11 Robert Ashton, the New England Company, and the Mohawk Institute, 1872–1910

William Acres

Roughly three decades after the Mohawk Institute’s inception in the 1830s, church administrators decided to “modernize” the school. This work was to be completed under the leadership of Robert Ashton, the Mohawk Institute’s third principal, who managed the Institute from 1872 until 1910, an important and lengthy period in the school’s history. This chapter examines Ashton’s influence on the Mohawk Institute, focusing on how he changed the school to a much stricter environment than had existed when Abraham Nelles, his predecessor, oversaw the Mohawk Institute. Robert Ashton modelled the supposedly improved Mohawk Institute after the industrial school at Feltham in England, where Ashton had worked; Feltham was intended to be a reformatory school for young offenders. This chapter’s focused examination of Ashton’s time as principal highlights several themes such as the significant influence a principal could exert and the impact he could have on the school, and, at times, the power struggles between school administrators and the church. In the end, Ashton’s reforms were spurned, especially by students and community members, and likely greatly contributed to the burning down of the school in 1903 and the removal of Ashton as principal in 1910.

Consultation with English social reformer Florence Nightingale (best known as the founder of modern nursing) and others led the leadership of the New England Company (NEC) in the 1860s to seek out a new vision for the education of Indigenous peoples. Part of their motivation was to bring new ideas about industrial schooling on the English model to bear on schools such as the Mohawk Institute, together with new theories about physiology and mental discipline. Rather than industrial training, the emphasis would be on farming. Hence, the NEC planned for the cultivation of all their properties, including the two-hundred-acre Manual Labour Farm near the Mohawk Institute, which, to date, it had not utilized. The plan was to have these properties cultivated and tended by the students at the Institute. It was believed by authorities at the NEC that participation in farm and domestic labour would quell the children’s instinct to return to the culture of their origins and that the work would instil new discipline and values in the students. If students were entirely engaged in this work, it was hoped, the “Indian” in the children would be replaced by a domestic, industrious labouring population, capable of earning a living, with a strong Christian component.

Another innovation promoted by some members of the NEC, among others, was the goal of removing what was sometimes referred to as the “contagion” of Indigenous culture through the application of hygienic principles and properly ventilated and secured residential facilities, bathing facilities, dry manure latrines, and other sanitary ideals. These ameliorative changes were frustrated by the 1858 Mohawk Institute building, which, by the early 1870s, was no longer fit for purpose. Mary Carpenter (1807–77), the sister of two Company members and a leading advocate of what were called Ragged Schools for indigent children in Bristol and elsewhere, visited the Mohawk Institute in 1873 with her brother and sister-in-law. The Carpenters, like Nightingale, were interested in cleanliness in all parts of the school, proper lavatories, bathing facilities, and the eradication of disease. While not all their reforms were possible—given that the 1858 structure did not meet any of their principal criticisms—the new head of the Mohawk Institute, Robert Ashton, was to try his hardest to ensure that the best British and imperial methods were put in place.

Before arriving at the Mohawk Institute, Ashton was influenced by another NEC member, Edward Mash Browell. Browell was a member of the Board of Visitors at the Middlesex Industrial School at Feltham, Middlesex, where a young Robert Ashton had been employed since 1861. The purpose of the Middlesex Industrial School was to reform the nearly criminalized, impoverished youth of some of London’s worst neighbourhoods. Browell and others of the Company saw the benefit of importing into an Indigenous community the Middlesex school’s designs and purposes.

The enactment of new ideas such as these meant new leadership for the Mohawk Institute would need to be recruited, as the current principal, Abraham Nelles (1805–84), the chief missionary of the Company’s Grand River Station, was considered incapable of steering the radical changes proposed by Browell. Nelles’s older mission was primarily Anglican, and his role was carried out almost independently of outside counsel. The Company replaced Nelles to minimize the Anglican influence so heavily promoted by the older missionaries of the NEC. By the spring of 1872, after interviews and consultation, the Company leadership settled on Robert Ashton (1842–1930) as the new superintendent, alongside his wife, Alice Turner Ashton (1840–1920). The Company’s efforts were experimental but served as the foundation of what would be nearly forty years of the Ashtons’ service at the Mohawk Institute. From his earliest days as superintendent, Ashton took his counsel almost entirely from the leadership of the NEC, following their directives and budgets and their decisions on how to expand the farm, work the children, and create a model school.

Some of the Ashtons’ reports and journals remain.¹ Robert Ashton maintained an extensive correspondence with the NEC leadership on a wide variety of business: lands, money, expansion of farming, the admission and discharge of students, curricula and academic progress, and relations with the Canadian government. Much of the material in this chapter is drawn from these sources, which are found largely in the NEC’s records, housed at the London Metropolitan Archives. As well, there are papers in the V. P. Cronyn Archives of the Diocese of Huron, at Huron University College. These materials ended up at the diocese due to litigation carried out between 1996 and 2006 by survivors of the Mohawk Institute, which meant the contents of historic superintendents’ and principals’ papers were released from the iron safe at the Institute and preserved by the last principal, William John Zimmerman, and his wife, Gladys. I treat these sources here primarily as NEC directives to Ashton, as they informed his very long tenure. What actually emerged from the execution of those directives from the NEC is yet another story.

Robert Ashton’s four-decade tenure as superintendent of the Mohawk Institute began in November 1872 and concluded with his retirement on 31 December 1910. By that time, the men who sat on the Special Committee for Missions of the NEC were relieved when he departed. A successor had been chosen in 1907, but Ashton remained until he was replaced by his son, Nelles Ashton, during a visit by the Company’s governor, John Walker Ford, and Herbert Henry Browell in 1910 to the NEC’s Grand River Station. The Ashton dynasty was saved only by an increase from the Department of Indian Affairs in the per-head capitation grant for students at the Institute in 1910. It was, nonetheless, a controversial decision to retain Nelles Ashton.

Ashton senior had become rigid and difficult to manage from London, England, the headquarters of the NEC’s charitable work. The system he imposed on the Institute, with decades of support from the Special Committee and the members of the ancient charity, gained very lukewarm reviews. In 1908, when Company member W. F. Webster visited, he noted, in his very confidential report, that if the NEC was pleased with a “reformatory,” then so be it. Clearly that was not the Company’s intention; they had already planned different approaches to expending their influence on Canadian Indigenous populations, but Ashton was at the end of his usefulness to them.²

Ashton had been deaf alike to the politics of the Six Nations over the Company’s claims to title on Six Nations lands and to the policies of both the government and the Anglican Church. Without diplomatic skills, he caused strife and bitterness. His power and severity in dealing with the leadership of the Confederacy Council, parents, educational interests, and students alike came from having created what amounted to a personal fiefdom at the Mohawk Institute. His exertions were met with three cases of arson in 1903. In April of that year, the Institute was razed and rebuilt at minimum expense. Three years later, a Company missionary, the Reverend James Leonard Strong at St. Paul’s Kenyengeh, on the Six Nations, was met with glowing approval by the NEC for his suggestion to recast their mission by building new churches on the Tuscarora Reserve. Ashton’s proposal for a hospital for contagious diseases was received with little enthusiasm, despite the fact that his son, Dr. Ernest Charles Ashton, was locally respected for his treatment of tuberculosis and other maladies devastating Indigenous peoples. Clearly, in the end, Ashton did not meet the goals of either the NEC or the Six Nations for the Mohawk Institute.

