During my prospectus defence, my supervisor - knowing that I thrive on metaphors - suggested one for helping to keep my work manageable. Think of a stone that you lift up, she said; underneath it are many different types of bugs. You might want to know where every single one of them are going, but that’s not feasible. You can only follow one or two bugs at a time.
“One bug at a time” has been a sort of motto as I’ve waded through catalogues of files, trying to decide what, when, where, and how I will read this summer. And so I have playfully subdivided my list of primary documents that I have yet to read into “bugs” - categories, really - so that the list does not become too overwhelming. That’s not precisely what she was suggesting in this metaphor, but I do feel that it’s in the same spirit.
I’ll be spending this summer in archives in Toronto and Ottawa. At the beginning of the month, I sent out privacy requests for swaths of files; I have yet to gain access to any of them. Fortunately, I have a few hundred non-restricted documents to pore over first. Some of these are online, so they’re a good place to start while I’m in BC. In a sense, I’m alternating between two bugs right now - the Department of Indian Affairs annual reports (I am tweeting snippets of these, sporadically, at @DIAreports) when internet access is not reliable, and various letters and memoranda from the Red Series when I do have a good connection and can view digitized image files.
Yesterday, I read a handful of letters pertaining to custody issues in the Northern Superintendency. One of the files I reviewed was quite lengthy, and also troubling. A little boy had gone to live in the home of a white settler in a village near his reserve. This settler had pulled the child out of school, in favour of tutoring him privately. I hope that I am seeing euphemisms where none exist, but to me, the Indian Agent’s condemnation of the man sounded like an allegation of sexual abuse. In any case, the man was deemed an unfit guardian, and the Department of Indian Affairs sent the child to the Shingwauk school, a significant distance from their home. Notably, there was another residential school far closer to the reserve; this was one of thousands of cases where interdenominational rivalry severed a family. The child’s family was neither absent nor deemed unfit by any of the officials involved in deciding his fate; the Department of Indian Affairs objected to a settler man adopting the child because the man was a "very peculiar sort of a fellow” - they made scant mention, however, of the boy’s mother and grandparents who were raising him.
Today, I read still more files where the fate of a child was decided by white officials, far away. The files are full of words, yet blank when it comes to what I feel matters so much - the children themselves. In one case, the adults argue over jurisdiction, and whose responsibility it is to pay for the costs of a child’s maintenance in a reformatory, but behind all this documentation is an eleven-year-old who has been sentenced to five years in an alien environment, as punishment for misbehaving and running away from a residential school. In another file, the Department swiftly agreed to pay for the transportation of a little girl who was to travel to Toronto to have her foot amputated; for the surgery, she spent two months away from home. While my research is on policy, I am aching to see how children responded to the politicking that severed them from their homes, severed their limbs. From the thousands of pages of microfilm, spanning decades, I hope we have not severed the children.
