10 A Model to Follow? The Sussex Vale Indian School

Thomas Peace

It is common to hear the Mohawk Institute referred to as “Canada’s first residential school.” Though this statement may be technically correct, it cultivates a misunderstanding that obscures rather than illuminates the broader history of residential schooling in Canada. In addition to early French, Catholic proto-residential schools, which laid the groundwork for later Catholic residential schools during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the anglophone, Protestant side there was also, in fact, a school that preceded the Mohawk Institute, and, from its failure, the Mohawk Institute—among several other New England Company initiatives—was built. Known as “The Academy for Instructing and Civilizing the Indians,” the school, built in 1787 in Sussex Vale, New Brunswick, could also be considered the first residential school in Canada. Though the residential school system’s Catholic roots share a very different lineage—anchored in Récollet, Jesuit, and Ursuline missionization during the seventeenth century—understanding Sussex Vale and the New England Company helps explain why residential schools became such problematic and pervasive institutions in English Canada.¹ If we want to understand how the Mohawk Institute was created, we must first look to the Protestant missionary efforts that shaped northeastern North America leading up to the school’s founding. These efforts originated in New England in the early to mid-seventeenth century.

The New England Company

The New England Company (NEC) was founded in England by an act of Parliament in 1649. Its purpose was to build upon the work of English Congregationalist missionaries, such as John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew, who had been proselytizing among the First Peoples of Massachusetts for nearly two decades. Seeing fruit in such work, the Company sought to extend these ecclesiastic labours by building “universities, schools and nurseries of literature, settled for further instructing and civilizing” Indigenous populations into English culture, society, and faith.² Based in England, the NEC’s incorporation empowered sixteen men to make the Company’s key decisions. Their purpose was to acquire land and solicit subscriptions to support the Company’s missionary work in North America. In its 1661 charter, the Company was likewise empowered to appoint commissioners based in North America to oversee local operations.³ By the late seventeenth century the local commissioners comprised the colonial elite. Often chaired by the governor of Massachusetts, the other commissioners were prominent businessmen, officials, and clergy from the colony.⁴

The reporting network for the early Company was anchored in English university culture and laid the groundwork for settler-colonial systems of control. From the early 1660s, funds for two missionary teachers were to be disbursed through the president’s office at Harvard College and reported through the president’s office of Trinity College at Oxford.⁵ Though funded through other structures, and never very successful, Harvard itself during these years aspired to welcome Indigenous students, founding a short-lived “Indian College” in 1655; it continued to disburse NEC funds through to the American Revolution. According to Jean Fitz Hankins, the majority of NEC missionaries were Harvard graduates, as were several members of the local board in Boston.⁶

Structured in this way—through a nascent university system—the NEC itself was much more focused on evangelism and day schooling than it was interested in concerns about higher education. Initially targeting Massachusetts, Pawkunnakut, Nipmuc, and Montauk populations, the Company met only marginal successes as many First Peoples were reluctant to engage with the English newcomers.⁷ What “gains” the Company might have seen were mostly found in John Eliot’s fourteen “praying towns,”⁸ each with a school; in some ways these communities served as precursors to the development of the reserve/reservation system. As is well-documented, these advances were not just Eliot’s to claim; throughout his work, Eliot collaborated with Indigenous men such as the Montauk Cockenoe, Massachusetts men Job Nesuton and Montequassum, and the Nipmuc Wowaus (James Printer), each of whom helped Eliot learn, print, and otherwise use the languages of the land.⁹ Where church and school may have made a long-lasting impact, it was more immediate circumstances and local actors than NEC influence that facilitated how Indigenous peoples interacted with these institutions.

It was not until the eighteenth century, however, that the Company began to expand geographically. Over the course of New England’s evangelical Great Awakening, the Company’s work extended its scope to target westward nations. During the 1740s, the NEC began to pursue the Haudenosaunee as potential prospects. Though the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) was already active in Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) communities, the roots of the NEC-Haudenosaunee relationship were slowly developed alongside these efforts; the Company sent two itinerant preachers to them after 1745.¹⁰ By the 1760s, as a child, well-known Kanien’kehá:ka leader Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant) attended Moor’s Indian Charity School, run by Eleazar Wheelock in Lebanon, Connecticut, and partially funded by the NEC; though his son Tekarihogen (John Brant) did not attend the school, Tekarihogen’s two older brothers, Joseph and Jacob, attended between 1800 and 1803.¹¹ Although missionary-supported schooling for the Haudenosaunee was primarily driven by the SPG in its early years, the NEC’s own involvement with the Confederacy dates back to the 1740s and ’50s. Specifically, the relationship between the Brant family and the NEC remains one that requires additional research.

The important point here is to recognize that the NEC is the longest-serving Protestant missionary organization in the northeastern part of North America. The structures upon which it sought to build—namely, the university, printed books, and segregated praying towns—continued to underpin its work for well over two centuries. The Harvard Indian College and Moor’s Indian Charity School excepted, these early efforts were mostly local in nature and centred upon Christian missionary work in Indigenous communities and nations. Though more work is needed here, the organization’s relationship with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy dates to before the American Revolution and the subsequent relocation of some of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to the Grand River and Bay of Quinte. The Company’s more direct involvement with the Haudenosaunee did not really begin until the 1820s, when Tekarihogen, whose family was deeply involved with colonial schooling, approached the NEC about supporting a school in the community.

