The Edmonton Indian Residential School

Written By Dane Ryksen

The site of the former residential school compound today. It’s now occupied by the Nechi Institute Centre for Indigenous Education. The brick farm building to the centre-left is one of the few original structures left on the grounds.

  • 25108 Poundmaker Road, Sturgeon County, Alberta

  • Architect: Roland Guerney Orr of the Department of Indian Affairs

  • Constructed: 1923-24/1936

  • Demolished: 2000 (Arson)

A gala event opened the Edmonton Indian Residential School on the cool night of October 23rd, 1924. Although students had been arriving at the Methodist-run institution for months, that didn’t stop a flashy ‘grand-opening’ celebration. Their building had “cost more to erect than any other in [the] entire system,” and the Church wanted everyone to know. The public were cordially invited to attend and “a great many Edmonton people” did.

Tours were conducted. The Alberta College band played. A commemorative tablet was unveiled. Dignitaries spoke. The school’s purpose was laid bare.

Charles Stewart, the former premier of Alberta serving as the Liberal government’s Minister of the Interior and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, explained. The government was unsatisfied “with the case of the Indian people in the Dominion.” It was nothing less than the “white man’s duty” to help them. They needed educating to “be assimilated into the life of the country which necessitated a great change in the red man’s mode of living.”

William Morris Graham, Western Commissioner of Indian Affairs, agreed. “Unless we have schools of this kind, we will never be able to touch the problem of the Indian at all. The Indian that goes to school is better than one who doesn’t go to school.” “[It is hoped] that every Indian boy and girl would have the chance to attend one of these institutions.”

Reverend C.E. Manning, General Secretary of the Methodist Church’s Home Department, had more pointed comments. In his eyes, a life-debt was owed. It was the white man who “[opened] up Canada” and “brought values to the red man which would not have been obtained otherwise.” Through Edmonton, they would have “opportunities of education in the way of free board and teaching […] such as no white child received.” They should be thankful.

Historian John Milroy explains that this position was commonplace among settler-Canadians. To them, “Aboriginal people were… ‘sunk’ in ‘ignorance and superstitious blindness,’ a well of darkness from which they were in need of ‘emancipation.’” Stewart thought so. It was the moral responsibility of every white Canadian to help “elevate the Indian from his condition of savagery [and their] state of ignorance, superstition and helplessness,” he contended.

Continuing, Milroy argues that the residential school system’s primary foundation was to make an ‘Indian’ fit “for life in a ‘modern’ Canada.” The day’s belief held that if Anglo-Canadian attitudes could be instilled at a young age, these children could “then reach the state of civilized Canadians: one in which their ‘practical knowledge’ and labour would make them ‘useful members of society.’” Of course — as Celia Haig-Brown writes — this all came at the expense of “the habits and feelings of their ancestors, and the acquirements of the language, arts and customs”.

This attitude was pervasive. Even pedestrian publications like the Edmonton Journal repeated this line of thinking almost verbatim. They once described Edmonton’s students as “already well-skilled in the arts of hunting and trapping.” They only needed “a few months of training in academic subjects” for them to be able “to take no insignificant part in life of the present day.” Learning to farm was always emphasized in these discussions.

The idea had been born from the mind of St. Albert’s Bishop Vital Grandin, early in the system’s development. Convinced that the Indigenous Peoples faced extinction, “and doubtful that adult hunters and trappers could be transformed successfully into farmers,” he had “pinned his hopes for the future of Aboriginal people on the education and conversion of children.”

In Edmonton’s eight-hundred acre field, the boys got to work — girls were ordered to prepare meals and adjust place settings in the kitchen and dining hall. All manner of farm-care was taught. Some boys tilled the land. Others took care of the ground’s seventy-five pigs. Machines were serviced. Forty cattle were watched; twenty-five were milked. It was hoped this “technical” education would allow “the young Indians [to] take up employment in ordinary walks of life,” specifically in “the economic life of the country.”

