Indian School Road: Legacies of the Shubenacadie Residential School by Chris Benjamin

Indian School Road: Legacies of the Shubenacadie Residential School by Chris Benjamin

Author:Chris Benjamin [Benjamin, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Canada, Post-Confederation (1867-)
ISBN: 9781771082136
Google: urSyoAEACAAJ
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing
Published: 2014-11-15T23:32:21.688990+00:00


Older girls worked the kitchen, where survivors remember many accidents.Sisters of Charity, Halifax, Congregational Archives

Knockwood remembers witnessing a young girl nearly lose her hand in a gruesome encounter with the mangle. The girls tried to turn it off but the propeller broke and the emergency switch was too high to reach. The girl screamed for several minutes until the Sister in charge came running in from her tea break. The girl’s hand was missing a layer of skin. She was pale, her lips purple. She fainted, and was rushed to hospital where she stayed several months. Her fingers never totally healed, but crochet work helped bring back some dexterity. When Father Mackey reported the accident, he said the girl had found she could warm her hands on the mangle. She’d already done it once, Mackey said, almost getting her hands caught the first time. “No one questioned how her hands could be cold working on a steaming machine in a hot laundry,” Knockwood notes. No safety device was ever installed and no safety training ever given. Knockwood remembers five girls who were maimed by the mangle or dough mixer in her eleven years at the school. The girls worked unsupervised.

The older girls got kitchen duty. Four at a time worked with two Sisters and a famously cranky, and sometimes cruel, cook in the kitchen. They got up at 4:00 or 5:00 A.M. to get the coal fires going and put on two giant aluminum pots of porridge. They each sliced and buttered a few dozen loaves of bread, boiled a couple hundred eggs, and made soup. They worked until 6:30 P.M., a fourteen-hour day. It required lugging ten-gallon milk pails around. Some of the girls weren’t tall enough to reach the stovetops and had to stand on stools. When they started they were partnered with another girl who’d been at it awhile, and the Sister might show them how to clean the fireplace and light the fire. It was children training children to use knives and machinery, including an industrial milk-and-cream separator, and a dough mixer. The kitchen-girls spent about an hour a day in class.

Three months after the first children arrived at Shubenacadie, two girls got their hands caught in the dough mixer. The first had been cleaning the mixer; the second, not noticing where her friend’s hand was, turned the machine on. She reached in to help the first girl. A Sister heard their screams, turned off the machine, and took them to the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax, forty minutes away. The second girl lost most of a finger. “They were warned many times about tinkering with the machines,” Mackey wrote.

Each girl worked four weeks at a time in the kitchen, twice each term, in rotation so that a new girl was added each week. During preserving season, two more girls were brought in. Survivors remember being severely punished for mistakes. “Sister Maria Adrian has beaten me many times over the head and pulled my



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