How Sussex Vale Operated

What happened with Sussex Vale marks a significant transition from the NEC’s earlier history in New England. Unlike its more localized efforts on the Indigenous territories that the English increasingly saw as southern New England, at Sussex Vale the NEC sought to meet its broader evangelical and assimilationist goals by establishing a residential facility that would remove Indigenous children from the influence of their families. Unlike in New England, the school was located in the borderland between the Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik homelands, where the Company had never worked before. With these nations tightly allied with the Catholic Church—a legacy of nearly two centuries of alliance with the French—the goal of the school was to convert these children to Protestantism, as well as teach them English and a skill set that would prepare them for the society that early New Brunswickers hoped to build. With their “education” complete, the Company’s commissioners hoped, these students would return to their families, affecting similar religious, cultural, and linguistic changes in their home communities.

Sussex Vale was managed by the who’s who of New Brunswick society. At various times the local NEC Board of Commissioners included Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Carleton, George Leonard, Ward Chipman, Edward Winslow, Joshua Upham, William Hazen, and George Proulx. These men were some of New Brunswick’s most significant early leaders. Many of them were instrumental in lobbying for New Brunswick to be partitioned from Nova Scotia, becoming its own separate Loyalist colony. They served on the Legislative Council, in the militia, and in key administrative positions. Chipman was a Harvard graduate (like Winslow and Upham) and acted as the colony’s first solicitor general; he also prepared the charter for the city of Saint John and was instrumental in setting up the colonial legal system.¹² With several additional responsibilities, the amount of time members of the NEC’s board could allocate to the school was minimal. The actual operation of the school, therefore, was overseen by Oliver Arnold, the school master and local Anglican missionary, and—after reorganization in 1807—Major General John Coffin, the school’s superintendent. NEC oversight of Arnold and Coffin was minimal.¹³

The school was located along the upper banks of the Kennebecasis River in the community today known as Sussex Corner. There, Loyalists from the American Revolution settled in the late 1780s, moving upriver from Saint John as the population grew. Some settler children also attended the school. The location was chosen because George Leonard, treasurer of the local commissioners, resided there, and he soon took Arnold under his wing.¹⁴ In 1804, Edward Winslow described the setting with these words: “The academy being placed in the centre of a fertile tract of country, and surrounded by wealthy & independent inhabitants, the Indians could not fail to observe their manners and to profit by comparing the comfortable effects of the industry of the white people with the miserable consequences of their own indolent folly.”¹⁵ In addition to describing the school site, another point drawn out by Winslow’s letter was the association of the school with the hoped-for removal of the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik from their lands. Though Micah Pawling has demonstrated that this removal was never complete,¹⁶ the purpose of the school was to equip these people for the world early New Brunswickers planned to build. There was no place for either of these nations in this vision. The plan was to have Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik families reside permanently near the settlement, adopt agriculture, and send their children to school, eventually assimilating into the settler society developing around them.

Arnold shared much in common with British missionaries working in New England and New York in the decades before the revolution. Like Eleazar Wheelock, Samuel Kirkland, and other prominent New England missionaries, Arnold was educated at Yale, completing his studies just as the revolution began. Like them, he saw school as a useful tool to help Indigenous peoples peacefully navigate the foreign occupation of their land. Little is known about Arnold’s activities during the war, but by 1783 he had arrived in Saint John and was working with George Leonard. Four years later, he had moved to Sussex Vale to take up his teaching position. In recognition of his role with the NEC, he was ordained by Anglican Bishop Charles Inglis, receiving a government salary, a stipend from the SPG, as well as his NEC income and a Company home. Over the course of his career, Arnold also served as a justice of the peace.¹⁷ Though he sometimes claimed otherwise, he was compensated handsomely for his efforts.

At first, the Sussex Vale school served to consolidate isolated local schools that had popped up across the colony in the intervening years. We only know about these early schools because of their relationship to the plans for consolidation, though it seems like a few day schools were up and running by the time the Sussex Vale plan was hatched.¹⁸ With the opening of Sussex Vale, for example, Frederick Dibblee, who had been teaching as many as twenty-two Wolastoqiyik adults and children at Fredericton, had his salary removed; the freed-up funds were used to support two other missionary teachers at Miramichi and Memramcook.¹⁹ There were clearly more efforts to school the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik than there is evidence that has withstood the tests of time. The prospect of these schools should not be forgotten. In fact, it was not until the mid-1790s that plans to consolidate efforts at Sussex Vale were cemented.²⁰

In 1797, the local NEC board drafted instructions for the schoolmaster.²¹ The routine at the school was clear. Six days per week were to be spent in exercises of reading and writing, with the school master responsible for attendance, while on Sundays (when the missionary was present) the children were to attend church. The schoolmaster was under relatively strict supervision. He was to keep detailed records of the students, including their arrival and departure, and present it to the board each February; quarterly, the board was also to receive a report on each student’s academic progress. Few of these procedures seem to have been followed, and according to historian Judith Fingard, the school—such as it was—remained more oriented to a segregated group of colonial children than the school’s Mi’kmaw or Wolastoqiyik charges;²² the records I have consulted are not good enough to closely detail the differences between how Indigenous and colonial children experienced the school.