Reynold Williams, from the Kispoix First Nation of Hazelton, British Columbia, attended Edmonton between 1950 and 1955. He described his experience with two words: “Cleaning barns.” Speaking to a Journal reporter years later, he said:

“I hardly went to school. We started with cows in the morning at about 5:30 a.m., then we would go to the pig barns and the horse barns. If you finished early and you work and do a good job, you eat breakfast. And if you didn’t do a good job, you had to go back and do it over again. That’s the way it was. It was their rules, I guess. They found ways to take you out of class, so you could go and do some labour.”

— Edmonton Journal, August 31st, 2003

Field instruction was lacklustre and often worthless. Very rarely were the students taught by trained professionals — instead their priest-teachers took up the mantle. According to Joseph “Augie” Merasty, a student from the similarly-patterned St. Therese Residential School, they didn’t even try:

“[The instructor] never touched a plow or any farm implement, and I honestly could say I never even saw him enter the barn. He was always super clean and wouldn’t go into a smelly barn, let alone drive a team of horses or milk a cow, or shovel and scrape dung. No, sir, he always had to be immaculately dressed.”

— The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir

In Edmonton’s case, “the land was poor, the weather was bad, and the boys simply too young to farm successfully.” The results should have been obvious. For some, like Martin Benson, an Indian Affairs education official, they were: “the schools were actually making it harder for students to earn a living,” he once wrote. For others it was of little consequence — work was work. “If their boys complained that they had to work hard at the school, they would take that as necessary, as no man, white or red, had the right to think that the government would support him without working,” Reverend Manning quipped.

What little was learned in the field was only matched by what little was taught in the classroom. Historian Anthony Di Mascio — describing identical tactics used in the Northwest Territories — explains how much of the system’s curriculum was designed to make “Aboriginal culture impure in the eyes of Aboriginal children themselves.” Textbooks that extolled the virtues of European agriculture, courses that reinforced western gender roles, lectures that venerated the great-men of British history, and frequent citations from the Testament and Gospel, inferred that the “[traditional] way of life and habits of the children were of an inferior standard.”

In doing this, Di Mascio argues the entire system stripped “[the children’s] identities bare and ensured that any attempt at reintegration with kin and community would fail.” In turn, the “deliberate process of psychological and interpersonal identity annihilation based upon racist ideas of subversion and disrespect for Aboriginal culture, knowledge, and values,” made the children aliens in their own society.

Haircutting was one way to achieve this. Teaching students to be ‘Canadian’ wasn’t just learning how to farm or read — it was how to look ‘Canadian’. George Muldoe, a student who attended from 1958 to 1963, was forced to cut his classmates’ long hair:

“I ended up being a barber for the school. I started first thing Saturday and I cut hair all day Sunday. So many weekends were cutting hair. I don’t know how I ended up being a barber. I was just asked and tried it. I did it for about three years […] Twenty-five years later, I still get comments about the haircuts I was giving. One guy said: ‘There you are, you son-of-a-bitch’. He said, ‘I waited 25 years to tell you that.’ He had long hair and I shaved him. He was just crying away. I didn’t feel very good doing that.”

— Edmonton Journal, August 31st, 2003

For Edith Memnook, an Edmonton student during the Great Depression, her haircut was an equally traumatic experience:

“From then on our culture was full of sin. It made me furious all my life. I hated white people for almost half a century.”

— Edmonton Journal, June 10th, 1991

Language was banned. In 1945 Reverend Cantelon of Edmonton’s McDougall United Church, was appointed to serve as Dean of the Boys’ Dormitory. He spoke fluent Cree, yet was expressly prohibited from communicating in his students’ native-tongue. His son later recalled that “he couldn’t take it after six months. The kids would come up to him and speak in Cree and he wasn’t permitted to reply. And they felt that he had forsaken them.”

