Manual Labour and Industrial Schooling for Indigenous Youth in Upper Canada, 1821-1863, and the Democratic Symbolic

This dissertation explores why residential schooling went on to become a federal system despite early and acknowledged failures. Efforts to understand the provenance and aftermath of the system must address how the schools were intimately related to Canada’s colonial past and liberal democratic present. In this dissertation, the history of the residential school system for Indigenous children in Canada is situated within the context of pre-confederation democratization. Democratization is understood within the framework outlined by Claude Lefort as a sociocultural phenomenon characterized by a shift in symbolic representations of the locus of power away from an external, identifiable source toward the sovereign power of the individuals constituting a collectivity. I focus on how Crown administrators, missionaries and philanthropists articulated the desirability of manual labour and industrial boarding schools for Indigenous children and how those discourses reflected and propagated an emerging democratic symbolic.

To maintain their unity, social systems have historically required symbolic representations of the source of legitimacy of concepts, relations of power, norms and behaviors. If for British colonizers, that source had in previous regimes represented something external to the collective that authorized claims to knowledge and was understood as the basis of law, within the democratic symbolic emergent in nineteenth century Western Europe and North America, that source dissipates in its distribution throughout the collectivity. In letters, reports and policy documents exploring and describing the form and function of manual labour and industrial boarding schools for Indigenous children written between 1821 and 1863, I identify the turn inward in seeking foundational legitimizing precepts in the evangelical ideal of salvation through personal transformation, in conceptualizations of self-perfection via pursuit of one’s individual interests and in ideas of a universalized society constructed around shared natural sympathies or mutual protection of self-interest. The work of manual labour and industrial boarding schools as they were imagined in this period was to generate a subject that would find the principle of order within their own person and cast out, preferably of their own volition, that which signified chaos and disorder.