‘The children show unmistakable signs of Indian blood’: Indigenous children attending public schools in British Columbia, 1872–1925

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reveals that, contrary to common knowledge, schooling for Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in British Columbia – Canada’s westernmost province – was not strictly segregated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Officially, government policy stipulated that Indigenous children should attend separate day and residential schools funded by the federal government and run by Christian missionaries. In practice, however, many Indigenous children attended public schools well into the twentieth century. To document Indigenous children attending public schools between 1872 and 1925, a range of archival sources are used, including public school records and correspondence, Department of Indian Affairs records and school photographs. In demonstrating that Indigenous children attended public schools in British Columbia, and in greater numbers than has previously been understood, the article also shows how government policy concerning schooling was negotiated, contested and even subverted in everyday educational life, though always in the context of settler colonialism’s asymmetrical power relations.