From Integration to Segregation: Government Education Policy and the School at Telegraph Creek, British Columbia, 1906–1951

Abstract

This article explores the unique circumstances surrounding the provincial school at Telegraph Creek in northwestern British Columbia, which was initially established for white settler children by Presbyterian missionaries in 1906. Local public school trustees permitted the attendance of Indigenous (specifically Tahltan) children year after year to maintain the minimum enrolment required to receive provincial funding. Combined with an annual tuition grant from the Department of Indian Affairs for the schooling of status Indian children, the Telegraph Creek public school functioned as an integrated school until provincial, federal, and missionary authorities interfered in the 1940s. This paper demonstrates how decisions made by both provincial and Indian Affairs officials leading up to the 1949 cost-sharing agreement to build a new school at Telegraph Creek were far from benign. Indigenous children in northwest British Columbia became the objects of a post-war educational policy that promoted integrated schooling and, ironically, facilitated segregation.