15 Collective Trauma and the Role of Religion in the Mohawk Institute Experience

Wendy Fletcher

Many years ago, when I first engaged with the story of the Mohawk Institute (MI) as a researcher, I was asked to explore the church’s involvement. The school had closed in 1970. No one in the Diocese of Huron (the ecclesiastical area where the Institute was geographically located) remembered anything about it. Various questions about the school and its relationship with the church circulated: Had the church actually been involved? Who owned the school? What were the relationships that governed it? From that narrow structural lens my findings showed very little. Residential schools were usually administered through a partnership between the Canadian government and a Canadian denominational church body. The Anglican Church had been less connected to this residential school than to others. The place of religion in the daily lives of students appeared to be quite marginal.

In the early 2000s a group of survivors from Six Nations asked me to join them to talk about what I had found. I met with them and articulated these findings. The outrage was strong. As survivors, they stressed that they had been abused by the church. To suggest that the church was less responsible for the harms done to them than the government did not fit their experience, and they shared this view with me in the most direct terms.

I was puzzled about the dissonance between my findings and their experience. Eventually, understanding dawned. Symbols are important. Daily, the survivors experienced their life mediated through an authority structure headed by a man wearing a clerical collar. Daily they were fed a diet of Christianity through prayers and religious knowledge education. Those parameters defined the structure of all else that transpired at the Mohawk Institute.

A growing awareness of the theory of collective trauma expanded my understanding. I gradually came to see that although the structural relationships that managed the school were peripherally related to the church, and the religious content quantifiably small, the Anglican Church was in fact the symbolic conductor of trauma and thereby definitive of survivors’ experience. This truth is reflected in the following vignette.

Some years ago, Renison University College in Waterloo, Ontario, held an exhibition entitled The Mush Hole that consisted of a collection of the artwork of R. G. Miller, a survivor of the Mohawk Institute. Renison is a college connected to the Anglican Church of Canada. The commitment to sponsoring the exhibition grew from the college’s commitment to post–Truth and Reconciliation Commission healing work. This astonishing collection of paintings reflected R. G. Miller’s experience at the Mohawk Institute, beginning at the age of three, and lasting until well into his adolescence.

When the artist arrived with his paintings, he asked that the most graphic of them, which had never been exhibited before, be displayed in the college’s Chapel of St. Bede’s. These paintings depict the sexual abuse of children by clergy and reflected the heart of his own trauma. For him, displaying the paintings in the chapel communicated a central message: At the centre of the harm done to him was the experience of religious trauma—or trauma experienced in connection to the Anglican identity of the Mohawk Institute.

Collective Trauma Theory

Traditionally, the idea of trauma has been understood as something that happens to disrupt the experience of individuals. More recently, theories of trauma have been broadened to take account of shared disruption—in other words, traumatic events that affect a collectivity rather than a lone individual. Illustrations include the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, and other communal traumas designed to eradicate group identity, if not the group itself.

Collective trauma theory is an appropriate vehicle for understanding the experience of residential school survivors, including those children who lived all or part of their childhoods at the Mohawk Institute. We will proceed using the following definition: Collective trauma occurs “when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.”¹ As implied with this definition, experiences that disrupt core aspects of a collective’s identity and its stability are determinative. All identity engages matters of cultural reference. The residential school project, designed as a social engineering experiment in assimilation, was intended not only to disrupt Indigenous core identity but to replace it with another—the transformation of the Indigenous child into a child modelled on a Euro-descent settler citizen. The entire structure of the residential school model for Indigenous children dislocated traditional culture, language, parenting forms, and other socialization practices, replacing these with a highly structured regimen of different language, education, religion, routine, food, and discipline through the in loco parentis (in place of the parents) oversight of the government moderated by Christian leaders. It is the moderation of the message through the medium of church leaders that creates the most significant contribution by religion to the discourse of this collective trauma. Given that authority was placed in the hands of religious leaders, everything associated with the residential school experience for the children became de facto a religious experience, even though the weight of time and energy spent on actual religious observance and teaching may have been small in relation to other aspects of the children’s daily lives.

In an experience of prolonged institutional trauma, symbols carry a heavy weight. In the case of the Mohawk Institute, the symbolic weight of things like a clergy collar, a cross, the chapel, and the Bible were magnified through the harming behaviours of individuals. The wider assimilationist context stripped away one world and its meaning and replaced it with another mediated through daily encounter with these symbols. Our primary thesis about the place of religion at the Mohawk Institute, then, is this: Religion became the framework for the collective traumatization of Indigenous children through the stripping away of their culture in favour of a process of “civilization” managed in a Christian context.

Collective trauma theory further argues that experienced trauma can be understood as a sociological process that “defines a painful injury to the collectivity, establishes the victim, attributes responsibility, and distributes the ideal and material consequence.”² Through this multi-step process, the journey toward collective action and the reclamation of collective identity is possible.

