For Mary Jane Logan McCallum, researching the history of student life at Mount Elgin’s residential school is personal.
The history professor and member of Munsee-Delaware nation first heard about the institution from mentions of her great grandfather and his brother attending.
Now she’s written a new book outlining the exploitation of children’s labour in residential schooling — focused on the daily gendered labour of boys’ and girls’ between 1890 and 1915. The institution operated for more than 100 years on Chippewa of the Thames First Nation, located about 25 km southwest of London.
Chippewas of the Thames First Nation was home to an Indian Residential School from 1841 to 1949 called the Mt. Elgin Industrial Institute. It was run by the Wesleyan Methodist Society, and later by the United Church of Canada’s Home Board of Missions. (United Church of Canada archives)
“There’s a profound sense of unfairness,” she said.
Her research — which delved into old maps, photographs, school reports, letters and financial documents — found students and parents felt the amount of work was harmful to academic learning and physical well-being. Domestic work done by girls and farm labour work by boys.
The day-to-day labour at the school was done by the children due to “miserly” funding. The training at the school set students up for “lowest levels of the social hierarchy” in Canadian society, she said.
The school “is a symbol not of education but of hunger, impoverishment, loneliness, punishment, and relentless hard work,” Mary Jane wrote in the book.
The title, Nii Ndahlohke, is translated to “I work” in Lunaape, the Munsee-Delaware language.
The book is not the “definitive history of this school,” she said. “This is one history among many that we can learn about.”
Loss of language, culture and tradition were felt
May Jane’s brother, Ian McCallum, translated some vocabulary in the book to Lunaape. He is the only intermediate Lunaape language…
Shannon Holsey. Photo supplied. 