The Feltham Model: Ashton’s Early Years

Ashton was hired as the school’s principal in the spring of 1872 with a clear remit. He planned to impose a smaller version of the Middlesex Industrial School at Feltham, where he had previously been a schoolmaster. He brought his two small children to the Mohawk Institute, which he described as an unprofitable wreck of a place, with the children running the show.³

The industrial school model in place at Feltham, England, where Ashton worked as a schoolmaster from 1861 until his appointment at the Mohawk Institute in the spring of 1872, was designed to cure the “sins” that were endemic in poor, urban families in Victorian London. Feltham’s strict work schedule prepared young boys, aged eight to fourteen, for trades, the navy, or other work. Parents of these children were either absent, criminal, or incapable of controlling their children. While the boys were not entirely criminalized, they were there at the behest of the local justices of the peace acting under parliamentary statutes, most remanded for vagrancy and destitution. These “inmates”—a term also used at times by Ashton to describe the children at the Mohawk Institute—lived within a walled institution of immense size and complexity. There was a working farm designed for profit, a tailor’s shop where all uniforms and repairs were done, a band for musical training, singing, and a long series of prayer times and double Sunday church services, strict (and parsimonious diets), and daily work and educational schedules on the half-day model. Work teams and distribution of all manner of work was enforced. Good conduct was rewarded.

These elements of Feltham would be adapted and used for the children at the Mohawk Institute. Ashton was to find the Feltham-style model entirely unknown at the Mohawk Institute when he arrived. Abraham Nelles, his predecessor, had subscribed to the view that the children were at the school to be educated. Nelles knew the community intimately; Ashton, though virtually ignorant, was keen to impose a new model for running the school. The overwhelming majority of Feltham boys were Church of England followers. Most of the Six Nations children at the Institute were within a Church of England—and later Anglican—system, but their acculturation was entirely different. The boys at Feltham lived communally. After the most recent dispossession of the Tuscarora Reserve in the early 1840s, the politics and culture at Six Nations were undergoing significant challenges. Sweeping legislation imposed the surveillance of resources, lands, and governance, and communal pressures, which a common educational system could only partly address. The children, by and large, lived with their families, and no legal authority had found these families incapable of raising their children. Feltham had been built for eight hundred boys, whereas the 1858 rebuilt Mohawk Institute, although enlarged over the years, was capable of housing a maximum of eighty “inmates.” In addition, the Feltham standards and organization were inspected and subject to rigorous statutory requirements; this rarely happened at the Mohawk Institute.

The NEC was concerned that their chief missionary, Abraham Nelles, was unsuited to so modern a task as creating an Anglocentric universe designed for rapid “civilizing and Christianizing” of Six Nations children. It was their hope that Robert Ashton would instead design this new model. Moreover, it was an economic model dependent on farm production, rather than the trades and vocations of the English model. The success of Ashton’s venture relied on a steady, and increasing, enrolment of students capable of sustained, hard physical work, on about 430 acres of property. Nelles’s school had operated only about 70 acres of farmland. Ashton entered the politically fraught world of the NEC’s Grand River Station, an agglomeration of properties—and policies—that the Company hoped in the later 1860s to meld into a thoroughly modern community with full surveillance, standards of behaviour, and model work.

When Ashton arrived, he confronted a situation entirely different from the conditions and students at the publicly funded, hugely staffed institution at Feltham—none of his charges were under the remand of justices of the peace. While there was no outright use of the justice system at the Institute, the Ashton regime would operate on intensive land cultivation, including orchards and a quasi-military discipline for both sexes. Indeed, Ashton’s doctrine was that the children of the Six Nations had to adapt to the Feltham model, rather than the other way around.

In his prime, Robert Ashton had been a force majeure: he had imported the latest British ideals of the industrial school model and brought them to bear on a population of Indigenous children with whom he had no prior experience. These children were of mixed tribal and linguistic identities, both boys and girls, and ranged in ages from seven to eighteen. By the mid-1880s, he was considered something of an expert in Canadian Indigenous child education. At first, he followed the NEC line at every turn, most particularly in adapting the industrial school model. Ashton’s vision was not a model that was universally approved, nor was it one derived from Canadian experience in Indigenous communities and education. But Ashton’s increasing primacy within the NEC’s Grand River Station allowed him funds and latitude to organize the institute as he saw fit. Now fifteen miles away from the Tuscarora Reserve, it was nonetheless an integral, not to say integrated, part of the “station” as a whole.

Quarrels among NEC missionaries had broken into open conflict by 1870–1 over attempts to create new mission “stations” on the Tuscarora Reserve. Where some members of the NEC wanted an innovative model of mission complete with public health rules, closely watched students, and a generally organized community, there was fierce resistance to this change among the older missionaries, such as Abraham Nelles and the Reverend Adam Elliott, as well as among the Confederacy chiefs, who were the hereditary governing body of the Six Nations. Another resistant missionary, the Reverend James Chance, recently displaced by the NEC’s closure of their Garden River mission near Sault Ste-Marie, arrived in the summer of 1871. In that same year, Nelles left for a surprise visit to the NEC to urge them to remove a fourth missionary, the Reverend Robert J. Roberts, about to undertake a new “station” at Cayuga, in the eastern portion of the Six Nations. Roberts was the NEC’s up-and-coming man in the 1860s who had established the new mission church at Kenyengeh (taken over by Chance). He, like Ashton, enjoyed the support of leading modernizers in the NEC.⁴

Superintendency and Consolidation of Power

NEC Members and political luminaries Sir James Carter and Senator Amos Edwin Botsford had constructed a system where missionaries at parishes had superintendency of particular schools; Ashton was one of five school superintendents. He was not considered a missionary and, thus, had no place on the Board of Missionaries devised in the regulations. These new regulations of November 1872 saw admissions to the Institute managed by the Company’s Board of Missionaries, headed by Nelles, and assigned to school districts mapped by the Reverend Robert J. Roberts (of the Cayuga Station). Ashton’s role as superintendent was set down in detail. Carter’s regulation had rules for the missionaries as well, but Ashton’s extensive duties, printed in the Company’s report of 1871–2, envisioned sweeping responsibilities.⁵ As the Special Committee outlined in a letter on 12 September 1871, there were to be “certain changes to the management of the Mohawk Institution which were in the contemplation of the New England Company, having for their object to bring the Institution to a state of efficiency and usefulness to the Indian races on the Reserve.”⁶ Efficiency was to be Ashton’s forte. The instructions were as follows:

