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“She Is Hostile to Our Ways”: First Nations Girls Sentenced to the Ontario Training School for Girls, 1933–1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Joan Sangster
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When industrial schools were initially proposed in late nineteenth-century Canada, they were perceived to be a common solution for the neglected and delinquent working-class boy of the urban slums and for the Aboriginal boy in need of similar education, discipline, and moral and vocational training. This undertaking briefly encapsulated the twinned aims of Canada's nation-building project: to civilize and acculturate both the poor and the colonized to middle-class, Western, white and Anglo norms. As John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff remark of nineteenth-century British imperialism, the taming of the “uncivilised and immoral” indigenous African and British slum dweller were overlapping projects, with the “primitive and the pauper” seen as “one in spirit. …the sacred task of the colonizing mission was to reconstruct the home lives of both” by inculcating in their daily lives the bourgeois values of “modern domesticity.”

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Law and History Review , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Spring 2002 , pp. 59 - 96
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2002

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References

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10. Native girls could also be charged under the Indian Act, which prohibited things such as the consumption of alcohol and “profligacy.” However, the other statutes provided all the latitude that judges needed. The Juvenile Delinquents Act, chap. 40, 7–8 Edward VII, 1908; Statutes of Ontario, The Training School Act, chap. 51, 1939. On the Juvenile Delinquent Act, see Canadian Welfare Council, The Juvenile Court in Law (Ottawa: Canadian Welfare Council, 1941)Google Scholar; Sutherland, Neil, Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Reitsma-Street, Marge, “More Control than Care: A Critique of Historical and Contemporary Laws for Delinquency and the Neglect of Children in Ontario,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 3.1 (1989–1990): 510–30Google Scholar; Trépanier, Jean, “Origins of the Juvenile Delinquents Act of 1908,” in Dimensions of Childhood: Essays on the History of Children and Youth in Canada, ed. Smandych, Russell, Dodds, Gordon, and Esau, Alvin (Winnipeg: Legal Research Institute, 1991), 205–32.Google Scholar On the 1924 amendment adding sexual immorality, see Théorêt, Bruno, “Régulation juridique pénale des mineures et discrimination à l'égard des filles: la clause de 1924 amendment la Loi sur les jeunes delinquents,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 4 (1990–1991): 539–55.Google Scholar The division of powers made the JDA in Canada somewhat different than U.S. counterparts, but for discussion of the latitude in American juvenile justice with regards to sexual immorality, see early comments by Tappan, Paul, Delinquent Girls in Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947)Google Scholar and later analysis by Schlossman, Steven and Wallach, Stephanie, “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality: Female Juvenile Delinquency in the Progressive Era,” Harvard Educational Review 48 (Feb. 1978): 65–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chesney-Lind, Meda, “Judicial Enforcement of the Female Sex Role, the Family Court and Female Delinquency,” Issues in Criminology 8 (1973): 51–70.Google Scholar

11. Although they were usually released by seventeen, girls could be under the supervision of OTSG until they were twenty-one. In 1949, this was changed to eighteen.

12. As well as the extensive administrative records for training schools, I examined forty-seven individual case files of First Nations girls who spent time in training school, almost all of them at OTSG. These were compared to my larger study of 350 OTSG case files, as well as files on girls' delinquency on reserves in the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) papers.

13. As Richard Evans points out, historians have long attempted to interrogate the limitations of their sources. See Evans, , In Defence of History (London: Granta Books, 1997), 147.Google Scholar

14. For some discussion of this issue, see Pierson, Ruth Roach, “Experience, Difference, Dominance and Voice in the Writing of Canadian Women's History,” in Writing Women's History: International Perspectives, ed. Offen, Karen, Pierson, Ruth Roach, and Rendall, Jane (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 79–106Google Scholar, and Jhappan, Rahda, “Post-Modern Race and Gender Essentialism or a Post-Mortem of Scholarship,” Studies in Political Economy 51 (Fall 1996): 15–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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16. The literature on this is vast, encompassing labor, immigration, and criminal justice history, to name some areas. See, for example, Tarnopolsky, Walter, Discrimination and The Law in Canada (Toronto: Richard De Boo, 1982)Google Scholar; James Walker, W. St. G., “Race” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada, Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1997), 12–50Google Scholar; Backhouse, Constance, Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).Google Scholar