Unsurprisingly, with hindsight, Sussex Vale’s early years resulted in utter failure. Few students attended, and following the resignation of three commissioners, the decision was made in 1804 to close the school. This failure, in the eyes of the commissioners who left, stemmed from the fact that there was little Wolastoqiyik or Mi’kmaw interest in the school, while its operation cost the Company significant money (about £800 per year) to entice families to send their children. Furthermore, the three men felt that the school could only do its work if the children were removed from their homes.²³

In 1807, a new plan arose. Blending elements that we would later see in the residential school system and the Sixties Scoop, the local commissioners planned to remove young children—some in their infancy—from their families and place them in English families under indenture, a type of bound labour determined by contract with the student’s parents. Using cash payments and clothing given to the children’s parents, the Company was able to recruit just over fifty children before the school closed in the late 1820s. In its first year of operation, the Company sent over £1,000 in cash and goods to support this work.²⁴ Given the associated pressures on Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik populations during these years—whereby the expansion of settler private property increasingly restricted access to land and resources—it seems likely that families of the children indentured made such difficult decisions in hopes of better times to come.²⁵ Judith Fingard notes that most of the students came from families who were relatively isolated from other Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik communities; students in later years were often the children of the students who had attended earlier.²⁶ White children also attended the school. They were taught separately, however, and were not removed from their families. An 1815 report claimed thirty-five Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik children attended the school.²⁷ The relationship between the white, Mi’kmaw, and Wolastoqiyik children at the schools is not clear from the documentary record that has survived.

By this point in time, Arnold and his family used the “school” for their own financial and personal benefit. According to Fingard, Arnold made somewhere between £130 and £190 annually for his work with the Company, and kept between four and seven indentured children to run his household.²⁸ In Fingard’s words, “the indentured children became virtual slaves to the leading families of Sussex Vale.”²⁹ These abuses, and others, brought systemic funding of Arnold’s work to a halt in 1816, though some funds continued to flow into the project for well over a decade more.³⁰ No matter what perspective one takes about the school, it was never on solid ground, and almost always harmful to its charges.

The School Routine and Its Failure

The relationship between the Company’s board and the local commissioners was always somewhat rocky. From the outset of the revised 1807 scheme, board members in England expressed concern about the age at which children were removed from their families, their inability to learn their own language, as well as the general safety of children indentured to specific families.³¹ In the early 1820s, the NEC commissioned Walter Bromley, a prominent social reformer in Nova Scotia, to investigate the school. Much of what we know about the school’s operation comes from his report. A few years later, in 1825–6, Anglican missionary John West was charged with investigating the school as well. Both reports were damning, providing insight into what daily life must have been like for the children.

It is difficult to determine Sussex Vale’s curriculum but it is clear that there were several aspects of school life that hindered student learning. In addition to the manual labour expected of students, many children also lived far away. In 1822, for example, seven children lived several miles from the school; the closest of these students lived three miles away, the farthest lived twenty-two miles away. For the students who did attend regularly, Bromley explained that they were proficient in bookkeeping, basic arithmetic and multiplication, the reading of religious texts and catechism, and some basic spelling and writing.³² Four years later, West believed that the quality of schooling had improved in more recent years.³³

Formal curriculum, though, was not the school’s primary focus. Rather, by the 1810s, the NEC commissioners turned their attention to indenturing Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik children. In 1822, for example, the school’s superintendent was given responsibility to select “Indian Children and place them out in English Families as Apprentices and to report to the Commissioners and through them to the Company the employment and conduct of each child separately.”³⁴ Four years later, West claimed that settlers “purchased” these children at ages between one and three, their parents having been “unnaturally induced to part with their children” by a weekly allowance and some additional money from the NEC.³⁵ West did not mince words. The school might have been an effective academy for general teaching and learning, but—in his words—whatever gains made were “counteracted by the generally bad examples they witnessed [and] the degradation which they naturally feel under an involuntary and indented servitude.”³⁶

These were not idle allegations either. West’s report is absolutely damning. Abuse of the school’s charges was rife. In recounting the experiences of two young girls, who upon leaving their apprenticeship wandered “the roads with loss of character,” West claims that this was the case for almost all the girls who attended the school. The evidence that the Anglican missionary put forth was the “bastard children by the white men.” To be cautious, it is important to note that West frames these children as mostly born because of sex out of wedlock, rather than the result of sexual assault. The issue of consent goes unaddressed. In 1809, for example, one of Arnold’s indentured servants, the Wolastoqiyik girl Molly Ann Gell, claimed that someone had carried her “into the Bushes and Against her Will forced her to Comply with his Wishes.” She bore a son—who was also indentured to Arnold—and later recanted this story, claiming it was Arnold’s own son who had seduced her in his home.³⁷ Another woman complained to West during her pregnancy of having been seduced by a local white farmer.³⁸ It is hard today to read West’s report and not see in it a sickening culture of racialized sexual abuse condoned by the settler community at Sussex Vale.