The Superintendent

1. The Superintendent shall have the control, and be responsible for the management of the Institution, Manual Labour School, and Farm, and upon him shall devolve the due exertion of the directions of the Company, or Special Committee in relation thereto;
2. The School Teachers at the Institution shall be independently recommended to the Company by the Superintendent, and the Board of Missionaries, and appointed by the Company.
3. Vacancies in the Institution will be filled up from the Day Schools on the Indian Reserve, from candidates who have been examined by the Board of Missionaries, and have obtained a certificate of fitness for admission. Other Indian children may be admitted on permission being granted by the Special Committee of the Company, and having passed an examination by the Board of Missionaries and obtained the necessary certificate of fitness.
4. The Superintendent is to keep a list of all of the children in the Institution, showing the dates of their admission, their age when admitted, the names and occupations of their parents, and from what school on the Reserve or elsewhere they came; together with a note of the state of knowledge at the time of admission.
5. He is to keep a list of the children as they leave the Institution; to keep up a communication with them, and to chronicle their progress in life, as far as is practicable for four years afterwards.⁷
6. He is to forward every quarter to the Special Committee a report of the actual state of the Institution, in the form required by the Committee.
7. He is to provide for the daily board of the establishment according to a dietary sanctioned by the Special Committee; also to be responsible for the cleanliness and good order of the dormitories and other rooms inhabited by or used by the children; also to advance with all diligence the industrial, moral, and religious education of the establishment; and is expected to interest himself in all that may conduce to the good of those that are placed under his care. He will conduct family Prayer night and morning with the children, and attend with them Public Worship every Sunday.⁸

The superintendent and the board were meant to work closely together. Students were recruited from the day schools under the missionary stations at Kenyengeh, Tuscarora, Mohawk, and Cayuga under examination/approval by these clergy. Various models, including Indigenous trustees for each school, were tried. But in effect, all were run by Anglican clergy with “superintendence” of NEC schools under the licence of the bishop of Huron. By the late 1870s these men were fully enmeshed with others in the Six Nations School Board; by the 1880s, the NEC jointly funded the latter body, though the Board of Missionaries continued to exist.⁹

When Ashton arrived, the new regulations meant the Board of Missionaries approved all admissions to schools falling within its various districts. Thus, Ashton had to rely almost entirely on these men for his admissions to the Mohawk Institute. Even more oversight was exercised by the Special Committee in London, where recommendations had to be sent for their final approval. In this way, there was an entirely new set of politics and personalities at the Grand River Station. The Board of Missionaries itself was a fractious and occasionally controversial group, although individually they were more amenable. They were also remarkably self-obsessed and incurious about what they were examining students for. When they first met at the Institute after Ashton’s arrival, he tried to offer board members a tour: “At the conclusion of the sitting, as they had not inspected the school or Institution I requested them to do so, but only Mr. Roberts, & Mr. Chance accompanied me & they only visited the girls’ dormitories & wash room & stated that that was far more than they had ever seen of the Institution before. No note respecting their inspection was entered in their minutes I presume.”¹⁰ The missionaries’ obliviousness indicated that the Institute was not particularly important to them in 1873. Soon after, each missionary was ordered to inspect the Institute each year to see for themselves how well Ashton was doing. By 1875 this system was cumbersome and prey to the jealousies—which were many—among the board. The NEC leadership eventually honed the system until it was only Ashton admitting and discharging students. Where Carter’s 1872 regulations had seen the superintendent as separate from the Board of Missionaries, disputes and quarrels among them were damaging admissions to both day schools and the Mohawk Institute. Over time, Ashton gained supremacy in these councils, superseding the Board of Missionaries and becoming the honorary secretary of the Six Nations School Board in 1878, from which office he exercised great influence in the training and appointment of day school teachers.

Over the subsequent few years, Ashton and Nelles were the sole survivors of the bitter controversies among the missionaries. At first Ashton attempted to tar his predecessor, Nelles, as lazy. In reality, Nelles’s family had been favoured by the Mohawks for several generations, since before the American Revolution in the 1700s.¹¹ Indeed, while Nelles was seen to be beloved due to his advocacy against colonial administrators regarding the 1840s removals of the Six Nations to Tuscarora, he was no man of business.¹² Nelles’s once dominant authority over the Grand River Station was being seriously eroded by NEC leadership; their chief missionary was rendering the entire mission into a personal fiefdom.

When the NEC proposed new churches in the early 1860s, Nelles and his junior missionary, the Reverend Robert J. Roberts, acted together to fundraise and work with the new Diocese of Huron. But when St. Paul’s Kenyengeh was to be built in 1868–9, the NEC entrusted these affairs entirely to Roberts. As a result, Nelles was furious and aggressive. He petitioned the diocese’s Bishop Benjamin Cronyn to remove Roberts. This demand was met with equal rage from the NEC. Since the NEC was funding everything, management of the accounting was taken from Nelles, who fumed that this “secular” work was being done by a missionary instead of a “lay agent,” or by a secular person whose sole oversight was in lands, their conveyancing, and other property matters.

This system of lay and clerical agents had been in place from the 1833–53 period, before Nelles took control. Where others, including NEC lay agent William Richardson (1833–47), were keen land speculators, and were felt to have betrayed the Six Nations, Nelles claimed to have proved ceaselessly loyal over the 1840s and ’50s.¹³ This was a great exaggeration on Nelles’s part. He had proved obstreperous in NEC business, and by the time of the dismissal of a second lay agent, William Clark, in 1853, he had gained sole control of the annual NEC grant to the entire mission.

Nelles’s accounting methods proved suspicious. Nelles was also known for his interference and campaigns of disinformation in the 1860s about government policies. By the time of Ashton’s arrival, Nelles’s control had been stopped with individual “station” missionaries managing their own accounts. Ashton, of course, maintained his own budget for the Institute and the farm. The Institute received larger shares of the total subvention during these early years. Nelles had tried to manipulate the Board of Missionaries—and various allies among Anglican Mohawk chiefs—to stop the NEC’s attempts to remove him.

When Ashton took over the Mohawk Institute from Nelles, with the advice of an excellent boys’ schoolmaster, Isaac Bearfoot, and others, he learned to keep quiet in the missionaries’ quarrels. For most of his first decade he confined his energies to the strictest, most disciplined form of student life. This was an abrupt and disquieting reversal of Nelles’s relative ease with the students and his concentration on their studies. Nonetheless, Ashton came out on top and was able to become honorary secretary of the revised Six Nations School Board from 1878 until the early 1900s. From Nelles’s death in 1884 until about 1906, Ashton was considered to be a skilled NEC employee.

Most of Ashton’s days were spent maintaining a constant presence on the farm, paying bills, planning improvements, working as man-of-all-business on properties, conveyances, and trustee work.¹⁴ The NEC’s properties were all under trusts. Ashton’s role was as both agent—negotiating land deals and sales, working with surveyors and local politicians—and trustee, maintaining an official legal capacity of signing into law the deals he had already done as an agent for the NEC. A distant set of English trustees relied increasingly on Ashton’s long-term tenure as superintendent to know how to manage, insure, and maintain a variety of buildings, parsonages, schools, and the Institute in its many parts. Everywhere, it seemed, Ashton’s organization and efficiency gave sufficient defence against criticism of the NEC, although he occasionally served as an irritant through his intractable attitudes toward the Department of Indian Affairs. Despite these numerous roles, it was the running of the Institute that gave him almost complete power.