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19. The literature here is extensive. For some discussion of the imposition of sexual and familial codes, including by means of the Indian Act, see Jamieson, Kathleen, Indian Women and the Law in Canada: Citizens Minus (Ottawa: Ministry of Supply and Services, 1978)Google Scholar; Silman, Janet, Enough Is Enough: Aboriginal Women Speak Out (Toronto: Women's Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Kirk, Sylvia Van, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society (Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer, 1979)Google Scholar; Anderson, Karen, Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (New York: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar; Devens, Carol, Countering Colonization: Native American Women and the Great Lakes Missions, 1630–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Barman, Jean, “Taming Aboriginal Sexuality: Gender, Power and Race in British Columbia,” B. C. Studies 115/116 (1997–1998): 237–67.Google Scholar

20. Scott Clark, “Aboriginal Customary Law Literature Review,” unpublished paper for the Manitoba Public Inquiry into the Administration of Justice for Aboriginal Peoples, 1990; Bryan Keon-Cohen, “Native Justice in Australia, Canada and the U.S.A.: A Comparative Analysis,” in Native People and Justice in Canada part 2, ed. Canadian Legal Aid Bulletin (1982): 187–258; Satzewich, Vic, “Where's the Beef? Cattle Killing, Rations Policy and First Nations ‘;Criminality’ in Southern Alberta, 1892–95,” Journal of Historical Sociology 9.2 (1996): 188–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Macleod, R. C. and Rollason, Heather, “Restrain the Lawless ‘Savage’: Native Defendants in Criminal Courts of the North West Territories,” Journal of Historical Sociology 10.2 (1997): 157–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Loo, Tina, “Tonto's Due: Law, Culture and Colonization in British Columbia,” in Forster, Hamar and McLaren, John, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law: British Columbia and the Yukon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 128–70.Google Scholar

21. Monture-Angus, Patricia, Thunder in My Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks (Halifax: Fernwood Books, 1995)Google Scholar; Ross, Rupert, Dancing with a Ghost: Exploring Indian Reality (Markám: Octopus Books, 1992)Google Scholar; Denny, Kjikeptin Alex, “Beyond the Marshall Inquiry: An Alternative Mi'kmaq Worldview and Justice System,” in Elusive Justice: Beyond the Marshall Inquiry, ed. Marmette, Joy (Halifax: Femwood Books, 1992), 103–8Google Scholar; Dickson-Gilmore, E. J., “Finding the Ways of the Ancestors: Cultural Change and the Invention of Tradition in the Development of Separate Legal Systems,” Canadian Journal of Criminology (July-Oct. 1992): 479–502Google Scholar; Fiske, Jo-Anne, “From Customary Law to Oral Traditions,” B.C. Studies 115/116 (1997–1998): 267–88Google Scholar; Ryan, Joan, Doing Things the Right Way: Dene Traditional Justice in Lac La Martre, NWT (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995).Google Scholar

22. Indeed, locating Aboriginal girls in the records of OTSG is difficult for this reason. However, the government did try to record the number of “Indians” as opposed to “whites” in the school. Whites were separated from three other “races,” namely, “Hebrews, Negroes and Indians.” Statistics on the “race” (later “nationality”) of training school inmates were published in Ontario, Annual Report of the Minister of Public Welfare and, after 1938, Annual Report of Industrial Schools and Training Schools (whereas they were not for reformatories and prisons). However, the actual files of Native girls are not marked and are therefore difficult to locate in the (sometimes chaotic) microfilmed collection. Once the federal government agreed to pay the fee for Indians with official federal status, this was noted in the register, allowing me to locate some files. However, not all First Nations girls (even those from reserves) had official Indian status. Some girls were Métis, and some may have lived off reserves and been paid for by the municipality even if they did have status.