In our exploration of the story of the Mohawk Institute, we are moving into the necessary next step in a collective trauma experience that seeks to participate in the resolution of, or at least a moving beyond, the traumatic experience. Documenting the story in a post–Truth and Reconciliation Commission era not only requires documentation of the trauma itself, but works to attribute responsibility and, in that, distribute consequences. Toward that end, understanding the role of organized religion in the trauma becomes paramount.

Unpacking the Narrative

In this chapter, we will attempt to explore two distinct threads that the preceding vignette raises: What was the connection of the Mohawk Institute to organized religion? And what was the role of religion in the experience of the children who lived there? These two threads then lead to a third theme that answers to the question of “So, what?” What was the impact of religious identity and practice on and in the stories and lived experiences of those who survived the Mohawk Institute?

Any attempt to explore the role of religion in the story of the Mohawk Institute must grapple with several things. We begin with a definition of religion: what it was and what it was used for in the context of colonial practice. We will also consider structural relationships as they relate to organized religion, the specifics of daily life in the context of religious practice, and, finally, the impact of that practice on the children who lived at the school. Our exploration of the impact of religious practice and identity on the children will lead us to consider the idea of collective trauma as it applied to survivors of the Mohawk Institute. Given the close link between discipline and religious values as practised by the school’s leadership, we will also consider the control and terrorization of bodies as a tactic of assimilation assisted by the theoretical frame of biopower as articulated by Foucault.

Religion and Colonization

In its organic form, religion rises from the community that it reflects. There is a symbiotic relationship between the people who practise the religion and the ongoing development of religious practice. Religion is a structure/system (a product of culture) that reflects the attempt by human beings to address the larger questions of meaning, purpose, belonging, and transcendence in their lives and from which they derive an ethical and moral framework, ritual practice, and philosophical perspectives to guide their daily lives.

This was not the case in relation to the residential school experiment. As religion became embedded as an arm of colonial practice, it was used as a tool of racial and cultural assimilation. In the project of colonization broadly construed, the religion of the colonizer becomes an expression of colonial power and enforcement. Practices, meaning frameworks, ethics, and rituals connected to the religion of the colonizer, are used to suppress and ultimately eradicate the organic religious practice of Indigenous culture and replace them with those of the colonizer.

Famed early twentieth-century philosopher Antonio Gramsci theorized that everything of culture, including religion and education, is a product of the economic relations that lie beneath them. The economic drivers of any culture (substructure) determine the forms of our “civilization.” They in turn enter an ongoing two-way conversation with the substructure as needs and capacities evolve.³

Colonization is primarily an economic activity. One group assumes control over another group or land with an economic imperative to expand and enrich itself. The colonization projects by which England, France, and Spain assumed control over what we know as the Americas had common strategies for expanding interests. The arrival of the colonizer was sometimes welcomed and at other times resisted. For their part, however, the colonizer saw the Indigenous persons already inhabiting lands they wished to assume as subjects to be managed, controlled, civilized, and used in support of their broader project of colonization. The assimilationist agenda was grounded in the racializing assumptions of the era, which developed a hierarchy of value for human beings based on skin colour, facial features, capacity, temperament, and more. Indigenous persons were considered less than those deemed as “white” (the colonizer) and thereby as in need of “civilization”—remaking the Indigenous person in their own image. It should be noted that this usually did not include the notion of equalization. People were civilized for service, not for equity.

An extremely pointed quote from the bishop of the Diocese of Huron circa 1970 will serve to illustrate the point. Upon learning that the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) intended to close all residential schools, including the Mohawk Institute, he wrote an outraged letter to the department in opposition: “We must persist in our efforts among the Indian people. Of course, we know that there is no hope for this current generation, but if we persist in our efforts, perhaps, we will be able to raise up the grandchildren of this current generation to the level of a servant class in Canadian society.”⁴ What does this have to do with religion? The preceding quote shows us the issue. From the beginning, modern colonization efforts have understood that state religion is an essential arm of assimilating the subject population. The state religion of the English colonizer was Anglicanism.

Referencing Gramsci’s perspective, the religious leadership of a culture is vested with authority by the state, through which it in turn contributes to the project of recreating the social norm of any society in the bodies of its citizens. The linkage of religion with state power sets the stage for church-state partnerships that have little to do with the content of religious teaching and much to do with the project of socialization. Our interest, then, is to understand the parameters of the church-state partnership in the work of the Mohawk Institute and how that partnership was experienced by the children who were subject to their authority.

Structural Connection to Organized Religion

In the case of the Mohawk Institute, as we saw in preceding chapters, the founding colonizing institution was the New England Company (NEC). While the NEC was an ecumenical body (members came from different Protestant denominations), its face at Six Nations was predominantly Anglican or Church of England.⁵ The school’s attachment to religion varied over time and by principal. For instance, under the Reverend Horace Snell, a priest of the Diocese of Huron of the Church of England in Canada, the focus on religion intensified. Regardless of who was principal, though, the Christian identity of the school linked to Anglican practice was a part of the children’s daily experience throughout the Mohawk Institute’s history.