Scholastic Life

When Ashton arrived, he found the boys better able to read compared to the girls. He summarized and reported all academic progress. Each student was graded precisely and administered by the boys’ or girls’ heads. Ashton also reported on the results of the regular examinations by the Board of Missionaries, with detailed summaries of each student’s progress in each subject. This practice continued throughout his tenure. After 1891, he augmented the NEC admissions with similar certificates sent to the Indian Office at Brantford. Since the Institute was now receiving “capitation” monies, these were for the use of the Department of Indian Affairs, which was now financing student enrolment. From 1878, Ashton could also control students’ provisional admissions from the Six Nations’ day schools and others, but only with NEC approval. A direct role for the missionaries in Institute admissions was removed, although they, too, sat on the Six Nations School Board.

The results of examinations were posted at the end of the reports to the NEC.¹⁵ These reports show that for the years 1872–6 most students were drawn from the day schools; their religion, nation, and origins were recorded. Additional students from Muncey Town, Sarnia, Walpole Island, and Tyendinaga at the Bay of Quinte were also admitted, continuing a pattern begun under Nelles. The geographical catchment was largely unchanged, despite a few more students from Walpole Island and the Sarnia reserves. According to Ashton’s journals, some students who died were recorded as being buried in the “pagan” or Longhouse traditions, so perhaps the fact of baptism was not considered solely binding; the same was true, it would seem, for Methodist, Baptist, or other students, though the NEC refused to fund Roman Catholics. This was a matter of some debate that resulted from moments of alliance or quarrel with other missionary societies operating on the Six Nations. Only in 1917 did then-Principal Cyril Mae Turnell record an increase in “pagan” students attending, although stricter Anglican regulations could not be enforced in 1877, for example, when there were many empty spaces.

The NEC wanted five-year progress reports on every graduate, a stipulation Ashton tried as best he could to fulfill. As much as they measured the advancement of students, these progress reports assisted in the Department of Indian Affairs’ repeated “morality” surveys, such as that carried out in 1908, which included the quantity of couples who were married in church (Anglican) and had children within wedlock. Great pride was taken in the achievements of many graduates, including Mohawk Institute graduates who were admitted to the Brantford Collegiate Institute for advanced studies in preparation for teaching, nursing, engineering, and medicine. But many more students seemed to go back to the world to which the administration incessantly feared they would return.

Student Labour

Ashton kept a full fourteen-month workbook of reports, correspondence, and daily journal entries in compliance with the NEC’s new “regulations.” As previously discussed, the regulations set out the duties and obligations of the superintendent of the Mohawk Institution. As part of these requirements, the Company demanded rigorous reporting—bimonthly, with quarterly accounts, annual reports, and accounting.¹⁶ Through these sources we learn about the extent of Ashton’s role as the NEC’s chief man of business. In this capacity, he exercised significant influence over Six Nations education, but it came at the expense of the day schools in NEC ledgers and was achieved almost entirely through what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 Final Report termed “institutionalized child labour.”

Ashton’s radical utilization of child labour was a complete reversal of the Nelles regime. He parsed the children’s efforts with much precision. For instance, this is an example of his reporting: “The cost of Maintenance and Management for the past year inclusive of supplies received from the farm amounts to $6381.89 or $176.13 less than in 1874 whilst the average number of pupils boarded was 9 more than in that year.”¹⁷ Ashton’s epitaph might have been his own words: “I have laboured anxiously to promote the happiness and insure [sic] the progress of those intrusted to my charge and whilst setting them examples of industry and order worthy of their imitation. I have greatly improved the Company’s property and exercised the strictest economy.”¹⁸ It appears that the students’ “happiness” was, of course, meant in a long-term sense, rather than in the immediate world of grinding labour that they were subjected to while at the Mohawk Institute. The word “study,” for example, does not appear once in his journals and reports of his first year, whereas “work” or “working” get 141 mentions.

So radical was the immediate impression of abrupt change at the school that over the course of Ashton’s first year, every staff member departed. The previous head teacher, Mr. Bouslaugh, and his wife retired. Thomas Griffiths, who was called “superintendent” by the NEC, and his wife, the boys’ and girls’ teachers, respectively, left. Robert Park, the highly competent farmer, also departed.¹⁹ Isaac Bearfoot, an Onondaga teacher, who had once attended the school and was mentored by Nelles, was the sole remaining employee, but he had only been working part-time. Ashton came to rely on Bearfoot heavily. He quickly appointed Bearfoot as boys’ master,²⁰ as well as Miss Jennie Fisher of Toronto. As head male and female teachers, respectively, Bearfoot and Fisher were two of the best.²¹

Owing much to his previous experience at Feltham, Ashton’s preoccupation with work systems was obvious from the outset. By 1876, the environment under Nelles’s tenure had changed considerably:

The farm has borne the expense of very considerable improvements. The stables were entirely refitted, a barn and granary removed and thoroughly repaired and improved besides other extensive repairs. We also dug a ditch 1000 feet long with an average depth of 3½ feet, built 800 feet of new board fence, removed and rebuilt 350 feet of closely boarded fence (girls’ yard) and 300 feet of board fence and graded and gravelled grounds and roads to the value of upwards of $300. We have also sown about 35 acres of fall wheat and fall ploughed 40 acres of land additionally—with this I can hardly consider that the working of the farm for the past year has resulted in any loss to the Company.²²

To facilitate these changes, Ashton introduced work teams. This model was developed from his experience at Feltham and was consistent with English industrial schooling more generally. Students were to spend half days in the classroom and half days in work activities such as doing laundry, baking, cleaning, or in the fields, with sections alternating throughout the year. Ashton modified this system, alternating days, rather than half days, for each team in the fields or other labour. The immediate effect of Ashton’s new system on the children must have been jarring:

During the Winter so little can be done out of doors that the boys are mostly at School. But as the warmer weather sets in I think it will be desireable [sic] to divide them into two divisions having one out of school on alternate days. This arrangement will make me to employ them in gardening, road-making, draining etc. whilst at the same time it will only leave two classes in school & these having the undivided attention of the Master will be in a position to make greater progress in their studies than could be expected when the teacher is compelled to divide his attention among four classes.²³

It was only through the military organization of these divisions or teams that the system worked. What appears entirely natural in photographs taken soon afterwards—the ditches and fencing—was all done by the boys. This was intense, manual, back-breaking work, unremitting under Ashton’s supervision via a hired man.²⁴