The school was a complete disaster. Both Bromley’s and West’s reports demonstrate that few students left Sussex Vale with the skills for which the NEC had hoped. Furthermore, and foreshadowing some of the real horrors of the residential school system, some students returned home and—if we can trust West’s account—were complained about as burdens in their own communities.³⁹ The difficulties for many Indigenous students in returning home is a well-documented result of this type of schooling, seen clearly in early seventeenth-century Récollet and Jesuit efforts to school First Peoples and right up until, and beyond, the closure of the residential school system.⁴⁰

Though Sussex Vale closed in 1826, eighteen apprentices were left behind in the community.⁴¹ Even though Bromley critiqued the school’s work in 1822, and John West did so again in 1826, as late as 1831, some children remained indentured. The latter years of their contracts were deemed the most profitable and their masters were unwilling to forgo their labour.⁴² A nineteenth-century Company history claimed that the NEC’s role in New Brunswick ended in 1836.⁴³

The New England Company Looks West

Bromley’s and West’s reports were followed by changes in procedure but not in emphasis. No longer would the Company work through local boards, nor would they use the apprenticeship model. That noted, upon receiving Bromley’s report, the board in England shut down Sussex Vale and instead cast their gaze further westward, where Protestant missionaries were seemingly having greater success. Immediately, the Company began supporting missionary work at Grand River, Rice and Chemong Lakes, the Bay of Quinte, and Garden River. All four missions were locations where we can trace the roots of the Canadian residential school system. The banks of the Grand River became the home of the Mohawk Institute, on Rice Lake was built the Alderville Industrial School, and Garden River was where the Shingwauk and Wawanosh Homes began. Though no specific colonial school was built on the Bay of Quinte, it is a place of long-standing significance in the contest and negotiation over colonial schooling; it was also the site of a Methodist mission village during the 1820s and ’30s, and day schools built later in the century.⁴⁴

Of these efforts, the Mohawk Institute’s roots, in particular, anchor tightly into the closing of the school at Sussex Vale. Rather than imposing its school on an unsuspecting and relatively distant society, the NEC’s arrival at Six Nations was, at least partially, at their request. In 1822, while in England lobbying for Six Nations’ land rights, Tekarihogen requested that the Company build a mission and school in his community.⁴⁵ It was in this context that, after he visited Sussex Vale, John West travelled to the Six Nations at Grand River to investigate the possibility of beginning a new mission. There, with the support of Tekarihogen, he visited several day schools.

Although the NEC arrived on the Grand River with plans to try assimilative schooling again, the structure of the Mohawk Institute looked very different than Sussex Vale. Rather than being imposed from the outside, the NEC work at Six Nations was much more collaborative. Tekarihogen, for example, acted as agent for the Company, filing reports and drawing on their funds.⁴⁶ The school also operated in a broader context where day schools were much more common and established. In 1753, the Kanien’kehá:ka man Sahonwagy was appointed by the SPG missionary at Fort Hunter as the community day school teacher at nearby Canajoharie; he replaced Paulus Petrus, another Kanien’kehá:ka schoolteacher from the community.⁴⁷

Sahonwagy was appointed to this position at a time when the British-Haudenosaunee alliance was tightening. Two years after he took up his position, William Johnson, a fur trader and large landholder in the region, was appointed British superintendent of Indian Affairs. Johnson, who had been previously married, entered into a long-term relationship with Konwatsi’tsiaiénni (Molly Brant), Thayendanegea’s sister. Anglicanism, in addition to kinship—as Elizabeth Elbourne’s work demonstrates—formed an important part of this alliance.⁴⁸ Given their missionary ties, schools might be considered through a similar strategic lens. In these early days, schools were institutions of negotiation and alliance.

It was within this context that Thayendanegea first attended school. Growing up in Canajoharie, it seems likely that the well-known Haudenosaunee leader attended the school taught by Sahonwagy before he went down to Eleazar Wheelock’s Charity School. These early experiences shaped Thayendanegea’s perspective about the value of schooling. When he negotiated his community’s move to the Grand River, schooling remained a core requirement. In Frederick Haldimand’s instructions to his officers, the governor made it clear that he had promised the Haudenosaunee that the government would build a school and provide “an allowance of £25. Sterlg. pr. annum for a School Master (whom they are to choose themselves).”⁴⁹ By 1787 there was a school established in the Mohawk Village with about sixty students in attendance, though it seems like the teacher (“an Old Yanky”) was probably not from the community.⁵⁰ In 1810, a school was also noted in the community, though this document raised concerns that the school fostered “idleness” and bad manners, indicating that not everyone in the Confederacy was supportive of these initiatives.⁵¹ Sixteen years later, George Ryerson (Egerton Ryerson’s brother) wrote to Lieutenant-Governor Peregrine Maitland “that the Mohawk School taught by William Hesse is faithfully conducted and attended, I cannot say one word in favour of the School in the Village by David Lawrence.”⁵² John West also visited that year and filed this report concerning the two schools:

There were about twenty present, who were taught by a Mohawk named Laurence Davis [David Lawrence], some of them were just beginning to read, and of the thirty-four, who were said to belong to the school, twelve could read in the English Testament. Within a few miles of this school in the Mohawk village, is a school supported by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which Mr. Brandt informed me consisted of about twenty children, with their schoolmaster William Hess.⁵³

What becomes clear when all of this is taken together is the relatively continuous history of schooling at Grand River, from its establishment through to the founding of the Mohawk Institute. By the 1820s, in addition to the Kanien’kehá:ka schools, there were also schools attended by Skaru:reh (Tuscarora) and Onyata’a:ka (Oneida) children.

