“Too Dangerous a Job”: Forced Child Labour and Wood Collection at the Chooutla Indian Residential School

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This post is part of a series entitled “Land, Memory, and Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education.” You can find the introduction here.

This post and series discuss Indian residential and day schools. Please take care as you read. If you are a Survivor or intergenerational Survivor of residential or day school and you need help, there’s a free 24-hour support line. Call 1-866-925-4419. Additional resources are available here.

I thank the Yukon Residential Schools Missing Children Project (YRSMCP) Working Group for allowing me to share this research. The YRSMCP is an initiative that seeks to learn the truth about the children who went missing from Yukon Indian Residential Schools, including those who may be buried in unmarked burial sites. This article is based on archival research conducted by Know History Inc. in support of the working group. While this piece provides valuable insight into children’s labour, it regrettably lacks the voices of the children themselves due to the nature of the archival records.

In October 1941, William Ross Kilbey, farm instructor at the Chooutla Indian Residential School in Carcross, Yukon, wrote to acquaintance and Member of Parliament R.M. Warren with an unusual request: help purchasing a caterpillar-tractor so that boys institutionalized at Chooutla could safely haul wood from the surrounding forests. At the time, boys led heavy horse-drawn wagons along steep, mountainous trails— “much too dangerous a haul to ask any boy in this school to be responsible for,” Kilbey admitted. Several boys had already been seriously injured and treated at the hospital in Whitehorse. Parents, hearing of these dangers, were reluctant to see their children return to Chooutla in the fall. As Kilbey noted, “during the summer vacation they have told their parents about our wood-haul […] the parents do not want to send the pupils back to school, thinking it too dangerous a job.”1

This single letter reveals the central role of children’s labour in keeping Chooutla running. From the 1910s through the 1950s, boys supplied the hundreds of cords of wood required to heat the institution each year. Read through an environmental history lens, Chooutla exemplifies how energy, Land, and Indigenous children’s bodies were bound together in a colonial system. It expands our understanding of the histories of residential and day schooling by exploring how the exploitation of children and the Land were integral to the operation of these institutions.  

“From the 1910s through the 1950s, boys supplied the hundreds of cords of wood required to heat the institution each year. Read through an environmental history lens, Chooutla exemplifies how energy, Land, and Indigenous children’s bodies were bound together in a colonial system.”

In the early twentieth century, using forced child labour to cut and haul wood was common at Canada’s residential schools. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented multiple cases of this at institutions in Alnwick and Wikwemikong, Ontario, and Onion Lake and File Hills, Saskatchewan.2 Historian Crystal Gail Fraser has shown that collecting wood was one of many tasks staff forced boys to perform at Immaculate Conception IRS in Aklavik, Northwest Territories.3 At Pelican Lake IRS near Sioux Lookout, Ontario, historian Braden Paora Te Hiwi found that boys “chopped and prepared over eight hundred cords of wood annually to fuel the school furnaces.”4 These patterns demonstrate how administrators substituted children’s labour for institutional investment, transforming forests into fuel through coercion. Focusing on Chooutla expands on this existing work and directs greater attention to children’s experiences with wood collection at an Indian Residential School in the Yukon. Despite the disproportionate impact of residential schooling in the North, northern institutions remain understudied.

William C. Bompas, the Anglican Bishop for the Diocese of the Yukon and member of the Church Missionary Society, opened the Chooutla Indian Residential School in Carcross in 1903. The Department of Indian Affairs began funding Chooutla shortly afterward. The children institutionalized at Chooutla were taken from communities throughout the Yukon, Northwest Territories, British Columbia, and Alaska. More than one thousand children had been institutionalized at Chooutla by the time it closed in 1969.

