Exploring the Factors Prompting British Columbia's First Integration Initiative: The Case of Port Essington Indian Day School

Abstract

On June 2, 1947, British Columbia Indian Agent F. Earl Anfield requested that the Prince Rupert Board of Trustees allow the seventeen children of Port Essington Indian Day School to attend Port Essington Elementary at an annual cost to federal authorities of $65.00 per child. The trustees' approval of the request led to the permanent closure of the fifty-eight-year-old Methodist-established day school and marked British Columbia's first large-scale integration initiative. The event would not have been significant were it not for the fact it occurred two years before the passage of provincial legislation—and four years before federal legislation—that would enable it.

How Alberta Education’s First Nations, Metis, and Inuit Policy Framework influence students attitudes towards the Indigenous Peoples of Canada.

“…One of the most famous school models of this time period are the residential schools (Prete, in press;Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada [TRC], 2015). The second regime was referred to as assimilation through integration, where Indigenous children were sent off-reserve to integrate among and be educated with non-Indigenous children (Dubensky & Raptis, 2017;Prete, in press;Raptis, 2011Raptis, , 2018TRC, 2015). An amendment to the Indian Act in 1985 gave the responsibility for educating Indigenous children to their respective provinces and territories (Indian Act, 1985).…”

Gateways to the West, Part I: Education in the Shaping of the West

“…Arguably, in the post-World War II era, seventy-five years after British Columbia's formal admission into the Canadian Confederation, government support and supervision of public schooling in remote areas of the province were more negligible than they had been thirty or forty years earlier, at the height of the mining and canning economies, for either its First Nations or European residents. 49 This story of tenuous sovereignties and waning government interest in Indigenous education in the North American West highlights the significance of schooling as both a local manifestation of nation-state power and as an intimate and somewhat unstable space in which intercultural relationships and identities were repeatedly renegotiated. As discussed in the next section, women and gendered systems of power played important roles in this historical negotiation.…”

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

“…As Raptis discovered, the integration of Indian children from the Methodist Indian day school into Port Essington's public elementary school took place for reasons that were rooted in the economic demise of the community itself and certain war-time decisions made at the federal level. 9 The decline of the fishing canneries in the 1930s, combined with the removal of Japanese residents (almost half of the town's population) to internment camps during World War II, made it economically unfeasible to maintain two elementary schools in the town. 10 In 1947, the Indian day school was closed and students were moved into the public school in order to boost its student population.…”