St. Joseph's Mission was a Catholic mission established near Williams Lake, British Columbia in 1867. The mission was operated by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. It is primarily known for the notorious St. Joseph's Indian Residential School located on the property, a part of the Canadian Indian residential school system that operated on the Mission from 1891 to 1981.
During the school's history, many student deaths were recorded which resulted in multiple public inquiries into conditions at the school, as early as 1902. After the school closed, several of its staff members were imprisoned for sexual abuse. A school reunion in 2013 resulted in the creation of Orange Shirt Day, which later became a Canadian statutory holiday.
Background In 1838, two Catholic priests, François Norbert Blanchet and Modeste Demers, arrived in the Oregon Country to establish the work of the Catholic church in the Pacific Northwest. In 1841, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate were invited by the Bishop of Montreal, Ignace Bourget, to create missions among the Indigenous peoples of Canada. They quickly established missions across North America, and in the Pacific Northwest. The Catholic missionaries soon found themselves racing against Protestant missionaries to be the first to Christianize Indigenous peoples, and both groups preached against and warned Indigenous peoples against the other. Both groups also lacked manpower and resources, which slowed the work.
The nomadic lifestyle of the First Nations challenged the early Oblate missionaries. To solve this problem, they encouraged the Indigenous to cease their nomadic ways and create farming settlements, preferably in a location far away from other white people, so that the missionaries could act without interference. Pierre-Paul Durieu was instrumental in creating the Oblate strategy for working with Indigenous people, called "Durieu's System". It involved interfering with tribal elections, and creating a "Catholic Indian state" in as many First Nations villages as possible. It involved turning the local chief into an ambassador for the Catholic church, by giving them the authority to enforce religious laws among his people, enforce a ban on tribal celebrations and practices, and to keep white men other than the priests away from the village.
As the Oblates continued their work in the Oregon Territory, they came into conflict with the Catholic priests who had preceded them, and following a decade of conflict, they made the decision to move to New Caledonia (the British portion of the Oregon territory) beginning in 1858, and request that Rome give them the autonomy to conduct their work as they pleased, without interference from local Catholic authorities, which was granted in 1864. The Oblates quickly established missions across the new Colony of British Columbia.
Meanwhile, the First Nations in the region lived essentially undisturbed by colonial settlement, with only the occasional fur trader passing through. The Cariboo region was home to the Secwepemc ("Shuswap"), the Tsilhqotʼin ("Chilcotin"), and the Dakelh ("Carrier") First Nations. Beginning somewhere between 1858 and 1861, the Cariboo Gold Rush sparked a massive wave of immigration into the Cariboo region by white people and Chinese people. In order to support the gold rush, the Cariboo Road was constructed between 1860 and 1863, which brought gold miners and other settlers into the Cariboo region. The settlers also brought smallpox; an epidemic in 1862-63 wiped out many of the Indigenous people in the Cariboo. The Tsilhqot'in people responded to the construction of the road by starting the Chilcotin War, which resulted in an attack on a construction crew and the subsequent hanging of five Tsilhqot'in chiefs.
History Founding the mission In 1860, James Maria McGuckin joined the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in Yorkshire, England. In 1863, he arrived in Victoria, British Columbia, where he was ordained as a priest and became the vice principal of an Oblate-run school. In 1866, the Oblates sent him to the Cariboo to establish a mission among the First Nations. He first arrived in Richfield, British Columbia, where he was asked to provide services to Irish and French gold-miners, who eventually raised funds to build a church in Richfield. However, as this was not his primary mission, he quickly moved on. In 1864, two Oblate priests made a journey to the Cariboo, where they proposed Quesnel, British Columbia or Soda Creek as the ideal sites for the future mission. In July 1866, Father Charles Grandidier made a journey to the Cariboo, and proposed two alternate locations for the mission: Pomeroy's farm along the San Jose River, near Williams Lake, not far from a Secwepemc settlement at modern-day Williams Lake; or a location near 141 Mile house. Father James McGuckin selected Pomeroy's farm, because it was located halfway between the major Secwepemc settlements at Soda Creek and Alkali Lake; it was also fairly close to Quesnel, a gathering place for the Dakelh and Tsilqot'in. It was also far enough away from Richfield to prevent any meddling by the gold-miners. When Mr. Pomeroy found out the Catholic church wanted to buy his farm, he raised his price; after unfruitful negotiating, two other men bought Pomeroy's farm at the original cost, and re-sold it to the Oblates at the same price they paid for it, in April 1867. The two men planted a wheat crop and added a milk cow prior to turning the property over to the Oblates.