23. The average number of Native admissions yearly for the period 1950–59 was 7 percent. Census of Canada, 1941, vol. 1, table 11, lists Indians as 0.8 percent of the Ontario population; Census of Canada, 1951, vol. 2, table 32, lists Indians as 0.8 percent of the Ontario population.

24. The highest number of Native admissions to St. Mary's was 9.3 percent of admissions in 1958; on average they were 5.8 percent of St. Mary admissions in the 1950s. Ontario, Annual Report on Training Schools, 1950–59.

25. Archives of Ontario (AO), RG 60, Ontario Training School for Girls, (OTSG) case file 2197, 1950s.

26. AO, OTSG case file 840, 1940s.

27. Training schools were overcrowded because some were lent to the federal government for military use, and they were then relocated in smaller quarters. OTSG had to move from its home in Gait to smaller buildings in Cobourg, Ontario. The Board did repeat this recommendation in the 1950s, even after OTSG returned to its own quarters. Ontario, Annual Report on Training Schools, Report of Training School Advisory Board, 1940, 1943, 1944 (for Whitton's recommendation that both “defectives” and “Indians” be placed in different institutions) and 1955.

28. In fact, this had been happening on an informal basis before then.

29. AO, OTSG case file 1929, 1950s. This, of course, was linked to the Indian Act and its attempts to designate and regulate Native identity according to the colonizer's gender norms. Jamieson, Indian Women and the Law; Winona Stevenson, “Colonialism and First Nations Women in Canada,” in Scratching the Surface, 49–82.

30. Maysie Rogers, “Indian Affairs,” Canadian Welfare, 1 March 1951, 18.

31. Joint Committee of the Senate and House of Commons, 1946–48, quoted in Hawthorn, H. B., A Survey of the Indians of Canada (Ottawa: Indian Affairs Branch, 1967), pt. 1, 326.Google Scholar

32. Some CAS services did cover Native communities, but this was not uniform. Ibid, 327.

33. Hawthorn, A Survey, 329.

34. Woodward, Mary, “Juvenile Delinquency among Indian Girls” (M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1949), 3, 12.Google Scholar

35. Peggy Pascoe argues that nineteenth-century “biological” or “scientific” racism was challenged in social science and legal discourses after the 1920s by those who argued that “culture,” not race, was all important. However, these theories laid the basis for a new “modernist ideology” that reinscribed racism in new ways. Pascoe, Peggy, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Hodes, Martha (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 464–90.Google Scholar

36. Woodward, “Juvenile Delinquency,” 12, 18.

37. Vestiges of “biological racism” did linger on. “Anne is dark skinned and shows her racial characteristics,” wrote one penal worker; “she is childish, likes to play with dolls and be outside.” AO, OTSG file 875, 1940s. (Dolls were undoubtedly related to her youth.) Some anthropological studies of this period reinforced similar assumptions; they noted that acculturation of Natives had led to distant parents and more “passive” children, that communities were in a state of disintegration, and that patterns of illegitimacy prevailed despite norms to the contrary. Honigmann, John, “Social Disintegration in Five Northern Communities,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 2 (1965): 199–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bock, Philip, “Patterns of Illegitimacy on a Canadian Indian Reserve: 1860–1960,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 126 (May 1964): 143–48Google Scholar; Boggs, Stephen, “Culture Change and the Personality of Ojibwa Children,” American Anthropologist 60 (1958): 47–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38. Hostbjor, Stella, “Social Services to the Indian Unmarried Mother,” Child Welfare (May 1961): 7–9.Google Scholar