Harold Woodsworth, son of Principal Joseph Francis Woodsworth, deflected these kinds of arguments. It was purely for pragmatic reasons, he contended. These languages were forbidden, not because of the superiority of English, but because “there were natives there from five different linguistic groups.” “I played with those children. They never stopped speaking their language,” he later argued.

Teachers who disagreed with their methods were free to leave. Others were forced out. For Mr. McIlwraith, the school’s seventh, eighth, and ninth grade teacher during the late 1950s, that’s what happened. His tenure at Edmonton was marked by vocal contempt for their outdated materials, methods, and purpose — that disillusionment drew him into conflict with Oliver Strapp, principal. In her dissertation, Donna Wilson explains that “in a letter to R.F. Davey, the superintendent of education, Strapp wrote that McIlwraith did not get along with other staff and had told him that ‘the children here are suffering under unjust staff members and he intends to be their defender.’” As a member of the Friends of the Indians Organization, McIlwraith was thought to be “exerting an influence that is detrimental to the harmonious conduct of the school.” Strapp threatened to resign if McIlwraith was not let go — the teacher soon was.

Few others were as sympathetic. A Journal reporter relayed George Brertton’s experience:

“He had asked his teacher: ‘What is this building?’

His mistake was asking his question in the only language he knew — Cree.

In the 11 years he spent there, he ate porridge with mouse feces in it, and was once hit so hard he shook for two days.

At 12, he was forced to dig graves, which brought on terrified nightmares of being buried alive. He started wetting the bed.

His teacher rubbed his nose into the urine-soaked mattress until it bled.”

— Edmonton Journal, November 24th, 2005

On grave-digging, Brertton remembers:

“That was a nightmare for me to do that. Having children’s caskets lowered, and not even having a minister there or anything, just burying them. They’re all around this area, unmarked. When I think about that, it hurts. I had a lot of nightmares about that. We had to dig these holes so far down. I remember yelling and screaming in my sleep because I thought I was going to be buried in one of those holes. There’s hundreds of them around [the school].”

— Edmonton Journal, August 31st, 2003

For Reynold Williams, he remembered one thing the most: “little kids hanging on the walls.” Explaining, he said:

“By the time I was big — 12 or 13 — they used your little brother to get work out of you. They’d hang him up on the wall until you were finished. If he had a belt, they’d hook him on a hanger, then put him on a hook, or they used his shirt. They’d hang him there as long as they wanted. All day sometimes […] I finally went home in 1955. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

— Edmonton Journal, August 31st, 2003

Word of what was going on spread among the reserves and “parents continually complained that children learned nothing useful.” It soon became challenging for the school to retain its students. “In October 1931, Indian agent G.C. Mortimer reported that it had been with great difficulty that he had been able to get students from the Kitwancool Reserve in British Columbia to return.”

They had to by law. A 1920 amendment to the Indian Act made residential schooling mandatory for all Indigenous youth. Thankfully for some there were ways around it. In 1941 for instance, three sisters were kept home by their mother, Isabel Steinhauer. They had learned so little from their time at Edmonton that she instead decided to homeschool her children, “making use of correspondence courses from the Alberta education department.”

Others tried their hand at escape. Vernon Makokis did — he was caught and beaten with “a strap 40-cm long, and six-cm wide, cut from the farm’s threshing machine belt.” Undeterred, he tried again. This time was successful. “It took him three days to walk from Edmonton to Saddle Lake, and he survived by killing partridges with his slingshot.” “Makokis cannot read a word to this day, because his family refused to send him back: ‘I got no education — I don’t read,’ he said.”

Most were trapped. Edmonton was nominally a school for Cree children from Maskwacis (née-Hobbema) area reserves — in truth, many students came from the British Columbian and Yukon interiors. Local historian Jac MacDonald once wrote that, “unlike Blue Quills Indian Residential School near St. Paul, the Edmonton school grounds were not fenced. Most children stayed put because their homes were too far away to make it home.”