Most of the time this was “routine” work; but, occasionally, Ashton’s designs for improvements or alterations saw immediate policy change. After an extended trip to England between July and September 1877—when Alice Ashton was left in charge of the Mohawk Institute, with Tom Green sometimes acting as the farm foreman and Isaac Bearfoot sometimes as superintendent—he returned with plans for regrading and settling the rear of the school structure. Surveyors were summoned. On 13 December his wife recorded that Ashton had “spent all day drawing plan of farm, and house buildings, going continually out to get measurements—and two days later, ‘several teams’ [of male students] were carting sand, work continuing the 17th, 18th, and 20th, of ‘teams grading.’” A few weeks before, school was cancelled for the heavy work of husking corn and drilling fifty-five acres of winter wheat; similarly, when threshing went slowly, the boys were released from school to help complete it. Potatoes were picked, peas were cut.²⁵

Much of this farm production was for profit, not consumption, although the NEC leadership rejected the idea that their charity could operate as a business—this would have been in total violation of charitable law in the United Kingdom, for any surpluses recorded had to be reinvested immediately in the operations of the Institute and that accounting had to be approved by the Charity Commission. But the impression that profit was being made off the children was strong, as was the knowledge that until 1841 these were lands that had been farmed by Mohawks adjacent to the village; the children were working hard to cultivate crops on their ancestors’ farms in some cases. Just prior to the first sales or expropriations of NEC lands in 1891, Ashton reported to the superintendent general of Indian Affairs a harvest of 1,275 bushels of wheat, 1,495 bushels of oats, 200 bushels of peas, 150 tons of hay, 990 bushels of corn, and 600 bushels of corn—a particularly excellent crop, together with corn fodder and a market garden. Consequently, it was very doubtful that students, particularly the senior male students, were present in class for much of that autumn.²⁶ School Inspector Martin Benson noted that in 1895 there was now a farm of some 430 acres, significant growth from the 70 acres that existed during the 1860s, just prior to Ashton taking over the Mohawk Institute. Moreover, a rigorous accounting for food, and sales of food, are absent from the 1873–6 lists, but it must be presumed that a great deal of excess food was intended for market.²⁷ These materials would have been submitted in the bimonthly reports to the NEC as the farm expanded to its final extent. Here, again, the idea of sales of produce was explicitly derived from the for-profit farm at Feltham. In addition to calculating the cost of maintaining each pupil each year, it was a primarily economic model with philanthropic motives undercut by constant heavy child labour.

Students also worked beyond the school’s walls. When inspector Benson made his extensive report for the Department of Indian Affairs in 1895, he did not mention children working outside of the school specifically, but it was not policy to stop students from seeking outside employment in the summer breaks, and, it would appear, students were sometimes farmed out for labour. As early as 1877, Alice Ashton was constantly arranging “situations” for the girls, often in positions as maids and cooks. In addition, the weekly “fatigue” students, teams of boys and girls, took their orders and supplies on Thursday evenings: for blacking, polishing, and scrubbing, ironing, and outdoor labour. Principal Turnell mentioned in 1917 that a neighbour was put out because boys from the Mohawk Institute were no longer available for threshing. The year before, the NEC had put an end to the practice encouraged by Ashton of children working beyond the school’s walls. This did not stop Mohawk Institute Principal Ann Boyce (who assumed the position after it was vacated by Robert Ashton’s son) from running a domestic finishing school of sorts at the Mohawk Parsonage. Her girls worked in the great houses of Brantford’s finest families. Eventually, she and her husband, Sydney Rogers, were themselves dismissed for using the labour of the children at a horse farm they had purchased adjacent to the Institute in 1929. If the boys’ work was measured in acreage, milk output, and the prizes for livestock received at various fairs, the girls’ endeavours were measured in carefully recorded piecework. Each student was given equipment to be cleaned, inspected, and their work meticulously recorded.

The need to keep children’s energy up led to dietary changes at the school. In 1873 Ashton instituted the NEC’s idea of a “dietary,” presumably garnered from the Company members’ significant charitable and philanthropic connections in England and elsewhere. “Formerly the children had potatoes and bread & butter or cornmeal porridge alone on alternate nights for supper their drink being cold water. For breakfast they had bread & milk.”²⁸ But the new diet contained too much meat and had to be changed.²⁹ While students disliked an excess of meat, and Ashton cut back on this, it may be presumed he instituted something like an English industrial school diet. At Feltham, supper consisted more or less of cocoa and bread. Later two suppers with meats were instituted. At lunch, or “dinner,” the fare was far more substantial, beef or mutton with vegetables. In 1895, inspector Martin Benson recorded the “Dietary.”³⁰ The sparse evening meal corresponded nearly exactly to the Feltham fare, with “gravy” doubtless considered a filling meat derivative. “Dinner,” or lunch, was the more substantial meal. Presumably the potatoes could be grown easily, with porridge and bread made from oats, cornmeal, and wheat cultivated on the Mohawk Institute properties.

Additionally, Ashton immediately ordered new beds as there had been a serious shortage in Nelles’s day. Bedclothes, clothing, hats, boots, walking attire, and church clothes all had to be made, sorted, stored, and accounted for. This was exactly the Feltham regime. All repairs to clothes, boots, shoes, and working attire were done in-house. Presumably, this was now the work of the girls in the sewing room. The following account describes the boys’ attire at the school:

The boys have each one good suit of Tweed many of the coats being quite new, they are not supplied with vests & most of them find their own caps—the same suit is generally worn Sunday & week days—excepting in a few cases where the old suit is not entirely worn out. They have all one good pair of boots or shoes but no second pair. Those who wear boots pay one dollar towards the expence [sic], the Company only supplying shoes—boots are best adapted for the Winter, and are generally worn outside the trousers to protect them from the snow. Every boy will be supplied with a pair of stout worsted socks this week—They wear home during the summer months. We have not sufficient shirts belonging to the Company to supply every boy with two—but as several of them find their own we are able to make what we have do for the present. In the Summer the boys are supplied with Coats and Pants of Cotton, tween and straw hats.³¹

Similarly, girls’ attire had to be made, along with almost everything else; such was the state of want Ashton found: “I will get some coarse aprons made at once for girls to work in but though I think all should have either aprons or pinafores I do not like to buy them without your instructions—for so many things are required in every department that I am quite afraid to purchase until I am instructed.”³² The girls would make all their own clothes, including their outfits for summer and Christmas holiday. Constant supplies and materials had to be bought, such as “12 pairs of blankets. 28 towels 1½ yards long. About 60 cords of fire-wood, 12 bags for farm use. 46 yards of serge at 40 cents per yd. Sundry cooking utensils. 6 lamps & glasses. 42½ yds. of calico for sheets but before we have two sheets for each bed & be able to give each child a clean pair once a fortnight we shall require 450 yds. at 14 cents per yd. as we are obliged to put a width & a half in each bed.”³³

Every expense had to be noted and approved by the NEC, then accounted. Everything was NEC property, and the auditors were very picky. In addition to keeping all the accounts, Alice Ashton ran an inventory of pieces of clothing, bedclothes, and other items considered standard. No detail appears to have been overlooked. The surveillance extended to every reach of a child’s life; privacy was non-existent.