39. On working-class girls and sex delinquency, see Indiana Matters, “Sinners or Sinned Against? Historical Aspects of Female Juvenile Delinquency in British Columbia,” in Not Just Pin Money: Selected Essays on the History of Women's Work in British Columbia, ed. Latham, Barbara and Pazdro, Roberta (Victoria: Camosun College, 1984), 265–77Google Scholar; Alexander, The Girl Problem. Claims that promiscuous or amoral sexuality in Native cultures had to be abolished for the sake of “civilization” had been voiced since the nineteenth century: Barman, “Taming Aboriginal Sexuality”; Osburn, Katherine M. B., “To Build Up the Morals of the Tribe: Southern Ute Women's Sexual Behaviour and the Office of Indian Affairs, 1895–1932,” Journal of Women's History 9.3 (1997): 11–26Google Scholar; Carter, Sarah, “Categories and Terrains of Exclusion: Constructing the ‘Indian’ Woman in the Early Settlement Era in Western Canada,” Great Plains Quarterly 13.3 (1993): 147–61.Google Scholar For a more international analysis of the anthropological gaze on indigenous women, see Sharon Tiffany and Adams, Kathleen, The Wild Woman: An Inquiry into the Anthropology of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1985).Google Scholar

40. National Archives of Canada (NAC), RG 10 (Dept. of Indian Affairs, or DIA), vol. 8464, file 901/23–21, pt. 2, “Social Workers Report, Nov. 1954, B. C.” My thanks to Jessa Chapuk-Hall for showing me this reference.

41. NAC, RG 10, vol. 100680, file 43 18–16. Indian Agent for Nipissing to DIA, C. 1948.

42. Mary Woodward, “Juvenile Delinquency.”

43. NAC, RG 10, DIA, vol. 10721, file 484, 18–28. Letter from Chapleau Agency to Mercer Superintendent, 22 Aug. 1966.

44. NAC, RG 10, vol. 6938, file 471/29–24, pt. 3, Helen Martins, Report for Southern Ontario, Aug. 1953.

45. Brant, Clare, “Native Ethics and Rules of Behaviour,” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 35 (1990): 534–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

46. Maysie Rogers suggested that assimilation could mean equality but not the disappearance of Indians' “special characteristics.” See Rogers, “Indian Affairs,” 21. Rogers also suggested that treaties needed to be respected and discriminatory attitudes of Canadians altered. Such views began to appear more in the 1960s.

47. U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, “Report on Juvenile Delinquency Among the Indians” (Washington, 1956), 8.

48. Rogers, “Indian Affairs,” 23. By the mid-1960s, social work writing is starting to stress community development and the need to involve Native peoples in the delivery of social services. See “Indian and Métis Conference,” Canadian Welfare (March-April, 1963): 124.

49. NAC, RG 10, DIA, vol. 11437, file 494, 18–4. Letter of Indian Agent Swartman to Cannon Sanderson, Red Lake, Ontario, 1950s.

50. AO, RG 20, container 46, Director of Psychology and Neurology to the Minister, 11 Feb. 1958.

51. Dorothy Chunn, “Secrets and Lies: The Criminalization of Incest and the (Reformation of the ‘Private’ in British Columbia, 1890–1940,” paper presented at Canadian Law and Society Association, St. Johns, June 1997; Sangster, Joan, “Masking and Unmasking the Sexual Abuse of Children: Violence against Children in the ‘Badlands’ of Ontario, 1916–30,” Journal of Family History 25.4 (2000): 504–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52. AO, OTSG case file 2353, 1950s.

53. Ibid.

54. On the material and social context of criminalization, and similar examples to these of non-Native girls, see Sangster, Joan, “Girls in Conflict with the Law. Exploring the Construction of Female ‘Delinquency’ in Ontario, 1940–60,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 12.1 (2000): 24–25.Google Scholar

55. AO, OTSG case file 1666, 1950s.

56. This perception was very common for many OTSG girls; immoral mothers in particular (i.e., those who had affairs, sometimes even those who lived in common-law marriages) were seen as potentially infecting their daughters.