Those that remained endured substandard living conditions. According to reports published by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission:

“In April 1924, Indian Commissioner W. M. Graham described the water system at the Edmonton school, which had opened only two weeks earlier, as ‘an absolute failure.’ He said the system could supply only half the school’s needs. The significance of this failure was demonstrated a year later when, in May 1925, fire destroyed much of the school’s engine and laundry room. According to Principal J. F. Woodsworth, the Edmonton Fire Department saved the school from destruction; ‘Our own fire protection equipment was as we expected: absolutely useless.’”

“In 1925, Principal J. F. Woodsworth reported to Ottawa that the roof of the newly opened United Church school in Edmonton, Alberta, leaked badly during heavy rains. Beds in the girls’ dormitory were soaked, pails of water in staff rooms filled rapidly, and furnishings were drenched. The windows were so poorly made and fitted that ‘all winter the wind came in making some of the rooms almost unfit for occupation, and this in spite of heavy fires going all the time.’”

“The general decline in the quality of conditions throughout the school system continued through the late 1950s and into the 1960s. After an inspection of the Edmonton school in 1957, W. E. Frame, a new inspector of Indian schools, wrote that since taking on his position with Indian Affairs, he had been struck by ‘the fact that the quality of classroom accommodation provided for the Indian pupils on the whole is inferior to that found in the public schools of this Province, with which I am very familiar. In many cases the Indian school buildings and additions appear to have been constructed on a ‘make do’ basis to meet immediate needs.’ He found the Edmonton school to be ‘outmoded and in very poor physical condition. Renovation and upkeep have been delayed to such an extent that nothing short of a complete and thorough overhaul can bring the buildings up to a reasonable standard.’”

1960 was when everything changed. That year marked the arrival of Earl Stotesbury, a traveling missionary. Jack Danylchuk, a Journal staff writer, eloquently described the scene:

“In the instant that the headlights of his bus swept over the long grass and unkempt grounds, Earl Stotesbury knew instinctively that something was wrong at the Edmonton Indian Residential School.

Inside the school, the United Church missionary’s sense of unease grew. The dining room floor was dirty. Tables and benches were smeared with food that had been left to dry.

‘I’d been to many residential schools and I had never seen anything like that,’ Stotesbury said, as he sorted through the memories of his 84 years for the evening of Sept. 17, 1960 and the source of his suspicions about the place where he was delivering 40 native children from Saskatchewan.

‘I was absolutely shocked at the condition of it, it was disgusting.’

Looking back […] Stotesbury’s memory is light and shadow, sometimes hard or a little vague — but clear on a crucial point: there was something about Jim Ludford, the school chaplain that alarmed him.

For the next 24 hours, Stotesbury followed his instincts. He laid bare a situation that the school’s advisory committee had failed to detect during Ludford’s eight years as chaplain.”

— Edmonton Journal, November 8th, 1998

James Clarence Ludford joined the Edmonton staff in 1951. He had been ordained five years earlier. Donna Wilson’s excellent work details the priest’s rise to power within the school. By 1957 he was being described as “assistant to Principal,” and “[Principal] Strapp reported he is giving Mr. Ludford more and more of the responsibilities for running the school in the expectation that Mr. Ludford will become Principal in a year or two.”

Whatever pretensions, to Stotesbury he “looked like he was ashamed of himself.” “The two clergymen took an immediate dislike to each other” which only deepened as the traveling missionary’s suspicions grew. There was “something off” in his “relations with male students.”

“[On his second day at Edmonton], a school employee discreetly confirmed what Stotesbury suspected: Ludford had engaged in ‘homosexual practices’ with children in his care. He interviewed students and collected 44 sworn statements that described sexual and physical abuse. ‘One of them told me how Ludford would line them up in a bathroom naked and have them do certain things with themselves,’ he said.”

