The Russ Moses Residential School Memoir
John Moses and Russ Moses
The Russ Moses residential school memoir does not exist in a vacuum, and it requires appropriate words of introduction and context which I, as Russ’s son, am pleased to provide herewith. My family members and I are Six Nations band members (Delaware and Upper Mohawk bands) living and working in Ottawa. My late father, Russ Moses (8 August 1932–22 May 2013), whose memoir is reproduced here, was a residential school survivor and Korean War veteran. He chose to relocate our family to Ottawa in 1965 upon leaving the military that year to pursue civilian employment with the federal government. My mother, Helen Monture Moses (aged ninety at the time of this writing), who followed her own mother, Edith Anderson Monture, into nursing, was one of the founding members of the National Native Nurses Association of Canada back in the 1970s.
On moving to Ottawa in the 1960s, our family—myself, my older brother Jim, and parents Russ and Helen—joined the bare handful of Indigenous families here in Ottawa comprising the city’s urban Indigenous population at that time. There are now many thousands of Indigenous people in Ottawa from all over Canada, coming here for school, to work with the federal government, to join national Indigenous political organizations, or to work in the private sector. When we moved here, there were far fewer Indigenous families in the city, even counting those from the two nearest reserve communities at Kitigan Zibi (Maniwaki, Quebec) and Pikwakanagan (Golden Lake, Ontario).
Our 1965 arrival in Ottawa included moves to rental housing on Bayswater Avenue and Baseline Road, before my folks bought a place in a new subdivision called Briargreen in Nepean, in Ottawa’s West End, in 1969. We moved into our new home in June of that year, and later that summer my folks hosted a large housewarming party that included friends and family from Six Nations, Tyendinaga, and from here in Ottawa. The housewarming party lasted two or three days, with tents and trailers in the front and backyards (the new neighbours were aghast), and included traditional blessings, food and drink, and singing and dancing to music on the record player.
During the 1970s and ’80s and beyond, as we made twice-yearly trips back to Six Nations and spent many summers there, and as we hosted visiting Six Nations relatives and friends in Ottawa, we witnessed the flourishing of Ottawa’s urban Indigenous community from the small beginnings I describe above. Our reality as a nuclear family of Status Indians who were registered band members living and working in Ottawa’s urban and suburban environments unfolded always with the knowledge of our Six Nations identity. In respect to my father’s family, this included the legacy of the residential schools.
The residential school experience thus looms large in the history of my family, just as it does for so many other Indigenous families across the country. While my mother’s family, the Montures, were for the most part raised at home in traditional Six Nations family settings, things were rather different on my father’s side. My late father, Russ Moses, was raised, along with his brother and sister, at the Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School in Brantford, Ontario, in the 1940s; their father/my grandfather, Ted Moses, was there in the 1910s, and my great-grandfather Nelson Moses was raised there even earlier, in the 1880s. So that makes me the first generation after three that was not sent there, for which I am of course grateful. The Mohawk Institute closed its doors as a residential school in 1970. My own elementary and secondary schooling was completed in Ottawa, in the public system, in the 1970s, when there was no public awareness regarding urban Indigenous issues, and any Indigenous curriculum content was confined to grade 8 history, as I recall, and was at any rate badly skewed by today’s standards.
The following memoir was written by my father, Russ, upon his leaving the Canadian military in 1965 and starting new work that year as a civilian public servant, with what was then the Indian Affairs Branch (IAB) of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration. He was one of a handful of new Indigenous hires in the IAB, part of an innovation to bring more Indigenous public servants into the federal government. His hiring in August 1965 coincided with the planning of an annual symposium of residential school principals and administrators set for January 1966. It was decided to approach a number of new Indigenous hires whom IAB knew to be former residential school students to add their views to the gathering. Written from the vantage point of December 1965, when he was thirty-three years old, happily married, and the father of two young boys, the memoir recounts Russ’s childhood experiences at the Mohawk Institute, which he attended from 1942 until 1947. Each residential school was a unique subculture in its own right: Different schools met different perceived needs in different regions of the country during different decades, and different conditions existed.