Maintaining Order

Achieving all this labour mandated the creation of a tight schedule. What appears below in table 11.1 is the schedule from January 1873, but extant later journals do not show amendments to it.³⁴

To keep to the schedule, bells were rung, and promptness was always necessary. Ashton’s world operated around this schedule. The electricity, for example, was entirely controlled on a master switch by the principal (as Ashton was now called). In addition, the infractions or merits of every student in every class were visible to them by way of a notice board with moveable markers in each class, and badges for merit were awarded and worn. All matters physical and economic were within Ashton’s immediate surveillance, a horse and cart available always for his use.³⁵ It was an entire school run for maximum efficiency on very tight budgets in every department. Presumably Ashton was also in charge of intellectual, spiritual, and emotional needs; however, virtually none of this appears in any of his reports, correspondence, or, indeed, in any inspection, thus telling us a great deal about his priorities and goals for the Mohawk Institute.³⁶

Ashton worried about the students not conforming to his vision of proper gendered behaviour. At first, the girls were too spirited and boisterous, not bowing to a senior male leader. In his journal Ashton lamented, “I have long since seen the great necessity of having a female with the girls as they are extremely rough and vulgar and greatly require the constant supervision of well mannered and cheerful females.”³⁷ Classes were integrated immediately, boys and girls together, but there was to be rigid physical separation outside the classrooms. Ashton fretted about the comingling of the sexes. In his journal, he notes, “To prevent the boys & girls from having almost unlimited communication, has been a source of much difficulty & anxiety to me.”³⁸ Ashton insisted that the young girls maintained incessant productivity in the laundry and other domestic tasks such as cleaning, sewing, scrubbing, and polishing. Not only was there a strict daily routine following the new “regulations,” but there were also additions to the curricula: evening and morning prayers were printed out, scriptural history (an Ashton obsession), singing (another Ashton obsession), and weekly service, usually ran by Nelles at the Mohawk Chapel down the road, or evening or morning prayers said by Ashton in bad weather at the Institute in a classroom with a chancel reserved for the purpose.³⁹ Recreation for the boys included games, lacrosse, and cricket, and for the girls a regime of long walks was instituted. This was far more intensive, regulated, and severe than in the Mohawk Institute in the era when Nelles was principal. The insolence of students in those years was replaced by a constant hum of quiet activity noted by Inspector Benson in 1895.

Six Nations voiced objections immediately. According to Ashton’s journal, “The Indians generally do not appreciate the great advantages of the Institution and consequently do not second my efforts to instruct and control their children, in fact at present they appear to offer me every possible opposition.”⁴⁰ In a way, the NEC and Ashton anticipated that parents would be reluctant to contribute to the general upkeep and maintenance of their children:

Subsequently, I have seen the Superintendent of Indian Affairs [David Laird], respecting the interest money of orphans & he at once suggested that the Interest money of all children in the school be paid by the Department directly to the Company, to be applied to their benefit—and offered to further the subject both with the Department & Indian Council, if approved by the Company. I am afraid that at present the advantages of the Institution are not sufficiently appreciated by the Indians to induce them willingly to adopt this suggestion.⁴¹

Source: Compiled from William Acres, ed., “Documents of the Mohawk Institute: The Journals and Reports of Robert Ashton, 1872–76 and the Diary of Alice Ashton, 1877,” special issue, Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 59, nos. 2021–2 (2024).

The lack of “appreciation” and parental financial support were constant refrains. But as teacher Isaac Bearfoot reminded Ashton, “the New England Company could not require the Indians to pay anything towards the support of the schools as they [the NEC] were a board of Trustees appointed to take charge of a fund collected for the express purpose of educating the children of the Six Nations.”⁴²

Generally, Ashton worried little about student experiences, though he was concerned about their outward appearances. Students were locked in crowded dormitories at night—Ashton deplored the free movement of students during the Nelles regime. When hiring a governess, he required her to “use her best endeavours to train them in habits of cleanliness, order, and propriety of demeanour—to carefully check any approach to vulgarity & lightness of conduct, & as far as possible to prevent them from communicating with the boys.”⁴³ Ashton also did not seem particularly interested in the young men, save as constant labourers. Alice Ashton, on the other hand, seemed to have had her favourites: She was particularly fond of Thomas Green and Obadiah Sickles, the former a superb academic and the latter a gifted artist.

A rigid internal system of favourites prevailed. Ashton retained a remnant of Robert Lugger’s 1828 “Bell School” system of paid monitors to enforce his rules: “I have appointed Monitors from amongst the pupils and trust that with a little judicious training they will become very useful & ultimately fitted for Assistants if required.” This was especially so when a single farmer was in charge, and a student was needed to superintend in Ashton’s absence: “I am therefore prompted to solicit the favour of being permitted to expend a small amount annually in remunerating the monitors according to their deserts—this would greatly encourage them and I trust prove an incentive to others.”⁴⁴ Good conduct badges were awarded, also following a Feltham custom.

Six Nations’ Response

On the Six Nations side, a decade of Ashton’s control of the Institute had very little effect on his popularity. Indeed, Ashton’s reputation continued to be very poor. Absalom Dingman, Indian inspector, signalled Ottawa on 20 June 1888 with a telegram to his superior, Robert Sinclair, acting deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs, stating, “There is bad feeling of Six Nations chiefs against Mohawk Institution here and schools generally.” A pointed 1888 attack by the “Education Committee” of the Confederacy Council on Ashton made a strong case for the Six Nations and other Indigenous children to have more “theoretic” learning at the Institute instead of incessant labour:

this Committee is of the opinion that the time is now past when there was any necessity of teaching Indian children common farm work, and whereas the class of work seems to be the exclusive industrial training that pupils receive at the Mohawk Institution, and whereas parents seem to expect that when placing their children in the said Institution their time during the school hours of five days in the week should be wholly devoted [to] the acquirement of theoretic knowledge and that the practical part of it should be confined to the hours before and after school.⁴⁵

A rather brutal Six Nations School Board policy of forbidding late students, Ashton’s design, from entering the reserve day schools after the morning bell was also cause of considerable distress among parents, for it applied in all conditions and weathers. Ashton’s emphasis on extreme punctuality at the Mohawk Institute was reflected in this refusal of a request for more lenience: “It seems to be a step backward towards the primitive barbarism instead of an advance towards civilization and improvement. The School Board therefore is unwilling to take the backward step.”⁴⁶ The Indian Department could not support Ashton in this approach. This long-standing grievance remained a constant.⁴⁷ Six boys absconded immediately on arriving in 1877. Ashton was not bothered. His axiom: The model was brittle, arranged against the constant fear of “fallenness” to which lay agent William Richardson had referred to in 1847 as the Six Nations’ default position; it was believed that without unceasing labour, students would descend, equating Indigenous life with a kind of original sin.⁴⁸

The failure to resolve these issues lingered. At the Cayuga mission Ashton was in open conflict with many members of the Confederacy Council, and further disputes over land claims rose in importance when questions began to be asked about Ashton’s methods of accounting for NEC profits from lands and their reinvestment.