— Edmonton Journal, November 8th, 1998

Wilson continues:

“Affidavits were taken from these boys and Mr. Stotesbury felt that it was necessary to protect [the students] from Mr. Ludford, and as a consequence several of them remained in the home of one of the staff members on the grounds. Their failure to appear in the dormitories was a matter of concern for Mr. Ludford who did not know where they were. In trying to locate them during the night his attempts were misinterpreted and the tension grew. Upon being convinced of the condition Mr. Stotesbury notified Mr. Stade, who is the Superintendent and who was in Edmonton. Mr. Stade got in touch with the Home Mission officers at the Council including Mr. Powell, the Superintendent for Alberta.”

A physical confrontation between Ludford and Stotesbury followed, and the latter locked the chaplain “in the school and called in the authorities.” Constables of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived shortly after to take him away.

In the aftermath, Journal writer Lisa Gregorie explains that, “Ludford was suspended by church officials […] After a psychiatric assessment, he appeared at a secret court hearing and pleaded guilty. No witnesses were called. Ludford was given a one year suspended sentence, then posted to a church job in Parry Sound, Ont. He died in 1990.” As for Stotesbury, Wilson writes that he “is upheld for his work with Native People, and in particular, for the development of an amphitheater in one of his charges.”

The Edmonton Indian Residential School never recovered. A student revolt followed three years later, and the facility unceremoniously closed for good on June 30th, 1968. An arsonist would burn the abandoned building down thirty-two years later.

As the old school sat a smouldering husk, former student Ernie Collison wrote a letter into the Journal from his home in Massett, British Columbia. “Good riddance to the school of shame” it was entitled:

“I attended the Edmonton Indian residential school from 1961 to 1965 and it has burned an indelible place in my soul. I hated the place, the staff and even some of the other attendees because of their meanness.

When I got there, I was 13, coming all the way from an island in the Pacific Ocean, Haida Gwaii (aka Queen Charlotte Islands). We did get bused to Jasper Place where I attended Elmwood, Britannica and JPCHS.

That part of my education was acceptable; however, as a kid, I had to endure the embarrassment of being singled out as a student of the Indian residential school amidst the general school population.

The principal in 1961-62 fed us canned pork for bag lunch and supper every day. We got institutionalized, given a number, and had to line up everyday for everything. Lots of us joined the military cadets and militia just to get a decent meal once a week at the armoury.

I was happy to read about the fire and loss of the building. The shame of the architecture is gone, it’s a part of my life that I least like to think about.”

— Edmonton Journal, July 19th, 2000

Image Gallery:

Author’s Note:

Long-time readers may notice this write-up is a bit different. Normally I like to build a narrative and write from this all-knowing, all-seeing, pretentiously grandstandy perspective. It’s easy to do that when you usually talk about something simple like buildings — it’s less so here. For this piece I constructed it to be far, far more quote-based, instead using my words to convey detail lost to formatting, and to help sting these separate elements into a more cohesive whole.

Why am I explaining this? As some of you may know, I’m a history student. At the time of writing I’m about one-year away from graduating from the University of Alberta. A mandatory course in the program is “Historiography;” basically the study of history as a field. One of the theoretical topics discussed there has left a lasting impact on me. 

“Who can tell history?”

You might wonder: “Well what does that mean? Can’t anyone tell history?” Of course! Anyone can and should have the right to research, discuss, and form opinions on anything and everything historical. Gatekeeping something so important is dangerous. However, there’s a debate on how we approach it. To some, certain stories can only be told truthfully — not necessarily in terms of historical fact, but in feeling and experience — by those who have a deep connection to the subject. An oft-cited example relates to the topic of residential schools.

Our debate centred around this idea: “Can a person who’s reaped the benefits of Colonialism — say someone like me; a white-man descended from Scots, Dutchmen, and Ukrainians, who came to Canada for ‘empty’ land — correctly convey a story about a person or group of persons who have suffered the effects of Colonialism?” 

