'I Would Like the Girls at Home': Domestic Labor and the Age of Discharge at Canadian Indian Residential Schools

Abstract

Survivors of Canadian Indian residential schools and their descendants will often recall discharge from the schools occurring at the age of either sixteen or eighteen. In fact the discharge of students from residential schools at the ages of sixteen or eighteen was a significant point of contention both for parents and other relatives of students as well as for school officials. This chapter examines the struggle over age of discharge between 1920 and 1940 through the lens of correspondence between parents and other family members, the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) and school staff about the return of female pupils. Parents and other relatives of the students initiated the exchange, requesting that pupils nearing or past the age of sixteen be returned to them hecause they were needed at home. In response, school staff wanting to retain students to the age of eighteen and beyond insisted that female students needed the further domestic training, moral uplift and protection offered by the schools so that they could be 'fitted' to undertake employment as domestic servants upon discharge. In fact it was often the need of the schools for the domestic labor of female students that was the real concern. On both sides of the issue, gender mattered and the struggle illuminates the importance of young Indigenous women to both economies of colonization and to Indigenous communities.