Figure 0.3. Russ Moses in RCAF uniform, 1965
Source: John Moses
When my great-grandfather Nelson Moses was at the Mohawk in the 1880s, it was run as a mission school where young men and women from the Six Nations community were sent to be trained as Indigenous Anglican clergy and teachers. When my grandfather Ted Moses was there in the 1910s it was essentially a military-themed boarding school during the era of global militarization that would culminate with the outbreak of the Great War. It degenerated throughout the 1920s and ’30s and the era of the Great Depression. My father and his siblings had the misfortune of being sent there during the 1940s, at the height of the Second World War, by which time any pretense toward education or training had been abandoned. Instead, the Indigenous children were there to provide the forced agricultural labour necessary to keep the large farm operation going, as a contribution to the civilian food-production effort on the Canadian home front during wartime. Others were sent to provide forced labour in various factories in Brantford, with the city’s major farm machinery companies by then likewise having been converted to meet wartime industrial production needs. As Russ’s accompanying hand-drawn map illustrates, the Mohawk Institute itself sat on 350 acres of prime southern Ontario farmland with different varieties of crops, livestock, and orchards under cultivation. Sadly, the child inmates derived no benefit from their labours, and, as you will read, were reduced to begging on the streets of Brantford to help sustain themselves.
Figure 0.4. Russ Moses’s hand-drawn map (1999), “Mohawk Institute, 1942–1946 by # 12 Boy.”
Source: John Moses
This unique first-person account is an important primary source document for an Indigenous auto-ethnography of the residential school experience in Canada wherein we assert, as Indigenous peoples, a leadership role in providing our own unfiltered testimonies and accounts, without representation or validation or mediation by others; and, since the memoir was produced in 1965 at the specific request of government officials, it obviously predates our current era of retrospection concerning the schools, as the Canadian state manoeuvres to contain its various liabilities. Thus, Russ’s memoir is not a mere representation or interpretation of an Indigenous experience by some second- or third-hand narrator—it remains an actual first-hand, first-person Indigenous account that continues to speak truth to power despite the passage of many decades.
Recently there has been speculation concerning the extent to which the government (up to the most senior levels, including the minister of citizenship and immigration’s office itself) knew about, or understood, residential school conditions at the time my father wrote his memoir. While Russ’s memoir, even at the time of its first submission, could have been, and possibly was, dismissed as being of historical interest only to the extent that he was writing in 1965 and describing events that had occurred some twenty years previously, any recent statements by former government officials that they were unaware of these conditions is incorrect. The photograph of Russ and his sister (my aunt Thelma Davis) that accompanies the memoir is one of the few possessions that my father retained from childhood. The other photograph is of Russ upon his release from the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1965, the same year in which he wrote his memoir. The condition of their clothing in the first photograph speaks for itself. The second photo of Russ in uniform speaks to the twin legacies of residential school attendance and later military service shared by many Indigenous families. The first picture, according to Russ’s note on the back, was taken in October 1943, during the course of one of the once-monthly, fifteen-minutes-only visiting sessions for brothers and sisters. I call this photograph Proof of Life. It was taken and kept on file by Mohawk Institute staff, to be provided to the Ontario Provincial Police and RCMP for identification purposes should the children attempt to run away home. Another photo was sent to family members on-reserve, as proof of the children’s well-being at the school.
Notwithstanding the tragic circumstances of child abuse and neglect described in his memoir, as Russ’s son it is important for me to convey to readers that Russ refused to be defined by his residential school experience. While Russ never hid his residential school experience, neither did he dwell upon it, and this imparts an important lesson for survivors of intergenerational trauma today. Beyond his upbringing, my father was a decorated naval veteran of the Korean War, an air force veteran of the Cold War, and an accomplished public servant whose many achievements included being deputy commissioner general of the groundbreaking Indians of Canada Pavilion at Montreal’s Expo 67, a watershed in Indigenous self-representation before national and global audiences. Most importantly, Russ was a loving husband, father, grandfather, father-in-law, and uncle, with a tremendous sense of humour and irony, and an appreciation of the absurd, which I think is what helped him deal with so many things in life. As you read the memoir, I would ask you to reflect on the following questions:
- In what ways was the childhood and educational experience described here different from your own experiences, or what you might know about your own parents’ or grandparents’ experiences?
- What were some of the specific techniques used to sever bonds between siblings, and between children and their families, and to disrupt the cross-generational transmission of Indigenous cultures, heritage, and languages?
- Finally, how might some of the conditions described here account for the social pathologies experienced in some Indigenous families and communities today?
I will conclude with Russ’s own admonition: “This is not my story, but yours.”
Transcription
Official government of Canada Letterhead
Indian Affairs Branch
Department of Citizen and Immigration
Ottawa 2, December 10, 1965
our file no. 1/25-20-1 (E.24)
Mr. Russ Moses
Information Section,
Room 425,
Bourque Building,
Ottawa, Ontario
Dear Mr. Moses:
During the week beginning with January 10, 1966, the Residential School Principals from all regions will be meeting at Elliot Lake, Ontario, to discuss various aspects of residential. schools.