Although this chapter focuses on residential schools, what this trajectory shows is the need to understand the history of day schooling in order to adequately contextualize the development of the Mohawk Institute. In 1827, Robert Lugger, a Cambridge graduate, arrived on the Grand River as the first NEC missionary at Six Nations. Lugger’s mission—like those of his counterparts at Rice and Chemong Lakes, the Bay of Quinte, and Garden River—was not focused on building boarding schools as much as it was to promote the assimilation of the peoples around these places through schooling. Within two years, the Company had built four schoolhouses at Six Nations; each had 100 acres of land associated with it, which—according to the Company—had been granted by Six Nations to the government for the NEC’s use. These grants were accompanied by several others that—the Company feared—would lead to the gradual erosion of Six Nations’ control over the land. A Company history, published in the 1870s, argued that it, along with Six Nations’ leadership, opposed these alienations, although the NEC also acquired considerable land over this period (about 350 acres).⁵⁴

The emphasis on day schools and the gradual erosion of Six Nations’ land on the north shore of the Grand River are important to understand because they help frame how we think about the Mohawk Institute. By the late 1840s, after the Institute was established, few people from Six Nations were crossing from the south side of the river (where most people lived) over to the north, where the school was located.⁵⁵ The reserve was consolidated in 1847 after the loss of much of the Haldimand Tract, and lands were subsequently sold off. Community members who lived on lands to the north and south had to move to the newly defined reserve. The Mohawk Institute was now several kilometres away from the reserve. Perhaps because the school was farther away, in 1853, a decision was taken to expand the Institute to accommodate more children.⁵⁶ At the mission itself lived only about forty adults, most of whom had attended the Institute during its early years; there was hope within the Company that a larger building could serve children living too far from the day schools. A new building was opened in 1859, and the student population was capped at sixty.⁵⁷

Though the history above suggests a culture of schooling had developed at Six Nations by the end of the 1820s, this does not mean that colonial schooling went uncontested at Six Nations. In addition to the 1810 report, noted above, many members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy resisted and rejected the Company’s work. These lines in an 1834 NEC report resonate with sentiments that were likely widespread, but seldom shared with the missionaries responsible for creating the archival record: “in many instances the Indians show themselves insensible to these advantages, and continue irresolute and suspicious, and look upon all whites as intruders.”⁵⁸ The solution to this problem, the NEC plotted, was to take ten boys and four to six girls away from their families and instruct them in the “arts, habits, and customs of civilized life.”⁵⁹ Though the policy of indenture was not part of the emerging plan for the school, the removal of children from their families had returned to the Company’s plan for Six Nations.

A big difference, however, from the plan at Sussex Vale was that the some leaders at Six Nations were involved in these decisions. In 1844, Henry Brant and “forty chiefs of the Onondaga Council Fire” expressed a hope to the NEC that “those of our youth who are educated at your institute, may hereafter, upon their assimilating themselves to the habits of the whites, receive each a farm for their good conduct. . . . The Chiefs are now anxious that 300 acres of the flats, in front of your Institute may be set apart for a farm.”⁶⁰ Today, these words make little sense to us. When we remember, though, the long-standing practice of alliance, and the way it intersected with both Christianity and schooling, as well as the reality that, by 1844, land pressures were becoming even more acute at Six Nations than they were in the past, this decision becomes a little easier to understand. We must also remember that the “Onondaga Council Fire” was not necessarily representative of the Confederacy. In their report the following month, the NEC noted—in reference to their potentially gaining control over Six Nations’ funds—that “the Indians themselves would have a good deal to say about their own funds, and would not like other persons to interfere, particularly the Pagan Indians, who do not approve of the Company’s plans for civilization. . . . The Indians generally can manage their own affairs; they might perhaps make a better use of their money themselves, than agents appointed to act for them.”⁶¹ These words are perhaps some of the most accurate in the historical record about the early school. They call attention to the contested place of the NEC at Six Nations, as well as the reality that the important decisions were made by the Confederacy, not an outside body.

In thinking about this period in the school’s history, I have found Rick Monture’s work on Thayendanegea useful. In his book We Share Our Matters, Monture posits that Thayendanegea’s goals in navigating Anglicanism and schools were always focused on ensuring that the Haudenosaunee would remain “sovereigns of the soil.”⁶² Taken with the concerns others in the Confederacy expressed about the NEC, we can see in these divergent approaches a common goal that sought the Confederacy’s well-being in a time of rapid change.

The Mohawk Institute in Its Early Years

Originally designed to house a Mechanics’ Institute, the first Mohawk Institute buildings were erected between 1829 and 1830 on land granted by the Six Nations’ Council to the government for NEC use.⁶³ The school, whose focus was to be the teaching of “all sorts of handicraft trades,”⁶⁴ had four rooms initially. In two of these, girls were to be taught spinning and weaving, while in the remaining two boys would learn tailoring and carpentry.⁶⁵ Over the course of the decade, shoemaking, wagon making, and blacksmithing were important parts of the boys’ curriculum, while girls—who were harder to recruit—focused on domestic tasks with an eye toward early childhood education. By 1839, the school was selling goods made by the students, though with little success.⁶⁶