I know some will instantly groan and bemoan statements like that as “identity politics” or “virtue signalling” or whatever other meaningless buzzword of the month is in right now. To me though, it’s a valid question and one I find myself asking. How can I properly convey the story of a residential school and the effects it’s had on those who attended, if I’m so far removed from that story and its effects?

However, that same debate also asks if a person of privilege has the moral obligation to tell those stories, since that privilege may grant them a wider audience, allow marginalized voices to be broadcast, or — ironically enough — the sense of being less-biased on the matter in the eyes of those viewers.

Given the reach of my work, I felt I had to share something, yet I still wanted to acknowledge this weird state of limbo — hence the approach here. Of course my own bias still exists with the narrative I’ve crafted, the quotes I’ve used, how I’ve selected them, the opinions of the authors and interviewees I’ve included, etc., but I hope the end result is able to provide as much of an objective look into the Edmonton Indian Residential School as I’m personally able to create.

— Dane

Sources & Further Reading:

  • News / Print Media:

    • “Indian Industrial School To Be Erected on Sturgeon Below Town of St. Albert,” Edmonton Bulletin, May 5, 1923.

    • “Indian School Near City Is Fine Structure,” Edmonton Journal, February 23, 1924.

    • “Bright Indians From N. Alberta Reserves Will Attend School,” Edmonton Journal, March 11, 1924.

    •  “Formal Opening Indian Residential School,” Edmonton Journal, October 22, 1924.

    • “Indian Residential School at St. Albert Formally Opened,” Edmonton Journal, October 24, 1924.

    • “All Work, No Play, Dull Indeed For Little Indians,” Edmonton Journal, October 9, 1953.

    • Jac MacDonald, “No Fond Memories of Residential School Here,” Edmonton Journal, June 10, 1991.

    • Don Retson, “Atoning for the Sins of the Past,” Edmonton Journal, June 12, 2000.

    • Duncan Thorne, “Residential School Fires Common, Says Official,” Edmonton Journal, July 18, 2000.

    • “Dark Memories Make a Winning Letter: Golden Pen Awards,” Edmonton Journal, September 20, 2000.

    • Kathy Walker, “Spending School Days in Fear,” Edmonton Journal, August 31, 2003.

    • Karen Kleiss, “Money Can’t Numb Pain,” Edmonton Journal, November 24, 2005.

    • Kevin Ma, “Nothing Short of Cultural Genocide,” St. Albert Today, June 3, 2015,

      https://www.stalberttoday.ca/local-news/nothing-short-of-cultural-genocide-1289146.

  • Books / Academic Papers:

    • Peter H. Bryce, The Story of a National Crime, Being a Record of the Health Conditions of the Indians in Canada from 1904 to 1921 (Ottawa: James Hope & Sons, 1922),

      http://caid.ca/AppJusIndCan1922.pdf.

    • Celia Haig-Brown, Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002), 29, 31.

    • Sherry Farrell Racette and Loren Lerner, ed., “Haunted: First Nations Children in Residential School Photography” in Depicting Canada’s Children (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2009) 51.

    • Anthony Di Mascio and Leigh Hortop-Di Mascio, “Residential Schooling in the Arctic: A Historical Case Study and Perspective,” Native Studies Review 20, 2 (2011), 34, 39-40, 48.

    • John S. Milloy and Paul Edwards, ed., A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014), 25.

    • Joseph Auguste Merasty and David Carpenter, ed., The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2015), 3.

    • Donna I. Wilson, “Living a Lie: The Edmonton Residential School 1950 to 1960 — A Story of Sexual Abuse by a United Church Minister and the Response by the Church of the Time” (DMin diss, St. Stephen’s College, 2015), 13, 85, 95, 102,

      https://era.library.ualberta.ca/items/d84f33b9-5291-4486-a43f-9ebbfdf42de9.

  • Websites:

Dane Ryksen
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