In order to bring as many view points as possible to these deliberations, a selected number of Indians have been invited to submit their views and you are one of the persons who has been selected.
We would be most grateful to you if you would put your thoughts regarding residential schools down on paper and send this to me by the end of December. Please feel tree to express your views candidly. We want to benefit both from your experience and your insights and frankness will be appreciated.
All the best to you and yours during the Yuletide Season. and I will very much appreciate hearing from you at your earliest convenience.
Yours sincerely,
L. Jampolsky,
Chief Superintendent of Vocational Training and Special Services.
The page is marked up in pen. The phrase "send this to me by the end of December" is underlined and the word "candidly" is double underlined. At the bottom of the page is "Will submit views RM 13/12/65" and "DONE 28/12/65"
Transcription
Mohawk Institute - 1942-47
First, a bit of what it was like in the "good old days".
In August 1942, shortly before my 9th birthday a series of unfortunate family circumstances made it necessary that I along with my 7 year old sister and an older brother, be placed in the Mohawk Institute at Brantford, Ontario.
Our home life prior to going to tha "Mohawk" was considerably better than many of the other Indian children who were to be my friends in the following five years. At the "mushole" (this was the name applied to the school by the Indians for many years) I found my surprise that one of the main tasks for a new arrival was to engage in physical combat with a series of opponents, this was done by the students, so that you knew exactly where you stood in the social structure that existed.
The food at the Institute was disgraceful. The normal diet was as follows:
Breakfast - two slices of bread with either jam or honey as the dressing, oatmeal with worms or cornmeal porridge, which was minimal in quantity and appalling in quality. The beverage consisted of skim milk and when one stops to consider that we were milking from twenty to thirty head of pure bred, Holstein cattle it seems odd that we did not ever receive whole milk and in my five years at the Institute, we never received butter once.
This is very strange for on entering the Institute our ration books for sugar and butter were turned into the management – we never received sugar other than Christmas morning when we had a yearly feast of one shredded wheat with the sprinkling of brown sugar.
Lunch - at the Institute this consisted of water as the beverage if you were a senior boy or a girl, you received (grade V or above) one and a half slices of dry bread and the main course consisted of "rotten soup" (local terminology) (i.e. scraps of beef, vegetables some in a state of decay.) Dessert would be restricted to nothing on some days and a type of tapioca pudding (fish eyes) or a crudely prepared custard, the taste of which I can taste to this day. Children under grade V level received one slice of dry bread incidentally we were not weight watchers.
Transcription
Supper - this consisted of two slices of bread and jam, fried potatoes, NO MEAT, a bun baked by the girls (terminology – "horse buns") and every other night, a piece of cake or possibly an apple in the summer months.
The manner in which the food was prepared did not encourage overeating. The diet remained constant, hunger was never absent. I would say here that 90% of the children were suffering from diet deficiency, and this was evident by the number of boils, warts and general malaise that existed within the school population.
I have seen Indian children eating from the swill barrel, picking out soggy bits of food that was intended for the pigs.
At the "mushole" we had several hundred laying hens (white leghorn). We received a yearly ration of one egg a piece - this was on Easter Sunday morning, the Easter bunny apparently influenced this.
The whole milk was separated in the barn, and the cream was been sold to a local dairy firm, "The Mohawk Creamery", which I believe is still in business. All eggs were sold as well as chickens at the end of their laying life - we never had chicken - except on several occasions when we stole one or two and roasted them on a well concealed fire in the bush - half raw chicken is not too bad eating!
The policy of the Mohawk Institute was that both girls and boys would attend school for half days and work the other half. This was Monday to Friday inclusive. No school on Saturday but generally we worked.
The normal work method was that the children under grade V level worked in the market garden in which every type of vegetable was grown and in the main sold - the only vegetables which were stored for our use were potatoes, beans, turnips of the animal fodder variety. The work was supervised by white people who were employed by the Institute and beatings were administered at the slightest pretext. We were not treated as human beings - we were the Indian who had to become shining examples of Anglican Christianity.
I have seen Indian children having their faces rubbed in human excrement, this was done by a gentleman who has now gone to his just reward.
The normal punishment for bedwetters (usually one of the smaller boys) was to have his face rubbed in his own urine.
Transcription
The senior boys worked on the farm - and I mean worked, we were underfed, Il clad and out in all types of weather. There is certainly something to be said for Indian stamina. At harvest times such as potato harvest, corn harvest for cattle fodder - we older boys would at times not attend school until well on into the fall as we were needed to help with the harvest.
We arose at 6:00 a.m. each morning and went to the barn to do "chores". This included milking the cattle, feeding and then using curry comb to brush and keep them in good mental and physical condition.