The early beginnings of the Institute under the NEC meant that the school was set up differently than many other Canadian residential schools. This led to a slightly different set of structural relationships with organized religion. As the sole owner of the Mohawk Institute, the NEC had sole proprietorship. This began to change with the introduction in Canada of government and church partnerships in the development and management of residential schools. When the DIA (variously named over the years) set up most of its schools, the model was clear—the government owned and funded the schools through a per capita and capital grant system and the denominational church partner provided the management of the schools through provision of personnel. Usually, the principal of the school was a designated clergy person from the denominational partner.

In 1891 the NEC applied to the DIA for the Mohawk Institute to become one of its schools. This meant that from 1891 the NEC received a per capita grant toward the operation of the school. This grant was insufficient to fully cover the costs of caring for children. As such the NEC offset this cost and covered all costs of the maintenance of the property.⁶ No significant changes in the administration of the school happened at this point in relation to religious affiliation and inputs.

In 1911 with the introduction of a series of new management agreements, the NEC remained the signatory partner with the government in the administration of the school. This distinguished it from other Anglican schools, which, for the most part, were run by the Mission Society of the Church of England in Canada. The principalship of the MI remained in the hands of the family originally appointed by the NEC. At times this leadership was clerical and other times not. However, the lease agreements between the Government of Canada and the NEC never stipulated that the principal should be a clergy person, although most leases of residential schools did.⁷ This made the structural religious connection different for the Mohawk Institute. Those Anglican schools that were run by the Mission Society named clergy as their senior administrators, who in turn were accountable both to national and diocesan (local) church bureaucracies’ input and oversight. In other words, the administrative connection to organized religion was different than in other cases in the first long segment of the Mohawk Institute’s history.

The NEC had not come through the First World War well, financially. As such, it was hoping to sell the Mohawk Institute to the Canadian government and step back from its involvement. No agreement was reached for a sale. The result was the negotiation of a new lease agreement between the NEC and the DIA. Under the terms of the new lease, the DIA would assume all financial and management responsibilities for running and maintaining the school. The NEC in turn handed over all authority to the DIA. However, as part of the lease, it was stipulated that there would be an ongoing dimension of religious instruction in the “faith of the Church of England” as part of the Institute’s educational work. As well, the NEC would also send the annual sum of fifteen hundred pounds sterling to cover the cost of the principal’s salary and the upkeep of the Mohawk Chapel.⁸

Although, from 1922 through the new lease, the DIA became the de facto managing partner of the MI, the principal previously appointed by the NEC remained in charge of the school until 1929. That year, the DIA removed Sydney Rogers from this role for poor administration. Here, then, in terms of the narrative of religious partnership, comes an important turning point. The lease for the school’s management did not stipulate that the principal should be an Anglican priest. However, the DIA assumed that it did and in June 1929 asked Archbishop David Williams of the Diocese of Huron to nominate a local Anglican clergyman for the role. Archbishop Williams named a Canadian priest by the name of Horace Snell to serve as principal. Snell then ran the Mohawk Institute from 1929 to 1944.⁹

This action set a direction that would last for the remainder of the Mohawk Institute’s story. There was some greater involvement of the school with local Anglican churches, particularly the Women’s Auxiliaries, who often sent gifts in kind to the Institute. As well, the bishop of Huron, from that point, did understand himself to have a certain authority over the Institute through the accountability mechanisms of the diocesan structure and the principal. This sense of authority surfaced strongly when it was time for the subsequent lease to be negotiated with the NEC.

Horace Snell approached retirement in 1944, as the lease was coming to an end. A new lease should have been negotiated, but the world was consumed with the Second World War, and a new agreement was not reached until 1946. Through those conversations, the NEC again asked that the DIA purchase the Mohawk Institute. Through these talks the Diocese of Huron expressed an interest in assuming full responsibility for the Institute. However, when it became evident that the NEC expected that the diocese would purchase the property, rather than receive it, both backed away from the deal. The DIA also declined to purchase. The new lease, which was signed in 1946, did not give the diocese any part of the management of the school. However, on the way to a formal agreement, the church stepped in on the matter of appointment of a new principal. In other words, the diocese stepped away from legal authority through ownership but assumed for itself the moral authority to exercise oversight through the principal’s appointment.

By the 1940s the DIA was aware that the lease with the NEC did not require the appointment of an Anglican priest. Through its own internal discernment processes, and on the recommendation of the local Indian superintendent at Six Nations, the DIA wanted to appoint a man who had taught in the reserve day school for many years. Joseph Hill was well regarded by the Six Nations Band Council and had excellent qualifications. The government was confident that his leadership was what the Mohawk Institute and its students needed. Joseph Hill was Indigenous, not Anglican, and not clergy.

