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.
For close to a century the Indian Industrial School at Brandon, Manitoba, perched on a low ridge north of the city and the snaking Assiniboine River, creating the impression of a British stately home overlooking a landscape park. Operating from 1885 to 1971 and rebuilt in 1930, the school was one of the first major residential schools built with government funds rather than through the private efforts of the church entities that operated them.1 The Methodist Missionary Society responsible for the school was adamant it be located in the agricultural south of the province despite the vehement protests of the Cree and Anishnaabe communities in Treaty 5 territory whose children it was intended to educate. Although all residential schools engendered ecological alienation by removing children from their home communities and ecosystems, the 500-kilometer-plus dislocation of its first pupils makes Brandon among the more extreme examples of this policy.
In part because of its relationship to a city deeply enmeshed in the processes of western agriculturalization and Indigenous displacement, the Industrial School at Brandon is a particularly revealing example of the settler-colonial ideals that underpinned the residential school system more broadly. Through consideration of photographs of the Brandon school grounds, this post explores some of the symbolism inherent in residential school landscape decisions – decisions which embodied an ideology of nation-building founded on the theft and transformation of Indigenous lands.
The Brandon Industrial School’s first principal was Methodist minister John Semmens. In his 1915 autobiography, Semmens reflected on the institution’s early years. He wrote briefly of student illness and death, noting that “it was sad beyond measure when we had to bury a pupil so far away from home and friends.”2 He did not, however, find those deaths significant enough to enumerate, nor did he explain any arrangements surrounding the burial or memorialization of the deceased children.3
The contrast between that paragraph and the one that follows is an uncomfortably frank revelation of the school’s priorities. Listing the changes undertaken during his tenure, Semmens found more pride in the transformation of the school grounds than in the pupils’ education or even their survival:
Meantime improvements went on apace… Roads had been made and trees planted until the place assumed a prosperous aspect. The farm had been fenced, Fresh land had been broken. A new barn was under way. Outwardly we were winning success, gradually but surely, and our hopes for the future seemed to be well based.4
Most photographs of the Brandon Industrial School focused on the types of outward improvements listed by Semmens. However, the image included in the 1898 report of the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) (figure 2) reveals the relative wildness of the school landscape. The image is dominated by scrubby brush and tall grass, with the principal’s residence barely visible in a dense bank of trees. It is possible to read the choice of photograph as symbolic, with the grand school building’s authority over the land Semmens disparagingly referred to as “a barren hillside” embodying the federal government’s authority in the anticipated transformation of the west. The wild prairie was to be plowed, planted, and transformed into profitable farmland; Indigenous peoples, broken of their ties to the land, were to be absorbed into the dominant white culture.
“The wild prairie was to be plowed, planted, and transformed into profitable farmland; Indigenous peoples, broken of their ties to the land, were to be absorbed into the dominant white culture.”
A photograph from a decade later (figure 3) reveals early attempts at transforming the school grounds, namely the tree planting and road-making that Semmens boasted about in his memoirs. Under the dominating presence of the school building, three children stand squarely in the middle of a gravel drive, positioned as though they are part of the suite of institutional improvements recorded in the scene. Certainly, residential schools aimed to promote productivity, cleanliness, homogenization, and the elimination of complexity for both lands and pupils.
Contrary to the present-day tendency to describe residential schools as a hidden shame, the earliest industrial schools were highly visible institutions located near major population centres. In turn, the schools were part of the visual lexicon of western settlement propaganda and featured prominently in commercial picture postcards such as the ones above. Differences between figures 3 and 4 invite our scrutiny. The three forlorn students are gone; the school building fills more of the frame. The trees, though still small and immature, are in leaf. Most noticeably, the image has been hand-coloured with sentimental hues: soft white clouds float in a pale blue sky, a rosy glow surrounds the imposing brick building, and landscaped plants announce themselves in vibrant shades of green and brown.
“Depictions of residential schools hid their harsh realities from sight to present themselves as models of progress and development.”
Although this flattering depiction of a site of so much misery may strike contemporary viewers as surprising, it is in keeping with the iconography of the picture-postcard craze and the ways the government intended residential schools to be understood. Just like early depictions of the prairies featured domesticated gardens and farmyards instead of the broad sweep of treeless plains that greeted most settlers, depictions of residential schools hid their harsh realities from sight to present themselves as models of progress and development.
In his 1897 report to the DIA, Principal Semmens wrote about the process of creating the school landscape, revealing the values embedded in the transformation:
The grounds adjacent to the institution are being improved as time and labour can be spared so that we may present the creditable appearance which our nearness to the Experimental farm and the city of Brandon would seem to demand. In breaking up the fallow land we are endeavouring to have every plot on the perfect square so that our work may commend itself to the numerous observers passing this way. In the direction of ornamentation we have not forgotten the great demand there is upon our skill and forethought. Everything possible will be done that taste can suggest or labour accomplish to make the general appearance attractive.5
Semmens’ concern for “the perfect square” is in keeping with the logic of the Dominion Land Survey, which in the 1870s and 1880s had imposed a regular grid across the prairie west to systematically measure and distribute its lands. His note indicates an awareness of the role of observers in co-creating the meanings signalled by the landscape, hinting at the school’s function in communicating with the settler public. By signalling the importance of “taste” and ornamentation, Semmens’ report further implies the association between garden aesthetics and the attainment of such class-linked ideals as refinement and civility. Figure 5, taken nearly two decades later, is a testament to the persistence of those values. It depicts an orderly landscape in which the plants are as carefully controlled as the people and buildings arranged among them.
