Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Nii Ndahlohke: Boys’ and Girls’ Work at Mount Elgin Industrial School, 1890

Labour / Le Travail
Issue 93 (2024)

Reviews / Comptes rendus

Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Nii Ndahlohke: Boys’ and Girls’ Work at Mount Elgin Industrial School, 1890–1915 (Altona, MB: Friesen Press, 2022)

In its 2015 Final Report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was clear: establishing truth about residential schooling is the key to reconciliation. The report, though, was not the final statement on the “complex truth”; it only signalled the start of a new phase of truth-telling intended to deepen the understanding of the residential school system and its legacy in what is currently Canada. Nii Ndahlohke, by Lenape historian Mary Jane Logan McCallum, is an example of the important work being done in this regard after the trc. The book’s inspiration stems from the work of the Munsee Delaware Language and History Group to support greater knowledge about the Munsee-Delaware Nation, one of three Delaware communities in Canada. As McCallum explains, “learning and teaching about Mount Elgin as descendants of the students who went there is an important part of this goal.” (2) The book, as a community-engaged study written for a popular audience (and pitched to a high school level in hopes it will be included in the Ontario curriculum), offers a micro analysis of the Mount Elgin Indian Residential School between 1890 and 1914. Nicknamed “the Mush Hole” after the “bland” and “unsatisfying diet at the school,” the school operated near London in southwestern Ontario between 1851-1946, making Mount Elgin one of Canada’s first and longest-running residential schools. (1)

Nii Ndahlohke will be of particular interest to scholars of work and labour because of McCallum’s decision, guided by community priorities, to focus on the role of student work in the institution’s operation/maintenance as well as student/community resistance to the school’s coercive labour regime in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Overall, this small book makes a large contribution. It shows how Canada’s genocidal residential school system must be understood through the lens of work and labour. In doing so, it models what community-engaged histories, attentive to Indigenous research priorities and Survivor experiences, can add to knowledge about schooling and settler capitalism in Canada.

The book’s title, Nii Ndahlohke, is a Lunaape phrase that means “I work” in English and is pronounced “neen da-low-kay.” (3) The study consists of an introduction, conclusion, and afterword by Julie Tucker (member of the Munsee Delaware Language and History Group) as well as two main chapters, one on boys’ work and the other on girls’ work. The focus on work contributes to recent research that has also examined labour in boarding institutions for Indigenous Peoples, but McCallum’s book offers a deeper analysis of the central importance of gendered labour to Mount Elgin specifically.

Chapter 1 looks at boys’ work and shows how their farm labour in particular was central to Mount Elgin’s operation. “One of the great ironies of the farms associated with residential schools,” McCallum points out, “was that they were market oriented.” This meant that “while there was often plenty of farm produce, by and large, the children did not eat a lot of meat, eggs, or butter (though the same was not true for the staff of Mount Elgin.” (20) Moreover, because agricultural work was required year-round, many boys were kept at the school during the summer to work long hours on the farm. This coercive environment bred resistance. In 1915, Frank Waddilove’s act of sabotage (placing a stone in the thrashing machine used to process wheat) was supported by fellow students and community members because it called greater attention to the school’s problem of overworking and mistreating students.

Girls’ work was also central to Mount Elgin’s operation. In Chapter 2, McCallum explains, “Their responsibilities included cleaning the floors, walls, and furniture; making beds; cooking and serving food; washing up after meals; and washing, drying, and ironing clothes and linens.” (36) Officials justified these tasks as proper training for girls to become domestic servants when they left the school. In reality, girls’ unpaid work was necessary to the maintenance of the institution. The work was often demanding and even dangerous to the girls’ health. The damp and cramped environment of the laundry exposed students to parasites such as lice and bed bugs as well as deadly infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. Girls, like boys, were exploited at Mount Elgin, and they found creative ways to resist. In 1908, four girls set fire to the school’s kitchen to protest being overworked and underfed; however, the fire did no significant damage and an investigation by officials concluded that there were no legitimate student grievances. Student and community complaints about overwork at Mount Elgin were largely ignored or dismissed by school and Department of Indian Affairs officials, but McCallum’s recovery work through historical research helpfully preserves memory of the various labour grievances at the school.

The book skillfully links boys’ and girls’ work at Mount Elgin to the wider matrix of emerging settler capitalism in the area surrounding the school, but more could have been done to connect that work to the other kinds of labour at the institution performed by priests, nuns, farmhands, service staff, and other contract workers. As well, learning to labour was central to other kinds of colonial schooling at the same time, such as day schools and public schools, but these possible linkages are not explored in Nii Ndahlohke. Making these connections, however, was not the community’s priority, so hopefully the book will inspire new scholars to push the insights of the book further, especially McCallum’s claim in the conclusion that student labour at residential schools can be considered a form of “slavery” and “forced or coerced labour” (59).

Nii Ndahlohke is written for a general audience but yields important insights and points the way forward for future scholars of work and labour. New research that, as much as possible, draws on McCallum’s example of community consultation to co-create new knowledge about schooling and settler capitalism will help contribute to the important project of putting truth before reconciliation.

Sean Carleton

University of Manitoba

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2024v93.019.