Carriage House Third Floor

The Third floor of Poundmaker’s Lodge Carriage House. The Third Floor is the Most Internally Divided Space in the Carriage House and Includes a Large Classroom. A Mural Depicting a Mountain Range Adorns the Wall on the Other Side of the Classroom and Can Be Seen in the Point Cloud. Click on the triangle to load the point cloud.

“It has always been clear to me that the Indians must have some sort of recreation, and if our agents would endeavor to substitute reasonable amusements for this senseless drumming and dancing, it would be a great assistance.” – Duncan Campbell Scott 1921, Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs

Mural in staff room, October 2020.

The third floor of the carriage house had a staff room, the coat room for students, and a teaching classroom. Today, this floor most resembles what the carriage house would have looked like when it was last in use; the staff’s quarters still feature a hand painted mural of the mountains; the classroom still has a chalkboard up with some writing from its last use visible; and the coatroom still features numbered hooks for students. When students came to the residential school, they were assigned a number which they would be referred to instead of a name. The students’ clothes from home, upon arrival, would be stuffed into a bag labelled with their number. In the playrooms of the main schoolhouse, there would also be a numbered hook for students’ coats and outside clothes to hang on when they were at the school. Many survivors today still remember the number they were assigned at their schools.

Staff stayed in this building because children lived on the top floor of the carriage house. Students attending residential schools were not given many freedoms and children were constantly supervised or kept under surveillance.  Students would often be given severe punishments for any breach in what was deemed by a supervisor to be inappropriate behaviour, including staying up too late, being in the wrong place, and speaking out of turn or in their native languages.

Neglect and Food Insecurity

Staffing issues during the war years restricted farming activities at each school, resulting in food shortages that affected the children. Many students attending Blue Quills and Old Sun remarked on the disparity between the meals they received verses those served to staff. Jerry Wood from Saddle Lake First Nation explains:
“we used to walk by the priests’ dining room. You know, they had a nice white table cloth, polished silver, two candles, two bottles of wine with great food while we ate the garbage” (NCTR, Alberta National Event, Edmonton Sharing Circle, 2014).

In addition to malnutrition, issues surrounding kitchen sanitation and unsafe food preparation also placed student health at risk. The repurposing of kitchen equipment, a lack of proper refrigeration, and a failure to enforce basic standards for health and safety were all to blame.

Students in the kitchen in the basement of the main school building, between 1926-1937. PR1985.0100 from The Provincial Archives of Alberta, Open Copyright.

Students often came to residential schools around the age of 5 or 6, but sometimes even younger, and not speaking any English. Yet if they misspoke and tried to communicate in their own language, they would be often by physically punished. William McLean, a survivor who attended the Edmonton IRS starting in 1933, remembers that, “and we were never allowed to speak our own language inside the school building and inside the classroom. If we were caught speaking our language in the school or in the classroom we would get a strapping for it by the teachers or supervisors.”

In extreme circumstances, the students barricaded themselves into spaces together or individually at the school to protect themselves from abuse. Mel Buffalo recounted to the Commission a time when he and other students at EIRS collectively barred the dormitory doors with full dressers to block out the abusers at night [4].

For obvious reasons, the administrative records of the Department of Indian Affairs do not explicitly detail neglect or abuse of the children in the residential school system; however, this is implicit in the way that staffing, the availability of food, punishments, and labour are discussed throughout various documents.

Food insecurity plagued students at all three schools. The excessive expense of staple items like milk was often cited by officials in the Department of Indian Affairs as necessitating the farming of adjacent lands to offset the high costs of food. Such endeavors frequently relied on student labour even though every hour tending crops and livestock represented less time in the classroom. Outside of farming, children were often conscripted for hauling ice and water, constructing outbuildings, moving furniture, as well as performing other menial tasks.

The following virtual tour was created using panospheres from the Z+F 5010X laser scanner. Use your mouse or arrow keys to explore each image. Click on an arrow to "jump" to the next location.

This image gallery shows historic and modern photos related to the third floor of the carriage house. Click on photos to expand and read their captions. If you have photos of the Edmonton IRS that you would like to submit to this archive, please contact us at irsdocumentationproject@gmail.com.

Laser scanning data can be used to create “as built” architectural plans which can support repair and restoration work to The Edmonton Indian Residential School Carriage House. The main school building was lost to fire in 2000. This plan was created using Autodesk Revit and forms part of a larger building information model (BIM) of the school. The Revit drawings and laser scanning data for this school are securely archived with access controlled by Poundmaker’s Lodge Treatment Center.

Gary Williams- This is your Dorm and Your Number

They gave us a set of pajamas tops and bottoms, and our clothes were left, or they were gone. We don’t know where they went to, destroyed, burned probably. Gave us a set of blankets, bottom and the top blanket and showed us to our dorm. When we got to the dorm there was about, maybe 25-30 beds in there, single beds, steel frame braided beds. There was no bunks at that time. It was just single beds, and I picked my corner there, close to the bathroom and to the showers there. There they had showers, and so we… [background interruption].

They made us stay on our beds, or beside our beds. So it was time for a snack before lunch or dinner, and we did have our lunch, and you’re sitting there not knowing anybody.. or the other 25 people or whatever. And we waited for lunch because we travelled a long way and we were quite hungry at that time. We had our lunch and then they hauled us into a dorm and all together, sort of get together meeting about the rules and everything.

“This is your dorm and your number,” and so and, “this is where you reside until we tell you to move.”

Anyway, we got we got our instruction orders; no swearing, no talking your language. All that sort of thing.

-Gary Williams

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Notes:

Oral interview with Gary Williams. Conducted by Peter Dawson at Poundmaker’s Lodge, St Albert, May 4, 2022. Transcribed by Erica Van Vugt and Madisen Hvidberg. University of Calgary, Jan 23, 2024.