57. If the charge was “incorrigibility” under the Training School Act, the committal usually detailed one or more precise problems. Efforts at sexual containment were central to the use of delinquency laws, and the project of girls training schools in this era. Sangster, “Girls in Conflict with the Law” Myers, Tamara, “The Voluntary Delinquent,” Canadian Historical Review 80.2 (1999): 242–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Iacovetta, Franca, “Parents, Daughters, and Family Court Intrusions into Working-Class Life,” in On the Case: Explorations in Social History, ed. Iacovetta, Franca and Mitchinson, Wendy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 312–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Theft was only a concern in a minority of cases. This stands in contrast to the study of a mixed-race girls reform school in South Africa where African girls were more likely to be policed for theft, white girls for sexual immorality. Chisholm, Linda, “Gender and Deviance in South African industrial Schools and Reformatories for Girls, 1911–34,” in Women and Gender in South Africa to 1945, ed. Walker, Cheryl (Cape Town: David Philip, 1990), 293–312.Google Scholar

58. AO, OTSG case file 1647, 1950s.

59. AO, OTSG case file 2272, 1950s.

60. As current authors note, the stereotype of Native peoples as alcoholics still has an effect on court cases involving women. See Nahanee, Teressa, “Sexual Assault of Inuit Females: A Comment on ‘Cultural Bias,’” in Confronting Sexual Assault: A Decade of Legal and Social Change, ed. Roberts, Julian and Mohr, Renate M. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 192–204.Google Scholar

61. AO, RG 20, container 47, Memo of Director of Psychology and Neurology for the Minister, 11 Feb. 1958. This memo also indicates that the province was well aware of over-incarceration: “we have long been aware that [OTSG]… contains a disproportionate number of Indian and part Indians, most committed to protect them against our civilization, but some… have a high nuisance value in communities bordering on Reserves and they are committed to our Department to get rid of them.”

62. Odern, Delinquent Daughters; Sangster, Joan, “Incarcerating ‘Bad Girls’: The Regulation of Sexuality Through the Female Refuges Act in Ontario, 1920–45,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7.2 (October 1996): 239–75.Google Scholar

63. AO, OTSG case file 525, 1940s.

64. AO, OTSG case file 840, 1940s.

65. Native peoples might also engage in customary marriages, rather than Christian ones, though these also tended to stress monogamous commitment. For some discussion of accommodation to Christian ideas concerning sexuality and marriage, see Barman, “Taming Aboriginal Sexuality” Sally Weaver, “The Iroquois: The Consolidation of the Grand River Reserve in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” and “The Iroquois: The Grand River Reserve, 1875–1945,” in Aboriginal Ontario: Historical Perspectives on the First Nations, ed. Rogers, Edward and Smith, Donald (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1994), 213–57Google Scholar; Schmaltz, Peter, The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Shkilnyk, Anastasia M., A Poison Stronger than Love: The Destruction of an Ojibwa Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Flannery, Regina, Ellen Smallboy: Glimpses of a Cree Woman's Life (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Rogers, Edward, The Round Lake Ojibwa (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1962).Google Scholar

66. In almost one quarter of the First Nations cases in OTSG, the girls made direct claims that they were sexually assaulted by nonfamily or family members. In another four cases, more indirect references were made to violence or abuse existing within the family.

67. AO, OTSG case file 2115, 1950s.

68. AO, OTSG case file 1595, 1950s.

69. AO, OTSG case file 265, 1930s.

70. Loo, “Tonto's Due.” See also Brownlie, Robin, “A Fatherly Eye: Two Indian Agents on Georgian Bay, 1918–39” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1996)Google Scholar, and on political integration, Boldt, Menno, Surviving as Indians: The Challenge of Self-Government (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).Google Scholar For a related view of American Tribal Courts, see Hoxie, Frederick, “Towards a ‘New’ North American Indian Legal History,” Symposium on Contemporary and Historical Issues in Legal Pluralism: Prairie and Northern Canada, November 1992 (Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg), 7.Google Scholar

71. AO, OTSG case file 1694, 1950s. It is difficult to know how important the issue of religion was since there was only a passing reference to it: “the grandmother is with the Church of Jesus Christ… P is interested in another mission and also wanted to attend a Longhouse wake.”