The bishop of Huron and other church leaders were vocal in their opposition to this idea. Church objections appear to have been twofold: that such an appointment would undermine the religious character of the school, and that an Indigenous person was not desirable in this role. Extensive correspondence on this matter exists. In a letter to DIA Director Hoey on 21 June 1945, Archbishop Seager wrote the following:

We offered strong objection [to the terms of the revised lease] as the effect of it was to radically alter the whole religious character, atmosphere and purpose of the school. . . . The proposal stirred practically the whole Church of England in Canada into disapproval. . . . Our committee is of the opinion that the appointment of an Indian as head of the institution is definitely undesirable. . . . The supervision of staff and other officers of the School is . . . likely to be much more successful in hands other than an Indian, however well qualified he might be.¹⁰

The overt racism of the church’s perspective, while not atypical for the time, seems to outweigh that of the DIA at this juncture. The DIA leadership was strongly supportive of appointing Joseph Hill. They felt that his Indigenous identity and experience as a leader among his people would assist him in directing the work of the Institute. The DIA’s proposal had been that the religious identity of the Mohawk Institute could be safeguarded through the hiring of a chaplain to teach religious knowledge as part of the curriculum and as part of his duties caring for the Mohawk Chapel. The church’s representatives felt that this would be inadequate in safeguarding the Christian identity of the school and the church’s interests in it.

Prior to the end of the war, Bishop Seager proceeded to appoint one of his clergy, the Reverend John Zimmerman, as principal. He had no authority to do this. However, the confusion of the war era meant that the DIA did not intervene in the matter, and Zimmerman subsequently served as principal of the Mohawk Institute until it closed in 1970.¹¹

Education and Mission

To understand the place of religion in the lives of students at the Mohawk Institute, it is important to grasp the broader context of theories of missionization (outreach to non-Christian populations) as well as the broader context of Church of England education for children that was at work in the background. The NEC constructed their mission work with two basic prongs: religious practice (liturgical worship) and education. Wherever the NEC went, they carried the idea with them that to take the gospel (Christian faith) meant providing spaces and opportunities for worship, as well as education. The education they offered in support of mission was basic literacy in the English language, as well as basic math and social studies, skills training, and religious knowledge.

In principle (though not always in practice), this mission model was not notably different from the type of education that was offered in England during the period. The idea was that residential or boarding schools offered a more comprehensive opportunity for children to learn than those offered through day schools. At home in England, only the children of the wealthy had the opportunity for residential education. It was considered an optimal vehicle for education. NEC mission work usually set up both day schools and residential schools configured for slightly different constituencies. Both models, however, included the religious knowledge component, as well as daily exposure to Christian faith practice through such things as daily Bible readings, prayer, and religious instruction, predominantly, in the case of the NEC’s work in North America, in the Anglican tradition.

At the invitation of the Mohawks, the NEC journeyed to Six Nations. They first built a church, Her Majesty’s Royal Chapel of the Mohawks (1785), and then later schools. The chapel would continue to figure prominently in the life of the students at the Mohawk Institute. Religious worship, as well as education in Christian teaching and Anglican ways, meant that the chapel, its chaplaincy, and the Institute would live a close and symbiotic relationship. As we see, for many students it became a symbol of their oppression at the hands of the church rather than a beacon of hope, which theoretically it was likely intended to be.

The theory of mission that the NEC brought with them to the Six Nations of the Grand River was clear: conversion of the “heathen” to Christianity both as a means of saving their souls and of helping them assimilate to the ways of Anglo culture. These aspects of mission were understood as a good. The rightness of this course was never questioned. When this missiology became linked with the assimilationist agenda of the Canadian government circa 1890, the Mohawk Institute experience of the twentieth century was catalyzed.

Religion, Daily Life, Annual Cycles

As discussed above, there was a recognizable pattern to the life of the Anglican school of the day. This pattern had annual, seasonal, weekly, and daily cycles. These cycles were framed around repeating events in the church’s calendar. Each part of the year had a rhythm of services and celebrations: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Trinity. As well, Anglicans of that period had an annual event known as confirmation, which involved children roughly around the age of twelve or thirteen. Annually children in every congregation around this age were asked to prepare to confirm their faith.

Life for children at the Mohawk Institute was built around these ritual Christian observances. One of the regular markers on which principals from the Institute reported, first to the NEC and then between 1929 and 1970 to the Diocese of Huron, was the number of services, the number of attendees, and the number of confirmands (children preparing for and participating in the ritual of committing to Christian faith).¹² This practice reflects a broader practice within the British Empire. Everywhere British colonizing agents went, they reported back to church and government officials with statistics. Numbers of converts, baptisms, attendees at services, and numbers of confirmands were all seen as measures of the progress of civilization by the empire through the church.¹³

Services were held at the Mohawk Chapel usually only through the summer season, given the difficulties with heating the building. Through the rest of the year, services were held at the Mohawk Institute itself, sometimes in the classrooms, and at other times in the refectory and the playroom. Attendance was mandatory at weekly Sunday service as well as daily prayer services in the morning and evening.