Though it was initially called a “Mechanics’ Institute,” the school at Six Nations never lived up to its name. The first Mechanics’ Institutes were created just five years earlier in Glasgow, Liverpool, and London. In Canada, the first Mechanics’ Institutes were founded in Montreal (1828) and Toronto (1830) at the same time as the school was being built at Six Nations.⁶⁷ Broadly, the aim of these new schools was “the instruction of their members in the principles of the Arts they practice, and in the various branches of Useful Knowledge.”⁶⁸ Most Mechanics’ Institutes had libraries and reading rooms and were focused on the continuing education of mostly professional adult men. What was built at Six Nations was nothing like this. Instead, the school there targeted children and—at least from the Company’s perspective—always looked toward a day where children might be removed from their families. Here is Lugger’s description of the school from June 1833, when the school was attended by thirty-six children: “The upper class read well in the Bible, repeat Scripture, Hymns, Catechisms, (Dr. Watts,) write a good round hand, cypher as far as division, and say all the tables. . . . As to understanding what they learn that is quite out of the question, and will be for years, until they are taken from their families and obliged to speak nothing but English, as I had proposed and planned for the proposed Institution.”⁶⁹ This was a Mechanics’ Institute in name only, and what Lugger reveals here is that the boarding school structure used at Sussex Vale was never far from mind. Removing children from their families was a recurrent strategy in the NEC’s tool box to re-educate Indigenous children.

It is always difficult to assess the conditions in which the children lived. Reports tend to focus on the scholastic and vocational work of the school, as well as financial concerns, rather than its more day-to-day lived realities. What we do know from these early years is that, for the most part, the students were cared for by the “mechanic” and his family. Together, Mr. Smith, his wife, and daughters provided for the children’s board, in addition to teaching them their trades and skills.⁷⁰ In 1841, vocational instruction was separated from housekeeping—because neither was going well—and the Smiths were replaced in their housekeeping responsibilities by an elderly couple without children.⁷¹

Given that the reports indicate that the Smiths had too much work to do initially, it did not take long for concerns to arise about the school’s treatment of students. In October 1837, several parents complained, causing the NEC to revisit the school’s operations.⁷² Nearly a year later, a report to the Company noted that “the boys at the Institution are happy and contented; not one of them has attempted to depart the school for a long time,” suggesting that earlier, the school had a problem with truancy.⁷³ Similarly in 1839, a report back to the Company offered the following observation: “It has been additionally gratifying, to find both the youths and their parents becoming every day, more and more contented with the treatment received; more sensible of the expediency of closer attention and stricter discipline; more inclined and better qualified, to take a juster view of the importance of knowledge imparted.”⁷⁴ The implication here was that, in the past, students’ desire to leave the school had posed problems. Though the root cause of student and parent concerns is unknown, that they were unhappy signals some problems at the school.

Lugger died in 1837 and was replaced by Abraham Nelles. Under Nelles’s direction, the school doubled its student population in 1840, from twenty to forty students, the Company renovating the building to accommodate the increased numbers.⁷⁵ A report from the mid-1840s described the school’s curriculum in this way:

The mode of teaching is the same as that among the Common Schools for the Whites, and the Text-Books . . . are those recommended by the Provincial Board of Education, videlicet:—the Bible, Mavor’s Spelling Book. English Reader, Daboll’s Arithmetic, Murray’s Grammar and a Geography. The instruction is carried on altogether in English. The children show as much aptitude in acquiring knowledge as the Whites.⁷⁶

Though far from what Mechanics’ Institutes were becoming elsewhere in North America, by the end of its first decade, the structure of the Mohawk Institute had taken root. Blending manual labour and academic study, the school held promise as an institution that prepared its students for the settler society Anglo-Canadians were building around Six Nations. As the 1840s turned to the 1850s, however, farming came to occupy a much more prominent place in students’ daily lives.

Overall, the success of the school was uncertain. Reports at this time emphasized that there was more demand from prospective students than there were spaces.⁷⁷ Front and centre in the NEC reports for these years was John Obey, who, upon leaving the school, ran a successful woodworking shop where he produced wagons, sleighs, tables, bedsteads, and chests.⁷⁸ There were also a handful of others noted. Most, though, seem to have been less enthusiastic in living up to the Company’s vision. In 1844, Nelles observed, “I think all who have learned trades work a portion of their time at them. Though some may appear to adopt the indolent careless habit of their friends when they return home I feel sure the instruction they receive will be a benefit to them when those, perhaps, who have assisted in imparting it will not be here to observe it.”⁷⁹ Even here—at Six Nations—where the school seems to have been far less physically damaging for its students than Sussex Vale, the degree of influence from the school remains unclear. Nelles’s proposed solution to this problem was further investment and a move toward farming. Rather than identify the boarding school approach as a flawed model, reinvestment and revision were the order of the day, as they would be for the next 150 years.

Conclusions

In many ways, the New England Company’s work at Six Nations was fundamentally different from what took place at Sussex Vale. Though in the future the Mohawk Institute took on many of the characteristics of Sussex Vale—especially in terms of violence and sexual assault—in its early years, the Mechanics’ Institute, and the boarding school that developed from it, were very distinct institutions. Where few Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik families were interested in the Company’s efforts along the Kennebecasis River, at Six Nations, the NEC had been invited into the community (at least by some) and—over time—dozens of families sent their children to the school. Where the curriculum at Sussex Vale can hardly be discussed using those words—it was unambiguously focused on exploiting the forced labour of children—at the Mohawk Institute the curriculum was discernible and comparable with that offered in nearby settler schools. Though there were obvious problems, by the end of the 1840s, the school was clearly part of the fabric of colonial schooling in a way never seen at Sussex Vale.

