A children's shirt is held up as people from the Indigenous community march through downtown Montreal on July 1, 2021.ANDREJ IVANOV/Getty Images
Mark Bourrie’s most recent book is Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul. Next year, he will publish a biography of Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf.
Indigenous people in Eastern Canada were able to derail residential school projects in Quebec almost 200 years before the culturally toxic idea was revived under British colonial rule.
While much of the attention on residential schools focuses on the ones that were started in the 1830s, there’s a lesser-known story about earlier attempts to start boarding schools for Indigenous youth several centuries prior in Quebec.
Those residential schools, run in Quebec City and Trois-Rivières by Roman Catholic Récollet friars and Jesuit priests, including at least two who became Catholic saints, were smaller than the schools of the 1800s and 1900s, but their aim was the same: the transformation of First Nations children into Christian Europeans.
The story is buried in the Jesuit Relations, the vast reports sent back to France in the 1600s.
In 1616, the Récollets developed a plan to target Indigenous youth, and within a few years, they operated a day school at Tadoussac. Starting in 1620, the Récollets took several young men from their families and kept them in their Quebec City residence. Through that decade, Jesuits and Récollets took teenagers to France to be exhibited as novelties, converted to Christianity and educated.
Amantacha, the teenage son of a Huron fur trader, was taken to Europe and spent several years in France in the late 1620s. He was captured by English mercenaries on his way home, but was released when the English realized the Hurons didn’t pay ransom.
Amantacha reunited with his father, who regretted handing him over to the priests. He made it back to the Huron country on southern Georgian Bay and fit into Huron society but disappeared a few years later while on a raid against the Iroquois.
Pastedechouan, a Naskapi boy taken to France by Récollets friars, had a harder time. After spending years in France, Pastedechouan never learned the skills needed to live as a Naskapi, but he didn’t fit into French society. He ended up begging from his own people and the French and became an alcoholic. Pastedechouan starved to death in the forest in 1636.
While Pastedechouan struggled in the woods, Samuel de Champlain, the manager of the Quebec fur trade post, was telling his Indigenous fur trade partners he would not do business with them unless they brought more boys to Quebec.
In 1632, Father Paul Le Jeune was sent to Quebec to lead the Jesuit missions on the St. Lawrence River and in Huron-Wendat country on southern Georgian Bay. Le Jeune believed residential schools were the best way to assimilate Indigenous people. Within months, he was collecting boys for his project.
Portrait of Paul Le Jeune from Old Huronia by Arthur Edward Jones SJ, Fifth Report of the Bureau of Archives for the Province of Ontario, 1908.
Le Jeune started with two boys. One was an orphan, the other was a seven-year-old left with the Jesuits by a divorced Naskapi mother who couldn’t feed her children. This child was described by a Jesuit writer as “certainly not unattractive.”
Le Jeune wanted to immerse the children in the French language and customs and convert them to Christianity. When they returned to their families, they’d convince their parents to adopt European ways.
The priests knew they needed to attack Huron and Naskapi views on sexuality. Young people in both cultures were free to have sexual relations with anyone of their choosing and were not expected to be monogamous until they were married. The Hurons – especially Huron women – had what we would see as modern views of divorce. They were free to leave their husbands and expected them to support their children.
These were attitudes that the Jesuits considered diabolical, and they set out to destroy them.
The Huron children would also serve as hostages for the Jesuit priests living in Huronia. As European diseases spread through the Huron country and killed thousands, Huron leaders did consider killing the missionaries or expelling them from their country.
In 1635, Étienne Binet, leader of the Jesuits in France, acknowledged what was already happening in New France. He gave the Jesuits in Quebec permission to open a residential boarding school and raised the money to pay for it.
Jean de Brébeuf, who was canonized as a saint in 1930, began giving special instruction to 12 Huron boys in the village of Ihonatiria, northwest of modern-day Penetanguishene. When the children were about to leave Huronia for Quebec with the 1636 fur trade brigade, the mothers of nine of these boys raised such loud objections that the Jesuits took just three boys. One, Satouta, was the grandson of a senior chief who oversaw the Hurons’ foreign relations.