In addition to regular attendance at worship, children received religious instruction in the Christian faith and Anglican practice offered by either the principal or the chaplain, depending on the year and the season.¹⁴ The content of the religious knowledge instruction appears to have been loose and variable. Basic exposure to prayers including the Lord’s Prayer and other basic Anglican prayers gave some orientation to the history of Anglicanism and the practice of Anglican worship. Some orientation to basic biblical stories through a non-critical lens reinforced key messages: To be a good person was to be a Christian. Memorization of Bible verses was obligatory. Other aspects of the messaging included the idea that Christianity was the only path to salvation. Other religions were to be set aside. A Christian was hard-working, respectful of authority and the rules authority prescribed. God was communicated as an omnipotent and omnipresent authority figure. Priests in their role as principal represented God’s authority. It appears that theology (faith teaching) that talked about this ever-present God as loving was at times discussed, but this depended on the perspective of the person transmitting the message. However, the overarching message received was that an authoritarian God was in charge. This God punished those who did not follow the designated path adequately. A heavy emphasis on sin and forgiveness through repentance attended the admonitions to live as prescribed.¹⁵

None of these teachings were notably different from the theology expressed in the broader context of either missionary endeavours or of the local Anglican congregations of the day. The significant challenge presented by this messaging in the context of the residential school was that it was presented within the framework of a racialized world view. At the core of Christian theology is the idea that all human beings are made in the image of God. Contrary to the intent of such a theology, which is to affirm the dignity of all, the messaging for children at the Mohawk Institute was nuanced with common forms of verbal abuse such as, “You worthless dirty Indian.”¹⁶ The assumption that Indigenous children were less than their Euro-descent counterparts was implicit in the very work of the residential school project. Changing Indigenous children so that they resembled settler children through their assimilation into that culture, in tandem with the loss of Indigenous culture, created the context for multi-generational harm and trauma in a way that was unique to the residential school enterprise and experience.

Religion, Worship, and Discipline

Survivors speak more about their memory of worship service than they do of religious instruction. The memories shared are rarely fond, and quite often include experiences of corporal punishment for falling asleep, not knowing prayers, and not singing loudly enough.¹⁷ This leads, then, to one of the most difficult aspects of life at the Mohawk Institute—the use of discipline and corporal punishment as a civilizing agent, often linked to Christian admonition. We are familiar with the biblical adage “spare the rod and spoil the child” (Proverbs 13:24). This adage had a central place in the philosophy of child management employed at the Institute. Of course, until fairly recently most educational systems in the Western world had some form of corporal punishment as a child-management practice. Certainly, this was the case in British boarding schools. Such a child-rearing philosophy was not known in Indigenous cultures prior to European contact. The broader issue is that the extremity of how corporal punishment was used at the Mohawk Institute greatly exceeded even the comparatively brutal ethic of the time.

Biopower and Biopolitics

Toward the end of his life, French philosopher Michel Foucault coined a pair of interlocking terms that are helpful for us in understanding the subjugation of the body as a primary tactic in the assimilation work implicit in residential schools. Although his writing is dense, his meaning is quite straightforward: The modern era has used control and subjugation of the body in various ways as a means of ensuring social control, enforcing normativity as defined by power holders, and limiting diversity. He calls this the use of biopower.¹⁸ He applies this to an exploration of things like the development of the modern prison system, regulation of human sexuality in Western cultures, and the definition of mental health and abnormality in our societies. His theory applies well to an analysis of the residential school system, although he himself did not live in an era where such an analysis had yet been considered.

The term he develops in tandem with biopower is biopolitics. This term expands the understanding of physical restraint of the body to broader political strategies for social control. Although he wrote little about race and racialization, the idea of biopolitics (systems using their authority to develop and implement political policies of subjugation as a normalizing strategy) applies in the assimilationist agenda of the early Canadian experience with reference to Indigenous people and their children.

Government policies defined the lives of the children at the Mohawk Institute. Policy allowed Indian agents, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to remove children from their homes and place them at the Institute. Policy regulated what they should eat, wear, learn, and do while at the Institute. As well, the use of corporal punishment was defined by policy. The containment of their bodies using physical force to ensure conformity to daily routine, to prevent or punish runaways, and to punish children for failure to conform in many ways (including religious practice) was regulated by policy. However, as we shall see, the regulation of that policy was loosely monitored so as to lead to a more aggressive application of physical force on the bodies of the children than even the policy allowed. It was understood that the use of physical force was necessary not only to contain the children in the school (prevent runaways), but also to ensure their conformity to the behavioural norms the government and its church mediators had defined.