These differences ought not distract us from seeing the structural common ground between these schools. Though the history of the Mohawk Institute’s founding was radically different from that of Sussex Vale, we can see that in the NEC, the two schools shared a common lineage, anchored as it was to the early history of Christian evangelism in New England. In the Mohawk Institute, the abuses of Sussex Vale might have been mitigated by early structures of community involvement and oversight, led initially by Tekarihogen, but over the school’s nearly two centuries of operation this was not always the case. Survivor testimony by people like Bud Whiteye, who outlines the brutality of life at the twentieth-century Mohawk Institute, resonate strongly with the experiences of Molly Ann Gell and her early nineteenth-century Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik peers.⁸⁰ As the chapters in Behind the Bricks demonstrate, it is important to understand this common foundation. As an organization founded to support Europe’s resettlement of North America by engaging Indigenous societies in cultural, linguistic, and religious re-education, the New England Company—and the culture of residential schooling that developed from it—could never fully escape Sussex Vale’s legacy.

Notes

1. 1 Good overviews of the school at Sussex Vale can be found in the 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); and Judith Fingard, “The New England Company and the New Brunswick Indians, 1786–1826: A Comment on the Colonial Perversion of British Benevolence,” Acadiensis 1, no. 2 (Spring 1972): 29–42. I have only cited specific material from these sources, though the general historical narrative here has been deeply shaped by these works. For a good understanding of early Catholic missions as they relate to residential schools, see Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (Harvard University Press, 2007).

2. 2 The Company was renewed by charter after the restoration of Charles II in February 1661 with a similar mandate. New England Company, History of the New England Company, vol. 1 (Taylor and Co., 1871), 1. Henceforth cited as NEC, History.

3. 3 NEC, History, 7.

4. 4 Jean Fittz Hankins, “Bringing the Good News: Protestant Missionaries to the Indians of New England and New York, 1700–1775” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 1993), 43.

5. 5 NEC, History, 12.

6. 6 Hankins, “Bringing the Good News,” 44.

7. 7 Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies (University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 107.

8. 8 “Praying Towns” were places created by English missionaries for the purposes of religious conversion, but also acculturation toward English systems of law and culture. For someone like Eliot, religious conversion was deeply intertwined with cultural and political assimilation. Jean O’Brien’s Dispossession by Degrees examines one of these communities—Natick—to demonstrate how the town’s Indigenous residents navigated and resisted these efforts for well over a century. See Jean O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

9. 9 Szasz lays out this history of collaboration well on pages 111–20. For a more complex discussion see O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, and Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2018).

10. 10 NEC, History, 15.

11. 11 Colin Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 70.

12. 12 Phillip Buckner, “Ward Chipman,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6 (henceforth DCB), University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/chipman_ward_1754_1824_6E.html.

13. 13 Fingard, “The New England Company,” 41.

14. 14 Fingard, 30.

15. 15 Edward Winslow, “Notes Respecting the Indians and Acadians of New Brunswick,” 1804, vol. 12-111, Winslow Papers, University of New Brunswick Libraries, accessed 13 May 2025, https://web.lib.unb.ca/winslow/pdf.cgi?img=./data/12/12_111_01_04.jpg.

16. 16 Micah Pawling, “Wəlastəkwey (Maliseet) Homeland: Waterscapes and Continuity Within the Lower St. John River Valley, 1784–1900,” Acadiensis 46, no. 2 (2017): 5–34, https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/Acadiensis/article/view/25946.

17. 17 Judith Fingard, “Oliver Arnold,” DCB, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/arnold_oliver_6E.html.

18. 18 A day school is an institution where the children attend during the day and return home to sleep.

19. 19 “Instructions to be observed at the Academy established at Sussex Vale for the purpose of teaching and civilizing the Indian Nations; and by the missionaries appointed by the Board in the several districts,” Leonard Family Fonds, New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, NB. See also George Leonard, 22 March 1791, letter 2, item 2, Historical Documents: Indian Academy Sussex, F242, New Brunswick Museum, and Darrel Butler, “Fredercik Dibblee,” DCB, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/dibblee_frederick_6E.html.

20. 20 Fingard, “The New England Company,” 30.

21. 21 “Instructions to be observed at the Academy established at Sussex Vale for the purpose of teaching and civilizing the Indian Nations; and by the missionaries appointed by the Board in the several districts.”

22. 22 Fingard, “The New England Company,” 38.

23. 23 Fingard, 30–2.

24. 24 NEC, History, 23.

25. 25 Fingard, “The New England Company,” 34.

26. 26 Fingard, 34.

27. 27 NEC, History, 30–1.

28. 28 Fingard, “The New England Company,” 36.

29. 29 Fingard, “Oliver Arnold.”

30. 30 Fingard, “The New England Company,” 37.

31. 31 Fingard, 34.

32. 32 “General Report to the New England Company by their Committee appointed by Resolutions of the 9th May 1822 concerning the Company’s affairs at home and abroad,” Historical Documents: Indian Academy Sussex, F242, New Brunswick Museum.

33. 33 Copy of the Report made to the New England Company by the Rev. John West M. A. after his visit to the Indian Academy at Sussex N.B. in 1825 and 1826 [26 September 1826], Historical Documents: Indian Academy Sussex, F242, New Brunswick Museum.

34. 34 “General Report to the New England Company.”

35. 35 Copy of the Report made to the New England Company by the Rev. John West.