72. This dilemma connects to contemporary controversies concerning the criminal justice system and violence within Native families. Some Native women have advocated “healing [rather than] the adversarial process” of (Euro-Canadian) courts to deal with domestic violence. They recognize the need to place violence within a context of racism and colonialism but do not wish to “excuse” men's use of violence, which the courts sometimes do. See Ontario Native Women's Association, Breaking Free: a proposal for change to aboriginal family violence (Thunder Bay: Ontario Native Women's Association, 1989)Google Scholar; Koshan, Jennifer, “The Sounds of Silence: The Public/Private Dichotomy, Violence, and Aboriginal Women,” in Challenging the Public/Private Divide: Feminism, Law and Public Policy, ed. Boyd, Susan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997): 87–109Google Scholar; Nahanee, “Sexual Assault of Innuit Females,” 192–204.

73. AO, OTSG case file 265, 1930s.

74. AO, OTSG case file 2105, 1950s.

75. The average age of entry was fourteen for Native girls, fifteen for non-Native. At least 60 percent of the OTSG First Nations girls had reserve origins or connections.

76. AO, OTSG case file 1886, 1950s.

77. Often, what could be seen as a virtue is interpreted as a vice. For example, one probation report complained that a Native girl was not learning the value of saving her earnings, as “the family pools their money” and the wider sharing of resources meant that there was “always someone being helped.” AO, OTSG case file 2050, 1950s.

78. AO, OTSG case file 2076, 1950s.

79. AO, OTSG case file 1666, 1950s.

80. AO, OTSG case file 1555, 1950s.

81. AO, OTSG case file 2115, 1950s. In this case Indian Affairs was not even given an adequate chance to find alternative care for her before she was committed.

82. Frideres, James, Native Peoples in Canada: Contemporary Conflicts (Scarborough: Prentice Hall, 1993), 148–52.Google Scholar In 1966, 69 percent of Ontario Native peoples still lived on reserves, 30 percent of Indian bands were in “remote” areas, and 45 per cent in rural areas.

83. Because of the small sample used from OTSG (and the necessity of keeping all inmates' identities confidential), I do not believe it is useful to detail the exact reserves girls came from. Also, a girl may be listed as a status member of a northern band but be arrested in a northern city, so that it is not clear when she left the reserve. The girls came from the major First Nations located in Ontario, but geographically, there were fewer from eastern Ontario and few from large cities like Toronto and Hamilton.

84. Sangster, Joan, “Criminalizing the Colonized: Ontario Native Women Confront the Criminal Justice System, 1920–60,” Canadian Historical Review 80.1 (March 1999): 32–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In three of the OTSG cases of First Nations girls, it is clear the Indian agent initiated the charge; in one case he supported it strongly. In other cases, he was sometimes called on to testify.

85. AO, OTSG case file 875, 1940s.

86. AO, OTSG case file 2085, 1950s.

87. Ibid.

88. Given the high numbers of cases originating in the far north, the claim that girls were “lonesome for [their own] people” was common. See NAC, RG 10, vol. 11438, file 494/18–28, pt. 2, Letter from Probation Officer in Toronto to Superintendent of Sioux Lookout Agency, 1962.

89. AO, OTSG case file 1647, 1950s.

90. AO, OTSG case file 2170, 1950s.

91. Clare Brant's training was in mainstream psychiatry, and so, for instance, he accepts some prevailing definitions of delinquency, such as the equation of illegitimate pregnancies with girls' delinquency. But Brant also developed new theories, based on his own medical and political experiences. He was influenced by his wide reading of anthropological literature, including anthropologists such as Wax, Rosalie and Thomas, Robert, “American Indians and White People,” Phylon 22.4 (1961): 305–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar His writing, and some of the articles he used, were deposited in the Trent University Archives after his death in 1995. The writing was collected in an unpublished manuscript: Trent University Archives (TUA), Clare Brant, Collection of Chapters, Lectures, Workshops and Thoughts. Brant also influenced the writing of Ross, Rupert, Dancing with a Ghost and Returning to the Teaching: Exploring Aboriginal Justice (Toronto: Penguin, 1996).Google Scholar

92. TUA, Brant, Collection. Clare Brant and P. G. R. Patterson, “Native Child Rearing Practices, Their Role in Mental Health,” unpublished paper, 108.

