Support NiCHE’s Work, Contribute to our 2025 Fundraising Campaign Here.
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.
It took the revelation of more than a thousand unmarked graves at former residential schools in 2021 for many Canadians to confront the brutal legacy of Indigenous child assimilation. Long before residential schools dominated the public consciousness, a quieter but no less significant story unfolded on Bear Island in Lake Temagami, Ontario.
From 1903 to 1950, the Bear Island Indian Day School operated not year-round but seasonally during the summer months when Teme-Augama Anishnabeg families gathered on the island before returning to their winter hunting territories. In this seasonal rhythm, we find a unique intersection of Indigenous resilience, settler-colonial opportunism, and environmental constraint.1
“In this seasonal rhythm, we find a unique intersection of Indigenous resilience, settler-colonial opportunism, and environmental constraint.”
From its opening in 1903, the Bear Island summer school was shaped by the land. Teme-Augama Anishnabeg are a borderland people whose language blends Ojibwe, Algonquin, and Cree, and whose homeland encompasses 10,000 square kilometres across the Ottawa Valley–Lake Huron height-of-land. For generations, Teme-Augama Anishnabeg migrated seasonally: summers on Bear Island for trade and reunion, winters on individual family hunting territories. They moved not because they were nomads, but because they were deeply rooted. Each family’s territory, stewarded since time immemorial, shaped and was shaped by Anishnabeg law, governance, and education.
When the Bear Island Indian Day School opened in 1903, it became the first Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) day school explicitly designed to operate with Anishnabeg seasonality, not against it. Unlike residential schools, Indian day schools had no boarding component.2 Like residential schools, the DIA used day schools to pursue their agenda of assimilation. The Bear Island Indian Day School provided a limited Euro-Canadian education—typically grades one through five—for part of the year. Many families welcomed this, not reflecting a desire to abandon Anishnabeg ways, but rather a desire to equip children to navigate a changing world.3 Children learned in English during the summer, then returned to the land and Anishnabeg teachings during the winter.
In the early twentieth century, Northern Ontario was a place where agents of the state—missionaries, teachers, Indian agents, and resource developers—traversed the land seasonally. Their access to Teme-Augama Anishnabeg was governed by ice and snow more so than by policy. They came north after spring breakup and retreated before freeze-up. In contrast, the snow and ice enhanced Anishnabeg mobility, allowing families to reach their hunting grounds by snowshoe and toboggan. For a time, settler-colonialism in Northern Ontario was forced to adapt to the seasonal lives of Anishnabeg peoples.
The Bear Island Indian Day School was a compromise. It offered the DIA a foothold on Bear Island while maintaining Teme-Augama Anishnabeg’s seasonal migrations. Attendance was relatively high during the summer, but tapered off in spring and fall. Despite pressure from Ottawa to extend the school year, the Teme-Augama Anishnabeg adhered to their seasonal cycle. School records show regular and expected absenteeism during migration, not as rebellion, but as continuity.4
This arrangement began to collapse in the 1920s and 30s, not because the school failed, but because the environmental conditions that sustained seasonal life were being dismantled. The Province of Ontario had no constitutional role in Indian Affairs. Nevertheless, it began asserting influence in Temagami through natural resource and development policy. The province refused to allow a reserve, restricted access to building materials, and blocked Teme-Augama Anishnabeg land stewardship in the name of forest conservation. It sold Teme-Augama Anishnabeg campsites to cottagers and permitted the flooding of traplines and villages for hydroelectric dams.
The province’s actions targeted the very foundation of seasonal life. Game wardens prosecuted Teme-Augama Anishnabeg families for hunting, while white settlers were allocated traplines previously stewarded by Anishnabeg. The Temagami Game and Fish Reserve banned Anishnabeg fishing entirely until settler outrage prompted a reversal. Meanwhile, steamer routes, highways, and cottaging brought settlers into previously inaccessible areas. More and more families were forced to abandon their hunting territories. By the 1940s, many Teme-Augama Anishnabeg lived year-round on Bear Island, not by choice but because the province had made their traditional lands uninhabitable.
The summer school, too, was caught in this shift. Closed for one summer during the Depression, it was reopened by the DIA in 1934 in response to increasing provincial interest. Ontario’s Department of Lands and Forests—not the Department of Education—began lobbying for year-round schooling on Bear Island, framing it as a natural resource issue. Provincial officials argued that proper education was needed to bring the region into harmony with the rest of Ontario, particularly for the benefit of tourism. Eventually, in 1950, Ontario assumed full control. A public school with mandatory year-round attendance opened that year, backed by the threat that families who refused would have their children taken.5
“What was lost in this shift was not just a school, but a model of co-existence.”