36. 36 Copy of the Report made to the New England Company by the Rev. John West.

37. 37 The Examination of Molly Ann Gell, 6 January 1809, Sussex Indian Academy Fonds, S65A-8, New Brunswick Museum. See also L. F. S. Upton, “Molly Ann Gell,” DCB, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/gell_molly_ann_6E.html.

38. 38 Copy of the Report made to the New England Company by the Rev. John West.

39. 39 Copy of the Report made to the New England Company by the Rev. John West.

40. 40 See Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith; Truth and Reconciliation 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).

41. 41 Copy of the Report made to the New England Company by the Rev. John West.

42. 42 Copy of Draft of letter by Judge Chipman, 25 February 1831, Historical Documents: Indian Academy Sussex, F242, New Brunswick Museum.

43. 43 NEC, History, 40.

44. 44 For more on this see Thomas Peace, “Indigenous Intellectual Traditions and Biography in the Northeast,” History Compass 16, no. 4 (2018): 6.

45. 45 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Final Report, 1:70.

46. 46 “History of the New England Company on the Grand River,” in The Valley of the Six Nations: A Collection of Documents on the Indian Lands of the Grand River, ed. Charles M. Johnston (Champlain Society, 1964), 257. See also Major General H. C. Darling’s report on the Six Nations, 24 July 1828, in Johnston, 292.

47. 47 Gus Richardson, “Sahonwagy,” DCB, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/sahonwagy_4E.html.

48. 48 Elizabeth Elbourne, “Managing Alliance, Negotiating Christianity: Haudenosaunee Uses of Anglicanism in Northeastern North America, 1760s–1830s,” in Mixed Blessings: Indigenous Encounters with Christianity in Canada, ed. Tolly Bradford and Chelsea Horton (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), 38–60.

49. 49 Haldimand to de Peyster, November 1784, in Johnston, 52. See also “Means Suggested as the Most Probable to Retain the Six Nations and Western Indians in the King’s Interest” in Johnston, 53.

50. 50 See Sir John Johnson to Claus, 19 October 1787, in Johnston, Valley of the Six Nations, 236; and A Visit with Joseph Brant on the Grand River, 1792, in Johnston, 60.

51. 51 The Educational Problems of the Confederacy about 1810, in Johnston, 245.

52. 52 George Ryerson to Maitland, 9 June 1826, in Johnston, 252.

53. 53 The Rev. John West’s Description of Religion and Education among the Six Nations, 1826, in Johnston, 254.

54. 54 NEC, History, 78–81. For a clearer discussion of the politics of land along the Grand River, see Susan M. Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River (University of Manitoba Press, 2017).

55. 55 NEC, History, 83.

56. 56 NEC, 84.

57. 57 NEC, 85.

58. 58 NEC Report, 8 September 1834, in Elizabeth Graham, The Mush Hole: Life at Two Indian Residential Schools (Heffle Publishing, 1997), 45.

59. 59 NEC Report, 8 September 1834, in Graham, 45.

60. 60 Six Nations to NEC, 10 June 1844, in Graham, 51.

61. 61 NEC Report, 19 July 1844, in Graham, 51.

62. 62 Rick Monture, We Share Our Matters: Two Centuries of Writing and Resistance at Six Nations of the Grand River (University of Manitoba Press, 2014), chap. 1, 60.

63. 63 NEC Report, 14 May 1829, in Graham, The Mush Hole, 44; NEC Report, 29 April 1831, in Graham, 45.

64. 64 NEC Report, 8 July 1830, in Graham, 44.

65. 65 NEC Report, 29 April 1831, in Graham, 45.

66. 66 NEC Report, 1839, in Graham, 47.

67. 67 Chad Gaffield, “Mechanics’ Institutes,” Canadian Encyclopedia, last modified 16 December 2013, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/mechanics-institutes.

68. 68 T. and E. Kelly, Books of the People: An Illustrated History of the British Library (Andre Deutsch, 1977), 67, as cited in Martyn Walker, “‘For the Last Many Years in England Everybody Has Been Educating the People, but They Have Forgotten to Find Them Any Books’: The Mechanics’ Institutes Library Movement and Its Contribution to Working-Class Adult Education During the Nineteenth Century,” Library & Information History 29 no. 4 (November 2013): 273.

69. 69 NEC Report, June 1833, in Graham, The Mush Hole, 45.

70. 70 NEC Report, 26 May 1840, and NEC Report, 24 November 1840, in Graham, 48.

71. 71 NEC Reports for 1841, in Graham, 49.

72. 72 NEC Report, 15 October 1837, in Graham, 46.

73. 73 NEW Report, 3 July 1838, in Graham, 47.

74. 74 NEC Report, 1839, in Graham, 47.

75. 75 NEC Report, 24 February 1840, in Graham, 47.

76. 76 Commissioners’ Report, in Graham, 53.

77. 77 NEC Reports, 6 January 1842 and 24 January 1843, in Graham 50.

78. 78 NEC Report, 22 May 1843, in Graham, 50.

79. 79 NEC Report, 22 February 1844, in Graham, 51. Nelles’s report on 23 July 1844 lists children who have left the school and describes their current work. See NEC Report, 23 July 1844, in Graham, 52.

80. 80 Bud Whiteye, A Dark Legacy: A Primer on Residential Schools in Canada (Woodland Cultural Centre).