As noted, the DIA had corporal punishment policies. These evolved over time. During the period of 1929–70 it was the case that corporal punishment was to be administered by the principal of the school only. Each school, including the Mohawk Institute, had a strap of regulation size that was kept in the principal’s office. Strapping was to be only on the palm of the hand and the number of strokes was proscribed by government policy. A register was kept in the principal’s office of every act of discipline (supposedly), signed both by the principal and the student in question. However, it appears that at the Mohawk Institute the use of physical oppression through corporal punishment lived outside the prescribed parameters. The fact that it was the religious authority figure who administered corporal punishment linked religion and pain in a way that left deep scars on the psyche of the children, not least because it appears that at the Institute the use of corporal punishment was much more indiscriminate than advocated by the policy.

From the beginning of his time as principal at the Institute, John Zimmerman expressed the view that harsh physical punishment was necessary to control and retrain the “savage” children who lived at the school. In a letter he wrote to the DIA superintendent on 6 December 1947, Zimmerman asked for permission to use more extreme forms of corporal punishment as a means of managing the children. Zimmerman reports that one evening the maintenance man went up to the boys’ dormitory and found two boys sexually assaulting a teenager who suffered from developmental challenges. He asked the superintendent his thoughts on the use of appropriate punishment as a means of correction: “What form of punishment will you permit for boys who persist in this filthy business? I have tried to reason with them and employ various approaches. For the lad who will not respond to the normal decencies of life through the normal approaches is there any other way that [sic] to resort to the pleasure pain principle?”¹⁹

Further on in the same letter he wrote about a boy stealing. Again, he asked to be able to use more extreme corporal punishment: “I may be of the old school but I believe that if we were permitted in these extreme cases to spank their posterior ends it might do some good. If you strap them on the hands they go down to the playroom and say they were not strapped hard. What do you think?”²⁰

The DIA was not supportive of increasing the extremity of corporal punishment. The superintendent wrote back to Zimmerman on 15 December reaffirming that the only corporal punishment allowed was that mandated by DIA policy: “We have corporal punishment regulations which we recommend to Principals who are having difficulty with this matter. . . . You will find in the long run that it does not pay to strap pupils anywhere but on the hands. The above regulations ‘systematize’ the administration of corporal punishment and the very form which the pupil has to go through is a deterrent.”²¹

There is no record of Zimmerman ever writing again to ask for exception to the corporal punishment policies of the department. However, the witness of the students and some staff demonstrate that he made the decision to apply physical punishment to the students in the manner he felt would create a culture of intimidation sufficient to control the population and achieve the school’s ends. “Sado-masochism” would be another way of naming what resulted.

The witness of survivors of the Institute tells a story of often capricious physical punishment outside the parameters prescribed by policy. In the collection of first-hand accounts of life at the Mohawk Institute collected by Elizabeth Graham, there are repeated references to severe beatings and random use of corporal punishment, connected to many “provocations.” Bob White Eye failed to pay attention in chapel: “I fell asleep in church. Zimmerman was preaching, and they dragged me back to the school and threw me in the dressing room, and they just beat me like a—if my older brother didn’t jump in, I imagine they would have killed me.”²² Albert Sault was sent to work on a local farm whose owner brought him back ten minutes late and he was punished:

Skin [Principal Zimmerman] was a nasty character—he flogged us. I stayed clear of him. If we were late we were flogged by the personnel. . . . The farmer brought us back 10 minutes late and he explained that it was his fault and they flogged us anyway. We’d be made to drop our pants and lie across a table and we were beaten with the wide strap. I heard he was as bad with the girls.²³

Calvin Sault tried several times to run away: “I didn’t really know where to accept any help or get any help. Every time I run away and got a beating I got the skin ripped right off my leg by Mr. Wilson—the boys’ master.”²⁴ Lee Snake remembered lining up for everything including the beatings: “It seemed you lined up for everything. You lined up to get a beating. I got fifty-two beatings that I counted—from Zimmerman—whatever. . . . They wouldn’t pick you right out in church—what they would do is make a note. After we’d get back from church they’d line us up downstairs and call your name out. If your name was called you knew you were in for it. . . . It was everyday too. I did something wrong on average once every two weeks.”²⁵

Some years ago, I conducted an interview with an Anglican priest who had worked at the Institute as acting principal during the summer of 1956, while a theological student at Huron College in London, Ontario. His name was Ken Jagz. It was Principal Zimmerman who hired him as a replacement for himself while he and his family spent the summer elsewhere. There were only about thirty students in residence that summer. The representation of the summer he gave was relatively positive, with one chilling exception. When Jagz arrived for his training, Zimmerman told him that he would be required to wear a strap on his belt at all times. The strap, he said, resembled a short cat-o’-nine-tails with several straps attached to it. He then observed that all staff members wore such straps, at all times. Although Jagz did not want to wear it, Zimmerman insisted. He instructed that the children must be in fear of the possibility of punishment at all times, as a way of keeping them in line. The threat of physical punishment was a daily reign of terror, used in the most dramatic Foucauldian terms to intimidate and constrain the children’s behaviours.²⁶