On July 5, 1867, St. Joseph's Mission was founded. The priests’ initial excursions among the Indigenous peoples were very successful, and ten churches and chapels were blessed in the Cariboo before the end of the first year, most of them Indigenous. The priests were aided in their efforts by reports of a miracle in which a Soda Creek woman was raised from the dead in order to receive baptism, after which she once again died. The priests found that they could usurp Secwepemc deities the "Old-One" and the "Coyote" as "God the Father" and "Jesus", and as the Old-One sent messengers on occasion, they claimed to be his messengers and were thus able to convert the Secwepemc people. Likewise, the priests usurped Dakelh religious beliefs in their efforts to convert the Dakelh people. However, the priests were unable to find any syncretism between Catholic and Tsilhqot'in religious beliefs, and while they had some success evangelizing the Tsilhqot'in, it was much more difficult, and there was resistance to the mission's efforts until the 1940s. In evangelizing the Cariboo First Nations, the Catholic missionaries faced no competition from Protestant missionaries, who had arrived with the gold rush and left when it ended, giving St. Joseph's Mission a monopoly on Indigenous missionary work in the Cariboo for many decades.
Initially the mission engaged in ranching and farming in order to become self-sustaining, but also as a means of building connections into the nearby community. Father McGuckin pre-empted and purchased hundreds of acres surrounding the mission to increase its agricultural potential, by 1881, the Mission was 1600 acres, and had secured water rights for 100 years. As they lacked sufficient Oblate brothers to farm the land, they hired local Catholics and Indigenous people to work the land. However, contractual disputes cost the mission hundreds of dollars, forcing the Oblates to find a way to farm the land themselves.
The mission was located on good farmland, and by 1876 the mission donated $850 annually towards the cost of running Oblate schools in other parts of the province; in 1918, St. Joseph's mission was considered the primary financial support of all Oblate mission work in British Columbia. The mission was responsible for recording births and deaths in the area.
First school The promise of an education and laws that made it mandatory for First Nations peoples to attend, many kids having been taken from their homes by force, many times when parents were not home to put up a fight, was an important factor in the Indigenous peoples' decision to convert to Catholicism, as they were eager to obtain an education for their children and the Oblate priests took it as an opportunity to wreak havoc on their communities and culture . The Oblate leadership decided to open a school at the Mission for Indigenous boys as early as 1869. However, Father McGuckin found this news unwelcome, despite the promises he had made to the Indigenous peoples while securing their conversion, as he had made a promise to local settlers open a school for white children, and did not believe that the mission had sufficient funds to operate two schools. He was also appalled at the idea of sending white and Indigenous children to the same school. Father McGuckin won the argument, and in 1871, it was decided to build a school for white children at St. Joseph's; the Sisters of Saint Anne were asked to send nuns to teach at the school.
In 1871, Father Charles Grandidier became the head of the mission, and work began on building a boarding school. The Sisters of Saint Anne at first rejected the request to send nuns, as they did not have any nuns to spare. Without teachers, the school faced delays in opening. At the same time, the government was constructing a school at Cache Creek and proposed a school at Soda Creek that threatened to take potential students away from St. Joseph's; as a result, Father McGuckin made the decision to open the school himself, as a boys school, on December 9, 1873, six months before the school at Cache Creek would be ready. Seven students were ready on the first day of school, but the school grew quickly, as it was the only school in the Cariboo. The school developed a reputation for quality, and as many as twelve students transferred from the government's Cache Creek school to St. Joseph's. While it was a boys-only school at first, the priests were forced to accept a girl who had been sent with her brothers to the school; and when they tried to reject her attendance the following school year, her parents threatened to send her to the government school. In 1876 the Sisters of Saint Anne agreed to send nuns to the mission and they opened a girls school. By 1878, the two schools had a combined enrollment of 75 white and métis students. In addition to academic subjects, the school taught domestic skills to the girls and agricultural trades to the boys.The poverty in the Cariboo led many students' families to fall behind in tuition payments; the school continued to allow their attendance, not wanting the children to be exposed to immorality at a government school.
St. Joseph's also became a school to prepare young men to join the priesthood as Oblates. The first priest-in-training was sent in 1874. In 1877, a number of graduates of St. Joseph's requested to study to join the priesthood, and they began their studies at St. Joseph's; William Murphy of Lac La Hache was the first to complete his training, in 1882, and join the Oblate order. A few men in Ireland who did not have enough funds to immigrate to Canada had their journey across the Atlantic paid for, on the condition that they study to join the priesthood at St. Joseph's.
Conversion to an Indian residential school Indigenous-Mission relations