After our usual sumptuous breakfast we returned to the barn to do "second chores" 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. - this included cleaning the stables, watering the young stock and getting hay down out of mow, as well as carrying in encilage from the silo to the main barn.
We also had some forty to eighty pigs depending on the time of year - we never received pork or bacon of any kind except at Christmas when a single slice of pork along with mashed potatoes and gravy made up our Christmas dinner. A few rock candies along with an orange and Christmas pudding, which was referred to as "dog shit" made up our Christmas celebrations. The I.O.D.E. sent us books as gifts.
Religion was pumped into us at a fast rate, chapel every evening, church on Sundays (twice). For some years after leaving the Institute, I was under the impression that my tribal affiliation was "Anglican" rather than Delaware.
Our formal education, was sadly neglected, when a child is tired, hungry, lice, infested, and treated as a sub-human, how in heavens name do you expect to make a decent citizen out of him or her, when the formal school curriculum is the most disregarded aspect of his whole background. I speak of lice, this was an accepted part of "being Indian" at the Mohawk - heads were shaved in late spring. We had no tooth brushes, no underwear was issued in the summe, no socks in the summer. Our clothing was a disgrace to this country. Our so-called "Sunday clothes" were cut down first world war army uniforms. Cold showers were provided summer and winter in which we were herded en masse by some of the bigger boys and if you did not keep under the shower, you would be struck with a brass studded belt.
The soap for perfuming our ablutions was the green liquid variety which would just about take the hide off you.
Transcription
Bullying by larger boys was terrible, younger boys were "slaves" to these fellows, and were required to act as such - there were also cases of homosexual contact, but this is not strange when you consider that the boys were not even allowed to talk to the girls - even their own sisters except for 15 minutes once a month when you met each other in the "visiting room" and you then spoke in hush tones.
Any mail coming to any student or mail being sent was opened and read before ever getting to the addressee or to the Indian child - money was removed and held in "trust" for the child.
It was our practice at the "Mohawk" to go begging at various homes throughout Brantford. There were certain homes that we knew the people were good to us, we would rap on the door and our question was: "Anything extra" whereupon if we were lucky, we would be rewarded with scraps from the household - survival of the fittest.
Many children tried to run away from the institute and nearly all caught and brought back to face the music. We had a form of running the gauntlet in which the offender had to go through the line that is one of his hand on his hands and knees through widespread legs of all the boys, and he would be struck with anything that was at hand all this done under the fatherly supervision of the boys mast, I have seen boys after going through a line of 50 to 70 boys crying in the most abject human misery and pain with not a soul to care - the dignity of man!!
As I sit writing this paper things that have been dormant in my mind for years come to the fore - we will sing hymn number 128!!
This situation, divides the shame amongst the churches, the Indian Affairs Branch and the Canadian public.
I could write on and on - and someday I will tell him how things used to be - sadness pain and misery were my legacy as an Indian.
The staff at Mohawk lived very well, separate dining room, where they were waited on by our Indian girls - the food I am told, was excellent.
When I was asked to do this paper I had some misgivings, for if I were to be honest, I must tell if things as they were and really, this is not my story, but yours.
Russell Moses,
Former Pupil - Mohawk Institute, 1942-47.
Transcription
There were an are some decent honourable people employed by the residential schools, but they were not sufficient in number to change things.
SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS FOR RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS
- Religion should not be the basic curriculum therefore it is my feeling that nondenominational residential school should be established (dreamer)
- More people of Indian ancestry should be encouraged to work in residential schools as they have a much better understanding of the Indian "personality" and would also be more apt to be trusted and respected by the students
- Indian residential school should be integrated the residential school should be a "home" rather than an Institute
- Salary paid to the staff. Member should be on a par with industry. Otherwise you tend to attract only social misfits, and religious sell it.
- The Indian students should have a certain amount of work (physical) to do - overwork is no good and no work is even worse. I believe that a limited amount of work gives responsibility to the individual helps him or her to develop a well-balanced personality.
- Parents of Indian children should be made to contribute to the financial upkeep of their children - I realize that this would be difficult, but it at least bears looking into.
- Each child should be given individual attention - get to know him or her - encourage leadership. This could be accomplished by giving awards for certain achievements.
- but most important solicit ideas from the students we adult do not know all the answers
SUMMATION - The years that an Indian child spends in an Indian residential school has a very great deal to do with his or her future outlook on life, and in my own case, it showed me that Indians are different simply because you made us different and so gentleman I say to you, take pains in molding, not the Indian up tomorrow, but the Canadian citizen of tomorrow. FOR "As ye sow so shall ye reap".