Portrait of Jean de Brébeuf from Old Huronia by Arthur Edward Jones SJ, Fifth Report of the Bureau of Archives for the Province of Ontario, 1908.
At Trois-Rivières, relatives of two of those boys snatched them away from the Jesuits, leaving just Satouta.
The French tried another tack. An official of the company that owned the colony promised to send 20 soldiers to Huronia if the Hurons sent 20 boys down to Quebec.
Eventually, two more Huron adolescent boys arrived in Quebec, then three were dropped off from another fur brigade. By the end of the summer of 1636, there were six boys in the residential school, but one child was sent home because he could not get along with the rest. All the boys were close relatives of Huron chiefs.
Under the control of Jesuits, including Isaac Jogues, who was canonized at the same time as Brébeuf, the boys were made to wear French clothes and eat French food, which some of them had trouble digesting. Quebec was also the arrival port for smallpox, measles and other European diseases that Indigenous people lacked immunity to. Satouta and another boy died within a few months.
The surviving boys were forced to endure hours of religious teachings and Catholic mass. They were taught reading and writing, and catechism. Public examinations of conscience and confession took up hours of their day. In what was described as their spare time, they cleared some land for a field to grow corn so they could eat traditional Huron food.
Despite the suspicions of some Hurons, three boys were sent to Trois-Rivières in the summer of 1637. One of the boys was named Tewatirhon. At Trois-Rivières, a rumour spread that the Jesuit missionaries in Huronia had been killed. Fearing French revenge, one of Tewatirhon’s uncles tried to rescue him and another Huron boy. The French found out about this and locked the uncle up. The boys managed to escape from the Jesuits, and another member of Tewatirhon’s family found him on the canoe route home.
This trading party was attacked by the Iroquois and everyone except Tewatirhon was captured. The boy made his way back to Quebec to spend another winter in the residential school.
The second surviving boy was able to get back to Huronia in the summer of 1638 but died the next year, while the third seemed to be quite happy and never tried to leave. That fall and winter, several other Huron boys arrived, but two were captured by the Iroquois and one was sent back to Huronia because he was depressed.
Still, the school was failing. It was meant to house far more than the three or four students who were there at any given time. Nor were many of the boys adopting French lifestyles and Christianity.
In 1638, new rumours spread that the Jesuits in Huronia had been killed. Charles de Montmagny, New France’s governor, wanted to send some French soldiers to investigate. Tewatirhon convinced him that it would be better if he and another student, Andehoua, went. Montmagny agreed, sending the two Huron boys, a Jesuit priest and some Algonquins up the canoe route to Georgian Bay.
The boys never came back.
Andehoua became a preacher, ignored by his own people, while Tewatirhon quickly reverted to Huron culture and sexuality. However, when he died after falling into a fire in 1641, the Jesuits claimed that he was a good Christian.
By 1639, the Jesuits realized their residential school was a failure. The children didn’t want Christian instruction and quickly reverted to Huron ways when they got home. The Jesuits hoped their former students would marry and raise Christian children, but, partly because of Catholic divorce rules, Huron women weren’t interested in becoming Christians.
The Jesuits finally realized they couldn’t convert the children unless their parents were already Christians. The priests decided to target Huron leaders and heads of families instead of children.
By 1640, all the children had left the Quebec residential school. The priest who ran the school spent most of that winter preaching to an elderly Huron man, Ateiachus. The old man, intrigued by what Tewatirhon told him about Christian spirituality, moved into the school after the last boys left. Fifteen or 16 young Huron men who were camped near the Jesuit mission at Quebec City came by occasionally to heckle the old man for deserting the ways of his own people.
The next summer, Ateiachus’s canoe flipped over while he was paddling back to Huronia. The bulky French clothes absorbed water and weighed him down, so he drowned. The Jesuit residential school experiment had failed. Money for a college in Huronia, donated by a wealthy Parisian benefactor in 1646, went into the fortifications at Ste. Marie among the Hurons and for the operation of the Jesuit mission in Quebec City.
So, while Indigenous people had the military power to resist, the residential school idea was stillborn. By 1830, military and economic power had shifted to colonists. The next generation of residential schools would create many Pastedechouans. There would be few Tewatirhons and Amantachas.