{"id":25876,"date":"2012-10-10T05:57:41","date_gmt":"2012-10-10T05:57:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=25876"},"modified":"2012-10-10T23:31:46","modified_gmt":"2012-10-10T23:31:46","slug":"metis-families-and-schools-the-decline-and-reclamation-of-metis-identities-in-saskatchewan-1885-1980","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=25876","title":{"rendered":"M\u00e9tis Families and Schools: The Decline and Reclamation of M\u00e9tis Identities in Saskatchewan, 1885-1980"},"content":{"rendered":"

M\u00e9tis Families and Schools: The Decline and Reclamation of M\u00e9tis Identities in Saskatchewan, 1885-1980<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon
\nMarch 2009
\n270 pages<\/p>\n

Jonathan Anuik<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies
\nUniversity of Alberta<\/em><\/p>\n

A Dissertation Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History<\/em><\/p>\n

In the late-nineteenth century, M\u00e9tis families and communities resisted what they perceived to be the encroachment of non-Aboriginal newcomers into the West. Resistance gave way to open conflict at the Red River Settlement and later in north central Saskatchewan. Both attempts by the M\u00e9tis to resist the imposition of the newcomer\u2019s settlement agenda were not successful, and the next 100 years would bring challenges to M\u00e9tis unity. The transmission of knowledge of a M\u00e9tis past declined as parents and grandparents opted to encourage their children and youth to pass into the growing settler society in what would become Saskatchewan. As parents restricted the flow of M\u00e9tis knowledge, missionaries who represented Christian churches collaborated to develop the first Northwest Territories Board of Education, the agent responsible for the first state-supported schools in what would become the province of Saskatchewan. These first schools included M\u00e9tis students and helped to shift their loyalties away from their families and communities and toward the British state. However, many M\u00e9tis children and youth remained on the margins of educational attainment. They were either unable to attend school, or their schools did not have the required infrastructure or relevant pedagogy and curriculum. In the years after World War II, the Government of Saskatchewan noticed the unequal access to and achievement of the M\u00e9tis in its schools. The government attempted to bring M\u00e9tis students in from the margins through infrastructural, pedagogical, and curricular adaptations to support their learning.<\/p>\n

Scholars have unearthed voluminous evidence of missionary work in Canada and have researched and written about public schools. As well, several scholars have undertaken research projects on Status First Nations education in the twentieth century. However, less is known about M\u00e9tis\u2019 interactions with Christian missionaries and in the state-supported or publicly funded schools. In this dissertation, I examine the history of missions and public schools in what would become Saskatchewan, and I enumerate the foundations that the M\u00e9tis considered important for their learning. I identify M\u00e9tis children and youth\u2019s reactions to Christian and public schools in Saskatchewan, but I argue that M\u00e9tis families who knew of their heritages actively participated in Roman Catholic Church rituals and activities and preserved and protected their pasts. Although experiences with Christianity varied, those with strong family ties and ties to the land adjusted well to the expectations of Christian teachings and formal public education. Overall, I tell the story of M\u00e9tis children and youth and their involvement in church and public schooling based on how they saw Christianity, education, and its role on their lands and in their families. And I explain how M\u00e9tis learners negotiated Protestant and Roman Catholic teachings and influences with the pedagogy and curriculum of public schools.<\/p>\n

Oral history forms a substantial portion of the sources for this history of M\u00e9tis children and youth and church and public education. I approached the interviews as means to generate new data \u2013 in collaboration with the people I interviewed. Consequently, I went into the interviews with a list of questions, but I strove to make these interviews conversational and allow for a two-way flow of knowledge. I started with contextual questions (i.e. date of birth, school attended, where family was from) and proceeded to probe further based on the responses I received from the person being interviewed and from previous interviews. As well, I drew from two oral history projects with tapes and transcripts available in the archives: the Saskatchewan Archives Board\u2019s \u201cTowards a New Past Oral History Project \u2018The M\u00e9tis\u2019\u201d and the Provincial Archives of Manitoba\u2019s Manitoba M\u00e9tis Oral History Project. See appendices A and B for discussion of my oral history methodology and the utility of the aforementioned oral history projects for my own research…<\/p>\n

Read the entire dissertation here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

M\u00e9tis Families and Schools: The Decline and Reclamation of M\u00e9tis Identities in Saskatchewan, 1885-1980 University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon March 2009 270 pages Jonathan Anuik, Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies University of Alberta A Dissertation Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,19,838,459,8],"tags":[12395,12396,12397,2721,10019],"class_list":["post-25876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-canada","category-dissertations","category-history","category-media-archive","tag-jonathan-anuik","tag-jonathan-d-anuik","tag-jonathan-david-anuik","tag-saskatchewan","tag-university-of-saskatchewan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25876\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}