All of this may have provoked the fires set in 1903, which destroyed outbuildings and the Mohawk Institute itself. The bricks used for the school’s reconstruction were sourced from the Workman and Watts brickyard, an operation producing two million bricks a year on the Babcock Lot near the school. Watts, like Ashton’s daughter Minnie, had married into the Cockshutt family, making the renovation all too much a family affair for Ashton.

After the Mohawk Institute was rebuilt, student movement became even more restricted in the new building. Vacations were entirely suspended unless a student leaving was able to reapply within thirty days at the beginning of the vacation. In 1908, Ashton tried to forbid the Christmas vacation despite NEC apprehension; the families’ great attachment to their children was well-known in England, a fact perhaps not appreciated by Ashton. Thus, it was not attempted. Ashton’s main objections to children leaving the school to go home were students’ loss of English, the possibility of their returning with disease, and the supposed lack of sanitary habits among students’ families. None of these restrictions suggested or imposed by Ashton were backed by the NEC.

These lingering issues were very difficult to make right and were exacerbated by disputes over land. The NEC’s Cayuga mission quitclaims of 1871–5, received from prominent Anglican members of the Six Nations, continued to rankle at the Confederacy Council, for example. Indigenous persons were forbidden sales of land. The only purchaser could be the government. It was possible to transfer property by quitclaim to another Indigenous person by literally quitting a property, for a financial consideration, with due paperwork. These were settled only in 1912. Dispensation of properties owned by John Beaver, hotly contested by heirs, led to a lingering debate in which Ashton was publicly humiliated. Ashton took vengeance by refusing to obey the ruling of the Department of Indians Affairs that the NEC must vacate the property in 1903. The affair aggravated officials and gained widespread notice, even in the House of Commons. The land deals on the Six Nations, but also the development of properties adjacent to the Institute, created a legacy of bad faith, not only with Ashton, but also with the NEC as a whole. It was Ashton’s absolute refusal to return these properties in 1903 after the Indian inspector ordered a fifteen-year tenure that may well have provoked the three fires set by students in 1903, as may have the vast industries begun in that year next door to the Institute on the so-called freehold of the Babcock Lot, which followed its sale to the wealthy Cockshutt family in 1902.⁴⁹

Barrister and Company member W. F. Webster visited the Mohawk Institute in October 1908, for cordial meetings with the Confederacy Council. He found Ashton in better physical condition than reports had suggested, able to continue if the Institute continued along the present “lines.” Changes were anticipated, but the NEC was at variance over the next directions.⁵⁰

But a more private visit to the Mohawk Institute by the governor of the NEC, John Walker Ford, and its treasurer, Ernest Mathews, in the summer of 1910 ended with Robert Ashton’s son, Nelles Ashton, being appointed principal of the school. When criminal charges of abuse at the Institute—and Nelles Ashton’s severe alcoholism—surfaced in 1913, the NEC’s reputation sat at its lowest point. Perhaps the Company already knew of the difficulties with Nelles Ashton and alcohol from earlier visits, but this was far from the major difficulty at the school. As Webster’s visit showed, the continued deteriorating relations with the Six Nations could not be allowed to continue. Changes were also coming with the appointment of Duncan Campbell Scott as deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs. In the end, neither the New England Company nor the Six Nations were pleased with Ashton. Though he did not fully live up to initial expectations, Robert Ashton had a significant influence on the Mohawk Institute during his time as principal, albeit negative according to many. Focused studies such as this one demonstrate how much individual principals shaped and influenced the experiences of the students who lived behind the bricks of the Mohawk Institute.

Notes

1. 1 William Acres, ed., “Documents of the Mohawk Institute: The Journals and Reports of Robert Ashton, 1872–76 and the Diary of Alice Ashton, 1877,” special issue, Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 59, nos. 2021–2 (2024). My pagination from the originals at CH-2003-43-05, HCH-2003-43-C 20787, V. P. Cronyn Archives, London, Ontario, for Robert Ashton is used here. The edition includes Alice Ashton’s journal of 1877, HCH-2003-43-01, Cronyn Archives, Diocese of Huron, also in my pagination, as it uses dates rather than page numbers. The edition preserves the original pagination for all documents in square brackets for clarity. I have used these original page numbers throughout this chapter.

2. 2 Report of Mr. W. F. Webster Upon His Visit to the Mohawk Institute, Brantford, and the Grand River Reserve, Canada, October 1908 (Spottiswoode & Co., 1908).

3. 3 All parts of the building were upgraded as far as possible, including better ventilation, windows, a system of “dry” closets in the rear of the building replacing damp pits for toilets, new carpets, flooring, and paint. Ashton saw the entire building, outdoor privies, waste, and garbage management as clearly ripe for epidemic.

4. 4 Acres, “Introduction” in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 143–59.

5. 5 Report of the proceedings of the New England Company for the civilization and conversion of Indians, Blacks and pagans in the Dominion of Canada, South Africa, and the West Indies during the two years 1871–1872 (London, 1874), 9 October 1872, 136–7, where the full text of his duties on appointment, dated 9 October 1972, are listed.

6. 6 Report of the proceedings of the New England Company, 132–3.

7. 7 I do not have evidence of such annual five-year running reports, although Ashton records filing one, for example, in 1883. The originals do not exist in the London Metropolitan Archives collection.

8. 8 Report of the proceedings of the New England Company, 9 October 1872, 136–7.

9. 9 In the annual report of the superintendent general in 1871, all eleven day schools on the Six Nations were said to be under the “New England Society”; by 1891, none of the schools were so named in the report to the superintendent general. An elaborate system of trustees per school, mirroring the committees of the Gradualization Act (1869), were changed to trustees representing the New England Company (two), another denomination, with elections from the Confederacy Council. Ashton was honorary secretary from 1878 to 1908.

10. 10 Robert Ashton, Report, p. 31, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 212. See also, Acres, “Introduction,” 159–66.

11. 11 Douglas Leighton, “Nelles, Abraham,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/nelles_abram_11E.html.

12. 12 “I enquired of Mr. Nelles how much land each of them had but he was unable to say or to point out the boundary of the Company’s land, in fact he is not sure of any of the boundaries.” Robert Ashton, Report, November 1872, first report, p. 16, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 201.

13. 13 Adam Elliott was second missionary for the NEC, appointed in 1837 by Edward Busk, and his wife, Charlotte, daughter of the Reverend Racey, incumbent of St. John’s Tuscarora from its consecration in 1835. She died at the Tuscarora mission parsonage in 1893. The church was originally at the Onondaga section north of the Grand River, where Nelles had lived for some years as well (1833–7). Elliott had very little to do with the Institute but did a great deal of pastoral work on the Six Nations as well as examinations of day schools until ill health led to his complete retirement in 1874. The little church was moved in 1883 by the Reverend Albert Sequakind Anthony (d. 1896), a Company assistant missionary and sometime assistant to Elliott and David Johnstone Cazwell at Cayuga. St. John’s was badly damaged by arson in June 2021 in the wake of revelations about Indigenous children’s unmarked graves on Indian Residential School properties—the investigation into the Mohawk Institute began formally in November 2021.