Jagz’s reflective words illustrate the point regarding the role of religion in the trauma of the Institute’s survivors: “I didn’t want to wear that strap. How could it be that the threat of violence could communicate the meaning of the gospel? I thought we were there to love the children. Instead we presided over a reign of terror.”²⁷

Only a small portion of the children’s daily life was given over to religious practice and teaching. However, the vesting of authority through which the entire experience of residential school trauma was mediated, in the hands of the religious leader as a symbol of ultimate authority, meant that the church itself mediated and presided over the collective trauma induced through the Mohawk Institute.

Religion and Sexual Abuse

We need to explore one more difficult dimension of the place of religion at this school. Other than the case of Nelles Ashton in the early 1900s (see Diana Castillo’s chapter in this volume), criminal charges were not laid against any member of staff who worked there. This makes addressing the misuses of authority through corporal punishment (assault) and any allegations of sexual assault difficult to engage from the vantage point of this present. However, a significant dimension of the traumatic memory of many Mohawk Institute survivors was their experience of having been physically and sexually assaulted while at the Institute.

Over the course of the Institute’s history, the forms and faces of sexual abuse were many. Among this current generation of survivors, abusers are named. Given the importance of religious symbolism in this narrative we need to note that students identify two Anglican priests as having participated in violating them sexually: one preyed on the boys and the other assaulted the girls.

Here we circle back to the exhibition The Mush Hole, created by survivor R. G. Miller. In his words, it was critical for his healing journey that the Anglican Church be confronted with harms he had experienced by placing his witness to that violation at the centre of the institution he understood to be responsible for it. If we revisit our understanding of collective trauma, we recall that after victimization has been named, attributing responsibility is the necessary next step in any movement beyond harm to collective action toward resolution of the past. Situating the graphic witness of harm within the context of the symbolic world of those who held authority, and thereby served as mediators of trauma, takes that step.

It is widely agreed that sexual abuse has more to do with power than it has to do with sex. In fact, over the course of history we have observed the use of sexual abuse and assault as a tactic for the diminishment of people particularly with reference to their collective identities. The feelings of shame and powerlessness that attend experiences of sexual assault and abuse reinforce messages of low self-esteem and lack of worth, not only for individuals, but also for carrier groups with a shared identity.²⁸ Messaging that contributed to low self-esteem and self-worth already abounded at the Mohawk Institute.

Survivors talk about the impact of this on their long-term trauma first as individuals but also with regard to how it impacted the group: “It wasn’t just me. He came for a lot of us. You would be lying there awake in your bed wondering is it my turn tonight. It didn’t make it better that I was the only one. We all felt powerless—he was like God. What could we do?”²⁹

Conclusion

The collective trauma of survivors of the Institute was mediated through an authority structure that had an Anglican priest as its head and Anglican religious culture as its framework for daily life and experience. This trauma had many faces: It was cultural, it was physical, it was sexual, it was religious. In the end it was ultimate; it shook the identity structure of these children and their culture to the core, communicating a message of worthlessness. Value could only be found through the loss of individual and collective self in favour of a second-rate place in the settler’s taxonomy of value. This was the project of assimilation through colonization. Abuse by clergy and others, laid on top of the basic practices of assimilation, worked to reinforce and exacerbate trauma at all levels.

When Foucault wrote about biopower he was addressing the use of force and containment to achieve a social end. The gathering up and incarceration of Indigenous children for the purpose of assimilation at the behest of the Canadian government reflects this. When Foucault wrote about biopolitics he addressed the use of policy to regulate the containment and direct processes of “normalization.” The DIA tended this through their development of policy designed to regulate the children’s life at the schools in every aspect. What will you wear? What will you eat? What will you do? What will you think?

If the government directed and the DIA regulated, what was the role left for religion? The churches administered the schools. They were the enforcement agency by which the model was implemented daily. The use of extreme discipline, as well as physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of authority figures in the daily life of the children at the Mohawk Institute pushed control, regulation, and enforcement into the realm of terror. For Foucault, tactics of terror meant crossing over: from use of power for social utility, into power as gross use/misuse of power for its own sake. ³⁰

When we are always afraid, we comply or resist. When the terror is great enough and the power overwhelming enough, we give ourselves up as a means of survival. Children at the Mohawk Institute lost their identities in the face of a harsh assimilationist agenda. Those who survived the collective trauma speak into history today as witnesses to what was lost, demanding through their very survival consequences, accountability, and the return of what was lost.

Notes

1. 1 Jeffrey C. Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory (Polity, 2012), 6.