What was lost in this shift was not just a school, but a model of co-existence. The Bear Island Indian Day School had, for nearly fifty years, provided an educational bridge that addressed both Anishnabeg and settler-colonial seasonality. It allowed children to receive instruction in the summer without sacrificing their culture, language, or land-based education in the winter. The province’s assumption of control severed that connection. Education was no longer seasonal, but compulsory. Anishnabeg children were no longer free to travel with their families; instead, they stayed behind while their parents returned, sometimes illegally, to the bush.
The closure of the Bear Island summer school was not merely a bureaucratic decision. It was the result of a decades-long, systematic effort by the Province of Ontario to destroy the Teme-Augama Anishnabeg’s ability to live with the land. This included land theft, environmental regulation, infrastructure development, and resource extraction. It involved jailing hunters, leasing campsites, flooding settlements, and denying a reserve. Though federal policies framed assimilation through education, it was Ontario’s manipulation of the environment that ultimately made seasonal life—and seasonal schooling—impossible.
“For Teme-Augama Anishnabeg, the Bear Island Indian Day School was a site of resistance, adaptation, and survival that offered a way to live in two worlds. Its closing marked the end of a seasonal era and the beginning of a provincial-colonial regime determined to settle, regulate, and erase.”
Environmental history helps us see how colonial power operates not just through laws or institutions, but through land, water, animals, and seasons. For Teme-Augama Anishnabeg, the Bear Island Indian Day School was a site of resistance, adaptation, and survival that offered a way to live in two worlds. Its closing marked the end of a seasonal era and the beginning of a provincial-colonial regime determined to settle, regulate, and erase.
Author’s Note: I first came to Lake Temagami in 1989 as a teenager at Camp Wanapitei, a canoe-tripping camp that travels the lakes and rivers of northern Canada. At the time, it was directed by the late Bruce Hodgins—historian, Trent University professor, and steadfast defender of Teme-Augama Anishnabeg rights. Under Bruce’s guidance, everyone left Wanapitei with a deep respect for the history and people of Temagami. Over the years I came to love the region so much that I moved there after completing my undergraduate degree. Since then, I have travelled its lakes and portages by canoe and snowshoe, truck and snowmobile, helicopter and on foot. I have listened to the stories of Teme-Augama Anishnabeg elders such as Gary Potts, Bella White, and Alex Mathias. Today, I am an environmental historian whose work is grounded in Northern Ontario. I am an uninvited settler on lands protected by the Robinson Huron Treaty of 1850, Treaty No. 9 of 1905, and the unceded lands of the Teme-Augama Anishnabeg. My lived experiences on this land continue to shape how I understand and write about Northern Ontario.
Feature Image: Teacher and pupils at Bear Island Indian Day School. Identified individuals include Presque Petrant (back row, far left), Cici Becker (back row, second from right), Margaret Petreant Moore (back row, far right), Emma Doherty (teacher, far left), and Charlie Moore (front row, white shirt). Photo by Duncan Campbell Scott, 1906. Photo Credit: Duncan Campbell Scott, “Miss Doherty and Pupils at Bear Island,” 25 July, 1906, Library and Archives Canada, 1971-205 NPC, Box number 3266, Book I, p. 9.
Notes
1 Robert Olajos, “‘To Continue the Life that We Had Always Lived’: Seasonality at the Bear Island Summer School, 1903-1950,” Masters Major Research Paper, Nipissing University, 2022.
2 Gowling WLG (Canada), “Schedule K,” Federal Indian Day School Class Action (2020).
3 Gary Potts, “Bushman and Dragonfly,” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes 33, no. 2 (1998): 190.
4 Sturgeon Falls Agency—Bear Island Summer School (Temagami). School Files Series. Department of Indian Affairs. Library and Archives Canada. RG 10, volume 6172, file 439-1, part 1, reel c-7910. https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/mass-digitized-archives/school-files-1879-1953/Pages/item.aspx?PageID=1873389.
5 Potts, “Bushman and Dragonfly,” 191.
Latest posts by Robert Olajos (see all)
- Seasonality at the Bear Island Indian Day School - November 18, 2025