Carcross winters routinely dropped to -20˚C, with cold snaps below -40˚C.5 Heating the large, drafty school buildings required enormous amounts of wood. In May 1914, the Northern Lights newsletter reported that “200 cords of wood [had] been cut and hauled” by boys and staff.6 A 1939 report estimated the school required roughly 250 cords annually and noted that 2,000 cords had been cut since 1930.7

A wood pile at the Chooutla Indian Residential School, Carcross, April 23, 1934
A wood pile at the Chooutla Indian Residential School, Carcross, April 23, 1934. Yukon Archives. Anglican Church, Diocese of Yukon Fonds, PHO 379, Acc. 89/41, 1044. Photo courtesy of the Yukon Archives.

Even after the main school building was destroyed in 1939 and replaced with a new structure in 1944, Chooutla still relied on wood, and consumption remained high. In 1946, an inspector from the Department of Public Works described the oil drum stoves as “very unsatisfactory.” They needed “to be kept on at full blast during colder weather”—a “dangerous and a grave fire menace” that demanded constant feeding. The boys’ unpaid labour kept those stoves burning.8 Administrators openly acknowledged their dependence on the children’s work. “All the boys had their daily tasks in the woods,” noted the 1913 annual report. A few years later, Principal Johnson worried that four older boys would soon leave and that “the rest are too small to take their place” in the “outside work.”9 In 1941, Principal H.C.M. Grant confirmed that “all the ‘teen age boys, taking turns, assist the Farm Instructor” with wood collection.10

Staff routinely framed wood collection as occupational training (not forced labour): “The ready use of an axe is one lesson most useful to a Yukon boy,” read Principal Townsend’s 1915 annual report.11 The rhetoric disguised the truth. Cutting hundreds of cords by hand was exhausting and dangerous. In 1923, Principal Barlow called the purchase of a saw a “great labour saver,” boasting that it could do “in one week what it would to take the boys almost a year to do by hand.”12 The comment underscores just how much work had previously been demanded of children.

Group of boys on collecting wood. Yukon Archives. Anglican Church of Canada. Diocese of Yukon fonds
Group of boys on collecting wood. Yukon Archives. Anglican Church of Canada. Diocese of Yukon fonds, PHO 378, Acc. 89/41, 148. Photo courtesy of the Yukon Archives.

By the late 1930s, accessible woodlots near Chooutla had been exhausted. In 1939, Grant reported that teams hauled wood from nearly ten kilometres away “over bad mountainous trails,” with at most a cord and a half per load. Everything within eleven kilometres “along sheltered roads from the wind” had already been logged.13 Each trip took hours, keeping boys out of classrooms for prolonged periods and exposing them to serious risk.

In June 1940, a boy was severely injured when a horse-drawn wagon struck him; he was flown to Whitehorse Hospital. Grant described it as “one of the worst accidents that I have seen in my ten years at this school.”14 Hospital records between 1939 and 1941 list four Chooutla boys treated for injuries, sometimes for weeks. While not all records specify causes, Grant did not deny the connection to wood hauling when pressed by federal officials.15

Despite evidence of injuries, officials refused Kilbey’s request for a tractor. Minister of Mines and Resources T.A. Crerar explained that the “use of horses provides valuable training for the senior pupils” and noted that “few tractors are used by Indians on the reserves.”16 This rationale preserved the fiction of “training” while justifying reliance on coerced child labour.

“Forced wood cutting and hauling at Chooutla was not a benign lesson in self-reliance. It was a system that endangered children, stole their classroom time, and transferred institutional heating costs onto their bodies.”

Only in 1953, following the construction of another new school building, heated by a diesel generating plant and steam boilers, did Chooutla cease using wood as its primary fuel. For more than forty years before that, however, the warmth that sustained staff and students through Yukon winters depended on the unpaid, dangerous labour of Indigenous boys.

Forced wood cutting and hauling at Chooutla was not a benign lesson in self-reliance. It was a system that endangered children, stole their classroom time, and transferred institutional heating costs onto their bodies. These stories are part of the environmental history of Indian residential schools: a history of energy, Land, and exploitation. Remembering them means acknowledging the children who were harmed and refusing to let their labour remain invisible.

Feature Image: Boys sawing and chopping wood. Yukon Archives. Mary David Moody Fonds, PHO 83, Acc. 78/3, 10. Photo courtesy of the Yukon Archives.