2. 2 Alexander, 26.

3. 3 In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci develops the idea of hegemony as a modification of pure Marxist thought: Although the economic substructure is determinative in any society, the idea of a dialectic interaction between the substructure and its culture (superstructure) is developed as a nuance. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (Columbia University Press, 2011).

4. 4 Bishop George Luxton to Superintendent Davey, March 1970, File 479/24-13-001, Pt. 2, Vol. 8798, RG 10, Library and Archives Canada (LAC).

5. 5 The Church of England and its broader religious group, known as Anglican, is a Protestant tradition begun as a breakaway from the Roman Catholic church during the Reformation in sixteenth-century England. It has ordained clergy known as bishops, priests, and deacons. With reference to the residential schools, most principals of Anglican schools were priests who reported both to the DIA but also to the Mission Society of the Anglican Church and to their appointing local bishop.

6. 6 NEC Minute Book, 1896, Guildhall Library, London, England.

7. 7 There were exceptions to this with the appointments of Canon Nelles in the nineteenth century, the Reverend Robert Ashton in the early 1890s, and then the Reverend Cyril Turnell, who was sent from England to serve as principal. His principalship lasted only three years (1915–18). After his time, management of the school returned to lay leadership within the family until 1929. The point is that the lease did not require the principal be a priest, and the priests who served at the MI were not connected to the local religious infrastructure in the way that subsequent clergy would be.

8. 8 NEC Minute Books, 1919–22, Guildhall Library, London, England.

9. 9 DIA to NEC Board of Governors, NEC Minute Books, 1929, Guildhall Library, London, England.

10. 10 File 466-1, Pt. 3, Volume 6299, RG 10, LAC.

11. 11 During this last era of the Institute’s life John Zimmerman also brought two other clergy to work with him at the school: Laverne Morgan as assistant principal in 1946 and the Reverend George Boyce during the last decade of the Institute’s history. Boyce had been ordained in a different Protestant tradition, but while at the MI was ordained as an Anglican priest. Both Morgan and Boyce served as master of the boys’ dormitory (i.e., house father) and helped with worship and taught religious knowledge.

12. 12 NEC Minute Books, 1922–69.

13. 13 The most striking illustrations of this are in the decades-long reports that go from India to the British Crown under the name “The Moral and Material Progress Reports.” In these reports you see the church listed as a department of the British government. Although the reporting with reference to the MI is not so direct, it is in the same vein and form.

14. 14 At times the principal served as teacher of religion for the children, while at other times a chaplain was in place for this purpose. For example, George Boyce served both as house father for the boys and as chaplain in the latter part of his time at the Institute.

15. 15 NEC Minute Books and Correspondence, 1922–69. Little is written about the religious curriculum followed at the MI during the period under consideration. I have formulated this summary of key aspects of religious knowledge teaching through a review of Church of England curriculum used in other forms of education for children, interviews with George Boyce, Ken Jagz, and Laverne Morgan, as well as interviews with the survivors themselves. I also reviewed the NEC minute books and correspondence from principals regarding religious instruction as detailed in their accounting to the NEC.

16. 16 Roberta Hill, Mohawk at Six Nations, interview with author, August 2017. Hill attended the Institute in the early 1960s.

17. 17 R. G. Miller, interview with author, November 2017.

18. 18 Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar, eds., Biopower: Foucault and Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 2016). In this collection of essays, the idea of biopower and biopolitics in Foucault’s work is applied to several recent events and contexts. Although the work does not address the North American Indigenous case, the arguments developed lend themselves to that application.

19. 19 Zimmerman to Colonel Neary, 6 December 1947, in Elizabeth Graham, The Mush Hole: Life at Two Indian Residential Schools (Heffle Publishing, 1997), 188

20. 20 Zimmerman to Neary, in Graham, 188

21. 21 Zimmerman to Neary, in Graham, 188. Details of the proscribed policy are then given and included the following: strap is rubber, fifteen inches; maximum four strokes for boys fourteen or older—younger students less; a register of punishments must be kept.

22. 22 Interview with Bob White Eye, who attended the school from 1955 to 1964, in Graham, The Mush Hole, 419.

23. 23 Interview with Albert Sault, 194? (exact date unknown), in Graham, 399.

24. 24 Interview with Calvin Sault, 194?–53 (exact admission year unknown), in Graham, 399.

25. 25 Interview with Lee Snake, 1963–5, in Graham, 422.

26. 26 The Reverend Ken Jagz, interview with author, 11 February 1999.

27. 27 Jagz, interview.

28. 28 Christina Lamb, Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: War Through the Lives of Women (William Collins, 2020). Lamb reflects on the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and more narrowly of genocide designed to undermine social cohesion within collective identity groups.

29. 29 R. G. Miller, interview with author, 4 April 2018.

30. 30 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage Books, 1975), 35–59. Foucault explores the role of torture in processes of conformity.