923, File 1/25-17, Pt. 1, c-9721, Vol. 8807, RG 10, LAC.

25. 25 Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision, 179; Milloy, A National Crime, 153

26. 26 Quoted in H. Shewell, “‘What Makes the Indian Tick?’ The Influence of Social Sciences on Canada’s Indian Policy, 1947–1964,” Histoire sociale / Social History 34, no. 67 (2001): 148.

27. 27 A. G. Bailey, “Reviewed Work: The North American Indian Today by C. T. Loram, T. F. McIlwraith,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienne d’Economique et de Science politique 10, no. 1 (1944): 110–12.

28. 28 Jacqueline Briggs, “Exemplary Punishment: T. R. L. MacInnes, the Department of Indian Affairs, and Indigenous Executions, 1936–52,” Canadian Historical Review 100, no. 3 (2019): 398–438.

29. 29 Milewski, “The Scientisation of Schooling,” 378; Ellis, A Class by Themselves?

30. 30 Shewell, “‘What Makes the Indian Tick?,’” 138.

31. 31 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, vol. 5, Canada’s Residential Schools: The Legacy (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 62.

32. 32 Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision, 186.

33. 33 Bartlett 1927[?].

34. 34 Philip Phelan to Horace Snell, principal of the Mohawk Institute, 31 March 1944, File 466-1, Pt. 3, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

35. 35 Donald A. Laird, clipping from The Canadian Military Gazette in which Laird’s article from Scientific American was originally reprinted, 1929, File 1/25-17, Pt. 1, c-9721, Vol. 8807, RG 10, LAC.

36. 36 For example, principal Horace Snell wrote to headquarters to confirm that the pupils repainted the “entire exterior” of the Mohawk Institute as well as painted and varnished the interior. Horace Snell, Principal of the Mohawk Institute, to Secretary, Department of Indian Affairs, 14 November 1930, File 466-5, Pt. 3, c-7934, Vol. 6201, RG 10, LAC.

37. 37 Horace Snell, Principal of the Mohawk Institute, to Secretary, Department of Indian Affairs, 17 March 1936, File 466-1, Pt. 2, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC; A. F. MacKenzie, Secretary of the Department of Indian Affairs, Letter from A. F. MacKenzie, to H. W. Snell, Principal of the Mohawk Institute, 26 February 1936, File 466-1, Pt. 2, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

38. 38 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, vol. 1, Canada’s Residential Schools, the History, Part 1, Origins to 1939 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 331.

39. 39 Philip Phelan to Horace Snell, Principal of the Mohawk Institute, 31 March 1944, File 466-1, Pt. 3, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

40. 40 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Final Report, 1:343.

41. 41 “Probe Ordered into Affairs of Indian School,” Globe and Mail, 23 February 1946, 5.

42. 42 C. A. F. Clark, Report to Colonel Neary of conditions at the Mohawk Institute, 24 September 1948, File 466-1, Pt. 5, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

43. 43 “Honor Two Indian Sisters on Retirement: Teaching Years Total 82 on Reservation,” Indian Record 20, no. 1 (January 1957).

44. 44 “Note Three Grads from Farm College,” Indian Record 5, no. 4 (April 1962).

45. 45 E. Jamieson to Mr. R. T. Ferrier, Superintendent of Indian Education, Department of Indian Affairs, 14 December 1925, File 1/25-17, Pt. 1, c-9721, Vol. 8807, RG 10, LAC.

46. 46 Russell T. Ferrier to Elmer Jamieson, 16 December 1925, File 1/25-17, Pt. 1, c-9721, Vol. 8807, RG 10, LAC.

47. 47 Russell T. Ferrier to S. Rogers, Principal of the Mohawk Institute, 16 December 1925, File 1/25-17, Pt. 1, c-9721, Vol. 8807, RG 10, LAC.

48. 48 J. D. McLean to Lieutenant Colonel Morgan, Indian Superintendent, Brantford, File 1/25-17, Pt. 1, c-9721, Vol. 8807, RG 10, LAC.

49. 49 S. Rogers, “Report on activities and progress of this Institute” (quarter ending 31 December 1925), 5 January 1926, File 466-1, Pt. 2, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

50. 50 S. Rogers, “Report on activities and progress of this Institute” (quarter ending 31 March 1926), 1926, exact date unknown, File 466-1, Pt. 2, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

51. 51 S. Rogers, “Report on activities and progress of this Institute” (quarter ending 30 June 1926), 3 July 1926, File 466-1, Pt. 2, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

52. 52 Rogers, “Report on activities and progress of this Institute” (quarter ending 31 March 1926), 1926.

53. 53 Rogers, “Report on activities” (quarter ending 31 December 1925), 1926.

54. 54 Ellis, A Class by Themselves?, 18–19.

55. 55 S. Rogers, Mohawk Institute, Quarterly Report (quarter ending 31 December 1924), 1924, File 466-1, Pt. 1, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

56. 56 Milewski, “The Scientisation of Schooling,” 347.

57. 57 Milewski, 351.

58. 58 Elmer Jamieson, “The Mental Capacity of Southern Ontario Indians” (repr., including original page numbers, from the May 1928 issue of Journal of Educational Psychology), 313, File 1/25-17, Pt. 1, c-9721, Vol. 8807, RG 10, LAC.

59. 59 Jamieson, 325.

60. 60 Jamieson, 326.

61. 61 Quoted in Constance Barbara Thomas, “Indian Education in Canada” (master’s thesis, McMaster University, 1972), 109.

62. 62 Thank you to Rick Hill for flagging these documents and sharing copies with me.

63. 63 Kenneth E. Kidd, “A Study of the Mental Ability of the Indian Children in Mohawk Institute, 1934–1935” (unpublished manuscript, June 1935).

64. 64 Kenneth E. Kidd. “The Education of the Ontario Indian,” Canadian School Journal (January 1937); Kenneth E. Kidd, “The Basis of Indian Education,” unknown publication [probably Canadian School Journal] (September 1936): 253.

65. 65 Graham, The Mush Hole.

66. 66 Ellis, A Class by Themselves?

67. 67 C. E. Stothers, Memorandum for the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, 6 February 1941, File 1/25-17, Pt. 1, c-9721, Vol. 8807, RG 10, LAC.

68. 68 C. A. Seager, Archbishop of Huron Diocese, to the Minister of Mines and Resources, 10 February 1948, File 466-1, Pt. 5, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

69. 69 Unknown government official to Archbishop Seager, 13 February 1948, File 466-1, Pt. 5, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

70. 70 Bernard F. Neary, Letter from Neary, Superintendent of Welfare and Training, to J. O. Webster, Inspector of Public Schools, Brantford, 22 January 1948, File 466-1, Pt. 5, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

71. 71 Bishop Luxton to Colonel F. B. Neary 10 February 10, 1949, File 466-1, Pt. 5, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

72. 72 Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision, 180.

73. 73 Stephen, Pick One, 67.

74. 74 Stephen, 72.

75. 75 Alexandria How[?] to Philip Phelan, Chief, Education Division, Indian Affairs Branch, 17 September 1949, File 466-1, Pt. 5, c-7933, Vol. 6200, RG 10, LAC.

76. 76 Graham, The Mush Hole, 193.

77. 77 Stephen, Pick One, 68.

78. 78 Graham, The Mush Hole, 17–18.

79. 79 Wendy Fletcher, “The Canadian Experiment with Social Engineering, A Historical Case: The Mohawk Institute,” Historical Papers: Canadian Society of Church History (July 2004): 133–49.