93. Brant's work was politically important as it posited an alternative understanding of Aboriginality, countering a pejorative identity for Native peoples. As Kay Anderson argues, however, we should also avoid “reifying” aspects of Aboriginal identity, which is not an unchanging “stable heritage from the past” but a cultural and political creation, framed by and within asymmetrical power relations. Anderson, Kay, “Constructing Geographies: ‘Race.’ Place and the Making of Sydney's Aboriginal Redfern,” in Constructions of Race, Place and Nation, ed. Jackson, Peter and Penrose, Jan (London: UCL Press, 1993), 96.Google Scholar

94. Brant and Patterson, “Native Child Rearing Practices,” 112.

95. TUA, Brant, Collection. “Native Ethics and Rules of Behaviour.”

96. Ibid., 130.

97. Grandstaff, Carl, Galloway, Wilda, Nixon, Joanne, “Racial and Cultural Identification among Canadian Indian Children,” Phylon 34 (1973): 368–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar This study was modeled on one pioneered by Afro-American psychologists Kenneth Clark and Maime Clark, who were trained in traditional theory but also committed to progressive racial politics. See Markowitz, Gerald and Rosner, David, Children, Race and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark's Northside Clinic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996).Google Scholar

98. AO, OTSG case file 1666, 1950s.

99. AO, OTSG case file 1771, 1950s.

100. Brant and Patterson, “Native Child Rearing Practices,” 102.

101. In Brant's view shyness was a cultural, social (possibly even biological) adaption of Native personality to their environment. The biological argument might be difficult for many researchers to accept. TUA, Brant, Collection. “Communication Patterns in Indians: Verbal and Non-Verbal,” Annals of Sex Research 6.4 (1993): 259–69.Google Scholar See also his “Self-Esteem and Shyness,” 148–53 (TUA, Brant, Collection).

102. AO, OTSG case file 1521, 1950s.

103. AO, OTSG case file 2084, 1950s.

104. AO, OTSG case file 2050, 1950s.

105. AO, OTSG case file 1519, 1950s.

106. TUA, Brant, Collection. “Communication Patterns in Indians,” 31.

107. AO, OTSG case file 1694, 1950s.

108. AO, OTSG case file 2115, 1950s. Today, a more affluent white child with her experiences might be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome; this girl, however, was seen as unintelligent and vacuous.

109. “People who disagreed openly [in Native groups] were barely tolerated, avoided or dismissed.” Marlene Brant Castellano, “Native Social Work Education in Canada: Issues and Adaptions,” unpublished typescript, Trent University Library. Those dispensing “therapy” to many of the girls in OTSG did not see those “from a lower socio-economic background” as good subjects for “psychotherapy.” AO, RG 20–148, Dept. of Reform Institutions, container 11, Tadeusz Grygier, “Social Adjustment, Personality and Behaviour in Ontario Training Schools,” 1966.

110. AO, OTSG case file 1820, 1950s.

111. AO, OTSG case file 2050, 1950s.

112. AO, OTSG case file 1428, 1950s.

113. For this argument in relation to health care, see Keim, Mary-Ellen, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900–50 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998), 175.Google Scholar

114. Trent, James, Inventing the Feeble Minded: A History of Mental Retardation in the U.S. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Noll, Steven, “The Sterilization of Willie Mallory,” in “Bad Mothers”: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America, ed. Ladd-Taylor, Molly and Umansky, Lauri (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 41–57Google Scholar; Rafter, Nicole Hann, “Introduction,” in White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919, ed. Rafter, Nicole Hann (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; McLaren, Our Own Master Race. On the reproduction of class and patriarchal relations in forensic testing, see Chunn, Dorothy and Menzies, Robert, “Gender, Madness and Crime: The Reproduction of Patriarchal and Class Relations in a Psychiatric Court Clinic,” Journal of Human Justice 1.2 (1990): 33–54.Google Scholar

115. Stephen, Jennifer, “‘Factory Girls’ and the Toronto Psychiatric Clinic,” in Law, Society and the State: Essays in Modern Legal History, ed. Binnie, Susan and Knafla, Louis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 405–37.Google Scholar Stephen deals with the period of eugenic popularity in the 1920s. For similar comments on psychiatry, class, and sexuality, see Lunbeck, Elizabeth, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender and Power in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap, 7.Google Scholar