The perceived power of the landscape to influence observers was not limited to the school grounds themselves. The aesthetic ideals of the area surrounding the Industrial School were also considered an active asset in attempts to transform Indigenous children. In an 1898 report, Indian Agencies Inspector T.P. Wadsworth wrote,
from its favourable situation and environment this school should have a prosperous future… It possesses within itself unique facilities for training the pupils, and it is surrounded by object lessons of high-class farming, and rural homes; these must make a lasting impression on their youthful minds.6
Figure 6 depicts a portion of the Dominion Experimental Farm, which abutted the school grounds. In addition to the rigid delineation of research plots, note the tree-lined roadways and boundaries. This type of intensive, state-sponsored scientific research enabled the agricultural model valorized by residential schools and intimately linked them with broader patterns of ecological upheaval.
Figure 7 makes clear what the others have hidden: the enormous amount of student labour required to maintain the agricultural and ornamental landscapes of residential schools. Forced child labour was not only necessary for the daily functioning of underfunded schools, but it was also one of the primary mechanisms by which the government intended to transform Indigenous children. The Brandon Industrial School’s second Principal Thomas Ferrier reported to the DIA in 1909 that the school emphasized farming and gardening as “the great hope of uplifting the Indian is to induce him to get his living from the soil.” Administrators were likewise vocal about their expectations that the agricultural focus of the children’s training would prevent them from learning the skills necessary to return to the forest- and lake-based lifeways of their northern communities.
Left: Figure 8. J.M. Turner, Harewood House from the South, 1798, watercolour. Right: Figure 9. “I.R. School Grounds, Brandon.” [no date, after 1930] by Ernest Jerrett. Archives of Manitoba, George Harris Fonds, Acc. 1979-141, P7456.
“Residential schools played a prominent role in the settler-colonial processes that overturned thousands of years of ecological relationships in Canada, destroying indigenous ecosystems and attempting to destroy Indigenous cultures.”
Similarities between Figure 8, a West Yorkshire stately home featuring grounds designed by a notable practitioner of the English landscape garden style, and Figure 9, the Brandon Industrial School landscape, suggest an attempt to recreate this type of characteristically English landscape in southern Manitoba. Regardless of the school’s success (or lack thereof) in this endeavor, residential schools played a prominent role in the settler-colonial processes that overturned thousands of years of ecological relationships in Canada, destroying indigenous ecosystems and attempting to destroy Indigenous cultures. The visual form of school landscapes served as a microcosm of those processes, not only projecting a model of the orderly, agricultural land use anticipated for the entire prairie west, but also embodying the same values and ways of viewing nature that characterized culturally and ecologically destructive colonialism around the globe.7
About the Author:
As a fourth-generation settler raised on my family’s grain farm in Treaty 6 Territory, I am deeply aware that everything my family has is a result of the Treaty relationship and the land itself. I came to this topic through a desire to better understand the role of Indigenous dispossession in modern environmental crises, and a longstanding interest in the Western tendency to devalue relationships to nature, in particular the tendency to ignore plants.
Pre-existing collections of Indigenous oral histories, including excerpts of student testimony presented in the publications of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee and transcripts of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, were central to the genesis of my thesis topic and informed my analysis of other sources. However, I made the choice to focus my work on settler-generated archival sources, believing that what is mine to tell is what is mine by ancestry: the settler viewpoint that raised me to adulthood in an agricultural landscape I was taught to find beautiful.
Notes
1 Residential schools initially fell into two categories: larger, more centrally located Industrial Schools with an explicit focus on teaching industries expected to be of value in settler-colonial economies, and so-called “boarding schools,” built in more remote regions on or near reserves. By the mid-1920s, the government shifted away from the industrial model and began referring to all such schools under the umbrella term “residential schools.”
2 Semmens, Rev. John. Notes on a Personal History, 1915, 97-98. United Church of Canada Archives, Fonds F3204 – John Semmens fonds.
3 The fate of the student burial grounds at Brandon, some of which are located on land that is now part of a privately owned campground, is an ongoing injustice. Despite decades of efforts to have the graves properly acknowledged little progress has been made. See Manitoba History: A Cup of Cold Water: Alfred Kirkness and the Brandon Residential School Cemeteries and City of Brandon should buy back land where residential school children are buried, family member says | CBC News
4 Semmens, Rev. John. Notes on a Personal History, 1915, 98.
5 Canada, Department of Indian Affairs Annual Report, 1897, 408.
6 Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs 1898, 533.
7 The wealth enabling the purchase of the estate on which Harewood House stood and the landscaping of its grounds by Lancelot “Capability” Brown derived from plantation and slave ownership in the Caribbean. See Mireille Harper, “Harewood, Slavery and the Caribbean,” https://harewood.org/stories/harewood-slavery-and-the-caribbean/.
Taryn Goff