14. 14 Alice Ashton’s journals for 1877, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” passim. She invariably refers to her husband as “the Super,” and records for each day his work, the students’ work, and other news.

15. 15 Each annual report included a full set of statistics on classes, progress, reading, arithmetic, writing on slates, writing with pens, as well as English proficiency, and tables on the students’ religion, tribe of origin, and the day school they had attended. From 1874 the students studied “Physiology,” at the specific behest of the Company leadership. The term may have referred to human biology, temperance, and other forms of bodily continence and function; these innovations were certainly sanctioned in conjunction with Dr. Peter Martin, Oronhyatekha, who was an NEC stalwart and who received his medical education fees from the NEC. See Acres, “Introduction,” in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 148.

16. 16 Report of the proceedings of the New England Company, 136–7.

17. 17 Robert Ashton, Report, December 1875 p. 148, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 302, my pagination from the original at CH-2003-43-05, HCH-2003-43-C 20787, V. P. Cronyn Archives, Diocese of Huron.

18. 18 Robert Ashton, Report, December 1876, p. 163, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 313.

19. 19 Report of the proceedings of the New England Company, 134, for Nelles’s rather vague summary of the purpose of the Manual Labour Farm.

20. 20 He went on to a distinguished career, ending as rector at Cayuga, Christ Church, for a time in the 1880s he was superintendent of the Six Nations School Board. He was in charge of the Junior School at the Institute from 1872 to 1876, thence to Huron College, where he received his divinity degree and then priestly ordination by Bishop Isaac Hellmuth, but was retained as needed by Ashton to help at the Institute. He was acting superintendent in 1877 when Ashton went to England for three months. He died at Cayuga in May 1911, after a bitter struggle between the bishop and Company over pensions.

21. 21 “I have to recommend Miss. Jennie M. Fisher to fill the post of Governess vacant by the removal of Mrs. Barefoot to the Boys School on the 1st May next. Miss Fisher is 22 years of age and at present a student for the second term in the Normal School at Toronto. She is in possession of a Certificate & has been teaching for upwards of 2 years but left her situation to re-attend at the Normal School during the present Sessions.” “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” p. 56 in the original, my pagination of the original.

22. 22 Robert Ashton, Report, December 1876, pp. 162–3, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 312–13.

23. 23 Robert Ashton, Report, February 1873, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 225, pp. 48–9 in the original manuscript.

24. 24 “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” p. 293 in Ashton’s original. “I have a man now working on the farm who thoroughly understands ditching and draining and with the assistance of the boys he will carry out the work without I think engaging additional labour.”

25. 25 “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” p. 58 in the original manuscript.

26. 26 Dominion of Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 31st December 1891 (S. E. Dawson, 1892), 95, https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/first-nations/indian-affairs-annual-reports/.

27. 27 As the reports contained detailed budgets for the Institute, it can only be surmised that the Ashtons kept separate farm accounts. These farm accounts are not included in the reports for 1872–77. Indeed, only three registers for the 1890s have anything like these calculations.

28. 28 Robert Ashton, 2 June 1873, p. 75, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 245.

29. 29 Ashton, 245.

30. 30 Martin Benson, Clerk of the Indian Schools, “Report, Indian Affairs on the Mohawk Institute,” 1895, File 7825 1A, Vol. 2006, RG 10, Library and Archives Canada (LAC).

31. 31 Robert Ashton, Report November 1872, report 2, pp. 26–7, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 210. H. J. Lister’s inspection in 1870, as well as Archdeacon O’Meara’s in 1860, found overcrowding and more beds needed.

32. 32 Robert Ashton, Journal and Reports, “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” p. 28 in Ashton’s original.

33. 33 Robert Ashton, Report No. 2, p. 28, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 211.

34. 34 Ashton noted, “I do not approve of the early hour for breakfast but as I found it the custom here I have not altered it.”

35. 35 Martin Benson, Clerk of the Indian Schools, “Report, Indian Affairs on the Mohawk Institute,” 1895, File 7825 1A, Vol. 2006, RG 10, LAC.

36. 36 Report, Indian Affairs on the Mohawk Institute, File 7825 1A, Vol. 2006, RG 10, LAC.

37. 37 Robert Ashton, Report No. 3, n.d., p. 41, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 220.

38. 38 Robert Ashton, Report, March 1873, p. 58, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 233.

39. 39 Ashton, Report, 1871–2, pp. 136–7.

40. 40 Robert Ashton, Report, October 1873, p. 104, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 266.

41. 41 Laird (1833–1914) was minister of the interior under the Liberal government of Alexander Mackenzie. Robert Ashton, Report, March 1873, p. 59, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 234.

42. 42 Robert Ashton, Report, December 1873, p. 114, in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 274–5.

43. 43 “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” p. 50 in the original manuscript.

44. 44 See Charles M. Johnson, “Robert Lugger,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 7, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/lugger_robert_7E.html, as using the Scottish educational reformer Andrew Bell (1753–1832), The Madras System (London, 1808), where he developed the system of monitorial oversight in Church of England Schools in India. Ashton Workbook, 1872–6, 51–2.

45. 45 David Seneca Hill, seconded Chief Benjamin Carpenter, and other members signing, 23 June 1888, File 75,494, Vol. 3202, RG 10, LAC.

46. 46 Chief James Styres and the Reverend David Caswell Johnstone signed this letter, but as Honorary Secretary Ashton here dictated the substance and tone of it. The Six Nations School Board approved the letter, 29 October 1888, File 75,494, Vol. 3202, RG 10, LAC. Note that “the” is crossed out in the original document.

47. 47 Dingman, October 1888, File 75,494, Vol. 3202, RG 10, LAC.

48. 48 Acres, “Introduction,” in “Documents of the Mohawk Institute,” 108–27. I treat the various scientific theories current in the 1860s and ’70s related to this relentless labour.

49. 49 The Cayuga mission quitclaims reached a crisis point in 1903, which may have led to the arsons at the Institute; sentiment was running high against Ashton and the school at that juncture. The issue of the twenty-acre quitclaim at the Cayuga mission was part of Chisholm’s statement of claim on behalf of the Six Nations in 1918, immediately following D. C. Scott’s release of the second Mohawk Glebe tranche for the purchase by the Six Nations. See File 268, item no. 3, Litigation fonds, V. P. Cronyn Archives, Diocese of Huron.

50. 50 Report of Mr. W. F. Webster Upon His Visit to the Mohawk Institute; CLC 540 MS 07920/8/pp. 149, 154–5, London Metropolitan Archives. Webster’s report of his 12 October meeting, where he refused to commit the Company to the “reform” party—presumably those in favour of an elected council—at the Six Nations; but he discussed the lands at length. The meeting went particularly well, and the Company moved to follow his recommendation not to use the word “pagan” in the future in describing the non-Christians, but rather “Deist.”