116. Keim, Colonizing Bodies, 174.

117. AO, OTSG case file 1595, 1950s.

118. Ao, OTSG case file 1647, 1950s.

119. My thanks to Ramona Sutherland for sharing her knowledge of Ojibwa with me on this issue.

120. AO, OTSG case file 2353, 1950s.

121. AO, OTSG case file 1771, 1950s.

122. AO, OTSG case file 1172, 1950s.

123. NAC, RG 10 DIA, vol. 10721, file 484, 18–28, “Juvenile Delinquency,” circa I960.

124. AO, OTSG case file 2353, 1950s.

125. Ao, OTSG case file 1666, 1950s.

126. AO, OTSG case files 1666, 1555, 1694, 1950s.

127. The terms “awls” and “rans” were those used by staff and government officials. On regulation and resistance in other reform schools, see Wimhurst, Kerry, “Control and Resistance: Reformatory Girls in Late Nineteenth-Century South Australia,” Journal of Social History 18 (1984): 273–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cahn, Susan, “Spirited Youth of Fiends Incarnate: The Samar-cand Arson Case and Female Adolescence in the American South,” Journal of Women's History 9.4 (1998): 152–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Myers, Tamara and Sangster, Joan, “Retorts, Runaways and Riots: Resistence in Reform Schools for Girls in Ontario and Quebec, 1920–60,” Journal of Social History 2001 (Spring 2001): 669–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

128. AO, OTSG case file 2170, 1950s. As one doctor wrote, “Like other Indian girls, if placed early in the institution the main problem is continued awls.” In this case, she was far from home in the North. Although statistics were kept on awls, these were not broken down by race, so it is difficult to test out his claim.

129. AO, OTSG case file 1353, 1950s.

130. AO, OTSG case file 2075, 1950s.

131. Brant and Patterson, “Native Child Rearing Practices,” 112.

132. Both Native and non-Native inmates were almost never sentenced to OTSG for violent behavior but became violent once in OTSG.

133. Bannerji, Himani, Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism (Toronto: Women's Press, 1995), 37.Google Scholar While these observations relate to racism, is it possible that they also provide some insight into other, non-Native OTSG girls who too felt diminished, stigmatized, and denigrated? 111.

134. AO, OTSG case file 875, 1940s.

135. AO, OTSG case file 1353, 1950s.

136. Ibid.

137. Along with Ellen, there is evidence that another inmate of Gait attempted suicide after her release, when on parole. See AO, RG 20 D-13, Mercer Reformatory for Females, case file 10395, 1950s.

138. TUA, Brant, Collection. “Suicide in the North American Indian: Causes and Prevention,” 170–81.

139. TUA, Brant, Collection. “Inquiry—Suicides at the Prison for Women.” 205.

140. AO, OTSG case file 1572, 1950s.

141. On the disjuncture between medical and penal staff, see Watson, Stephen, “Applying Foucault: Some Problems Encountered in the Application of Foucault's Methods to the History of Medicine in Prisons,” in Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body, ed. Jones, Colin and Porter, Roy (London: Routledge, 1994), 132.Google Scholar

142. Ibid.

143. AO, OTSG case file 1555, 1950s.

144. AO, OTSG case file 1666, 1950s.

145. AO, OTSG case file 1555, 1950s.

146. AO, OTSG case file 1929, 1950s.

147. AO, OTSG case file 525, 1940s.

148. AO, OTSG case file 1666, 1950s.

149. In this very small sample, it is clearest in two cases involving Haudenosaunee peoples.

150. Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnicity and the Historical Imagination, 289.

151. Sherene Razack discusses the problems of “talking culture” in Looking White People in the Eye; “power should not be subsumed under culture,” 61.

152. It is important to note that “individual” tragedies can spawn collective consequences for the children (and therefore communities) of those who were institutionalized, akin to the “residential school syndrome” that Native communities are now trying to heal.

153. AO, OTSG case file 2340, 1950s.