Notes

1 Letter from Ross Kilbey to R. M. Warren re: Chooutla IRS, Yukon Agency – Carcross Residential School – Building Maintenance – Supplies – Accounts – Building Rental – General Administration, Library and Archives Canada, RG10, Vol. 6480, File no. 940-5, Part no. 8.

2 See Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 1, Parts 1 and 2 for more details regarding wood collection at Indian Residential Schools.

3 Crystal Gail Fraser, By Strength We Are Still Here: Indigenous Peoples and Indian Residential Schooling in Inuvik, Northwest Territories (University of Manitoba Press: Winnipeg, 2024), 46.

4 Braden Paora Te Hiwi, “Unlike their Playmates of Civilization, the Indian Children’s Recreation must be Cultivated and Developed”: The Administration of Physical Education at Pelican Lake Indian Residential School, 1926-1944,” Historical Studies in Education 29, no. 1 (Spring 2017)” 108.

5 Carcross, YT, monthly data report, 1907-2007, Environment and Climate Change Canada Historic Climate Data Archive, https://climate.weather.gc.ca.

6 Northern Lights – May 1914, Northern Lights, General Synod Archives – Anglican Church Archives.

7 Report re: Carcross Indian Residential School Requirements 1939-1940, Yukon Agency – Carcross Residential School – Building Maintenance – Supplies – Accounts – General Administration, Library and Archives Canada, RG10, Vol. 6480, File no. 940-5, Part no. 6.

8 C.F. Dawson to C.G. Brault, Carcross Residential School – Building maintenance – Supplies – Accounts – Principal’s residence, Library and Archives Canada, RG10, Vol. 6480, File no. 940-5, Part no. 9.

9 Letter re: Child Recruitment & Other Carcross IRS Matters, Circa 1917, Johnson, C.F. [Chooutla], Yukon Archives, Vol. Cor 252, File no. 11a.

10 Letter from H.C.M. Grant to R.A. Hoey re: injured children, Yukon Agency – Carcross Residential School – General Administration, Library and Archives Canada, RG10, Vol. 6479, File no. 940-1, Part no. 2.

11 The report of Rev. W.T. Townsend, B.A. Principal of Chooutla Boarding School, Carcross, Yukon Territory, for the year ending March 31st, 1915., Chooutla School (former title: Carcross School), Yukon Archives, Anglican Church, Diocese of Yukon Fonds, Vol. COR 260, File no. 4.

12 Chooutla Indian Residential School Annual Report, 1923, Barlow, Rev. W., Yukon Archives, Anglican Church, Diocese of Yukon Fonds, Vol. COR 249, File no. 10.

13 Report re: Carcross Indian Residential School Requirements, 1939-1940.

14 Letter from H.C.M. Grant to Superintendent of Indian Affairs, re: George Henry – Indian Child – Use of Plane, Yukon Agency – Carcross Residential School- Admissions & Discharges, Library and Archives Canada, RG10, Vol. 6481, File no. 940-10, Part no. 4.

15 Letter from H.C.M. Grant to R.A. Hoey re: injured children.

16 Letter from T. A. Crerar to R. M. Warren re: caterpillar tractor, Yukon Agency – Carcross Residential School – Building Maintenance – Supplies – Accounts – Building Rental – General Administration, Library and Archives Canada, RG10, Vol. 6480, File no. 940-5, Part no. 8.

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M. Blake Butler

Originally from Mississauga, I now live in Vancouver. I am the descendant of Irish, English, Greek, and Polish immigrants to Canada. I have been a member of NiCHE since 2020 and am currently an editor and book review co-editor. Outside of NiCHE, I am a member of the Protect Our Winters Canada Science Alliance and am employed as a historian and project manager with Know History, Inc., a historical services firm based in Ottawa. I have been a member of the research team supporting the Yukon Residential Schools Missing Children Project since February 2023. My personal research examines Canadian and environmental histories, with an emphasis on winter-based topics. My doctoral dissertation explored the history of snow in Vancouver between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth century.

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